There were two other non-fiction projects I abandoned that were more ambitious than any of the above:
“American Christmas” might have been an entire book; it was going to be a compendium of American Christmas mythology, pointing out that Christmas as we know it in this country has nothing to do with Christ or Christianity, but is instead devoted to one of our own native deities, Santa Claus, who is not the same as Father Christmas and owes very little to the Dutch Sinter Klaas he’s allegedly based on. I never wrote it because it would have been one hell of a lot of work for a project that probably wouldn’t have sold.
And finally, I worked off and on for years assembling material for a book to be called Weird! Eerie! Terrifying! about pre-Code horror comics, but abandoned the project because a) it would have been lots of work for little return, b) other people beat me to it, notably Mike Benton with Horror Comics: The Illustrated History, and c) I put most of what I wanted to say on the subject into my 12,000-word article “The Other Guys,” as published in Scream Factory and reprinted in Alter Ego.
And that’s that.
About the Author
Lawrence Watt-Evans became a professional writer because he had no marketable skills except a knack for asking strange questions and coming up with stranger answers, which is the primary prerequisite for writing science fiction, fantasy, and this book. He tries to abide by Buckaroo Banzai’s famous dictum: “Wherever you go, there you are.”
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