Happy Birthday To Ya!

It's been a definite mixed week. Highs and lows. My wife and I rowed in the middle of the week, the row turned nasty, and for a couple of days afterwards, we edged around each other gingerly. We'd been to see our solicitor, all to do with my late father, and it seemed to get to us.
We both miss him, and we've both been upset by my family's downright madness, greed...dysfuctionality. My wife came from a close, warm family, and she must feel she's married into the House of Usher.
My family is, and always has been a painful subject for me. I became aware from an early age that we weren't quite normal. I argued a lot with my dad, especially about politics. I was a teenager in the 1980s, when unemployment rocketed, and when I started looking for my first job, it was particularly fraught. He'd never really had to interview for jobs, he grew up in a time of full employment. He couldn't understand that you might apply for a job and not get it.
We started to heal the rift slowly when I met my now-wife. I think towards the end, thank God, we understood each other. And it was thanks to my wife that I learned some interesting details about my dad's past. He told her some things that he'd never ever told me.
I realize now just how hard my dad had been trying to keep our family together. I feel angry now that his life wasn't happier. Society, History, Economics, Politics and the English class system all contributed to his strain; but so did his own wife. He was 76 when he died. It's not unusual for someone to die at that age, but it's not unusual, either, for people to live until their 90s. And when I think about how hard he'd worked, how intelligent, kind, imaginative and generous he was, and then think about how harshly life treated him, I can't help but feel angry.
He never had a proper retirement. For years, he carried on working, even as his health got worse and worse. My wife and I kept trying to persuade him to give it up; but the simple fact was, he didn't want to go home.
I've carried on with Writing Practice all this week. Dad keeps creeping into it, whatever the subject I start with. I'm looking for a theme, a subject for a long project. Well, there's a lot of pain there. At the same time, I don't want to write about something I don't fully understand. I don't want it to be autobiographical- or overtly autobiographical, anyway.
My wife and I made up for my birthday- just. I was on my way to work, having slept on the camp bed, when she came in with my presents. She'd bought me the DVDs of Jurassic Park and Alien. I'm chuffed to bits. Now all I need is the time to watch them.
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I started, finished and sent off a short horror story. To Microhorror again. Even as I'm trying to get to grips with real life, I get this urge to tell a creepy story. I'd never have dreamt, ten years ago, that I'd be able to finish a project, let alone with such speed. I really cannot tell you how grateful I am to horror fiction. Not only has reading classic short horror fiction (especially M.R. James) rekindled my love of reading, but it has freed me to write.
And the ideas seem to come so easily. I read a fact about the supernatural- say, that there's a superstition that if a cat jumps over a corpse, that corpse will come back to life- and then I mull that over, often in daydreams, and then a premise comes to me. I don't plan a lot, and often, the planning's all in my head. Sometimes, I don't even know the ending. I simply get my pen and notepad, either first thing in the morning or on the train to work, and make a start.
Very often, I try to remember which short stories I've read at least twice, and see if there's anything I can pinch from them. Sometimes, in fact, my starting point will be reading a piece of fiction, being really bowled over by it, and wanting to try and emulate it. Stealing, really; I'm not too proud to admit it. I think of these stories as my cover versions. My Canon Alberic's Scrapbook, my John Charrington's Wedding.
Above all, I feel light-hearted, even mischievous, when I write horror stories. Almost as though I'm shoplifting.
Lately, though, I've found myself wanting to write something mainstream. Something to look at real life head-on, rather than the odd detail creeping into a horror story. I've told my writing class that this is something I've been thinking about. They were disappointed by the thought that I might not write horror stories again. It's just that some of the group there, when they write stories about people going through a divorce, say, or dealing with the death of a parent, make me feel like I'm slumming it.