A View from Sesqua Valley

Plots and Dreams

2012-01-31T11:24:00.000-08:00

First, I want to thank those of you who have ordered Tom Ligotti's Centipede Press book as a result of watching my videos concerning the book. It came as a surprise to me that YouTube could be used as a form of book promotion; when I first began to do my video blogs, I just thought, wow, what a cool tool for queer-punk exhibitionism, what a great way to nauseate the planet. But as a serious tool for discussing my own books and those of authors I admire, YouTube is ideal. Now if only I can get rid of that annoying whirring sound that has begun to plague my audio. I'm going to purchase an individual digital mic to plug into the mic outlet and see if that helps. Of course, I can rarely be completely sane and Literary in my videos, and often my imp of ye perverse commands that I be goofy; thus my reading from Tom's superb book was prefaced with four minutes of Lady Gaga shtick.

My next-to-be-published book will be UNCOMMON PLACES, from Hippocampus Press. The majority of the book is made up on the newer things that I wrote for my Centipede Press omnibus; many readers simply could not afford the expensive hardcover, and I like to have my writing available in less expensive trade pb editions. The above image is Gwabryel's front cover painting, and he has provided many interior illustrations as well. I consider UNCOMMON PLACES my second-best book, following SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT. S. T. Joshi encouraged me to write a number of wee prose-poems for the book, a form that I adore. The book reprints my prose-poem/vignette sequences that pay homage to Oscar Wilde and Edgar A. Poe. The book's title piece was previously published in THE TANGLED MUSE, but for this new book I have added an additional 10 words to the sequence, making it 25,000 words. Using Lovecraft's Commonplace Book, I wove a tale in segments that is a sequel to J. Vernon Shea's "The Haunter of the Graveyard." I have since revised and expanded those segments as a single entity and entitled it "Gathered Dust," and it is the title piece for my new book from Dark Regions Press. I had expected UNCOMMON PLACES to be published first, but such was not the case, so the second version of the sequel to dear Vernon's tale has been published before the first version. Vernon Shea was a wonderful friend whom I met through correspondence in the early 1970's, when I first became an obsessed Lovecraft fan and wrote to as many of the surviving members of the Lovecraft Circle as I could. Vernon and I became very close, talked often on the 'phone, and he really supported my early Mythos writing, poor as those stories were. I was annoyed when his "The Haunter of the Graveyard" was dropped from TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS when Jim Turner re-edited that book for Arkham House, and had plotted ever since to write a sequel to Vernon's story as a way of paying homage to our friendship.

There are many very strange wee prose-poems in UNCOMMON PLACES, and a new sequence entitled "Letters from an Old Gent," made up of prose-poems in the form of letters that Lovecraft might have written to various chums and loved ones. The book is really solid and contains what I feel is my best writing of those things that I had penned before writing SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT. The book will be the first Hippocampus Press book to be published this year, so I expect it to come out next month or early March.

My lab results are in from my new doctor's examination, and my health is much improved. I've changed my diet and am taking my heart medications, and I hope to really return to writing this year. I didn't think my writing had much of a future, I was so weak, and thus I announced my complete retirement. Happily, that was absurdly premature. The writing is still very slow-going. I am writing a book of weird fiction with Jessica Amanda Salmonson, but I suspect this will be a two-year project. The book will be a combination of past book ideas, with some strange and campy stories, and some tales inspired by Clark Ashton Smith. I also want to write another book inspired by Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth. Another mate, Paul of Cthulhu, who runs the yog-sothoth.com site (click on the title of this blog to be taken to the yog-sothoth forum), has recorded his own reading of the sonnets, and he supplied me with a file for listening to his remarkable readings, read in his beautiful British voice (I simply adore poetry readings by Brits)--and it filled me with an ache to return to HPL's Fungi and write one more book completely inspired by the sonnets, but this time a book of actual stories rather than prose-poems. I'm going to dedicate the book to Paul and see if Arcane Wisdom Press wants to publish it. Again, writing is slow-going, so it may take me more than a year to write the thing. But at least I have the mind-set to return to working on new weird fiction. Writing is something I must do--it is vital to my existence. I write because I must, because without it I go completely gaga.

Be well, my darlings.

Gwabryel's illustration for "House of Legend," one of the wee prose-poems soon to see publication in my next book, UNCOMMON PLACES.)

THE NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT

2012-01-23T20:35:00.000-08:00

It's been a long exhausting day--went to see my new primary doktor for the first time to-day--so I'm a bit tired in this new vlog; but my excitement about this forthcoming annotated edition of H. P. Lovecraft is intense. Mr. Klinger has also edited DRACULA, a volume I have yet to own.

AGONIZING

2012-01-20T13:38:00.000-08:00

THOMAS LIGOTTI, ESQ.

2012-01-19T16:24:00.001-08:00

Loft Soul

2012-01-17T17:27:00.000-08:00

Gawd, isn't that a fabulous image??!! It is Oliver Wetter's cover illustration for the forthcoming anthology from Innsmouth Free Press, Fungi. Oh, Yuggoth, how I ache to write some wee thing for this anthology, and how impossible it is yet to write any new fiction. This is my current intense psychological situation as an artist. I ache to write new fiction, I need to do so to feel like I am alive; but this past illness has robbed me of so much energy, and I am having such trouble concentrating, that writing is next to impossible. And trying to force new work just makes matters worse, leading to headaches and even asthma attacks. How much is real, how much is psychological? The mind can heal or debauch the body. I've been trying to work on a new story for Cody Goodfellow's forthcoming anthology of tales inspired by Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborea tales, but the idea I had was too similar to Smith's "Ubbo Sathla," and I couldn't get started on it anyway, so I've given up. (But trying to write the story returned me to reading lots and lots of Smith, and his fiction utterly enchants me!)

I keep waiting for that one project that will so excite and inspire me that I cannot help but delve into fictional expression. I am convinced, still, that an anthology called Fungi is such a thing. Maybe I shall try to write a wee prose-poem sequence, keenly Lovecraftian, centering on the theme of fungi and see what I can come up with. I must be in this book! It will drive me mad to miss out on such a thing.

Tomorrow I have an appointment with my new doktor, my very first real primary physician. He is a doctor at Swedish Hospital. I have apply'd for disability and have already qualify'd for food stamps, but I need to have a regular real doctor give me an examination and then sign papers so that I can try and get medical coverage. I am hoping it doesn't snow tonight--I dread driving in snow!

Unable to work on fiction alone, I have asked the brilliant Jessica Amanda Salmonson to write my next book with me. She and I have collaborated in bygone days on a couple of tales (indeed, she helped me write the very first tale of Sesqua Valley), and her vision is so deliciously dark and twisted that I think, together, we can write a really diseased collection of decadent weird fiction. But it will have to be slow-going, and this is will be a two-year project.

Okay, perhaps I will spend ye rest of ye evening scanning HPL's Fungi from Yuggoth and makes notes toward a new wee prose-poem sequence concerning Lovecraftian fungi. O, Dark Gawds of Yuggoth, inspire me....................................................

Hey! I just discovered how to bring my YouTube videos here! I'm getting depressed about that whining noise in the background, it makes me not want to record new vlogs. I recorded one last night and the audio was so messed-up that I deleted it. Some tells me the noise may be my laptop fan. Maybe the only way I can get rid of the noise is to get a new laptop, but this one is still perfect for the important thing--writing new fiction. Ooooo, let me find one of my really deranged YouTube vlogs, the kind that gets me nasty comments from YouTube viewers.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!

A Visit from Ye Lovecraft Scholar

2011-12-29T16:42:00.000-08:00

S. T. Joshi, along with Sunni and Jason Brock, will be visiting me tomorrow. I shall endeavor to get them before my webcam and have Jason interview S. T. Sunand wants to bring me one of his new books, DISECCTING CTHULHU, a collection of essays concerning ye Cthulhu Mythos that he has edited and has just been publish'd by Miskatonic River Press. As an author of Lovecraftian weird fiction, I often find such essays extremely edifying and inspirational--they help me to see aspects of Lovecraft's fiction of which I wou'd otherwise be clueless, and sometimes they contain hints that set my imagination on fire and thus inspire new tales. I also want Jason to get S. T. to talk about the newest issue (#2) of WEIRD FICTION REVIEW, as I don't think the journal has had much press.

Things here have been crazy. We have been having at least two therapists or visiting nurses come each day to examine mother and check out how we're doing. Yesterday we got mom a hospital bed, and it's so wonderful I want one for myself! Starting tomorrow we have caregivers coming four nights a week to help put mom to bed (since Ghostboy will be gone to work on those nights). My friend Greg is bringing over a used desktop computer and will install it down here for Ghostboy's exclusive use, and we will move this laptop upstairs to the dining room, which is where I wrote my last book, ENCOUNTERS WITH ENOCH COFFIN. I need not to have to climb the stairs up and down to the basement and back, it weakens me profoundly, so we are moving my writing back upstairs and perhaps this will, in time, help me to return to full-time writing, although I think I'm still a long way from that. This last illness robbed me of much strength, and things still aren't "right"-- I think I'm suffering still from dehydration, however much water I drink.

So look for a new S. T. JOSHI video tomorrow on my MrWilum channel over at YouTube. I cannot tell you how cool it is, still, to have the world's leading Lovecraft scholar living in my home town. Even though we are now close friends, there is still a bit of magick in the air when S. T. is here, because of my hero-worship. I like that he can inspire that fanboy enthusiasm in me. I plan to have Jason and S. T. talk about their new projects, and there will be many to speak of, because both gents are extremely creative and always working on new things. I'll be posting the video on my Facebook profile as well. Enjoy!

New Hardcover Collection

2011-12-25T09:04:00.000-08:00

I went to Amazon and wrote a wee review of my new book, GATHERED DUST AND OTHERS, typing up the Contents and all; only to get a message from Amazon that my review could not be published "as is." They have done this too many times at Amazon. There is absolutely no reason for my review to be rejected or censored. So, a pox on them. I doubt I'll be bothering to write any more reviews there. Still, it's a great place to have your book available at.

Of course, as soon as I have a new book published I have to re-read the entire thing in book form because I KNOW there are gonna be typos that I've missed. No matter how carefully a book is proofed, the misprints sneak in. I can read the proof copy one-hundred times and never find some--and then I read the published book and find them instantly! Jeffrey Thomas and I proofed the book together, and he found most of the mistakes. I did find a few. On one page I meant to type "especial," but it appears as "especially." Bah.

I wanted GATHERED DUST to include some things that have never appeared in hardcover, and I wanted to include most of my "dead boyfriend" tales that were inspired by the death of my old junky boyfriend, who died in my arms after having choked on bile, after he snorted some filthy street smack. I have a new wee thing, a tale of Gershom that is tied to the story "The Tangled Muse," and so I had "The Tangled Muse" included in the book even though it will also appear in my forthcoming book from Hippocampus Press.

Most of the new stuff is Lovecraftian. One of the new original pieces is "These Deities of Rarest Air." I know I wrote the thing when I was in a state of deep depression -- but I have no memory of this new prose-poem sequence being so confused and lacking of any kind of logic. It is, for the most part, like one continuous wail of self-pity, and I am rather embarrassed by it now. I guess it shews a portion of my mentality that may be of some interest to psychologists, but self-pity rarely profits expressions of personal art. It inspired horror as I read it--the horror of "Oh my gawd, why did I allow this to be published!!!???" But I like the connected couple of bits at the end that tell a kind of story, so what the hell.

This is my first book with Dark Regions Press, and I am absolutely exhilarated with their production of it. The handsome hardcover has a sewn-in gold book ribbon and the jacket is sturdy. I love Wayne Miller's superb painting for the jacket. It shews a scene from the title story, which is a sequel to J. Vernon Shea's "The Haunter of the Graveyard" that appeared in Derleth's original edition of TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS. The story as it appears in this book is actually its second version. The original version was written in segments for a 10,000 word extension of my prose-poem/vignette sequence, "Uncommon Places," as it will appear next year in my second collection from Hippocampus Press. Each segment in "Uncommon Places" is inspired by some entry or entries in H. P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book. It came to me that I could make this 10,000 word final extension mostly a connected short story inspired by Shea's tale, something I have wanted to write for a long time. So the plot of the story was inspired by such entries from the Commonplace Book as:

[entry 176] "Man blindfolded and taken in closed cab or car to some very ancient or secret place." So I have a scene where the main character is blindfolded in a cab.

[165] "Terrible trip to an ancient and forgotten tomb" inspired the expansion on something that Vernon mentioned in his original story but never expanded on, of the tomb of Obediah Carter.

[112] "Man lives near graveyard--how does he live? Eats no food." This inspired a major component in the tale and is illustrated in the jacket painting by Wayne Miller. Here's how I briefly describe it in ye tale:

"My uncles experiments with filming seemed to incorporate some kind of trick photography near the end, for on the last spool of film he is shown in close up, dangling from the vines of the tree, vines that resembled cloudy veins through which a dark substance flowed in the direction of my uncle's upraised arms, into which the vines had penetrated. Uncle Silas did not regard the camera as he muttered, 'More, more--my arms are hungry.'"

When I began working on this first book for Dark Regions Press, I decided to completely rewrite those separate segments from "Uncommon Places" and turn them into one smooth narrative, a novelette that I could then dedicate to Vernon, my dear chum. I expanded some portions of the story and deleted some of the prose-poem segments that will appear in UNCOMMON PLACES when it is published next Spring by Hippocampus Press.

GATHERED DUST AND OTHERS, then, is a good gathering of divergent pieces, a showcase of all aspects of my writing. I have my "dead boyfriend" takes, a new tale set in Gershom, my city of exiles ("Let Us Wash This Thing"), and some few things that have never appeared in hardcover. The book will also be released as trade pb and will be my first ebook, for ye with Kindle.

Next year my second book for Dark Regions Press will be publish'd: ENCOUNTERS WITH ENOCH COFFIN, written in collaboration with Jeffrey Thomas. It contains a series of connected tales and novelettes concerning a sinister New England artist, Enoch Coffin, who is lured into intensely Lovecraftian adventures through his love of arcane things and his connection with antient New England sorcery.

A Wee Up-date, Just

2011-12-06T02:26:00.000-08:00

Gwabryel's illustration for "Some Distant Baying Sound," which will appear in UNCOMMON PLACES next Spring from Hippocampus Press

Just a wee note. I am not much online these days because I'm still rather weak and the stairs leading down to the basement, where I have my laptop and Internet access, proves difficult at times. Going down the stairs is usually okay, but climbing them to get back to the main floor and my bedroom sometimes so exhausts me and gives me such a pain in my chest that I need to take one of my nitroglycerine pills. I am trying to come down once or twice a week to check email and all of that. I sometimes think I am feeling better, but then I try to behave in a normal fashion and the result is wretched. Today I decided to drive to Southcenter Mall to pay my Nordstrom bill, as I am too late to mail it in. I try to mail it in so that I don't wander to the cosmetic section and become entranced with some new lipstick or eyeshadow. Honey, I'm a sucker for makeup. So I parked my car and got out and walked to the store, and I nearly fainted. The air was so bleedin' cold and I could not breathe. I had to find a chair to sit in before I paid my bill. I was gonna pay in the underwear section, but the lure proved too fatal, so I staggered to cosmetics, where at the MAC section Lady Gaga was crooning "Born This Way." I went to the NARS section -- and O MY GREAT YUGGOTH, what did I see?

The new Arabian Nights shadow trio. Girlfriend, did I get it? You bet I did! Now I need to get healthy so I have the energy to do a FABULOUS drag for some new YouTube frolick.

I stay in bed almost all day, trying to read but usually sleeping or gasping for air. Just very weak. We are making big chances and hiring more full-time at-home care for Mother, so that I don't have to lift her any longer. I think the heavy lifting of taking care of mom may have triggered, in part, this new heart trauma.

I want to return to writing, but I simply have no strength. If I am bent over this keyboard for more than half an hour I get dizzy and have difficulty breathing. So I won't be online too often, and there will be long gaps of silence here and at YouTube & Facebook, and I shall get hideously behind in answering email. I love y'all for your patience. I have asked a friend, one of the finest fantasy and horror writers of all time, to help me write my next book--I simply cannot do it on my own, and she has agreed. Whether I can actually work on weird fiction is a question that remains unanswerable. But one has to try or die.

Kisses, my sweets.

trying to lure Joe Pulver into Pugmire drag, but he was too sane to venture into so unwholesome a realm.

Willy

The Queen Lives--Just Barely

2011-11-29T20:30:00.000-08:00

It's ironic that two bleedin' days after my patrons scold me into making a doctor's appointment and getting back on my meds that I end up in the hospital. I drove myself to Swedish/Providence around midnight on Thanksgiving, another stupidity for which I got gobs of scolding. I knew that what I was experiencing was similar to when I had my heart attack in 2003. My second night in hospital one doktor who was looking over test results came in and said something like, "Your heart condition has gone from so-&-so to severe." I didn't know what he meant, but I began to prepare for my death, as a proper Drama Queen should. When my niece Brandee phoned, I told her to bring the copy of the Tampa University Press single edition of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward that I had just started reading and was on my bedside table to the hospital--if I was gonna die in hospital, I wou'd die with that book on my breast, above my wither'd heart.

ye trade pb edition of S. T.s wonderful annotated THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD

Well, I didn't die with the book on me breast, and then S. T. shew'd up with his girlfriend Mary (bringing some wonderful lilies, those flowers of Death), so I had him sign ye book. My room that moment was packed with S. T., Jessica Salmonson, Eileen Gunn, and others--and then two Mormon gents entered as well to give me a blessing with holy consecrated oil. Everyone left the room quickly as the Mormons came in except S. T., and I thought he was gonna stay witness ye Mormon hoodoo--but then he left as well.

My beloved companion, Ghostboy, took over taking care of my mother, and he did and is doing an excellent job. I think the heavy lifting that is required for taking care of mom added to the strain on my heart. We have decided to put mother into a rest home, and thus my future is indeed a mystery.

I have been weak and listless all day. I can come down here to the basement to do Internet things for half an hour, and then I need to return to bed. I have no energy and breathing is at times difficult. I was on oxygen at hospital and miss it now. I have no idea how long it will take me to completely recover, but I remain Retired from Writing until that time. I hope, some years from now, to totally return to writing weird Lovecraftian fiction--life would not be worthwhile if I cannot.

Many thanks to all for your wondrous support and well-wishes.
Love,
Willy

--finis???---

2011-11-22T20:50:00.000-08:00

Above is me in the Dutch churchyard in Brooklyn that inspir'd Lovecraft to write "The Hound." While roaming the site, HPL chipped off a bit off tombstone from one of ye markers, and fantasized about how the dweller interred beneath the stone would haunt Grandpa for this desecration. My being there was part of a three-week tour during which my patrons took me to New England and New York, ending our tour at WFC in Saratoga, during which Joe Pulver took us too visit the tomb of Robert W. Chamber. It was amazing, that tour. During our four days in Providence, S. T. Joshi, who was doing work on the Collected Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith at John Hay Library, took us on an exhaustive tour of Lovecraftian sites. I was carrying all three of S. T.'s Penguin Classics editions of Lovecraft's tale, and my battered old pb edition of Fungi from Yuggoth. The greatest, moft overwhelming experience of my life as a Lovecraft came when I went up and touched 10 Barnes Street, where Grandpa penned so many of his classics.

I know it's a fantastic thing to say, but I did sense Lovecraft's spirit there, and my soul connection with him. It was the moment when I felt so amazingly thankful to be a Lovecraftian writer, the thing that has blessed me with keenest joy.

