Wednesday running around London and ....

[ellen_datlow]

I talked for about an hour to Farah Mendlesohn's class at Middlesex University about the editing process, about what I consider to be encompassed by the term "horror" and how I got into short story editing. Afterwards I went for coffee in the campus cafe with Farah and three of her students.

Then I met Paul McAuley at his flat and we walked to Islington for tea with Kim Newman. After that, Kim went to see a movie, Paul went home to work, and I went over to Rob Holdstock's for a drink before dinner.

Rob, Sarah (his partner), and I drove to a pub called The Woodman that had marvelous English food: roasts, which I love, Yorkshire pudding, excellent roast potatoes and perfect vegetables (NOT overcooked), and dessert. By the time we finished we three were stuffed.

The big adventure was their driving me back to Camden Town--we drove in circles for 45 minutes and the most ridiculous thing was that at least once we were in viewing distance of the High Street but couldn't get there. Sarah, who was driving and I in the front seat with her finally were hysterical laughing at our plight. I was in tears with laughter. Rob was trying to read the map which was utterly unhelpful (not him, but the map). Somehow, after twice reaching Mornington Crescent we managed to find the right street home...Rob asked me not to blog about it but Clute just told me (to make Rob feel better)that he had read that Camden Town has the most complicated traffic patterns of urban streets in the western world. So Rob, I hope this makes up for me blogging about it.


And I saw Jeff VanderMeer's rave on Scifi Weekly for Inferno:

Inferno

Comments

Re: Student Talk

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

I never do straight talks--I always ask to be interviewed so my responses depend on the questions from the interviewer of the class. Sorry. I just talked about the different sub-genres of horror: supernatural fiction, psychological horror, terror tales, sf horror and then went into a bit of how sometimes ghost stories are not horror because they have no element of fear or disquiet in them but are more poignant...