David Rory O'Neill

I’ve been at it again, messing with the bard.

Genre writing sweeps all before it, Vampires and badly written soft-porn passing as fifty shades of erotica, bandwagons stuffed with cliché and publishers and gatekeepers undignified grasping at fast passing fashion. Literary Fiction spurned, boring! Too thought provoking. God forbid a reader might be provoked to thought or have their spirit stirred by the poetry of shared human experience.

Escape through empathy is not good enough, only fantasy and vampire lovers, cheap sexual thrills, gore violence and above all only fashionable in-thing-celebrity will get the gatekeepers slavering.

Bitter, me? No, just a little saddened by the state of the commerce driven world and so: 

From Macbeth.

Is this a genre which I see before me,

The rules toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee!

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation

Proceeding from the vampire–obsessed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I write.

Thou marshall’st me the way that I was not going,

And such an instrument I was to use.

Mine eyes are made the fools o’ th’ other senses,

Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still,

And on thy page and dudgeon gouts of cliché,

Which was not so before. There’s no such in great literature.

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes. Now o’er the one publishing world

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep. Agents-craft celebrates

Random House’s offerings; and withered murder,

Alarumed by his sentinel, the gatekeeper,

Whose howl ‘s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,

With Penguins’ ravishing strides, towards their design

Moves like Joyce’s ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Hear not my steps which way they walk, for fear

Thy very stones prate of my doubts

And take the present horror from the time,

Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives;

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

[A till-bell rings.]

I go, and it is done. The bell invites me.

Hear it not, Smashwords, for it is a knell

That summons thee to Times top 100, or to hell or

to genre writing and serving the monster

public or better, to literary obscurity with pride.