I have been extremely ill for over a month, and it doesn't seem like I'm gonna get better any time soon. Tonight has been one of the worst nights. I think my ailments are a combination of heart disease and lingering bronchitis. One of my ailments is coranary arterial spasms, which happens usually when I recline in bed and try to sleep--they jerk my body and produce a little yelp, making sleep impossible so that I am a zombie moft of ye time. I've not seen my heart doctor at Swedish or taken my meds for almoft half a year, stupid, I know. I shall correct that. The bronchitis has been severe. Speaking and breathing is, at times, almoft impossible. (I spell "most" as "moft" cos HPL did so in his correspondence--he is utterly under me skin...) Writing is impossible, and because I'm a Drama Queen, honey, I am convic'd that I shall never get better, that this illness is my final trial. The wretched health is combined with my task as my mother's live-in caregiver. She has sunk into rich senility and almoft never stops yelling, screaming, howling. I need silence in order to write. But also, being down here in the basement, bent over the keyboard, completely wears me out after half an hour. Thus I spend almoft all of my time in my deathbed--I mean my sickbed, where I have gather'd pens and pads. I thought maybe I could spend day after day jotting down notes, inspir'd by ye books I read, recording little germs or titles for potential future tales, perhaps even plot outlines or rough drafts in longhand. Ain't happening.

So. I herewith announce my Retirement from Writing. Maybe after three or four years of trying to rest, I shall recover and be able to work. Maybe I need only wait until Spring's warmer weather to nourish my body with a semblance of restored health. Maybe not. This is a real ripoff, a cruel cosmic jest, because I am at ye height of my abilities as an author. Girlfriends, I have so many ideas for future books whirling within my wither'd brain, books I ache to write.

If this is the end of my career, that's cool. I've accomplished far more than I ever thought I would. I still have four books forthcoming! My thanks to all of you who have supported me as an author. I wrote those books for you. I love you.

I'll still come here to chat about weird literature and promote books by my chums and new cds from Boy George and Barbra Streisand. And I'm staying on Facebook, where I usually post the vlogs I record at YouTube.

Be well, kind hearts. Thank you for following my blog. I hope to keep it worthwhile.

Slowing Down

2011-11-13T23:31:00.000-08:00

Things have really slowed down in life, due to declining health and an inability to concentrate on new work because I live in a madhouse. The writing life is such a delight and it one of two things that really make life worth living. So now, being unable to write because of weakness and distraction, I feel like one of ye walking dead. Happily, I still have much to look forward to as an author, and so perhaps it's a good thing for me to stop and rest for a few years; I mean, I have so many books still coming out that people will burn out on my work. There are several anthology appearances yet to happen, but the one I am most excited about is THE DEVIL'S COATTAILS, for which Maryanne K. Snyder and I have written an extremely unusual story set in London in the last 1870's, in the year that Oscar Wilde, having graduated from university, moved to London and set up house with the artist Frank Miles. This is the same period in which the children of Sesqua Valley were awakened by settlers moving into the valley. So I thought it would be fun to write a story in which the first-born beast of Sesqua Valley, Simon Gregory Williams, journeys to Victorian London and has a wee encounter with Oscar Wilde. It was great fun, writing that story with Maryanne. She was here last night signing the signature sheets of the book with me. It is going to be an awesome book, edited by Jason V Brock and William F. Nolan.

Maryanne and I at ye Lovecraft Plaque at Brown University

Although it may be some time before I work on completely new books--and if I don't get my health back that time may never come--I have been daydreaming and planning one last huge omnibus aka The Tangled Muse, that would contain the best of my fiction that I have written since that gorgeous Centipede Press book was publish'd. Included would be the new stories from forthcoming books, tales such as "Gathered Dust" and "The Strange Dark One." I also want the entire Some Unknown Gulf of Night included and have the entire of Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth in the book as well, as prologue to Gulf. If my strength and ability to write returns, then I'll compose a few substantial new stories for the book as well. I plan on calling this new omnibus Unhallowed Places, and wou'd like to see it published around 2016. So, although I absolutely cannot work on new fiction now and may not be able to for some time, I shall not be idle. At the moment I am carefully going over the entire Some Unknown Gulf of Night, polishing and revising. I have entirely rewritten segment XIII.

I am thankful to my editors and publishers, and especially to my readers. I love you for your support. This Friday I will be visited by Larry Roberts and S. T. Joshi, and I hope to get them before my webcam to discuss the new line of Mythos books that S. T. is edited for Arcane Wisdom Press.

Hanging Out with Grandpa

2011-10-30T08:54:00.000-07:00

This is me and HPL at ye Sesqua Depot around 1933. I have a vague recollection of the day. My friend, Andrea, took the photograph with the camera that was left behind by Richard Upton Pickman, who vanished in Sesqua Valley after a visit with Simon Gregory Williams (you can read about that in my story, "Depths of Dreamks and Madness," to be published next month in my new book from Dark Regions Press, Gathered Dust and Others).

Jeffrey Thomas has been working his ass off editing and proofing our book, Encounters with Enoch Coffin, whut will be publish'd next year by Dark Regions Press. I have to say that I am extremely excited about this book! Last year at this time I entered a state of intense creativity, utterly hypnotized by my Ever-Muse, H. P. Lovecraft, and wrote Some Unknown Gulf of Night in six weeks. (The book just came out in paperback and there are so copies for sale at Amazon.com.) It happened again this year, as I was writing my stories for the Enoch Coffin book -- I became utterly beguiled by our character, Enoch, and his exploits. Jeff kept sending me his tales for the book, and they are amazing! I love our book because it is so audaciously Lovecraftian. Writing it with Jeff has been one of the best experiences in my life. I think the story I wrote, set in Kingsport, may be my very finest piece of fiction. Ye Contents of the book is:

"Ye Unkempt Thing"
"Matter of Truth and Death"
"Beneath Arkham"
"Spectral Evidence"
"They Smell of Thunder"
"Mystic Articulation"
"Every Exquisite Thing"
"Impossible Color"
"Ecstasy in Aberration"
"Shadow Puppets"
"Fearless Symmetry"
"Unto the Child of Woman"

Jeff focused on writing stories set in real New England, while I set my tales in Lovecraft Country. I did, however, write one tale set in Providence, and then I decided to pen one final tale of Enoch Coffin visiting Sesqua Valley. The book will have a jacket by the magnificent SANTIAGO CARUSO!!

There are a number of anthologies still to come out this year in which I have tales. Let's see if I can remember all of them:
NEW CTHULHU: TALES OF THE RECENT WEIRD
THE DEVIL'S COATTAILS
HORROR FOR THE HOLIDAYS
MONSTERS AND MORMONS

Hmm, I may be forgetting one other. NEW CTHULHU will be reprinting "The Fungal Stain," and the book's contents looks just wonderful, I'm very excited about that book. Maryanne K. Snyder and I wrote a story for THE DEVIL'S COATTAILS in which newly-born Simon Gregory Williams of Sesqua Valley journeys to London in 1879 and taunts Oscar Wilde. My story for HORROR FOR THE HOLIDAYS, "The Tomb of Oscar Wilde," is a tale of Rosh Chodesh. And MONSTERS AND MORMONS will reprint "Recompense of Sorrow" for its first American publication, and I have tweaked ye tale a bit for this new publication. Oh, I've just completed a new piece for the December issue of the Lovecraft eZine, a wee poetic trilogy for ye Holy Days called "Elder Instincts."

I think I am, at last, in the mood to write. To begin work on the next book, a book of very queer Sesqua Valley tales to be publish'd by Arcane Wisdom Press. I like writing for Larry Roberts. I mean, he brought Gulf out so quickly in that gorgeous hardcover edition, and now the trade pb edition is out. I order'd a copy of ye pb from Amazon cos they got copies before Larry did. All of the copies that Amazon had sold out (there were probably only five), but some individual sellers are selling it there as well. Prices at Amazon can be so fucked-up. One guy was selling this just-published paperback for $104!!! He has since lower'd ye price to a mere $59. And someone is selling a used copy for $41.33 -- but I wonder if that is a used paperback edition or of ye hardcover? Hmmm.

It's fun to be a writer.

CAS illos for "The Lurking Fear"

2011-10-23T12:19:00.000-07:00

I don't think I have posted these illustrations that Clark Ashton Smith composed for the Home Brew appearance of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear." These are some nasty (i.e. sexual) looking trees. Their trunks seem to me quite like some of the line work of Aubrey Beardsley. I find them rather wonderful.

Some have claimed that Lovecraft was not a "sexual" writer, as opposed to Smith (who was so sexual that editors demanded toning down of many of his tales, some of which were later published by Necronomicon Press in their The Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith series of chapbooks). There are, of course, extremely blatant sexual touches in Lovecraft's fiction, wherein mortal souls cross ye rim and copulate with the Outside. These sexual situations in Lovecraft seem tied to his abhorrent racism, but they make for potent horror.

Can we assess Lovecraft's sexuality from his fiction? I don't think so. Some have suggested that HPL's tales reveal his latent homosexuality, for we find close male bonding, one man describing another's masculine beauty, and (in "The Lurking Fear") husky dudes sharing the same bed. Lovecraft was homophobic, detesting queens such as myself, effeminate men, while admiring male beauty if he found it noble, intellectual, and masculine. I don't know. What do Shakespeare's sonnets tell us of the poet's sexuality, if anything? The very erotic portions of the sonnets are clearly heterosexual. I don't think, if one didn't know I was queer, that one could guess my sexuality from my last book, Some Unknown Gulf of Night, because its most explicit eroticism is mostly heterosexual.

I was really back to reading CAS when I thought I was going to write a book inspired by his work. But then I realised that I didn't have what it takes, as an artist, to write such a book--not yet, anyway, so I set Smith aside and worked on other things. Now I have a hankering to return to Smith and relish his eroticism.

Writing Lovecraftian Weird Fiction

2011-10-21T16:46:00.000-07:00

October is usually my favorite month, but this one has been gawd-awful. The few good bits were visits from friends. I haven't been able to write, and I have felt what seemed almost a hostility to the idea of writing--something new and really sick, but I think I'm over it. I don't know if it's burn-out or what. I've been writing my brains out and still have gobs of books coming out, two more this year and four next year. When I feel, as an author, like a lost soul, I often return to Lovecraft, and there I find myself anew. It has happened this week, at last, from my reading of the remarkable book shewn above. Ken Faig has been doing some brilliant research on Lovecraft for a very long time, and much of his finest work is in this book from Hippocampus Press. Last night I reread Ken's essay "Lovecraft's 'He'," and in one part of this remarkable essay he quotes a passage from a Lovecraft letter that relates a dream, and I felt that familiar, beloved ache to use this dream as the basis for a new wee tale, combining it with similar things culled from ye Commonplace Book.

This is how it works for me as a Lovecraftian writer--I can find inspiration in all of Lovecraft, or in books about Lovecraft. It all remains a fount of never-ending inspiration and aesthetic nourishment. It has become utterly addictive to me, and I am happiest when I am writing new Lovecraftian weird fiction. I love the hunt through HPL's Works for inspiration, and I love sitting back and letting my writer's mind weave all of the influences into some new work. It's intoxicating. So, I hope to end this month by beginning and maybe completing a new wee thing, that I want to submit to S. T. for BLACK WINGS III. I want to write a kind of dreamy tale, probably less than 3,000 words, inspired by "The Ancient Track," something akin to what I wrote in Some Unknown Gulf of Night. I have an idea, but there have been too many distractions today to begin work on the piece. Perhaps tonight.

It's one of my perverse little goals in life to be identified as an artist with H. P. Lovecraft--totally. I want to be a part of his shadow in the realm of weird fiction. When the happy day of my death arrives, and those still living pick up one of my books, I want those readers to be haunted by two ghost, spectral twins. I want my work, always, to conjure forth the shade of H. P. Lovecraft. This passion is, I think, part of what makes my work unique and my own.

Ah--mother calls from ye upper regions. I must flee.

Rad Friends & Good Times

2011-10-10T19:51:00.000-07:00

This delightful Cthulhu face mask (perfect for holding up banks in Arkham) was one of many splendid gifts from Charles Schneider, a magnificent fellow. This has been one of ye gnarliest week-ends of my life, the people I live with have behaved so badly, shockingly so, and I ached for that time when I lived alone in my own wee apartment. But the week-end was saved by short and pleasant visits from other Lovecraftians. It was great fun to sing, along with such serious weird scholars as Scott Connors and S. T. Joshi, "Happy Birthday" to Larry Roberts of Arcane Wisdom Press. And to be able to share that experience online, at YouTube, is simply joyous. Larry Roberts has inform'd me that ye trade paperback edition of Some Unknown Gulf of Night will be releas'd on October 31st.

I never intended to go online. I had no interest in email or YouTube, and I knew nothing about forums except for Thomas Ligotti Online, whut I discovered while using a computer at the public library. It was S. T. who insisted that I go online. My first book for which he was editor, The Fungal Stain and other Dreams (Hippocampus Press) is a book I typed entirely on me electric typewriter. I then made xerox copies of the entire book and sent all of that to S. T., who then had to scan the entire book. "We're not doing this again, Wilum," S. T. told me sternly; & when Jerad Walters said he wanted to publish an omnibus of my work through Centipede Press, I had my friend Greg Lowney help me hook up. It hath changed my life. Being able to write using a keyboard panel hooked to my laptop feels like I'm still at ye typewriter, something I need psychologically. But I am writing far more quickly these days, since I do my roughs on the laptop and then print yem out and polish. Indeed, S. T. and I were recently discussing that it is now impossible to pen rough drafts in longhand, as was our usual practice.

So I am very thankful for the Internet. It has expanded my life enormously. It has made it so much easier for my readers, all around the world, to buy my books. And it makes the writing of those books far easier too. I've not been able to write much of late, because of my bewildering, depressing and exhausting homelife. Happily, my elder sister, Linda, arrived to Seattle this morning, to spend a week. Tomorrow is our mom's birthday and the birthday of Linda's daughter, Brandee, and so we are having a big celebration here. But I now get a very needed break from having to care for our mother, which has so exhausted me of late that writing has been impossible, because sleep has been impossible. I have spent most of today sleeping. Tomorrow, I plan on returning to writing!!! Hooray!!! I have a nice wee autumnal piece in mind for ye Lovecraft eZine.

Many thanks, my darlings, for reading my blog and watching my vlogs. You enrich my life.

SPAWN OF YE GREEN ABYSS

2011-10-05T11:58:00.000-07:00

S. T. Joshi's planned reprint anthology of his favorite Mythos tales, Spawn of the Green Abyss, will now be published by Centipede Press, probably in the summer or fall of 2012. Centipede Press will publish both a trade edition and a signed limited edition. Actually, although most of ye stories are reprints, the anthology will include some new tales that will see their first publication in this book. Ye Nameless Contents Be:
"Spawn of the Green Abyss," by C. Hall Thompson
"The Deep Ones," by James Wade
"The Franklyn Papers," by Ramsey Campbell
"Where Yidhra Walks," by Walter C. DeBll, Jr.
"Black Man with a Horn," by T. E. D. Klein
"Nethescurial," by Thomas Ligotti
"Black Brat of Dunwich," by Stanley C. Sargent
"The Phantom of Beguilement," by ye Queen of Eldritch Horror
"...Hungry...Rats," by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (original to this edition)
"Virgin's Island," by Donald Tyson (original to this edition)
"In the Shadow of Swords," by Cody Goodfellow (original to this edition)

And, next year will see S. T.'s anthology of all-new original Lovecraftian tales, Black Wings II.

It will be interesting to see if this new trend of Mythos anthologies, all of which seem to have the name "Cthulhu" somewhere in their titles, will continue. Next month we have New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird from Prime Books, a reprint anthology with a very solid Contents. I hope these books continue to come forth, especially the reprint volumes--then I can be in new books but still be lazy and not write new yarns.

New Penguin Edition of HPL

2011-09-29T19:57:00.000-07:00

Penguin Classics has just publish'd a new Deluxe edition of their first volume of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction. The three editions of Lovecraft's weird tales from Penguin are my absolute favorite editions of Lovecraft's work. Edited, and fully annotated, by S. T. Joshi, they give us a fuller understanding of Lovecraft's genius as an artist. This new Deluxe edition reprints the older edition exactly, but with a new cover illustration and three other art pieces by Travis Louie. The cover stock is quite beautiful, and the title of the book and Lovecraft's name are slightly emboss'd. I have two copies of the earlier edition in my library, but I love getting newer editions of HPL's Tales because I am forever returning to them for inspiration, and it's nice to have different editions.

Following a succinct 14-page Introduction, the stories in the book (arranged chronologically) are:
Dagon
The Statement of Randolph Carter
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
Celephais
Nyarlathotep
The Picture in the House
The Outsider
Herbert West--Reanimator
The Hound
The Rats in the Walls
The Festival
He
Cool Air
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour Out of Space
The Whisperer in Darkness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Haunter of the Dark

I love annotated editions, and S. T.'s Notes are fascinating and informative. They begin with basic information, and then tell aspects of the story and how HPL came to write it, &c. Here is the opening paragraph to ye Note for "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family":

"This story first appeared in the amateur journal, the Wolverine (edited by Horace L. Lawson), for March and June 1921; this was the only time until recent corrected editions that the full title of the story was printed. When it appeared in Weird Tales for April 1924 the editor, Edwin Baird, gave it the title 'The White Ape,' much to Lovecraft's disgust; in the Weird Tales reprint of May 1935 it was titled simply 'Arthur Jermyn.'"

This is followed by a full page of introductory matter, and then we have one and one-third pages of annotations.

with S. T. and ye Gang in front of 598 Angell Street, Providence, where HPL wrote "The Outsider."

I am hoping that Penguin will reprint the other two volumes of Lovecraft in this Deluxe format.

SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT trade pb next month!

2011-09-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

I love having a book come out in October, my favourite month--yet I wasn't too disappointed when Tom Lynch shyly inform'd me on ye phone that Miskatonic River Press wouldn't be able to bring out THE STRANGE DARK ONE next month as we had planned. He still has two more books to bring forth this year--both of which will be fantastic, S. T. Joshi's anthology of essays on the Cthulhu Mythos called DISSECTING CTHULHU and the weird fiction anthology HORROR FOR THE HOLIDAYS (in which I have a new wee yarn called "The Tomb of Oscar Wilde").

However -- the hardcover edition of SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT is now out of print--which explains why the chap who is selling it for $75 on Amazon suddenly inflated ye price to $90! And so Larry Roberts and Arcane Wisdom Press will be bringing out GULF in its trade paperback edition -- next month!! Whoo-hoo! So I gets me a book out for All Hallow's after all. Sweet. I like to have my books in affordable editions for those who are as poor as I am and cannot afford expensive hardcovers.

So October is going to be a lovely month. My sister, Linda, is coming to town for October 11th, which is her daughter's birthday as well as our Mother's birthday--and she will stay until the 18th so that I can go on ye 17th to this gig that Penguin Books has set up for S. T. Joshi at the University Bookstore, where he will promote his Penguin Classics edition of Arthur Machen.

I hope you are all well. Ah--how I adore Autumn!

