Romanticism

Ralan's reports that the Twilight Temptations anthology still needs stories. I hadn't really paid attention to that one (even though I love themed anthologies), but I took a look at the guidelines yesterday. They want dark fantasy (and horror and SF) with a romantic conceit--not romantic as in romance novels, but romantic as in the artistic movement of Romanticism.

That interested me, mostly because it's so unusual. So I went out to the library this afternoon and checked out The Major English Romantic Poets, ed. by William H. Marshall, which was all my local (crappy) library had. I figured I'd steep myself in romantic poetry and then see what I could come up with in fiction.

Unfortunately, and I'd forgotten this fact but it certainly explains why I didn't have a single volume of the Romantic poets in my personal library, I loathe 99.9% of romantic poetry. Especially Wordsworth. God, I really hate Wordsworth. And reading Byron and Shelley and Keats (oh my) just makes me remember my hateful and hated sophomore English lit teacher Dr. Sears, the one who was so sarcastic.

So it doesn't look as though I'll be contributing to Twilight Temptations--I don't really write dark fantasy anyway. Instead, I'll finish the story I'm working on now, about a dragon who's a captain in an army; he comes across two children trapped and hiding near a battle and when he tries to take them back to base camp, he and they are captured by the dragons fighting for the other side. It's not a bit romantic, but I think probably that's a good thing.