Cotton gloves and gothic atmospheres

I work with special collections at a library in Edinburgh, which means I wear cotton gloves and handle manuscripts that are in some cases four hundred years old, and I want to tell you that the things written in those manuscripts would keep you awake if you read them, not because of the historical significance but because of the content, which is frequently extraordinary. The Gothic fiction I write is directly informed by this work. Not by any specific manuscript, but by the knowledge that the genre has roots in a real tradition of writing about terror, transformation, and the uncanny that predates the Gothic novel by centuries. I read John Dee's diaries and account books from the 1580s. The marginal annotations are not academic commentary. They are a man trying to describe what he saw. I live in Marchmont and I write in the evenings after work, and the atmosphere of the collections room carries forward in a way that is useful. I'm working on a novel set in contemporary Edinburgh in which a conservator at a library discovers that a collection she has been cataloguing has a history that the institutional record has deliberately obscured. The tone is Gothic but the research methods are mine. Two shorter stories have been published: one in *Black Static*, one in a Scottish literary journal. The novel is in its third year.