THE STRANGE DARK ONE DELAY'D

2011-09-12T11:10:00.000-07:00

Above is ye original Jeffrey Thomas cover for THE STRANGE DARK ONE. We've added some additional drag to the cover and 'tis much more colourful nigh. The book was scheduled to be publish'd next month, my one paperback book in a year of three hardcover books. Just had a wee chat with Tom Lynch, and he wants to bring the book out early next year--which is quite fine, really, as three new books a year is fine. Of course, this means that I will have FIVE BOOKS out next year--oy; three new titles and two reprints. So, GATHERED DUST AND OTHERS will be publish'd in hardcover this year, perhaps this month. Then next year's publications will go something like this:

THE STRANGE DARK ONE--TALES OF NYARLATHOTEP
(Miskatonic River Press, illustrated by Jeffrey Thomas)
UNCOMMON PLACES
(Hippocampus Press, illustrated by Gwabryel)
SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT, trade paperback reprint edition
(Arcane Wisdom Press, illustrated by Matthew Jaffe)
GATHERED DUST AND OTHER, trade pb reprint edition and ebook edition
(Dark Regions Press, jacket by Wayne Miller & hopefully some interior art by Jeffrey Thomas)
ENCOUNTERS WITH ENOCH COFFIN, with Jeffrey Thomas
(limited edition hardcover, with jacket by Santiago Caruso)

I have yet to begin work on MIDNIGHT DIN AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES, my second book for Arcane Wisdom Press. Ain't in that zone yet that makes writing possible; but I don't want the book publish'd until 2013 (five books out next year is mo' than enuf, methinks), so there's no rush in writing it. I will delay the writing of my second book for Miskatonic River Press, MONSTROUS AFTERMATH, by one year. I think next year's big new project will be the writing of a large collection of tales set in my city of exiles, Gershom, a book I plan on writing with Maryanne K. Snyder, and probably call DWELLERS IN EXILE. Lots of lots of writing yet to do. Perhaps after a few years I will finally find the courage to try and write the collection of poetry and poems inspir'd by ye works of Clark Ashton Smith, an idea that haunts and won't let go.

VIVA SANTIAGO

2011-09-07T12:09:00.000-07:00

Ever first seeing Santiago Caruso's magnificent illustrations for a Spanish edition of "The Dunwich Horror," I have been obsess'd with ye idea of him illustrating one of my books. I am happy to announce that Santiago will be creating the jacket illustration for the Dark Regions Press book that Jeffrey Thomas and I have just completed writing, Encounters with Enoch Coffin. I cannot praise highly enough the enormous effect that Santiago's art has had on my -- I bought the hardcover Spanish edition of THE DUNWICH HORROR and return to it often, just to look at those amazing atmospheric illustrations that so evoke the perverse potency of Lovecraft's powerful tale.

So this has made Jeff and I ecstatic! I chose Jeff to write this book with me because he is a talented artist as well as a fine writer, and I wanted a collaborator who understood the techniques of art, the experience of being an artist, aspects of which are of vital importance to our portrayal of this sinister New England artist of our invention, Enoch Coffin. With our combined twelve tales, the book is 77,000 words, and I firmly feel that the stories we have written for this book are among the finest, most original and certainly most Lovecraftian work that Jeff and I have composed. Jeff's stories are so brilliant, and we have played off of each other's portrayal of our hypnotic and dangerous artist, thus creating what we both feel is a character of intense energy and originality. Encounters with Enoch Coffin will be published initially in hardcover some time next year.

S. T. Joshi and the gang will be bringing mother and me some rocking Thai food this Saturday, ye 10th, and I will drag Sunand before my webcam and do another wee video interview with him. He has so many projects forthcoming, including a new edition of Arthur Machen from Penguin Classics for which film-maker Guillermo del Toro has written a Foreward. And check out the awesome cover illustration!

S. T. will also have his first book published by The Library of America, an edition of Ambrose Bierce! So, we have much to talk about. Gawd, it is so incredibly cool, to have the world's leading Lovecraft scholar living here in Seattle. I have enter'd a wonderful phase of life (despite the sad situation of my home life) in which I feel such aesthetic fulfillment, as I sit here in my wonderful seclusion and write book after book. Because of the magickal support of my beloved patrons, I have been able to write full-time, & this has enabled me to grow exponentially as an artist, learned how to write more and more stories of length, to write rapidly, to find more and more the value of H. P. LOVECRAFT as Mine Eternal Muse. This is simply the best time of my life, the best time of my existence as an obsess'd Lovecraftian freak. I love it to death.

And now my buddy, that remarkable writer Jeffrey Thomas, has written an excellent book with me, & now this MAGNIFICENT artist, SANTIAGO CARUSO, will be drawing the jacket illustration. Great Yuggoth -- what an eldrtich joy!

WAITING FOR YE BUS TO INNSMOUTH

2011-09-02T09:21:00.000-07:00

My Facebook buddy, David Anderson, Photoshopped this still of me on ye bench in front of the Hollywood Theatre, where the annual Lovecraft Film Festival is held. S. T. Joshi stopped by to give me a ride to Portland, and before we left I wanted to film a wee video interview with him. Some rather "serious" people objected to the way I was dressed in my first video with S. T., so--being a punk wanker--I wanted to look totally ridiculous for the second one, and this was ye result. Alas, I can no longer attend the HPLFF or MythosCon or World Fantasy Con because I need to stay home and tend to my invalid mother. I'm really depressed about missing World Horror Con in Salt Lake City, next year I think, as the other WHC held there was so wonderful and, being a Mormon, the city holds a special place in me wither'd heart. (And this time the World Horror Convention in Salt Lake City has a LOVECRAFTIAN THEME!!! Wah!!!!)

But, being house-bound means that I can write lots and lots of books, so that's groovy. I thought that I was completely finish'd with my portion of stories for the book I am writing with Jeffrey Thomas, Encounters with Enoch Coffin. For this book (to be publish'd in hardcover next year by Dark Regions Press), I was setting my tales in HPL's mythical towns of Arkham, Kingsport, &c, and Jeff was concentrating on real New England cities. But his newest tale that he sent me, "Fearless Symmetry," was so magnificent that I needed to write one more story for the book, a wee sequel to Jeff's new tale. And although we were going to have all the stories set in Lovecraft's New England, I decided to set my final tale in Sesqua Valley. So that is the story I am working on this week-end.

ENCOUNTERS WITH ENOCH COFFIN is going to be one hell of a good collection. Jeff has written some of his finest things for it, and I feel that my long story set in Innsmouth and my novelette set in Kingsport are among the best things I have yet penned. H. P. Lovecraft served as our magnificent Muse for this book, and it is Lovecraftian to the core! One reason the book came about was because of S. T. Joshi's rather brutal comments on Jeff's Mythos fiction in S. T.'s The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos. S. T. can, at times, be rather severe (as I have scolded him), and in this case Jeff was really distraught about S. T.'s comments and vowed never to writer another Lovecraftian tale. To which I said, "No Way." Because our main character, Enoch Coffin, is a sinister New England artist, I wanted to co-write the book with a writer who was also gifted as an illustrator, and Jeff immediately came to mind. I am happy that my little plot has worked so well, with Jeff not only returning to Lovecraftian weird fiction, but returning to it with such brilliant work.

Okay, I need to return to writing my final tale of Enoch Coffin for the book, "Unto the Child of Woman."

Shalom.

at ye bench with mine beloved collaborator, Maryanne K. Snyder--we've just had a story accepted by S. T. for WEIRD FICTION REVIEW!

The Real New Book!

2011-08-26T20:36:00.000-07:00

The CAS-inspir'd book is -- a future project. I have found it extremely difficult to begin work on. I knew that it wou'd be difficult, but it is more so than I thought, & I may simply not have what it takes to write such a book. But not to fear, my darlinks!

Larry Roberts, who just publish'd Some Unknown Gulf of Night, seems anxious to have another book from me! Now, my last few books have been so serious that I feel a wee ache to do something rather camp, yet still Lovecraftian and creepy. I've also been wanting to do something with an exotic setting, as can be found in the weird fiction of Henry S. Whitehead. Don't know if that is viable. Maybe I could invent a haunted island or something. Anyway, writing for Larry Roberts gives me the freedom to be wild and eccentric and as kinky as I wanna be -- he is, after all, the publisher of Edward Lee.

So I have the idea for this new collection. Imagine a book co-written by H. P. Lovecraft, Henry S. Whitehead, and Ronald Firbank ! With just a pinch of Poe and Saki. Now some of ye may never have heard of Ronald Firbank. I have been trying to get the biography written by Jonathan Fryer (see above) for some time. I thought the book was already publish'd but it ain't available anywhere. One of my favourite books these past few decades has been Prancing Novelist: In Praise of Ronald Firbank, by Brigid Brophy, whut I discover'd during my initial discovery of Oscar Wilde.

It's a classic examination of this remarkable writer. His prose style is what one might call High Camp. Some of his sentences fairly shriek. I thought that would be a sublime prose style to emulate in my new book for Arcane Wisdom Press, Midnight Din and other Weird Stories. I've just completed my share of working on my collaborative book with Jeffrey Thomas, Encounters with Enoch Coffin, and I've really enjoy'd writing stories with a recurring character. So for this new book I thought I would have a recurring Queen called Reginald Din. It will be a wonderful challenge, to write tales that are campy and irreverent & yet absolutely Lovecraftian-creepy as well. We shall see if I am the woman who can pull it off.

Another challenge: I wrote Some Unknown Gulf of Night last November/December, in a matter of six weeks. I plan to write this entire new book before this year is over, whut gives me about four months. I love that idea and I think, if I can find the concentration, to accomplish this.

My thoughts and prayers are with ye who are in the path of this huge storm, Hurricane Irene. I hope that you have fled, however harsh an ordeal that may be. I have had fantasies of what I would take with me if such a storm was headed my way, & I know that I would have to rent one of those U-Haul gigs that was large enough to hold all my books and Barbra Streisand cds. Our big worry here on the Northwest is The Big One, a nine-point earthquake. Be safe, my darlings!

Conjuring A New Book

2011-08-14T11:14:00.000-07:00

S. T. shews us ye CAS papers at John Hay Library

One of the really exciting moments of our visit to Providence in October of 2007 was being shewn the boxes of Clark Ashton Smith papers at Brown University. By coincidence, S. T. Joshi was in Providence at the same time we were, working on the volumes of Smith's poetry that would eventually be publish'd by Hippocampus Press. Many of the ruled sheets were scrawled over in Smith's handwriting in very faint pencil and looked extremely delicate. When Derrick brought those three thick, beautiful volumes of verse into print, it was a time of celebration.

Perhaps it is a common occurrence, that many of us come to CAS by way of H. P. Lovecraft. I probably first read Clark Ashton Smith's weird tales when, in either Ireland or Las Vegas, I bought a second-hand pb set of Derleth's Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. When I finally return'd to Seattle in 1973, I discover'd Arkham House and quickly bought every in-print title, and I remember there was at least one volume of Smith's fiction in print as well as his Selected Poems. Reading the three volumes of HPL's Selected Letters then available, one gain'd a sense of Grandpa's admiration for Smith's poetry and prose. I then found the lovely wee Panther Horror pb reprintings of the early Arkham House Smith hardcovers, and his fiction had a real influence on my own attempts at writing dark phantasy. The CAS influence has been remarked on over the years by friends and fans who have read my books. I've paid little tributes to Smith in some of my weird tales, often mentioning him by name, and naming one character in "Your Metamorphic Moan" Klarkson Ash.

A couple of years ago I felt the ache to write an entire book of poetry and prose that wou'd be directly influenc'd by CAS. Although the idea intrigued me, it was also intimidating. I have no confidence in my ability as a poet, and I have moftly confined myself to writing in my favourite form of the sonnet. That was when I thought of Maryanne K. Snyder, my collaborator with whom I wrote a story that sold to Weird Tales and has since been reprinted in The Tangled Muse. When I first met Maryanne and her charming husband Greg, at a Seattle Gay Pride march, she was writing lots and lots of really excellent poetry. Gobs and gobs. She has the soul of a poet, as can be detected when one reads her personal letters or listens to her talk. And she is a huge CAS fan. It was the obvious choice, to ask her to write this CASian book with me. Over the years, her writing time has becoming limited as she pursues an existence as a business woman--another thing at which she is brilliant. Thus working with her on projects is a sometime-thing, & thus it has been an easy & regrettable habit to keep putting off this CAS-flavor'd collection while I wrote my many other books.

But the time hath come for the CAS book to become reality, and I suddenly feel an amazing energy for conjuring its reality. That will probably be my main focus once this book I am writing with Jeffrey Thomas, a book perhaps to be called Encounters with Enoch Coffin and to be publish'd next year by Dark Regions Press, is completed, & that will be soon. Thus I am slowly devouring the wondrous three volumes of Smith's poetry from Hippocampus Press and the magnificent five volumes of The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger forNight Shade Books. & it is indeed a compelling, enchanted realm, the world of Clark Ashton Smith. I look forward to when I can delve into that realm non-stop, every day, day after day, as I work non-stop on a book that pays this Master of the Weird Tale homage.

The Writing Begins to Flow --- :-}

2011-08-03T15:29:00.000-07:00

The leatherbound-with-slipcase edition of Gathered Dust and Others has sold out in pre-order, and the regular $40 hardcover editions seem to be selling quickly. My thanks to all who have order'd it! Ooo, how I love that cover painting by Wayne Miller. It captures the atmosphere of the book's title story exactly.

I completed, at 8,256 words, what I consider my definitive tale of Lovecraft's Dunwich, "They Smell of Thunder." I have finally taught myself how to write in this new environment of being upstairs in the dining room, where I need to be to keep a closer watch on me mum. This new tale is for another book I am writing for Dark Regions Press, a collaborative book with the amazing Jeffrey Thomas. (Oh, wow, I just figur'd out how to do colour'd text....) The book consists of stories concerning a sinister New England artist, Enoch Coffin, and his encounters with ye supernatural, with which he communes so as to aid his art. I have now penned two tales and have started work on the next, set in Kingsport and tentatively entitled "Mystic Articulation." Jeff has written a number of excellent stories, and this is gonna be one rad book. His tales are set in the real New England while mine are set in Lovecraft's invented mythic cities.

I have also been trying to work on an interplanetary tale in the tradition of Clark Ashton Smith, for a collection of CAS-inspired stories that I am writing with Maryanne K. Snyder. Thus far this new idea has not worked out, and I am probably going to abandon it and find something more to my liking. I am, perhaps, not capable of finding the interest needed for the writing of tales set on other worlds. I do have an idea for another tale, inspir'd by my reading of Clark's translations of Baudelaire and his story, "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros." My initial concern with writing this book with Maryanne was that the works not be in any way Lovecraftian but rather try to evoke the spirit (although not the language) of Clark Ashton Smith. But now I'm just gonna go ahead and write whatever comes our way. Our influences are legion.

Still have no word on the release of Some Unknown Gulf of Night.. I hope that the book will be in our hot hands soon. It's weird: I'll have that book released this month, the Dark Regions book next month, and the Miskatonic River Press book the following month. How utterly insane, to have one book each for ye next three months. Who can afford to buy yem all? My books must needs compete with each other. Utter lunacy. I vow never to have more than two books out per year from now on. Preferably one book a year, but I keep writing them so quickly that, well............

That's me in the Davy Crockett get-up with the Jimmy Durante glasses, next to my older sister, Linda. Must have been 1956 or 1957. How strange to have grown so antient. Hmmmmm, it looks like my sis is holding a copy of ye Necronomicon!!!

S. T. JOSHI

2011-07-20T13:54:00.000-07:00

The first time I met S. T. was at a very early Norwescon here in Seattle. I don't think he had yet edited the Corrected Text Editions of Lovecraft for Arkham House, but he had already secured his reputation as a Lovecraftian scholar of note. I had read his letters and essays in zines such as Nyctalops and was quite impress'd. But it was his editing of the four volumes of HPL's Tales for Arkham House, and then the wonderful edition of Miscellaneous Writings that made me an obsess'd Joshi fan. To have Lovecraft's fiction in texts that were as close as possible to how Lovecraft wished them to be preserv'd was just amazing and magical.

One of the really sensational experiences of my life was when my chums Maryanne and Greg took me on a three-week tour of New England and New York in October of 2007. It just happened that S. T. was in Providence during our four-day stay there, doing work on Clark Ashton Smith at ye John Hay Library. Above you can see S. T, shewing us the boxes fill'd with Smith's personal papers, with poems scrawled in faded pencil -- and Maryanne is freaking out at the rarity of it all. Those four days were the moft magical of my life, especially the after-noon during which S. T. took us on an exhausting walking tour of Lovecraftian sites on College Hill and I stood next to S. T. before 10 Barnes Street, holding in me moist palms all three of S. T.'s edited/annotated Penguin Classics HPL editions. That was the finest moment of my life as a Lovecraftian, and it fill'd me with renew'd determination to write book after book in homage to Lovecraft's genius.

There have been many Lovecraftian miracles in my weary life, but the finest was when S. T. marry'd a Seattle lass and moved to our city. I was at this time return'd in activity to The Esoteric Order of Dagon Amateur Press Association, for which S. T. was the acting O. E. Having him living in the city gave boring Seattle a mystical sheen, and seem'd a sign from Yuggoth that my life as an obsess'd Lovecraftian weird artist was the right choice and one to be pursued with increas'd alacrity. Still, I was much too shy and anti-social to actually try and visit S. T. at his Seattle home, and the few times I was him was when he did various book signings at University Book Store.

Finally a new miracle arriv'd and Hippocampus Press agreed to publish a collection of my weird fiction, and thus I worked with S. T. as my editor. It was such an overwhelming experience. Up until then I didn't have much interference from my publishers with the contents of my work. I loved being audaciously eccentric, and this is especially evident in Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts, where I got away with much bad writing, weird and archaic spelling influenc'd by Lovecraft's Letters, &c &c. Knowing that I'd be working with S. T. as my editor instill'd within me an ache to do my finest writing for the book that became The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams. S. T. was the one and only critic whose opinion meant anything to me; because he was so intimate with Lovecraft's fiction, I felt that he alone cou'd fully understand my work, my author's obsession with remaining an artist of Lovecraftian horror. The result was that that first book for Hippocampus Press contain'd my best writing up to that time, showcasing a maturity and consistency of style, most of which was the result of working diligently so as to delivery to S. T. an excellent wee book of Lovecraftian tales.

S. T. has worked as my editor on three books, and was inspirational on my delving into the prose-poem form in writing an experimental volume as my second book for Hippocampus Press, Uncommon Places. I knew that S. T. was a huge fan of the prose-poem form, and that gave me the confidence to approach him and Derrick with the idea of a book that was fill'd with prose-poems and prose-poem/vignette sequences. I am especially pleased with that book and ache to see it in print. The fabulous artist, Gwabryel, has been commissioned to illustrate it, and his work has me so excited. Below is the pen & ink version of his illustration for my vignette, "Cathedral of Death" -- ye final version will be a full-colour rendition.

I am still in awe of S. T. Joshi, but he has now become a close and very dear friend. It has been so rad to be able to share that cherish'd friendship with the world via YouTube, when S. T. comes to sit before my webcam. He has promis'd to come visit around ye holiday season, when we will record our singing of Holiday songs. It shall be an eldritch clamor!

"The Tomb of Oscar Wilde"

2011-07-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

I had been trying to write a new weird tale for Horror for the Holidays, an anthology being edited by Scott David Aniolowski for Miskatonic River Press. But writing has been next to impossible since moving my laptop upstairs, to the dining room, so that I can keep a closer look on me mum, who is becoming more and more challenging to watch over. And so I gave up on writing the new Sesqua Valley story I was working on, a tale of Rosh Chodesh in which Shub-Niggurath is worshiped as part of the Shekinah. Sadly, I inform'd Scott that I simply couldn't write. He then ask'd if I cou'd perhaps write a wee sonnet sequence concerning Jewish holidays for the book, & I've had the ache to return to poetry of late, so I said I'd try that. I wanted one of the sonnets to concern the minor holiday, Rosh Chodesh, the festival of the New Moon. Dwelling on ye moon always makes me think of Oscar Wilde, because the moon is so often invoked in Wilde's poetry, in Salome and others -- and there is that wonderfully irreverent illustration by Aubrey Beardsley, "The Woman in the Moon." Thinking of Wilde led me to scan his poetry for mentions of Luna, and this led me to YouTube, so as to listen to readings of Wilde's poetry. Among the Wilde videos were some shewing visitors to Wilde's tomb ---

and, girlfriend, I was APPALLED!!! I had no idea that Wilde's tomb had been so marred by graffiti and lipstick kisses. I did a Google on Wilde's tomb to see if this issue had been address'd and discover'd that ye animal fats in lipstick seep into the monument's stone and does irreparable damage. I knew that I had to address this in a poem or weird tale, and thus I work'd on a new story, bringing in Rosh Chodesh and Shub-Niggurath.

