I sketched out The Empty House in 2015. It’s a rather ambitious book, an experiment to see if I could write stories like Lovecraft’s gothic cosmic horror, but in Shirley Jackson’s much more subdued style. She wrote The Haunting of Hill House, which is truly scary, though there is no violence or bloodshed. The original movie, The Haunting, is excellent. The remake is garbage.

I started with a list of sixty seven linked but semi-independent stories, and I tried to finish each one before going on to the next. But after nine stories — notes, sketch, rough, first draft, second, ‘third’, and reading aloud once — I got tired, so I put it aside to work on other things for a while, so that I could come back refreshed.

Which I did in 2018. I developed more of the stories, but this time I didn’t try to finish each one. I wrote extended notes, detailed sketches, roughs, first drafts, and so on. This was a lot more productive than before, but by the end of the year I was tired again, so I started working on another project. Then another, and another …

Finally, in May of this year (2023), I got back to The Empty House, and spent over two months of intense work on those stories which were less finished. I brought each of them up a level — from sketch to rough, from rough to first, and so on. That kind of work takes a lot of focused concentration, which is exhausting, despite great satisfaction — as anybody who does original creative work of any kind will understand. And at my age, I’m lucky if I get four or five creative hours a day. 

Many of the stories toward the end had only titles and a single-line note of what the story should be about. The last six stories had neither title nor note, just what characters were involved. When I had first created this list of stories, I had left those all but blank, knowing that when I came to them I would have a better idea of how to get to the ending that I wanted. Those last six stories, taken together, would be about how the evil in the house would at last be vanquished. 

When I got to those ending stories, I was able to write sketches without being handicapped by what I might have written eight years ago, which would have been completely wrong, after all that I had written since then. (I know some writers who can’t free themselves from an outline or a sketch, and can’t let the story lead them in its own direction. I actually heard one writer say that she hated outlines, because then she was forced to follow them.) 

I reached the point where I needed another break, so that I could see the book with fresh eyes. I decided that this time the break would be for only two weeks.

I learned how to use a graphic application for designing settings for D&D table-top games. I have a first edition, second printing of the original D&D boxed set, signed by Dave Arneson, but I had been designing settings for underground adventures for many years before D&D came out. 

My graphics application has a not-too-steep learning curve, but it took intense concentration and focus (of a different kind from writing fiction) in order to create a ‘draft’ of something that might actually be used in a table-top game, and it wasn’t always easy to figure out how to make the application do things the way I wanted it to, instead of in the way for which it had been designed. I have certainly done that before. Doing this drove The Empty House so far into the back of my mind that I wasn’t even aware of it any more. Which was just what I wanted. 

I finished what I had set out to do with Dungeonfog and put it aside. It was the perfect distraction from the very different problems of The Empty House with its sixty seven stories, and I started working on it again, looking forward to exploring the nightmares in that empty house, and making them work. 

It was going well, until I discovered that my email client wouldn’t let me send anything. I still receive emails, but I can’t reply. It took me three days searching on line to discover that it wasn’t my fault, but that my provider, without letting anybody know, had decided to not support email any more. Since then it’s been a nightmare of a different sort, trying to contact about four hundred websites that require passwords, trying to let something like five hundred fifty friends know that I have a new address. I did discover that hundreds of these could be scratched off my lists. There’s still some clean-up to do, but three weeks of this business is more than too much.

Do I sound just a bit miffed? Hmm. I wonder why (he said sarcastically). But last week I finally got back to The Empty House. 

And it was as if I had never been away.