(Another essay from his youth, composed on March 1, 1979)
Lin Carter, like HP Lovecraft and Rosemary Rogers, sleeps by day and rises at sunset to write. I wonder if there might not be a connection between the two?
It seems to me that I have difficulty writing during the months of March through May, so enraptured at by by the reawakening of the earth. It becomes a distraction: the sweet fragrances, the songs of mating birds, the warm benevolence of the sun, the branches greening and the eyes of flowers everywhere about. The best time to write during the day is for me in winter. December and January and February, when the earth is asleep. Then it seems to me that I can fall fully into myself; or is it that my self can blossom outwards? Howsoever it may be, it is at these times that my writing goes best.
I wonder if perhaps the type of writing has something to do with the best time to write. Then I would say that during the daylight hours we are reminded of the Reality of life, beside which the Artificiality of writing becomes most evident: so that I might say those who write of mundane things were best to do their writing in daylit hours. Yet those others of us who write from within of great passions or fantastical visions, should do our writing in the dark, when the land is hushed and lit only by Moon- and star- and fog-lights, and everything is perceived as Suggestions of what Might Have Been. Really, these things seem preposterous in the daytime – yet a passionate belief is needed, the more so to draw our readers into the web of our beliefs.
(Composed by pen, dictated on Wednesday, October 8, 2008)