It is always nice when a new story kind of creeps up on one as a surprise of inspiration, especially during a period of writer's block when nothing seems to be working. I wrote a first draft and worked on it a bit, then sent a first polish to Scott; and then this morning I did a final revision/polish, adding some dialogue that came to me in the night as dream. I wrote a new sonnet for the tale, which I read last night on MrWilum. It feels wonderful to have finish'd something new, even though 'tis but a wee thing of merely 1,600 words. What I really love is now I have a story of that title, so that, in some future epoch, I can assemble a new omnibus of my work and call it The Tomb of Oscar Wilde and Others. Yes!

Nu, I have a new tale in which I evoke poetry and my Jewishness, and in which I pay homage to dear Oscar, the poet whose work I so adore. Those of you who have The Tangled Muse will have read my prose-poem tribute to Wilde therein -- & it will be reprinted in my forthcoming collection from Hippocampus Press, Uncommon Places, to be publish'd next year. Maryanne K. Snyder and I have also written a tale of young Wilde and his encounter, in London, with newly-spawn'd Simon Gregory Williams of Sesqua Valley. The delightful Jason V Brock has accepted that story for a forthcoming hardcover anthology.

Wilde will continue to haunt me as Magnificent Muse. I've always had a hankering to write my own wee novel inspir'd by The Picture of Dorian Gray. I may yet do so.

Shalom.

Ye Aesthetic Ache

2011-07-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

I can't believe what I just did. I just spent over an hour writing a new blog here, and then I absentmindedly went offline before saving it! It's all gone! Arrrrrgh!!! But that is perhaps a significant representation of my current mental chaos. My mind is mush. I cannot concentrate on work, and I am getting desperate. I did so much writing last year, and I began this year so cocksure that I wou'd continue writing, writing, writing. I've not completed anything of length this year. Moving my writing from ye solitary and silent basement to this upstairs dining room, so that I can keep a closer watch on my invalid mother, who requires constant care, has absolutely killed my ability to concentrate on writing. It's driving me bonkers, because writing is the air I breathe. I grasp, in desperation, into the air of aesthetic inspiration, for those mad & lunatic & oh-so zany aspects of inspiration that will get me to me keyboard and revive my writing. I had this insane idea that I am going to write my own version of Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear." but I forgot to write down my ideas for it as notes and nigh I cannot remember my plot! Curses on my mental chaos & inspidity! (And I cannot even spell insipidty, and it ain't even a real word anyway . . . . . . )

I've been reading over my copy of my new book and finding all of the stupid errors that have crept in despite brave proofreading. Bah. In one place I use the words "transformed" twice in the same sentence. Then at one place of mass stupidity I typed "personae" (plural) when I meant to type ye singular "persona." Oy, too hopeless. But I've been making corrections in my Word doc, and someday when I have another omnibus of my work publish'd the truly Corrected Text of Some Unknown Gulf on Night will be included. But reading over my book, such a lovely book and so beautifully design'd by the brilliant Larry Roberts, has me reading again my wee paperback of Fungi from Yuggoth & Other Poems, the copy that I held with me as I stood next to S. T. in front of 10 Barnes Street, the house where Lovecraft lived when he penned his sonnets, that charming paperback with its yellow'd pages and those charming illustrations by Frank Utpatel.

And ye Fungi are casting their bewitchment over me once again, instilling within me that ache to write my own weird stuff. So it was rather magickal, this morning, when Paul of yog-sothoth.com sent me a wee message providing a link to his audio work in progress -- a superb reading of Fungi from Yuggoth. My gawd, it is such a fun, a fine, reading. I am a devoted Anglophile, and to me ye sweetest music of all Time is a British voice speaking the works of Shakespeare or reciting poetry. Nigh, this is a rough first recording by Paul, and he will refine it before unleashing it onto an Innocent Publick -- but he does more than merely read the sonnets -- he performs them with vocal inflections, subtle yet entirely effective. It's dead good and I ache to hear ye final version. But here's the thing: just as listening to Will Hart's wonderful reading of the sonnets inspir'd ye writing of Some Unknown Gulf of Night, listening to-day to Paul's readings fill'd me with this overwhelming desire to return to Fungi from Yuggoth and write a second book inspir'd by these sonnets! It's a crazy idea--and I think an irresistible one. I cannot bloody write, I am so unhappy in this wretched state of writer's block. I've had to tell two mates that I cannot contribute stories to their anthologies, and that makes me so angry with myself for so lacking professional discipline as a writer.

So, this new idea is something I can work on slowly, with no writer's deadline hanging over me, something I can work on for the rest of this year and much of next. A new book of short-shorts or tales up to 3,000 words, each inspir'd by Fungi from Yuggoth. I think I like this idea a lot. I grasp at it as a lifeline for my writing in this dreary period of block through which I stagger, moaning in misery. And if I can then write such a new book, I can offer it to Tom Lynch as my second book for Miskatonic River Press -- and the amazing SANTIAGO CARUSO can illustrate it! Oh, Shub-Niggurath!! Ngai!!!!

Great Yuggoth -- look whut ye poftman just brought me:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It is a facsimile printing of "The Lurking Fear" as it originally appear'd in Home Brew, complete with Clark Ashton Smith's slyly erotic illustrations!

My gawd! If this doesn't put me in ye mood for writing new Lovecraftian weird fiction, nuthin' will. Come on, Grandpa -- work yr Eldritch Magick!!!!!!!! Ia!!!!! Shub-Niggurath!!!!!!!!!!!!

Soon -- soon -- & it's GORGEOUS!

2011-07-11T14:44:00.000-07:00

Larry Roberts sent me the proof copy of my newest book, SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT -- and, Great Yuggoth, it's a lovely wee book! I may be deluded in thinking this is the best book I have yet written -- that may just be my sense of wonder in the way the book came about, as a total surprise of inspiration culled from listening to Will Hart's magnificent readings of Fungi from Yuggoth on his YouTube channel. I was suddenly overwhelmed with the need to write this book before the end of 2010. "I'm gonna write this book before I go to MythosCon," I assured myself, not really believing I could do such a thing. I was possess'd by the writing, more powerfully than I have ever been as a Lovecraftian weird artist, and the writing of the book became the entering of a realm of intoxicated ecstasy that can only be found in the work -- the delicious intense labor that we writers are sometimes blessed with, when we enter that writing zone and nothing else exists.

Each number'd segment in Some Unknown Gulf of Night is my aesthetic response, in prose-poem or vignette, to that number'd sonnet in Lovecraft's cycle of poetry; thus, my segment XVIII shewn above is my "response" to Sonnet XVIII, "The Garden s of Yin," in Fungi from Yuggoth. Thus, when reading my book, it might be fun to first read the poem in Lovecraft's work, and then read my imaginative reply to it in my wee book.

The book is now in production and will be shipping in about three weeks. It is simply gorgeous, beautifully design'd by Larry Roberts, superbly illustrated by the wonderful Matthew Jaffe. I really do think it might be the best book, in the writing and power of imagination, that I have compos'd. I am especially fond of the prose-poem and vignette forms, and am thrill'd to have this book out this year, this year in which Centipede Press will be publishing their gorgeous edition of Thomas Ligotti's vignettes, The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales.

There may be some few copies of Some Unknown Gulf of Night still available for pre-order at HorrorMall.

Strange New Compulsion

2011-07-07T19:10:00.000-07:00

The above image from Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear" is by the wonderful Raymond Bayless, and was for the first of the Arkham House Corrected Texts editions edited by the indefatigable S. T. Joshi. I've been doing a series of video commentaries on Lovecraft's Tales for my YouTube channel, and in April I discuss'd "The Lurking Fear," a story that I have always enjoy'd. The tale recently came up in a Lovecraft thread at Thomas Ligotti Online where it was suggested by some that HPL wasn't completely serious in writing the story, because some of the language is admittedly overblown. I reject the idea that Lovecraft parody'd his style in this tale or in "The Hound" -- reject that idea absolutely. "The Lurking Fear" is told by a madman who is gradually losing his hold on sanity, and his descent from sanity is mirror'd in the story's wild language and emotional stress. Right? So I decided I needed to reread "The Lurking Fear" and then I remember'd that there was a link to a two-part audio rendition of it at the too-wonderful Lovecraft eZine, so I downloaded that and have just listen'd to it ~~~~~~~~

& nigh I have a Strange Compulsion . . . . .

I'm gonna write my own version of "The Lurking Fear." No, for real, y'all. I know, I know -- it's such a fanboy idea. Don't care. My story will be called

"What Lurking Fear"

W. H. Pugmire, Esq.

It's gonna have four 2,000 word chapters, and I am going to use the same titles for my chapters that Grandpa used in his tale. The story will be set in Dunwich and concern one Yannick Martense who lives in a queer mansion atop a high domed hill in Dunwich. He is visited by the sinister New England artist, Enoch Coffin. The story will be for the book I am writing with Jeffrey Thomas, a collection of connected tales concerning Enoch Coffin and his intimate relationship with nameless arcane weirdness. I am totally obsess'd with this idea and even though it sounds comical -- I shall be as utterly serious in my writing of ye tale as Lovecraft was in writing "The Lurking Fear" . . .

(stop your chortling.....)

CENTIPEDE PRESS SITE HAS A NEW LOOK!

2011-07-04T13:53:00.000-07:00

One of today's most remarkable and excellent genre presses is Centipede Press. Jerad (pictured above on your right) is almost frantic in his desire to publish wonderful book after book. And now his Centipede Press website has a brand new look -- but I must warn you that visiting it can be agonizing because of all the AWESOME BOOKS HE HAS FORTHCOMING!!! I mean, My Gawd, The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales by Thomas Ligotti -- a rare book that has been so difficult to obtain! For this new edition, Ligotti has personally revised all of the works, some of them quite substantially, and he has written a new Introduction for the volume. Harry O. Morris has provided 11 stunning new illustrations for the book, all of which will be printed in colour.

Then there is Lee Brown Coye: A Retrospective, reproducing the artwork of this master craftsman. And -- o my gawd! -- KARL EDWARD WAGNER: Masters of the Weird Tale -- edited and with an Introduction by Stephen Jones, additional Introduction by Peter Straub and personal reminiscence by David Drake, and with an Afterword by Laird Barron, over 700 pages of bonny Karl's horror fiction, profusely illustrated.

It has been the high-point of my life as an author to work with Jerad on The Tangled Muse. His genius as a book designer thrill'd me, as I wanted my book to resemble some tome that had spill'd forth from Oscar Wilde's Yellow Nineties fin-de-siecle -- and Jerad accomplish'd this feat with his expert hand.

The newly design'd site has an Opinion Page for which I have written a wee thing concerning my relationship with S. T. Joshi. The mighty Laird Barron contributes a fascinating article entitled "The Tiger Stripe," and Dave Roberts contributes a fascinating article on "The Scholar Geek." New articles from a wealth of writers and others will be presented each month, and Centipede readers/customers are invited to get in on ye action. I urge you to visit this fabulous site. Jerad's books are pricy, yet worth every cent. They are among the finest books of genre fiction being publish'd to-day.

Clicking on the title to this blog will take you directly to Centipede Press -- that Wonderland of Horror!!!!

Banner Year for Mythos Anthologies!

2011-06-27T14:43:00.000-07:00

Look ma -- got my name on ye cover! Just below the magnificent Thomas Ligotti!

This is proving to be a wonderful year for Cthulhu Mythos anthologies. I was recently sent the new anthology Historical Lovecraft, but life has been way too chaotic for me to dip into the book yet. It has been getting rave reviews at Amazon. The editors also do the free online site, Innsmouth Free Press, a lovely place to read new Mythos fiction.

I am still awaiting my copy of Dead But Dreaming II from Miskatonic River Press, in which a story that took me decades to "realise" -- my sequel-of-sorts to Robert Bloch's "The Skull of the Marquis de Sade," has nigh been publish'd. The first Dead But Dreaming was an extremely popular book, and I have high expectations for this second offering.

Two fabulous reprint anthologies will be published in Autumn. I am delirious about appearing in The Book of Cthulhu, forthcoming from those rad kids at Night Shade Books. The contents is simply amazing. And of course Prime books will release, in September, New Cthulhu--The Recent Weird, in which one of my better tales, "The Fungal Stain," will be reprinted.

I'm hoping that all of this is but the beginning of a new vogue in the publication of Lovecraftian anthologies. Lois Gresh is editing Arkham Nightmares for Arkham House, and that promises to contain many fine new tales some of which will explore Lovecraftian regions. And S. T. Joshi has an anthology coming out maybe next year, Spawn of the Green Abyss, which contains both reprints and some few brand new Mythos tales. Joshi is also working with Larry Roberts and Arcane Wisdom Press on a new line of books, Modern Mythos Library, that will publish Mythos novels and collections picked by S. T. S. T. is also editing Black Wings II and Black Wings III for P. S. Publishing.

It is a great time to be a Mythos writer! Of my own books, The Tangled Muse from Centipede Press is almost sold out, and that amazes me. And my September hardcover from Dark Regions Press, Gathered Dust and Others, just went up for pre-sale, and people seem to be quickly ordering the special leather-bound boxed edition. Many thanx to everyone who has purchas'd my books--you make this groovy life possible, this writing life that is of such mammoth importance to me. Kisses to all.

I AM PROVIDENCE continues to cast its spell

2011-06-24T22:23:00.000-07:00

I stole ye above image from another blog, TENTACLII::H. P. LOVECRAFT BLOG, because it reminds me of how wonderful it is when a box arrives from Hippocampus Press. Although S. T. brought me a set of I Am Providence when he pick'd me up to drive me to last year's H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival and Cthulhu Con, I also purchas'd a set from Derrick as I wanted one for me upstairs bedroom and one for my work station in ye basement. I've been reading the book again, slowly, and am nigh half-way through the 2nd volume, and this has had the effect of returning me to add more wordage to my already lengthy review of the volumes at Amazon. There have been some rather--ungenerous--reviews of the book at Amazon by people who dislike S. T. and claim that he too often intrudes into the story of Lovecraft's life so as to make personal asides. I find these comments by S. T. always interesting and always adding to the interesting story of Lovecraft's life and Work. Every page of the book's first twenty-five chapters--every single page--are about H. P. Lovecraft, despite what these morons at Amazon claim. And it is a story that has compell'd me for decades, the story of a figure who has me so spellbound that he has absolutely alter'd my life, has given me my life! I initially heard of Lovecraft from reading an issue of the horror film fanzine Gore Creatures that was dedicated to his fiction. This was in the 1960's. Then my horror film buddy, Brian, who was into reading weird fiction (I just liked to watch horror films) shew'd me his newly-purchas'd edition of the 1943 Arkham House Lovecraft collection, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, for which he paid a handsome price. When in high school Brian and I published a one-shot horror film fanzine in which we had a section of tributes to Forry Ackerman. Somehow I got Robert Bloch's address and got him to contribute a wee tribute to his buddy Forry.

When I went to Ireland to serve as an LDS missionary, I continued to correspond with Bloch; and because my superiors didn't allow me to attend cinema and watch evil horror films, I began to buy books by Bob, or anthologies in which Bloch was one of many writers, and thus I was introduced to names such as Carl Jacobi, August Derleth, Brian Lumley and so many others. I also went to used bookshops and found Panther Horror editions of Lovecraft's Tales, one of which was called The Haunter of the Dark and other tales.

And I was intrigued to see that the book's title tale had been dedicated by HPL to my buddy, Robert Bloch. Finally return'd to the States a total weird fiction freak and discover'd Arkham House the Lovecraft's Selected Letters, and thus HPL's personality engulf'd mine own. I changed my author's byline, which had been Bill Pugmire, Jr., to W. H. Pugmire, to coincide with H. P. Lovecraft. I then bought Augie's original edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and read Lin Carter's A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, and they convinc'd me that I had to become a famous Mythos writer. I began to mimic, in my letters, Lovecraft's idiosyncrasies as they are found in his publish'd correspondence (such as typing "publish'd" instead of "published," or typing "antient" instead of "ancient"), and dated my letters 1776 instead of 1976. Yes, I was utterly under ye Old Gent's spell. The 1970's were such an intense time to be a Lovecraft fans because the new breed of scholars were beginning to publish their discoveries and opinions. Then S. T. edited the Corrected Texts Editions for Arkham House, and eventually Derrick began Hippocampus Press. We have now enter'd ye richest time in the world of Lovecraft Studies, with edition after edition of the Works being publish'd by prestigious Houses.

I have never been able to shake Lovecraft from me, and it has been my perverse attitude that I want to be more and more Lovecraftian as I age, and that I want my focus as an author to be tied to H. P. Lovecraft and his genius. Gawd, there is still so much more to write! Lovecraft feeds my Muse more powerfully now, in middle age, than ever before. I strive to find new ways to express my Lovecraftian ecstasy. The discovery of my passion for writing my wee prose-poem/vignette sequences has been a beautiful find, and I am utterly addicted to ye form. I am having four books publish'd this year, 2011, which seems mad but that's how inspirational I find writing the weird eldritch stuff. It's as much fun as it is work--but it's the work I like best, getting lost in that zone we sink into as writers, where the real world fades away and we become lost in our sense of wonder. It's the best!

So reading these two fabulous volumes feeds me absolutely. I love them, every page. If you can, go to Amazon and write your own review of I Am Providence. The book deserves all the attention and comment we can give it, be it praise or criticism. In writing it, S. T. Joshi has done such a service to Lovecraft's memory, Lovecraft's genius, and we who celebrate it. Selah.

YE CURSE OF YIG

2011-06-22T23:11:00.000-07:00

In a letter to August Derleth, H. P. Lovecraft wrote: "By the way--if you want to see a new story which is practically mine, read "The Curse of Yig" in the current W.T. Mrs. Reed is a client for whom Long & I have done oceans of work, & this story is about 75% mine. Alkl I had to work on was a synopsis describing a couple of pioneers in a cabin with a nest of rattlesnakes beneath, the killing of the husband by snakes, the bursting of the corpse, & the madness of the wife, who was an eye-witness to the horror. There was no plot or motivation--no prologue or aftermath to the incident--so that one might say the story, as a story, is wholly mine. I invented the snake-god & the curse, the tragic wielding of the axe by the wife, the matter of the snake-victim's identity, & the asylum epilogue. Also, I worked up the geographic & other incidental colour--getting some data from the alleged authoress, who knows Oklahoma, but more from books."

I have not read "The Curse of Yig" for quite a while, as I am waiting to read all of the Lovecraft revisions when they are publish'd in ye two forthcoming annotated volumes from Arcane Wisdom Press. The first such volume, The Crawling Chaos and Others, is at the printers as I write and should be available in four to six weeks, and in it one will find the fully annotated text of "The Curse of Yig." However, through my beloved weird sister Sarah and her blog, She Never Slept, and her Facebook activity, I discovered that a film version of the story had been produced; and through Sarah's sorcery I was able to get in touch with the film's producer/director, Paul von Stoetzel, & in to-day's poft I got a copy of the film on DVD.

Great Yuggoth!!! This is, quite simply, one of the finest adaptations of a Lovecraft weird tale to cinema that I have ever seen. It is brilliant and effective in every way. It has been my opinion that films that stay as true as possible to H. P. Lovecraft's original stories are the films that work best, because they have the genius of Lovecraft as their foundation. This is one of those rare films (such as Bryan Moore's excellent Cool Air and ye HPLHS's magnificent The Call of Cthulhu) that have as one of their major strong points their keeping Lovecraft's story as the basis for their cinematic effort.

There are some quite wonderful additions. The actress pictured above, Amy Schweikhard, opens the film as its initial narrator. Thus is Lovecraft's original male character transform'd. She sits in a chair and begins to speak Lovecraft's language. The dialogue is taken directly from the text of Lovecraft's story, and it is perfectly performed. But this woman is not just a figure inthe story -- she is the story's "alleged authoress," Zealia Bishop (& what a delightfully appropriately Lovecraftian name this authoress has!). Miss Schweikhard's delivery is so good, so effective, and has the immediate effect of instilling into the film an atmosphere of weird mystery. She is utterly convincing, in the way she sits, the look on her face (which is almost a lack of expression that, underneath, churns a volcano of emotion). The change of character gender works very well, especially when Lovecraft's original line, uttered by Doctor McNeill, "You've done remarkable work for a man as young as you seem to be..." becomes "You've done remarkable work--for a woman--as young as you seem to be."

Production is solid and everything contains a sense of authenticity. The lower lair of the asylum's seemingly deserted region is atmospheric and prepares one for the sight of the horror, that which has been kissed with the curse of Yig. The creature is shewn to us just enough, and as the narrator quotes the actual lines of Lovecraft's description, "It was absolutely hairless, and its tawny-looking back seemed subtly squamous in the dim ghoulish light. . . . Around the shoulders it was rather speckled and brownish, and the head was very curiously flat. As it looked up to hiss at me I saw that the beady little black eyes were damnably anthropoid, but I could not bear to study them for long", that is exactly what is shewn on the screen. It is Lovecraft's offspring of Yig superbly and perfectly realised. We do not see it overlong, just as it is not further described in the story.

One of the weakest element in low budget film productions is poor acting. In this department, this movie excels. Everyone gives extremely good, at times brilliant, performances. Tim Uren is excellent as the doomed Walker Davis, a male character who, in true Lovecraft tradition, faints when overwhelmed by terror and horror. Minor roles are handled with finesse, with Conor Timmis giving an exemplary performance in his few moments of dialogue. One character that has been added to Lovecraft's story is a an "Okmulgee Man," portrayed magnificently by Kurt Schweickhard. This wholly successful character is similar to that of old Zadok Allen in "The Shadow over Innsmouth," and he is so good he almost steals the show.

The invention of that "Okmulgee Man" is but one of the wonderful and perfect aspects of the topnotch screenplay by leading player, Tim Uren. The script is flawless, with many moments of brilliance. Again, it tells the story almost exactly as Lovecraft penned it -- but I do not think it is a simple matter to accomplish this in a screenplay. It takes thought and effort and keen knowledge of Lovecraft's text, and then it takes an understand of the film medium to thus convey a work of prose into an effective and fascinating film.

Music score is provided by Scott Keever, and wow is it wonderful. It is not intrusive, and it absolutely adds to the mood of the film. When the music needs to unsettle, it is subtly weird. When the narrative introduces the Davis couple the music becomes delightful folksy (a poor word to describe the music at this portion of the film). Keever himself appears with his fiddle in some scenes.

I watched this amazing Lovecraftian film spellbound, and then I read the story and that spell was enhanced. The language of the film is Lovecraft's. The story is Lovecraft's. But Lovecraft has been perfectly realised and evoked within a medium that has rarely done him justice. The Curse of Yig, quite simply, is one of the finest Lovecraftian films ever produced. I cannot praise it highly enough.

Eldritch Bookmarks & S. T. Joshi!

2011-06-20T16:46:00.000-07:00

Those who pre-order the fabulous new anthology Dead But Dreaming II from Miskatonic River Press will receive the above fabtranulous bookmark sign'd by moi! Pretty damn cool. This bookmark is printed on sturdy card stock and is quite lovely. Order your copy of this book this instant! One side of the bookmark shews Dead But Dreaming II, while the other side shews ye magnificent Jeffrey Thomas cover for my first book from MRP, The Strange Dark One--Tale of Nyarlathotep. The photo of me is from an Eldritch Queen moment at MythosCon. My eyebrows were painted on unevenly, but oh well, some girls just need help.

Had a lovely time with our local gang, who descended upon mother and me with laughter and Thai food. It was a really great time, the highlight being a 15 minute interview with S. T. Joshi that I recorded on YouTube and then posted on my Facebook page. S. T. discusses many forthcoming projects and was quite delightful. We couldn't get him to sing on camera, as has been requested by many of his fans; but I just got an email from him saying he does want to please his fans and thus S. T. wants to get together around ye holidays and do a video of Holiday Songs! Stay tuned!!!

SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT is nigh..........!

2011-06-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

Larry Roberts sent me ye signature sheets for Some Unknown Gulf of Night yesterday, so as soon as I sign and return those, ye book will be published. The hardcover edition sold-out in pre-order, & I want to thank all of ye who order'd it. It was so great -- Larry hired a for-real proofreader to work on the book, and I think it will thus be completely free of misprints! A miracle! Yuggoth, how I hate proofreading. I went over and over the proofs for The Tangled Muse, wanting so for my Centipede Press book to be error-free. Then I decided to reprint the title story in my forthcoming collection from Dark Regions Press, and Jeffrey Thomas worked with me as editor on that book -- and he found THREE typos, all my fault, that were in the story and they were reproduced in the Centipede omnibus -- arrrgh!

Writing Some Unknown Gulf of Night the a magical experience. I have long wanted to do something inspir'd by Fungi from Yuggoth and always assumed it wou'd be a sonnet cycle of my own. But my sonnet sequence in Sesqua Valley & Other Haunts so dissatisfies me that I am not encouraged to try my hand at another such thing. Then my buddy Will Hart recorded the entire sonnet cycle by Lovecraft and posted his readings on his channel at YouTube, CthulhuWho1, and as I listen'd to Will's superb reading of HPL's sonnets I was inspir'd with the ache to write a prose-poem sequence based on ye Fungi. Ye may have noticed that I am totally obsess'd with writing these prose-poem sequences, and the idea of doing an ENTIRE BOOK of them made me dizzy with contemplative ecstasy.

So I set to work. I told myself that I would have the thing finish'd before I left for MythosCon. My work would be a poem-by-poem aesthetic "commentary" on Lovecraft's sonnets. I listen'd to Will read sonnet #1, took notes on words that should recur in my piece, and then typed ye initial version straight into Microsoft Word. Then I read it aloud and polished/revised. I didn't want to make too many changes, I didn't want the thing to be over-polished. Lovecraft wrote his sonnet cycle in less than two weeks. I wanted Some Unknown Gulf of Night to be a work that issued from my cracked brain quickly, smoothly, almost as stream-of-conscious writing. So for my first sequence I used words and images from Lovecraft's first sonnet. HPL's first three sonnets told a connected tale of sorts, and thus my first three prose-poems would do likewise. I sent each sequence to Will for his evaluation, and his enthusiasm for the project fed my flame. Then I began sending them as I wrote them to my buddy J. D. Worthington, one of this era's finest Lovecraft critics.

I wrote the thing in six weeks. It was like being hypnotized. Reality ceased to exist. I could not eat or sleep, I had to write this thing. I've never had such an experience as a writer, it was awesome. And the finish'd result, to my mind, is what I consider my finest book. But, girlfriend, I'm partial. It feels rad to have a new book that is all-original, no reprints. I think that was a key factor in it's selling out in pre-order.

The illustrations by Matthew Jaffe are so wonderful, so perfect. The book design is simply amazing, it's going to be a beautiful book of high aesthetics and poetry. With luck, it will be released in a fortnight or so. I itch to hold it in my paws.

Kisses to all, my darlings.

GATHERED DUST & OTHERS hardcover edition.

2011-06-06T16:44:00.000-07:00

Gathered Dust and Others will have a hardcover edition limited to 100 copies, as well as the special boxed leather-bound Deluxe 13 edition limited to thirteen copies. The book will be officially announced by Dark Regions Press tomorrow--Tuesday, 7 June 2011--and Joe will probably then begin to take pre-orders. I don't expect this hardcover edition to sell out in pre-order as Some Unknown Gulf of Night did, but who knows? I am extremely happy and grateful to have a third hardcover edition of my fiction offered this year! There are those who dislike trade paperbacks and prefer to collect an author in hardcover, and small press limited edition hardcovers are often such lovely books, beautifully produced. Most of the reprints in this book have not been available in hardcover. Of the new works, the title story is a new Lovecraftian novelette set in Arkham and serves as sequel to J. Vernon Shea's "The Haunter of the Graveyard," a tale that Vernon wrote for Augie when Derleth was editing ye original Arkham House edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Another long new story, "Depths of Dreams and Madness," is set in Sesqua Valley in the 1920's and has, among its characters, H. P. Lovecraft's sinister artist, Richard Upton Pickman and Robert E. Howard's mad poet, Justin Geoffrey. The book features one of my weirdest, most perverse vignettes, "Let Us Wash this Thing," and a new Lovecraftian prose-poem sequence, "These Deities of Rarest Air."

Gawd, how I love Wayne Miller's superb jacket painting, above, and the lettering which is tainted by graveyatd debris! Jeffrey Thomas served as the book's editor and has supply'd a rather remarkable Introduction.

Click on ye title of this blog to be taken to the Dark Regions Press website, where the book will be announced in their newest newletter and probably be availablefor pre-order. We expect a late-Summer release for the hardcover. After all hardcover editions havesold out the book will be available as trade paperback and ebook.

Thanks!

Wayne Miller's Jacket Painting for GATHERED DUST

2011-06-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

I have been exceptionally lucky with my illustrator's for my books. My first book for Dark Regions Press will be Gathered Dust and Others, and the remarkable Wayne Miller just completed his stunning jacket painting for the book. The scene depicted is from the collection's title story, a new tale set in Arkham that is a sequel to J. Vernon Shea's "The Haunter of the Graveyard," a story that Vernon wrote for Derleth when Augie requested a tale from Vernon for the original edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I have always loved Vernon's tale and wanted to write some kind of sequel to it as a memorial to our friendship -- of all of the members of the Lovecraft Circle who knew and corresponded with HPL, Vernon was my dearest friend.

Here's are a couple of relevant portions of my story that explain the scene in the painting above:

# # # # # # # # #

I found, during my first two months of residence in Arkham, that Uncle Silas had gained a curious reputation in the town, for it was whispered that he never ate, was never known to shop for groceries or dine out; and the fact that he was often seen haunting the abandoned cemetery at night gave way to gossip of vampirism and other such nonsense. It was when I discovered my relation's own home movies that I learned how uncanny truth can eclipse the wildness of paltry rumor, for Uncle Silas had followed Elmer Harrod in the practice of being filmed within the wild confines of the haunted burying ground; but where the horror host had brought in a film crew to record his outlandish behavior among the tombs, it seemed that my uncle's was a one-madman's crude operation. On one spool of film he had recorded himself dancing among the rotting stone slabs and speaking the most outlandish gibberish I have ever heard, in what must have been a language of his own invention. He seemed almost to chew his lips as he drooled and muttered a name I could not make out. I found a film that showed him reclined on the slab beneath which Obediah Carter slept, and the dim electric light that he had somehow been able to set up caught to perfection the weirdness of his facial distortions, with which he mimicked the actual visage of the dead sorcerer. The most disturbing images that I found, however, were caught on the three spools that showed my old relation twitching before the unwholesome tree on which he had ended his life. On one spool of celluloid he is shown wrapping the tree's pale vines around his arms and ankles and then pirouetting like some deranged puppet; and it was disturbing to see how the old withered tree, in the uncanny light, took on the semblance of a gigantic bestial claw that curled its grotesque distended digits in night air.

# # # # # #

My uncle's experiments with filming seemed to incorporate some kind of trick photography near the end, for on the last spool of film he is shown in close up, dangling from the vines of the tree, vines that resembled cloudy veins through which a dark substance flowed in the direction of my uncle's upraised arms, into which the vines had penetrated. Uncle Silas did not regard the camera as he muttered, "More, more--my arms are hungry."

# # # # # # #

I wrote the initial version of this story as segments in the addition to my prose-poem/vignette sequence, "Uncommon Places," the additional 10,000 words of which will be published next year in my second book from Hippocampus Press, Uncommon Places. The sequence is a series of segments that are all inspir'd by entries in H. P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book, and the entry that ispir'd the above scenes in my tale is Entry #112: "Man lives near graveyard--how does he live? Eats no food."

I really look forward to the publication of this first collection from Dark Regions Press. It will be my first ebook, and there will be a trade pb edition. There will also be an edition in DRP's Deluxe 13 series, limited to thirteen copies in hardcover and slipcase.

A Little Better

2011-06-01T10:01:00.000-07:00

I used System Restore and things are a bit better -- although some times when I am on the Internet I am suddenly removed from it for no apparent reason. Other weird things are happening. I'm still getting fake scam "warnings" about malicious malware that tell me to click on this and then all will be repaired. Bogus.

Life has been exhausting and really depressing. Mom is getting weaker and weirder, took her in to the hospital on Sunday and found out that her dilantin levels were high and toxic. Brought her home yesterday but need to take her to her main doctor today.

Been having such a difficult time trying to get into the writing of my new book, one that I am writing in collaboration with Jeffrey Thomas. It will be a series of stories concerning a sinister New England artist, Enoch Coffin. Jeff has already sent me his first two stories and is close to completing a third! I've yet to complete one page of my first -- although I found a new beginning that I think may now work. I asked Jeff to work on this book with me because he had been dejected by the way that S. T. trashed Jeff's Lovecraftian tales in The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos -- to the point where Jeff was determined never to write another Lovecraftian tale. I've seen S. T.'s critiques have this kind of reaction on other writers that he trashed and I wasn't about to tolerate its effect on Jeff, who is simply a wonderful weird artist in fiction and illustration. So I feel that my efforts have been successful and Jeff's stories are superb Lovecraftian tales. But I really like this initial idea of my own and hope I can find my way into the telling of it.

Part of my distraction is that I've moved my writing from the quiet, dark and secluded basement up to the dining room, so that I can be near mom, who sits in an armchair just behind me. I need to keep more of an eye on her and not leave her alone for hours when I am down working on a new book, I get lost in that writing zone and time and ye world become nonexistent.

Anyway, I am determined to get back to work. And soon -- oh, soon, soon -- my very finest book, Some Unknown Gulf of Night, will be releas'd, & the joy I shall then experience will inspire gobs of writing energy, I know.

Shalom.
--willy

Malware or whatever it's called

2011-05-30T20:35:00.000-07:00

I'VE PICKED UP A BLOODY WORM (gotta stay off those queer cowboy wrestling sites........) -- and I cannot access my email. When I come on the Internet this worm turns everything off and my screen goes black. I've try'd System Restore and other things, but it's no go. I have no email so the best way to contact me is at Facebook, I am still able to access the Web, if not for long. Don't know how to fix it or what to do. I may just stay offline for a long long time. As long as I can access Microsoft Word and work on new books, that's all I need. My great concern is not being able to hear from my publishers, who send contracts &c via email. I thus return to ye primitive non-Internet realm -- where life is slow and dull but free of electric worms.

Editors can phone me at (206) 725-8848 -- but if caller I. D. doesn't identify you I usually don't pick up unless you begin leaving a recorded message and I know who you are -- get gobs of yem lousy solicitors, so I do.

Or you can correspond:
Wilum Pugmire
5115 South Mead Street
Seattle, WA 98118
USA

Sorry for the inconvenience, darlings.
Shalom.

--willy

Yo Followers!

2011-05-27T17:04:00.000-07:00

So I don't see my followers listed any longer. Did I do something that deleted them? Did I dream that they existed? I'm confused. Been real busy trying to write and all. Hope to have a substantial new blog in a few days.

Later--never mind, there they are.

I am feeling so very old, having turned sixty this year. I was reminded of how much I have changed from the skinny Jewish-looking kid with Kafkaesque ears above when, yesterday, two very lovely young friends came to visit me from Kansas. We did a vlog on YouTube, and I watched myself in the background, and I thought, "When the hell did I become this grotesque bloated creature? How have I grown so antient?" Mentally I feel no different, I am still so young-in-heart and childish in my mind. I feel extremely lucky to be living the life of a full-time writer. At the moment I am having an extremely difficult time concentrating on this new book I am writing with Jeffrey Thomas. He has already completed two stories and is nearly finish'd with a third -- & I am on page two of my first tale. Life keeps interrupting work, and taking care of my invalid mother is becoming more demanding and thus I am more and more exhausted at this time of night, which I usually set aside for writing. I miss getting utterly lost in the writing of a new thing, something I haven't really experienced since working on Some Unknown Gulf of Night.

I just did the final proofing of that book, and as soon as I get and sign the signature sheets and return them to Larry, the book goes to print. Honeys, I am more excited about the publication of this book than any other I've worked on except for The Tangled Muse. I like that one of my new books publish'd this year will be all-original work, no reprints.

As I grow older, I become more and more focused on doing the one thing that really brings me joy--writing Lovecraftian weird fiction. That will be my focus this next decade. If I have my way, by the time I reach 70 I am gonna have so many books written and publish'd you won't believe it.

Or I'll die trying!

GATHERED DUST AND OTHERS

2011-05-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

My dears, I am at that restless state, one that kinda drives me crazy. I am so ready to have one of my next books publish'd, & it is frustrating to have to wait until mid-summer for that to happen. I just got the proposed cover for my first book from Dark Regions Press, a magnificent and moody painting by Wayne Miller, which illustrates one of the book's new original tales, "Gathered Dust." That story has a bit of a history. I wrote the first version as an extension to my prose-poem/vignette sequence, "Uncommon Places," the first version of which was published in The Tangled Muse. I decided to make Uncommon Places the title for my next book from Hippocampus Press, and so I wanted to add another 10,000 words to the title piece, all segments of which are inspir'd by entries in H. P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book. I found these evocative entries, among others:

entry 112--"Man lives near graveyard--how does he live? Eats no food"
entry 165--"Terrible trip to an ancient and forgotten tomb"
entry 176--"Man blindfolded and taken in closed cab or car to some very ancient and secret place"

These are other entries inspir'd me to write the thing as connected portions that form'd a sequel to J. Vernon Shea's "The Haunter of the Graveyard," whut is set in Arkham. One of the graves mention'd in Vernon's tale belong to a Carter, and thus I brought in the legend of Randolph Carter and his book of short stories, The Attic Window and Others. I told my connected tale in segments inspir'd by entries in HPL's book, and in-between the telling of that tale I added some surreal additional prose-poems, one of which begins thus:

"She climbed the winding wooden steps that led to the small door, pushed it open and coughed into the dry air that, issuing from the attic room, assailed her face. Her candle's feeble flame threw shadows into the room among the litter of antiques, the wooden crates, the shrouded figures. She was curious to see that their dark sartorial camouflage resembled her own, and she wondered if they, too, had hoped to conceal themselves from the world of men when roaming the streets at night. Pressing her hand against the breast of one still thing, she felt its torso of twisted wire; and then she lifted her face to its sad mask, the expression of which filled her with such remorse that she drifted from the thing, to the attic window. Bending before the small panes of glass, she gazed into their latticework at her peculiar wavering reflection, upon which shadows frolicked."

All of these additions brought another 10,000 words to the piece and I was happy. Then I began work on what was going to be my first book for Miskatonic River Press, and I decided I wanted to call the book Gathered Dust and Others, and ye title story would be a complete revision & expansion of my sequel to "The Haunter of the Graveyard." I rewrote the thing as single story, adding some few bits and leaving out the surreal prose-poem vignettes from the other version. It came to over 12,000 words.
Then things happen'd and my first book for MRP is nigh to be The Strange Dark One--Tales of Nyarlathotep, to be publish'd this October. Joe at Dark Regions Press express'd interest in publishing a book of my Lovecraftian tales, so I began to work on that and asked my MPR publisher, the sweet and adorable Tom Lynch, if I could steal "Gathered Dust" from them and use it in my DRP collection, which needed some new things to fill out wordage. So I began writing the other new tales for that book, and we were going to call it Depths of Dreams and Madness -- but then I saw Wayne's fabulous jacket illustration for the book, depicting one of the weirdest scenes from "Gathered Dust," and I ached to call this new book Gathered Dust and Others, kinda a nice Arkham House-ish book title, me thought. Joe agreed to ye title change, & thus that will be ye title of my first book from Dark Regions Press, publish'd sometime this year, I think. I love the title, as it is symbolic of my tales, whut are the gather'd debris of my sick imagination.

At the moment I am revising a rather nice Mythos tale by my buddy, Jeffrey J Taylor. He sent me the tale to critique, and I thought it good but needed just a bit work and elaboration, and asked him if I cou'd revise it. We are calling the story "Ushered on the Wind" -- 'tis a tale of ye Wind-Walker -- and I think it is going to be a rather effective Mythos tale. After we polish I plan on submitting it to Mike Davis for the Lovecraft eZine.

So much weird Lovecraftian fiction to write!

OLD CHUMS & FUTURE SONNETS

2011-05-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

One old pal that I have long hoped to reconnect with is Dave Billman, who began to illustrate my fanzines back when I was in high school. I finally found him again at Facebook. It was Dave who gave me the name of "Wilum," telling me he thought it sounded like the name of some backwoods Dunwich denizen; & it was from Dave that I got the dream-name of Mount Selta in my Sesqua tales -- Khroyd'hon -- as at the time Dave lived on Croydon Street. The cover above is from my Lovecraft fanzine from the 1970's. I have long wanted Dave to illustrate one of my books, and he has recently express'd interest in doing so when I pitched ye idea to him; so one future book idea is going to be a collection called Visions of Khroyd'hon, Sesqua Valley tales and novelettes illustrated by David Billman.

Life has been rather chaotic of late, which is okay except that I haven't been able to concentrate on new writing. I've spent this morning reading a book I just got in ye post, Contested Will, by James Shapiro; & I've been rereading the superb Jonathan Bate book, Soul of an Age. Reading about Shakespeare always instills within me an ache to work on a new sonnet sequence. Thus I got out an excellent book, The Making of a Sonnet, edited by Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland (W. W. Norton and Company, 2008), and am nigh preparing to begin slow and steady work on a new sonnet sequence that I want to call Sonnets of Loneliness and Light.

It was simply amazing to be able to watch a DVD of the new film from The H. P., Lovecraft Historical Society, their amazing production of The Whisperer in Darkness. It is, quite simply, the finest film based on a Lovecraft story ever produced, a work of talent and genius. I may never be able to view the film on a big screen, as I am house-bound as my mother's live-in caregiver and cannot leave her alone; but I am anxious to own the DVD myself and thus watch the film with my headphones on so as to drink the stereophonic score to ye full. If you have a chance to view this magnificent film, do not fail to do so.

DEAD BUT DREAMING 2

2011-05-06T11:30:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid in high school I was obsess'd with horror films, & I finally did a really fine film fanzine, calling it Fantasia and getting all of the big-name film fandom writers to contribute to it. I decided to have a section of tributes to Forry Ackerman, and somehow I got Robert Bloch's address and asked if he would write a wee tribute to 4sj. (I also asked Bob for Ray Bradbury's address, which he supply'd, and Bradbury also wrote a few lines of tribute to ye Ackermonster). When I was shipped to Northern Ireland to work as a missionary for the Mormon Church, I wasn't allow'd to go see horror films (I had fantasies of spending every off-day in some cinema watching Hammer Films...), so I began to buy books by Bloch, with whom I was still in correspondence. It was in Ireland that I bought my first editions of H. P. Lovecraft, mostly because in the title story of one, The Haunter of the Dark (Panther Horror), I saw that the title story was dedicated to my buddy, Bob Bloch. I began to buy anthologies in which Bloch was one of many writers, and thus I became a reader of weird fiction. Influenced by Bloch's letters and his wonderful stories, I began to write my own weird fiction while serving in Omagh, and soon placed a story with Space & Time. Returning to ye States, I discovered Arkham House and became a Cthulhu nut. I was determined to become a famous Mythos writer.

One of Bloch's stories that really thrilled me was "The Skull of the Marquis de Sade," and I loved the Amicus film that it inspir'd as well. Early on in my "career" as a horror writer, I was determined to write a sequel to Bob's story. He pretended to be enthused when I wrote to tell him so. The idea never evolv'd into an actual tale, and as I grew older & older, I fancied that it was but one of those youthful enthusiasms that wou'd never really take form in reality. But I couldn't let go of the ache of desire to write that story, and over the decades I kept trying. & I amaz'd myself, one week, by actually writing ye damn'd thing!!! I decided to play with narrative voice and wrote it in a kind of colloquial style, such as HPL had done with "Pickman's Model." I am happy to see that the story will soon be in print, in Dead but Dreaming 2. I think this book will be a fantastic treat for all Mythos fans. It is nigh available for pre-order at Miskatonic River Press, and all of ye who pre-order will received a fancy book mark sign'd by -- the Queen of Eldritch Horror! So put that bitch to work, y'all, and let us see many copies pre-ordered!!!

Delicious Antique Whore

2011-05-02T17:18:00.000-07:00

That's me & my favourite drag queen, Jackie Hell. She is wild, honey! Check out her extremely depraved videos on YouTube. She and my darling chum Kook Teflon came over to help me celebrate my (gawd I can't believe it) 60th birthday, what happens to-morrow. I never thought to exist for such a length of mortal time. I creak, I groan -- I've taught myself not to smile too widely & thus expose my teeth, or lack thereof. I'm like Wilde now, whose teeth were so wretchedly grotesque that he had a habit of covering his mouth with a finger when he spoke.

It's been a wild year of frantic writing production -- I echo Henry James, whose constant scolding chant in his Notebooks was "Produce! Produce!" I live to write, & I become so lost in that void, that world where only the writing exists, that time itself stops and I live absolutely within my fever'd imagination. Gawd, I love it!

I am now preparing to work on the book I am writing with Jeffrey Thomas, of tales concerning ye sinister New England artist, Enoch Coffin. I tell myself that I will work slow, I need not rush, I have no writer's deadline to heed (although Joe at Dead Regions Press is already hot to publish the book) -- but I cannot help myself and sink into that frenzied world of writing writing writing. I am determined to leave a goodly supply of books before I kick off and cross ye Audient Void!

Okay, I am off to read some new books and listen to RuPaul and then I am going to read "The Shadow out of Time" so as to do a video commentary of it tomorrow on me YouTube channel.

If I survive and slink into my sixty-first year..............................................................

shalom,
Willy Pugnacious

More Fun with ye New Scanner!

2011-04-28T12:14:00.000-07:00

Looking for things to scan and thus share with y'all, I found an old issue of Queer Madness (a zine I did for ye E.O.D apa) from 1980. It's a fun issue to read because it's almoft like a wee journal of things I was doing then -- it amuses me that I was then so intent on writing my first novel, a thing I have yet to accomplish. I had some remarkably good artwork in that issue -- including these two items (above and below) that were originally drawn for my chapbook tribute to Carl Jacobi. The artwork above, illustrating the remarkably effective tale "The Face in the Wind," is by David Vosburgh -- an artist I wish I was still in contact with, as it would be wonderful to have him illustrate one of my new books. The piece below, illustrating "Revelations in Black," is by Canadian artist Maurice Squidd, another rad artist with whom I have lost contact. The illustrated tales are among the finest in the weird tale genre, and both may be found in the Arkham House collection Revelations in Black (1947), which has had many reprintings in pb format (sometimes as two individual volumes). The Arkham House edition is well worth buying at o.p. prices -- it is a remarkable collection.

Reading the stories in such a book often wets my appetite to write my own, to really work at finding atmospheric ideas that I can weave into a finish'd tale. My weird fiction has been influenced more by the books publish'd by August Derleth and Arkham House than by any other element in literature. It used to be my huge dream, to have a collection of mine own publish'd by AH -- it is still a dream that, coming true, would thrill me beyond measure.

The new book, Depths of Dreams and Madness, is completed. The new tale I was trying to write for it began to really bore me, so I said screw it ain't gonna write it, and instead I chose two elder yarns with which to fill up ye contents. & then my editor and buddy, Jeffrey Thomas, sent me his amazing and so amusing Introduction. I think the book will be one that will please my readers, despite the number of reprints. Ye contents be:
Introduction by Jeffrey Thomas (3,669 words)
"Gathered Dust" (12,200 words), new novelette set in Arkham; this is a direct sequel to J. Vernon Shea's "The Haunter of the Graveyard," a tale that Vernon wrote for Derleth's original edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (when Jim Turner re-edited the book he removed Vernon's tale). I originally wrote this as a series of connected vignettes inspir'd by HPL's Commonplace Book, & that version will be included in next year's book from Hippocampus Press, Uncommon Places. I then rewrote it as a single story, and that is the version in this book. I think it's one of the eeriest tales I have yet penned.
"Your Kiss of Corruption" (1,255 words, reprint)
"Yon Baleful God" (1,063 words, reprint)
"Time of Twilight" (739 words, reprint)
"These Deities of Rarest Air" (10,000 words, new prose-poem sequence)
"The Boy with the Bloodstained Mouth (253 words, reprint)
"The Woven Offspring" (1,747 words; reprint, but with another revised ending)
"The Tangled Muse" (6,093 words, reprint)
"Let Us Wash This Thing" (2,250 words, new tale set in Gershom)
"Bloom of Sacrifice" (1,670 words, reprint)
"He Who Made Me Dream" (880 words, reprint)
"Cool Mist" (992 words, reprint)
"Descent into Shadow and Light" (1,312 words; reprinted from the Lovecraft eZine, for which I am writing monthly Lovecraftian vignettes)
"Serenade of Starlight" (3,233 words, reprint)
"Graffito Flow" (2,134 words, reprint)
"Depths of Dreams and Madness" (9,500 words; almost a novelette! This is a new Sesqua Valley tale in which I bring as character's H. P. Lovecaft's sinister artist, Richard Upton Pickman, and Robert E. Howard's mad poet, Justin Geoffrey. Ye tale is set in 1926.)
"Host of Haunted Air" (4,041 words, reprint)
"A Vestige of Mirth" (1,810 words, reprint)

Because my editor, Jeff, has illustrated many of these for various small press zines, I am hoping to have those old illos used as interior art. His illustration for "The Woven Offspring" is simply magnificent. The book may be publish'd as early as this summer! It will be my first ebook, for those of ye who are into Kindle. There will also be a trade pb edition and a Deluxe 13 edition. The Deluxe 13 editions are limited to thirteen copies only, leather-bound and in slipcase, with satin book ribbon and sign'd and so gorgeous you can't believe it. It will be my third hardcover publish'd this year (following The Tangled Muse and Some Unknown Gulf of Night) -- kinda amazing to me!

New book almoft finish'd

2011-04-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

Got a new printer, and it has a scanner -- my first scanner! So I've been having fun scanning some of the old photos. Above it me on ye cover of a Penguin Classics edition of the magnificent novel that inspir'd ye title of my Centipede Press omnibus.

I live with my mother, in the house that my father had built when I was five. It has always felt like home, and during the past few decades when I have lived elsewhere, I always felt an ache of homesickness whenever I would visit my folks. I wanted to go back home and live in that house. Now I do, as my mother can no longer live alone. It's one of the reasons that I've been able to write such a slew of books these past two years. I shall inherit this house, so it will be my home for my remains of day. The difficulty comes, as a writer, when Mother has her bad days, when she becomes confused or lonely. I worked on the last story for my new book last week and wasn't able to finish one bloody paragraph because of craziness here at home. But now the story seems to be flowing, and I shall probably have it completed before my 60th birthday, on May 3. May 3 is also the day that RuPaul's new album is released! I am gonna do me a video celebration in big drag on my YouTube channel!

I like how this final story for my new book is coming along. It is another tale that touches on the legend of Nyarlathotep. I can't stop writing dem t'ings. It is set in Gershom, my city of exiles. I created this new fictive locality as a way of writing weird fiction in an urban setting. I had been reading some of that New Weird stuff and told myself, "Hey, you can invent a cool city and with that new setting you can write cutting edge tales that aren't Lovecraftian!" Right. The first tale set in Gershom was "Some Distant Memory," a tale that saw its first publication in The Tangled Muse (I submitted it to Weird Tales, but it were rejected, poor thing...). It is influenced by Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" -- so much for this new setting inspiring non-Lovecraftian fiction! The story will be reprinted in a Cthulhu anthology forthcoming from Night Shade Books. The second tale set in Gershom was "The Tangled Muse." I finally wrote a third tale, "Let Us Wash This Thing," and it will see its first publication in this new book from Dark Regions Press. And now I'm writing my 4th tale set in Gershom, a tale of Nyarlathotep entitled "A Shadow of Your Own Design."

But even though this new book will soon be completed -- there be no rest for ye Wicked Ol' Queen. I begin immediately working on a book I am writing with Jeffrey Thomas, a series of tales concerning a sinister New England artist, Enoch Coffin. And I finally begin serious and concentrated work on my book with Maryanne K. Snyder, of tales and poetry all of which is inspir'd by the Works of Clark Ashton Smith.

So on this Easter Sunday (hey, isn't the new Lady Gaga song, "Judas," releas'd today??!!) my prayer to Jesus is, Please give me a few more years in which to write so many new books that when I then celebrate my Happy Extinction from this Mortal Coil I will leave behind me one big-ass body of work in ye weird fiction genre.

Can I get an "amen"?

DEPTHS OF DREAMS AND MADNESS

2011-04-21T19:14:00.000-07:00

One of the Cthulhu Mythos weird tales with which I am obsess'd is Robert E. Howard's "The Black Stone" (illustrated above on ye jacket of ye Arkham House anthology there pictur'd). I love that Stone so much that I had a replica of it rais'd in Sesqua Valley, in my book The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams (Hippocampus Press, 2006):

"Following Ash's directions, she drove along a narrow road through dark woodland, coming at last to an incline in the roadway that led to a wide expanse of meadow. Parking, Aubrey leapt out and bent to pick up a couple of good-sized stones, then ran through the high grass, toward the Black Stone. Panting, her companion caught up with her.

"'Wow, it must be ancient!' she exclaimed, admiring the tall monolith.

"'Not at all. It was raised in the late 1920s, by some of the children of the valley. It's a replica of another stone--and one that is indeed ancient--in the town of Stregoicavar. Simon encountered the original on one of his journeys, and was so taken with it that he ordered this replica to be raised here in this meadow.'"

Now, when I wrote that it was clear in my mind that Justin Geoffrey, Robert E. Howard's mad poet who had encountered the Black Stone in the original story, had died five years previously, raving in an asylum. But no . . . ! This morning I put the final polish on my newest tale, "Depths of Dreams and Madness" -- & in this story I not only have HPL's Richard Upton Pickman journey to Sesqua Valley so as to paint ye portrait of ye valley's first-born Beast . . . . I have REH's Justin Geoffrey visiting the valley as well, after his mysterious escape from the asylum, where the record of his death is one big lie. Because this new story is the title piece for my first book from Dark Regions Press, I was hoping to make it a substantial novelette of 15,000 words; but it came to its conclusion at 9,500 words -- and thus it is still a tale of substance. I have set the story in 1926, the year of Pickman's mysterious disappearance (as it is recorded in Lovecraft's "History of the Necronomicon") and also the year in which Justin Geoffrey is said to have died raving mad in an asylum in Illinois.

Now I have one more tale to pen for this new collection, and I am hoping to write a perverse wee thing set in Gershom, my city of exiles, concerning a purple-skinned hermaphrodite actress who portrays the Christ in some play of passion and poetry, a play written by Sebastian Melmoth, of whom some of ye may have read in ye title tale of my omnibus from Centipede Press, The Tangled Muse.

So, after a couple months of non-activity & angst, things are back on track.

A New Lovecraftian Collection this Summer from Dark Regions Press

2011-04-11T12:18:00.000-07:00


At ye churchyard in Brooklyn that inspir'd "The Hound"

One of the experiences that continues to charm my memory is the three week tour of New England and New York that was a gift from my patrons, Greg and Maryanne. I knew that I would love New England, but I was prepared to be bored to death with New York. I loved it. Above is me on our first night there, in the Dutch churchyard that inspired H. P. Lovecraft to write "The Hound" (HPL had chipped off a wee bit of tombstone during his visit to the site). That's me, above, during a moment of writer's inspiration, jotting down some notes in either my commonplace book or my travel journal, both of which I constantly carried with me. That was a great night. Derrick Hussey, of Hippocampus Press, took us on a walking tour of Lovecraftian sites, including Sonia's apartment into which Lovecraft moved after their marriage. I'm hoping to write a wee segment based on visiting the churchyard above for the new prose-poem sequence I am now writing for a collection that may be happening. Jeffrey Thomas and I are working on a collaborative book of Lovecraftian tale concerning a sinister New England artist, and have found a publisher who is interested in the book. The publisher also suggested he'd be interested in bringing out a solo collection of my own work, which would have to be mostly reprints. I find it next to impossible to say no to publishers who shew such keen in working with me, so I quickly assembled what at first I thought would be a reprint collection of most of my urban horror stuff, my tales of my dead lovers &c. I thought to call the book Dead Boyfriends & Other Freaks -- but then I thought the title was perhaps not quite right. One of the new tales in my collection from Terradan Works, "Into the Depths of Dreams and Madness," really fails to please my and I've been wanting a chance to completely rewrite it as a 15,000 word novelette. It concerns Lovecraft's character, the artist Richard Upton Pickman, visiting Sesqua Valley so as to paint ye portrait of Simon Gregory Williams. The story as it now stands is a ludicrous failure because my portrayal of Pickman is simply inept. My need to write a story with HPL's artist as a character is an obsession I cannot relinquish -- despite the fact that I may not have what it takes to write such a tale -- & thus I am gonna completely rewrite this stupid story and try to turn it into a brilliant novelette, that I will then entitle "Depths of Dreams and Madness," which would then be the title of this new book. Here's the book as I have proposed it to this publisher:

Introduction by Jeffrey Thomas
"Your Kiss of Corruption" (newest version, 1,255 words)
"Yon Baleful God" (1,063 words)
"Time of Twilight" (739 words)
"These Deities of Rarest Air" (new prose-poem sequence, of which 5,000 words is now written; hoping to make it around 15,000 words total; very Lovecraftian)
"The Woven Offspring" (1,747 words; I revised this tale for its inclusion in The Tangled Muse, but was still unhappy with the ending, so I have revised the ending yet again and now feel I have it down exactly as I want it -- maybe...........................)
"The Book that Told the Hidden Way" (yet to be written new Mythos tale)
"Bloom of Sacrifice" (1,670 words)
"The Tangled Muse" (6,093 words)
"He Who Made Me Dream" (880 words)
"Cool Mist" (newest version, 992 words)
"Descent into Shadow and Light" (1,312 words)
"Serenade of Starlight" (3,233 words, slight revision from ye version in The Children of Cthulhu)
"Graffito Flow" (2,134 words, newest version)
"Depths of Dreams and Madness" (yet unwritten but hopefully 15,000 words or there about)

The collection offers newer versions as they appeared in The Tangled Muse, for which I revised all of the old stories, in some cases completely rewriting them, plus some items that have never been collected in any of my books. Seems a pretty solid collection, and I have gobs of energy for the writing of the new stuff and will have it all completed within a couple of months, so that it could be published end of this year.

Okay, darlings, back to work with me. All of this frantic writing is keeping me occupied, so it may be a while before I feel the desire or have time to record new vlogs on YouTube. (Ha! Spoke too soon -- just got the new E.O.D. mailing from S. T. and I'm gonna open it before me webcam.................................) (oh great YUGGOTH!!! it's not a new apa mailing -- it's S. T. Joshi's manuscript for his just-completed novel concerning young Howard Phillips Lovecraft -- whut I am to read & critique ------ oh my gawd!!!!!!!!!!)

Joe of DARK REGIONS PRESS has just confirm'd his desire to publish this new book this summer, as limited edition hardcover, trade pd and ebook!

Twisted tree at entrance to Dutch churchyard in Brooklyn

Arcane Wisdom Press book is Sold Out!

2011-04-07T20:30:00.000-07:00

Some Unknown Gulf of Night, my 37,000 word prose-poem sequence to be publish'd this Summer by Arcane Wisdom Press, is now sold out in its limited edition hardcover. I be amazed, and I thank all of you who pre-ordered it.

I have mention'd that I was planning on writing a book next year with Jeffrey Thomas, of connected stories about a sinister New England artist ("Pickman's Model" is never far from my haunted mind....) Happily, Joe Morey of Dark Regions Press has shewn keen interest in publishing ye book, and he is a publisher I have been interested in working with -- so bollocks to waiting until next year, I want Jeff and I to write the entire book this year! I've just asked him some technical info about razors that are used by artists, as for this first story I have a wee scene in mind when a woman is trying to seduce our artist in her boudoir, but he doesn't seem interested in her ponderous breasts, so she says something like, "Aren't you interested in women?" To which he replies, "I am wed to darkness." But then he studies the flat white surface of her torso, and is inspir'd, so he takes a razor, from his satchel perhaps, and proceeds to etch her portrait in her flesh. To make it really kinky I was thinking he might use one of those feminine razors with which women shave their pubic hair -- but I think an artist's razor wou'd be appropriate. A few days ago I watched the sweet Roger Cormon film, Pit and the Pendulum, on telly, and it gave me an ache to make this first story, set in Arkham, kinda Poe-Gothic in the Roger Corman/Vincent Price tradition. But maybe that would be too camp -- even for me.................................................

Writing Flows At Last

2011-04-06T22:22:00.000-07:00

That's me from David Belisle's Mormon Fag photo exhibit. David is a rad local photographer, we used to work together at Cyclops Cafe and Pony. He and Michael Stipe worked together on a book about R. E. M. (David used to tour with the band). We did this photo project when I first returned to Mormonism. We had these larger than life photos of me in drag, in vivid color -- and then we had one of me looking very LDS in black and white. I miss David and working at the Pony, one of our most notorious local queer bars.

But being home-bound as my mother's live-in caregiver gives me the wonderful opportunity to write full-time, since I don't pay rent. It's great now, because the writing has really returned and new work is flowing from me fingers to me keyboard. Been writing a number of prose-poems and vignettes. One of what I feel is the best of my prose-poems has just been published in this month's issue of the Lovecraft eZine, and it has also been read by MorganScorpion on her YouTube channel. I've been working on a number of wee things that, when completed, will form a 20,000 word sequence of prose-poems, all of which will be inspir'd by Lovecraft's weird fiction and the entries in his commonplace book. The completed work will be entitled "Unhallowed Places" and form the nucleus of ye revised/expanded edition of Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror to be published by Mythos Books.

And I have just completed an opening proem for The Strange Dark One -- Tales of Nyarlathotep, to be publish'd this Oktobyr by Miskatonic River Press. My editor there, Scott, wanted opening and closing poems for the book. This opening proem is in the style of HPL's "The Ancient Track," and the closing poem will be a new sonnet that I thought I was gonna write tonight but I'm feeling too lazy and distracted.

Yesterday was a great day for art. Got one of the new illustrations from Jeffrey Thomas for my Nyarlathotep book, and it is amazing. Then Larry Roberts sent me the two interior art pieces by Matthew Jaffe for Some Unknown Gulf of Night, and they are magnificent.

& before ye week hath expir'd I hope to have a good amount of work done on ye rough of my first fictive collaboration with Jeffrey Thomas -- we are writing a book of connected tales featuring a sinister New England artist, whom I think I want to name Enoch Blake. I initially suggested the idea to Stanley Sargent, as a book for him to write on his own, of an artist fascinated by ye supernatural and who investigates aspects of it as a way of inspiring new paintings. I thought such a series should be written by an author who also has artistic abilities, and Stan has painted some amazing works. Since Stan lives in San Francisco, I thought that city would prove an excellent backdrop for such a series of tales. But gloom-&-doom Stan thought the idea sucked, and that pissed me off so I mumbled to myself, "Man, if I knew anything about artwork I'd write such a book myself." Then I thought, "Honey, just get a co-author who is also an artist!" And then I knew I'd want to set such a series of tales in mine beloved New England, whut I was able to finally visit in 2007. And then I thought of Jeffrey Thomas, who lives in New England and has written cool Lovecraftian fiction and is an artist. So I propos'd ye project to him and he said "hell yes."

So, I'm lost in a sea of endless projects. That makes me one happy old queen.

Books & More Books

2011-03-31T19:11:00.000-07:00

Great Yuggoth, what a cool illustration! It is one of the Jeffrey Thomas illos for my forthcoming collection, The Strange Dark One--Tales of Nyarlathotep. The book will be published this October by Miskatonic River Press, my first collection for them (to be followed in 2013 by Gathered Dust and Others), and Jeff is doing an illustration for each tale. I try'd to post the cover here but ye file is too big -- it worked over at Facebook, where it is now my profile image. It's gorgeous. I am quite excited about the book, and working with a new publisher. I met the Tom Lynch, that handsome devil, at MythosCon, and he impressed me as a publisher with whom I can easily work and one whom I can trust. One sometimes takes risks working with publishers for the first time, there are delays and other bothers. I've juggled the contents of the book a wee bit, and here is ye final list of stories:
"The Strange Dark One" is a new Sesqua Valley novelette of 14,000 words. With it I borrow one of the blackened windows from the Starry Wisdom church of HPL's "The Haunter of the Dark" -- but most surprisingly I have also referenced one of August Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos tales, "The Dwellers in Darkness," one of my favorite Mythos tales despite its stupid ending. In Augie's story there is a character named Laird Dorgan -- and in my story I introduce his daughter, April (whom I named after Derleth's own daughter, who recently passed away). I think this novelette is one of the coolest tales of Sesqua Valley that I have ever penned.
"Past the Gates of Deepest Dreaming" (7,431 words) has appeared once, in The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams; this new version is heavily revised for its appearance in TSDO.
"Some Bacchante of Irem" (3,000 words), a tale that has not been reprinted since its initial publication in Dark Discoveries.
"The Audient Void" (1,500 words), heavily revised.
"The Hands that Reek and Smoke" (3,000 words), for which the above black & white illustration was created.
"One Last Theft" (10,000 words).
"Immortal Remains" (2,579 words), utterly rewritten for this book.
"To See Beyond" (7,500 words), brand new unpublished Sesqua Valley story that is my sequel to Robert Bloch's "The Cheaters."

My editor, Scott Aniolowski, has requested closing and opening poems, so I shall pen two new sonnets for the book as well, although my poetic efforts are a bit rusty. The book will be published this October -- I love having books published in October.

While driving up to Olympia last weekend with S. T. Joshi to have dinner with the magnificent Laird Barron, my beloved friend and the fellow whom I consider today's most talented and fantastic new weird writer (if you haven't read Laird's two collections from Night Shade Books, you really need to devour those!), S. T. said he felt that Hippocampus Press won't be able to publish my next collection from them, Uncommon Places," until next year. That is way cool with me.

And I will begin work eventually on two collaborative books: one with Maryanne K. Snyder, where every tale and poem will be inspired by the works of Clark Ashton Smith; and a new Lovecraftian collection with Jeffrey Thomas, concerning a sinister New England artist, a book of connected tales.

Lots of wonderful work yet to do! Books and more books to write! It is the work that I love, because it helps to sooth and save my sanity, my soul.

Hooray -- I think I have now been able to load ye book's FABULOUS COVER!!

New Book Half Sold Out!

2011-03-23T18:10:00.000-07:00

Incredibly, my next book is already half sold out at Horror Mall after just a few days of going up for pre-sale! I wish I had known about this when I was a skinny little sissy being shoved into lockers in Junior High and High School. I could have told my butch tormentors, "You know, decades from now my new book will be half sold out in a matter of days, so screw you." Some Unknown Gulf of Night will be published as a beautiful limited edition signed hardcover, illustrated by the amazing Matthew Jaffe, and sell for $65. 150 pages, and just 100 copies. I consider it the finest and strangest book I have ever penned. Click on ye title to this wee blog to be taken to the Miskatonic Books Blog, from which you may be linked to Horror Mall and order ye book while yet they last! I've just posted one final promotional video on my YouTube channel, reading from the book. I have become quite fond of doing my vlogs on my MrWilum channel -- it's become like doing one of my punk rock fanzines, where I splatter my personality on the page -- only with a video I can reveal myself as never before. Some are hoffify'd -- some enchanted & amused. As a promotional tool for writers, the video blog is simply wonderful. You can shew your new book to the webcam and read from it, you can talk about the books your friends have written and shew them to the world. It's awesome.

April R. Derleth (1954-2011)

2011-03-22T15:13:00.000-07:00

That's Walden and April Derleth above, the children of August Derleth. April died yesterday. Here is the notice from Locus Online News:

"Publisher APRIL R[OSE] DERLETH, 56, died March 21, 2011. The daughter of author August Derleth, April was co-owner of Arkham House with her brother Walden Derleth, and ran the company as president and CEO starting in 2002.

"April Derleth was born August 9, 1954. Her parents divorced when she was five years old, and her father retained custody. August Derleth co-founded Arkham House in 1939 with Donald Wandrei. After August Derleth's death in 1971, Wandrei briefly served as editorial director until being succeeded by James Turner, who oversaw operations until April Derleth took over. She sought to shift the house's focus back to its original emphasis on classic weird fiction. Arkham House has announced that sales and unfulfilled orders will be temporarily suspended."

This is very sad indeed, because Miss Derleth brought Arkham House back to life after years of dormancy, with two excellent new editors and many new books planned and announced. I myself am working on a story for Arkham Nightmares, a new Arkham House anthology edited by the wonderful Lois Gresh, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Mythos Con. August Derleth has been on my mind of late, and I have just started recording a series of vlogs concerning his "posthumous collaborations" with H. P. Lovecraft. It is my fervent prayer that Arkham House can survive and continue under new direction. Peace unto April Rose Derleth.

H. P. Lovecraft's "The Nameless City"

2011-03-15T22:18:00.000-07:00

That's me with pen & pad in hand as I sit inside ye Fleur-de-Lys Building in Providence, the very building that figures in "The Call of Cthulhu." I love remembering my four days spent in Providence, one of the supreme highlights of my life as an obsess'd Lovecraftian. At ye moment I am listening to the H. P. Lovecraft podcast (hopefully ye link provided will take ye there) and their wonderful discussion of "The Nameless City," with bewitching readings from ye tale by the amazing Andrew Leman. If you have not listened to these literary podcasts, you are really missing out. They are delightful. And informative. The two hosts are delightfully inform'd Lovecraft fans and often bring perspectives to Lovecraft's weird tales that are as unique as they are fascinating. I'm listening (for ye third time -- these podcasts are so good they can be listen'd to repeatedly) to their discussion of "The Nameless City" because earlier to-night I made a wee video commentary on the tale, & I do not feel I said enough. I am now preparing to read a weird tale of mine own, set in Sesqua Valley, inspir'd by "The Nameless City." The podcast offer'd is truly haunting, for throughout one hears the daemon-wind that haunts Lovecraft's tale, & it really enhances the experience. Superb.

"The Nameless City" has oft been dismiss'd as a bad story. It is nothing of the kind. The prose style with which Lovecraft penned the tale has been condemn'd as bad, as overblown. Perhaps I am a clueless yob who cannot recognize bad writing when it swims before my eyes -- but I find the writing of this story smooth, poetic and effective. As often with Lovecraft, we do not know if we can rely on the narrative to be an authentic presentation of reality; it could be the relating of a dream, of a vision spawn'd in lunacy. This adds to the beguiling mystery of the tale for me.

In the first volume of his biography of H. P. Lovecraft, I Am Providence, S. T. Joshi has some ungenerous things to say about the story. (One of the real pleasures of I Am Providence are its fascinating and informed discussions of Lovecraft's fiction.) S. T. writes of "The Nameless City": "The absurdities and implausibilities in this tale, along with its wildly overheated prose, give it a very low place in the Lovecraft canon. Where, for example, did the creatures who built the nameless city come from? There are no indications that they came from another planet; but if they are simply early denizens of the earth, how did they come to possess their physical shape? Their curiously composite nature seems to rule out any evolutionary pattern known to earth's creatures. How do they continue to exist in the depths of the earth? The narrator must also be very foolish not to realise at once that the entities were the ones who built the city. Lovecraft does not seem to have thought out the details of this story at all carefully." Now this is simply absurd criticism. Had Lovecraft explained any of these things, he would have ruptured the mystique of the spectral race and robbed the story of much of its atmosphere. This is like saying that, in my tales of Sesqua Valley, I should explain the origin of the valley's shadow-spawn, these queer creatures with silver eyes who spill into reality from a realm of otherness. I have no intention of explaining any of this.

"The Nameless City" remains one of my favorite tales by H. P. Lovecraft, despite maturity and repeated readings. So there.

The Derleth Factor

2011-03-14T20:19:00.000-07:00

I've always been an August Derleth fan, but of late I've been reconsidering all that he has done for the genre, as editor and author. My thinking of late has been edified by the works of John D. Haefele, who is a member of the amateur press association devoted to Lovecraft, The Esoteric Order of Dagon, for which S. T. Joshi is our Official Editor. John has been doing a lot of work related to Derleth and the history of his relationship with H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthuhlu Mythos. One extremely fine book (I've already read it three times) is August Derleth Redux: The Weird Tale 1930-1971, published in Denmark in 2009 by H. Harksen Productions. It's a great wee book. But I am really excited about John's forthcoming book, which will be a thorough study of the Derleth Mythos. Derleth's handling of the Lovecraft papers and copyright, of his personal explication of symbolism in Lovecraft's Mythos, and in his heinous use of Lovecraft's name in the stories published as posthumous "collaborations" have fired up emotional debate. Anger and knee-jerk reaction has played its role in shaping the current assessment of Derleth and his treatment of Lovecraft and his tales of the Mythos. I have said my share of foolish things in the heat of clueless emotion.

I have really been enjoying the series of vlog commentaries I've been recording at YouTube concerning the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft. I have had a hankering to do the same kind of commentary concerning the tales by Derleth that have been published in such books as The Survivor and Others, The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces and The Watchers Out of Time. I am going to begin recording a series that discusses the posthumous collaborations, tale by tale, probably at the end of this week. (Tomorrow will be reserved for H. P. Lovecraft alone, it being the Ides of March, on which Grandpa died in 1937.) I think that I have been among many who have quickly condemned the posthumous collaborations as crap without giving them careful critical attention, and I mean to re-examine them in this series of vlogs at my MrWilum channel.

MATTHEW JAFFE COVER ART FOR MY NEXT BOOK.

2011-03-07T18:59:00.000-08:00

I am floating on a dark cloud of aesthetic ecstasy -- Larry Roberts just sent me the above cover artwork for my next book, Some Unknown Gulf of Night. The artist is Matthew Jaffe, who did ye cover art for Laird Barron's stunning second collection, Occultation. I shall probably be reading that segment from my new book tonight on my MrWilum channel at YouTube. I have been thinking of this new book as my charmed book, it came to me out of the blue, mysteriously and magically, & I wrote it in a state of aesthetic frenzy in a period of six weeks. I thought that Larry would be publishing it only as a paper chapbook, but he amazed me by planning to bring it out first as a limited edition hardcover! Arcane Wisdom Press will publish the hardcover either late Spring or early Summer, and then they will bring ye book out as pb. Great Yuggoth, whut an amazing cover illustration! I'm a lucky guy.

Maybe Now I Can Chill

2011-03-05T12:43:00.000-08:00

I think one reason I have been so unable to concentrate on writing this past month was -- I am so ready to have a new book out. I was feeling so frustrated, knowing that I had readied four books for publication last year and not seeing them come into being. But yesterday's mail brought my copies of The Tangled Muse, my omnibus from Centipede Press -- &, Great Yuggoth!, it is honestly the moft beautiful book I have ever seen. Jerad has a true genius for book design, which is one reason that Centipede Press has become such an acknowledged publishing house. What he did with this new version of my book is simply amazing & magnificent. Jerad used the illustration that I found by Virgil Finlay of the woman attired in her tangled tresses as a visual motif at the beginning of the book. The image is first used in dark negative, a gray image on black background. It looks spectral. The same negative image is used, enlarged, for the book's title page, and it looks so cool. And then the image is reproduced once more, clearly as it is seen above. I love that this remarkable illustration has become my Tangled Muse -- you can imagine how freaked out I was when I first discover'd ye illustration when, looking for art to use for the book, I did a wee Google on Finlay. I probably screamed like a drag queen when I first set eyes on the image, it is too perfect.

So now I can relax and just concentrate on writing the next few books. I feel a kind of aesthetic calm now, knowing that this beautiful book is publish'd & will soon be in ye hands of yem whut have order'd it. It's been a long wait & I thank ye for your patience. I did a reading from the book as my new vlog over on my YouTube channel, and will probably do a few more. It is the duty of all small press writers to promote their own books, because, honey, small press publishers ain't got no clue when it comes to promotion.

My new book to be shipping next week

2011-02-25T23:43:00.000-08:00

Just got an email from Centipede Press announcing that my new book, The Tangled Muse, should be shipping late next week. Now would be a very good time to pre-order. The book is expensive ($125 per copy) but once it goes o.p. it will be even more costly. It is limited to 150 copies signed by S. T. Joshi and myself. I've been in such a funk of late, unable to feel the energy I need to compose new work -- & I think part of that was due to the depression of having this beautiful book so delay'd because of complications with one of the artists whose work has now been completely removed. Jerad is a genius when it comes to book design, & this book is just the most beautiful I have ever set me eyes upon. We chose that illustration by Beardsley for the front board as we felt it rather resembles me in drag. I begged Jerad to have the boards yellow -- to reflect ye Yellow 'Nineties, ye Victorian fin-de-siecle of Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. Yuggoth, I am so thrill'd with the publication of this book I cannot tell you. My eternal thanx to Jerad, who has been an angel to work with, a real delight.

New Inspiration

2011-02-23T19:59:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have seen the first issue of a new free ezine devoted to Lovecraft and Lovecraftian fiction. The first issue is absolutely superb. I've been doing a series of video commentaries on Lovecraft's Tales on my YouTube channel (which, to my utter amazement, is creeping close to having had 22,000 visits!! Holy Moly!!), and it has proved so interesting and so much fun that it has given me a yen to begin a new sequence of wee vignettes, each of which is inspir'd by a certain Lovecraft weird tale and is my personal "take" on that tale. It wou'd be a kind of Some Unknown Gulf of Night, but culling its inspiration from HPL's fictive oeuvre. I need something to get my fictive juices flowing again -- haven't written much of anything all month except the 2,000 words of a new collaboration with a very gifted young writer, Jacob Henry Orloff. I have long been dubious of having fiction publish'd in electric form -- but that prejudice was shattered when, on our way to MythosCon, my patrons shew'd me their new Kindle book thingies -- & I must say I was impress'd. It has been a kind of horrific vision for me of the future -- a time when books will fade away, replaced by electric gadgets with illuminated screens. I now see it as rather a cool alternative to books. I prefer to be published in book form. My gawd, there is nothing more wondrous, as an author, than holding your book in hand, feeling its weight, smelling the pages and ink, seeing your work on good paper. It's awesome! However, as a Lovecraftian, I want to reach those who love Lovecraft's weird fiction and those other writers who pay homage to Lovecraft with their own writings. So, I am very interested in having this new series of wee Lovecraftian vignettes see their first publication in this great new source, the Lovecraft ezine above. The magazine will also be publishing some few of my other Mythos tales, beginning next month. It comes to me, again & again, what a great time this is to be a Lovecraftian!!

2011-02-19T17:13:00.000-08:00

Isn't that a great illustration? Just staring at it makes me want to take up my pen (or, as in these days, my keyboard) and write Lovecraftian horror. Been having problems writing of late -- I've lost much of the energy I found in the last half of last year. I don't mind slowing down. Maybe it will be that I write only one book this year. No matter -- the year will be deliciously Lovecraftian. Whenever I cannot write, I return to Lovecraft, & gawd what a wealth there is to return to nigh. Not only HPL's fiction, but Lovecraft studies, as found in Nyctalops, Lovecraft Studies, Crypt of Cthulhu -- and various books. The finest (i.e. my favorite) Lovecraft scholar is Robert H. Waugh, who is soon to have a second volume of his amazing & magnificent Lovecraft scholarship publish'd by Hippocampus Press.

I wish that S. T. Joshi would write an entire book concerning Lovecraft's tales. The expanded edition of his Lovecraft biography, I Am Providence, comes close, containing much that is fascinating concerning the history of Lovecraft's fiction. At the moment S. T. is busy writing his own novel concerning the young H. P. Lovecraft, & has announced progress of it in his current blog. It has often been my wish to write my own story-by-story commentary on the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft -- but I am not a scholar and my talents as a literary critic are weak. However, I have found this desire to have inspired my current slew of vlogs on my MrWilum channel over on YouTube, & I have started a series of commentaries on Lovecraft's individual tales that is proving fun to record, although they add nothing new to Lovecraft studies. I'm hoping they will help introduce some of my many viewers to Lovecraft's fiction. I've printed out the chronology of Lovecraft's tales that may be found on the exception site, The H. P. Lovecraft Archive -- the creation of Donovan K. Loucks. The list mentions the revisions that Lovecraft worked on as well as his solo stories, and so I can comment on the revisions as well, working mostly in chronological order.

I am so ready to have a new book out I can't tell you! I hope I don't have to wait much longer. That's such an important part of the writing ritual for me -- to hold my newest book in my sweaty little paw. I love it.

Slowing Down

2011-02-11T14:16:00.000-08:00

That's me walking past a church in Marblehead that may have inspired the church mention'd by Lovecraft in "The Festival." I am carefully studying all of Lovecraft's Kingsport stories as I prepare to write a new Kingsport novelette for my forthcoming book from Miskatonic River Press, Gathered Dust and Others. One of the real joys of working on a book set in "Lovecraft country" is that I can completely escape from modern time and prosaic reality, and I can sink my psyche into the realms created by H. P. Lovecraft. It's a world I need more than ever. This month has been a pathetic waste of time. I've been lazy, but it's mostly a product of lack of sleep. Insomnia has become a huge dilemma. I simply cannot sleep, there is too much on my mind. I recline in bed and my mind won't stop whirling and buzzing. Without sleep, my brain cannot function as a writer's brain must, with clarity and rest. Honey, it sucks. Part of the problem is that I've taken on too many projects, for there are so many cool books that I want to write for -- but I need to concentrate on my collections. I have three collaborative projects ahead of me, and collaboration is really difficult because you have to please the person with whom you are working, not just yourself. So I've told some of the editors that I was gonna write for, "sorry, I need to bow out," and just concentrate on the books that really mater to me, my collections.

I am so ready to have a new book published. This is another source of frustration. I still have no idea when The Tangled Muse will see print from Centipede Press. I may have to wait until early Spring to see a new book out, and that seems a long ways away. I am now trying to complete two collaborative stories. I am writing a story for Arkham Nightmares with Maryanne, and she has very definite ideas about what makes a story work. I am also working with a new collaborator, Jacob Orloff, who has written a fine collection of weird fiction that he allowed me to read. He is a very young writer but already has a fairly solid style and a rich imagination, and I am determined to have the story I am writing with him completed by this month.

I hope to find my energy again. I think I became too over-confident at the end of last year, when I wrote Some Unknown Gulf of Night in six weeks -- it made me feel like I can do anything, when in truth the writing of that wee book was a freakish incident of amazing inspiration. It's not the kind of thing one can replicate at will.

Arcane Wisdom has announced and are taking pre-orders for the first volume of S. T. Joshi's two-volume set of Lovecraft's revisions and collaborations. It is going to be a fabulous set! You may place pre-orders at Horrormall.

O, Ambition....

2011-02-04T19:24:00.000-08:00

That's me at MythosCon, with Chanel on my lips and Poe on me hat, reading from Some Unknown Gulf Of Night. The writing of that book feels, still, like some rare miracle & ecstasy. I wrote its 37,000 words in a state of self-hypnosis. The last time I looked it over I thought it was pretty good -- but often, when reading over something, I find myself hugely disappointed; so I am not going to look at ye text again until it comes to me in publish'd form. No matter my future opinion of it, the memory of its creation will always give me intense pleasure and move my sense of wonder. I have never been a writer of discipline, & that's why I have convinced myself that I can never be a really professional writer -- one who has what it takes to sit down and write for several hours each day, or one who is determined to write 1,000 words a day, or whatever. A creature of mood, I write when I wish to, or when I can. I have not been able to write anything these first four days of February. I have sat before this keyboard and thought I might -- but nothing inspires me to touch fingers to ye keys.

However -- something in my psyche has alter'd and transform'd. I have become a creature of -- ambition. One of my artistic poses has been to pretend I do not care if my books are "popular" -- "I write because I must, and whatever happens afterward is immaterial, let they who want to read my books do so, it matters not how many they number." In saying this I am merely aping Lovecraft, of course -- and he cared more than he let on, as do I. Writers are sometimes great babies. We weep for love. We are so easily wounded. Bad reviews, rejection of work, drives us mad. We have our goals and dreams. Our ambitions. My ambition, early on, was to become an acclaimed writer of modern Cthulhu Mythos fiction. Later on I became obsess'd with having my fiction praised my S. T. Joshi, the only critic whose opinion means anything to me. But with the writing of Some Unknown Gulf of Night, I have a new mantra: "I want this book to be wildly successful!" I have never thought such a thing, and it rather shocks me to think it now -- but there it is. My idea of "success" has always been rooted in critical success, not commercial success. This is still true, although I am now hopeful to actually make a bit more money from my writing. I have worked so diligently to create interesting and worthy additions to the genre of Lovecraftian horror, but to do so in my own weird way, with works that are perversely mine own. I am that ridiculous creature, a man who has both confidence in his abilities and yet profound doubts concerning their worth. The confidence comes from my intentions -- I am dead serious in my approach to writing, & I consider my writing my Art. The doubts come from looking at my work and sighing, "Oy, is this the best you can do?" I consider my imagination extremely adolescent, and I try to disguise that fact with a magnificent prose style.

So. I shall probably have four books published this year. That is absurd because it means that people who cannot buy more than one of them will have to choose. If I may influence, I would say, if you can buy but one of my books this year, let it be Some Unknown Gulf of Night from Arcane Wisdom. It is the book that is completely new, sans reprints of any kind. It is my perfect realization of my current obsession with the writing of prose-poem/vignette sequences. It is the book of mine in which I try to be audaciously artistic. I am dying to discover what my readers think of it. I hope it pleases. I want it to be a wild success.

Now, hopefully some day this month I can discover again that driving need to create. It is the work that saves my sanity and soul.

Shalom.

Miskatonic Books and Blog

2011-01-12T12:47:00.000-08:00

Larry Roberts, of Bloodletting Press and Arcane Wisdom, is a devoted Lovecraftian and now has opened a new bookstore at Horror Mall: http://www.miskatonicbooks.com By clicking on the title of this blog entry you will be taken to Larry's new Miskatonic Books blog.

I am really really excited about Larry's forthcoming publication of my new book, my charmed book as I call it. His books are so beautifully designed and produced, and this adds to the joy of being published. Book-making is an art, and I love my books to be as artful and gorgeous as possible. Although the main edition of Some Unknown Gulf of Night will be a paper-bound chapbook, there will be a limited hardcover edition of 100 copies.

I am now working on the next two books, one for Miskatonic River Press (a book that I have tentatively titled Gathered Dust and Others) and a book I am writing with Maryanne K. Snyder. The book that I am writing for MRP will be a traditional and yet very strange collection of Cthulhu Mythos fiction. The tone of the book has been highly influenced by the wondrous artwork of Santiago Caruso, who will be illustrating my book. The book I am writing with Maryanne will be a 100,000 word collection of weird fiction, prose-poems and verse all of which will be inspired by the works on Clark Ashton Smith. I am determined that this book will have a first edition hardcover, and Jerad of Centipede Press has expressed a tentative interest in publishing it!

So I have an entire year of work ahead of me, lots and lots of writing. One of the aspects of gathering at MythosCon was to realise that the world of Lovecraftian publications and Mythos writing is quite alive and thriving. We have much to look forward to!

MythosCon was Intense ! !

2011-01-10T14:25:00.000-08:00

My darlings:--

I had such a great time at MythosCon, which was certainly the most amazing and exciting Lovecraftian event I have ever attended. The photos above shew me holding up a Japanese paperback edition of Cutting Edge -- editor Dennis Etchison brought copies to give to me and Bill Nolan. As far as I know, it is my only appearance in Japanese. What a fabulous gift! The other photo is me reading from my newest book,
Some Unknown Gulf of Night, to be published this year by Arcane Wisdom and illustrated by the magnificent Matthew Jaffe. I hate doing readings and I was very glad that Robert M. Price went ten minutes over in his reading just before mine, thus I only had to read for twenty minutes rather than half an hour, and five minutes of that was spent yakking about my new book.

I flew down with some of the most devoted Lovecraftians I have ever known, Greg Lowney and Maryanne K. Snyder, and their youngest son Victor. Greg is one of the fellows who helps to organize and run The H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, and Maryanne is one of the finest readers of weird fiction, a woman of intense wisdom regarding the genre, and my collaborator. She and I will write our first collaborative book this year, a collection of 100,000 words of weird fiction and poetry inspired by the works of Clark Ashton Smith. Centipede Press has already shewn a tentative interest in publishing it. We had a hotel some three miles from the convention, but Tempe has a wonderful free bus (the blue bus) that Greg and I rode one time. I lucked out in that Sunni and Jason Brock, who were also staying at the hotel, gave daily rides to and from the hotel to S. T. Joshi and myself.

It's always such a pleasure to get together with S. T., but it is most wonderful to see him in full Lovecraftian mode as he was at this convention. He knows (and remembers) so much, has such interesting ideas (with which one does not always agree), and he has worked so diligently. All of the panels he was on, concerning the revisions or the letters or Lovecraft scholarship, were of intense interest, hugely because of him. But he was joined on these panels with other giants such as Steve Mariconda and and Ken Fair, Jr. I've known Ken through correspondence for about 40 years but this was the first time we have met, and he is a pure Lovecraftian gentleman.

Some writers and editors I was hoping to hang out with did make it. I had some quality time with the charming Lois Gresh, and it was fascinating to talk with her at length in Hospitality and find out that we shared so many views on aspects of writing and other things. She is delightful.

It was a blast, as always, to see Ramsey Campbell, and his reading (of his story from Black Wings, was hugely entertaining. For some reason I missed Cody Goodfellow's reading, but the wild man and I were on a panel together about modern Mythos writers, and he was great. We invited Bob Price and Ann K. Schwader to participate on the panel as well. Ann's reading, of her poetry, was excellent, and I am intensely excited about a sonnet cycle concerning Lavinia Whateley that will be a portion of a forthcoming collection!

The best readings, for me, were by the incredibly handsome Matt Cardin and the intensely fascinating and talented Michael Cisco. Both men are superb Lovecraftian scholars as well, and their weird fiction is quite simply some of the finest out there. Matt has a recent collection out from Mythos Books. We both had stories in The Children of Cthulhu. But it was the Michael Cisco reading that blew my mind. It was a performance, really, and a chilling one. He read his extremely disturbing tale from Black Wings, narrating it as the people who told the tale. He did this with such powerful conviction that we were all utterly amazed when the reading ended.

I got to meet Walt DeBill and Richard Gavin, two of the gents (along with Bob Price and Jeffrey Thomas and Don Webb) with whom I wrote a Lovecraftian round-robin story that will be published in the next issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Among scholars was the always excellent Peter Cannon, who is also the author of some fine weird fiction, much of it humorous. I was extremely pleased to learn that Peter will be having a new collection of weird fiction published by Subterranean Press!

One of the real highlights was a slide show and talk given by Steve Mariconda concerning the area that inspired Lovecraft to write "The Colour Out of Space" -- such a thrilling presentation that really opened my eyes concerning the area called Arkham.

Donald Sidney-Fryer is one of our polished gems, an excellent fellow in every way, who speaks the music of poetry so beautifully. His presentation of the poetry of Spenser, Clark Ashton Smith, Nora May French, George Sterling -- and his own brilliant poetry (published recently by Hippocampus Press) -- was outstanding and hypnotic. We were graced with fine writers from all over, including the brilliant Canadian writer Simon Strantzas and the writer from Lovecraft's Providence, Jonathan Thomas. New York poet Fred Phillips gave a delightful reading from his recently published Hippocampus poetry collection, and the amazing William F. Nolan is still writing as he approaches age 83 -- he is working on his first Arkham House collection!

Two of my intense joys at MythosCon was meeting Matthew Jaffe and Tom Lynch. Matthew is such a great artist. The original painting of his cover for Laird Barron's Occultation was on display in art room, and then he brought an unfinished piece that was just as remarkable. His talent is immense and his style simply divine. When Larry Roberts asked me about who I wanted to illustrate my Arcane Wisdom book, I immediately thought of Matthew, and he has agreed! I'm in heaven. Tom Lynch now runs Miskatonic River Press. Last year he asked if I would be interested in writing him a collection of weird fiction set in Lovecraft Country, and I said that I would. That will be the first book I complete this year, a wee thing of around 50,000 words. And, yes!, it will be illustrated by Santiago Caruso!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Tom is a delightful fellow and absolutely devoted to bringing out new books of good Mythos fiction. We talked S. T. Joshi into writing an Introduction for this new book, which I hope is but the first of many I write for Tom.

Okay, I need to get some more sleep. Utterly exhausted. Many many thanks, Adam and Mark, for the finest convention I have ever been to. I have touched on just a part of it here. It was four fantastic days, and I have come home with more energy than ever before for the writing of my books of Lovecraftian weird fiction. You make me so proud to be a modern Mythos writer. I wish you the best of luck with continuing this amazing convention. If you are able to do it again, I think it may be remarkable how the attendance will have grown. I have every intention of talking about it continually on my YouTube channel, and will soon send you some $$$ for pre-registration for next year! Ia! Ia!

Santiago Caruso and Miskatonic River Press

2011-01-01T12:23:00.000-08:00

The year is starting off well, with an official story acceptance. I wrote a wee tale for Dead But Dreaming 2, an anthology forthcoming from Miskatonic River Press. Tom Lynch, of MRP, then invited me to write a collection of traditional Mythos fiction for him, and it sounded like a nice challenge, with each tale set in Lovecraft Country. I've looked at some of the products from the press online and have been very impressed with the atmospheric cover illustrations. Then, I recently did a Google search on "The Dunwich Horror," and I came across a video on YouTube that showcased Santiago Caruso's amazing illustrations for Lovecraft's tale -- and I was simply blown away! As is evident by now, I love Lovecraftian art, especially illustrations for Lovecraft's weird tales. It is one of my great disappointments that I have absolutely no talent for drawing. I have a number of artists appear in my fiction, and I am now preparing to write a complete book of tales concerning a weird New England artist, a book I am going to write with Jeffrey Thomas, who is himself a fine artist.

When I discovered that Santiago Caruso does art for Miskatonic River Press, I became really excited -- perhaps there was a chance that my publisher could get Santiago to draw the cover illustration for my book! I shall be meeting Tom at MythosCon, and I am going to stress how wonderful such a thing would be. And the very idea of it makes me approach the writing of that book differently -- I want to be more descriptive and visual in my prose style.

I've been trying to work on a tale that I will submit for possible inclusion in Arkham Nightmares, an anthology being edited for Arkham House by Lois Gresh. I have no been successful, everything I have try'd to do has been a false start. Then, last night, I was watching a program devoted to the marvelous poet, W. S. Merwin, during which he read a poem that mentioned following a black dog -- and that was the key I needed. I now have almost 1,000 words of semi-polish. I had planned to set the tale in Sesqua Valley, but 'tis nigh set in Arkham. Perhaps I'll have a rough version that I can shew to Lois when I meet her at MythosCon. I am so looking forward to that convention!

MATTHEW JAFFE to illustrate SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT

2010-12-29T13:44:00.000-08:00

The amazing illustration is by Matthew Jaffe, for the jacket of Laird Barron's magnificent second collection, Occultation. Matthew will also be illustrating the forthcoming Centipede omnibus, Masters of the Weird Tale--Arthur Machen, and some of his illustrations for that may be found, reproduced in color, in the 2010-2011 Centipede Press catalog. They are stunning. Thus it is with the greatest of pleasure, with pure joy, that I can announce that Matthew has agreed to illustrate Some Unknown Gulf of Night, providing cover and interior work. His style will be perfect for the book. I was fortunate enough to meet Matthew at thus year's H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival -- it was kind of funny, cos when he initially came up and introduced himself, his name sounded familiar but I couldn't place it. Then he came again and told me who he was and I perked up, being already such a fan of his artwork. It was on seeing the Machen work that I sighed, "Oh, how wonderful to have him illustrate a book of my own," and so it is dreamy indeed that he said "yes" to illustrating the new book forthcoming from Arcane Wisdom Press. That book is going to be special. I also asked an extremely fine Lovecraft scholar, J. D. Worthington, if he would write an Introduction to the book, and he wrote what is probably the finest Introduction to any of my books, a piece that is kind and knowledgeable and perfect! The book will probably see publication late spring/early summer of 2011.

New Book Just Sold to ARCANE WISDOM !

2010-12-20T20:05:00.000-08:00

The year is ending strangely & beautifully. I say strangely because I still find it bewildering that I was able to write a wee book of 37,000 words in six weeks. I have never experienced that before and it rather feels like a dream I had. I challenged myself to try and write the book before this year ended, before I left for MythosCon. What happened was, I became so obsess'd with writing the thing, and so determined to emulate the rush with which H. P. Lovecraft penned his sonnet sequence, Fungi from Yuggoth (said sequence being the inspiration for my book), that I entered into a kind of self-made state of surrealism. leaving "reality" behind and becoming utterly consumed by the world that I was creating with my keyboard. I told myself, "If Lovecraft could write his entire sequence of 35 sonnets in less than two weeks, I can write my sequence of 36 prose-poems in less than two months." The entire experience has proved to be one of life's happiest. Larry Roberts, of Bloodletting Press, had asked me two years ago if I would be interested in writing a wee chapbook for Arcane Wisdom. It has taken me this long to come up with an idea that interested me enough to write it. The big push of inspiration came from listening to William Hart's reading of the entire Fungi from Yuggoth sequence at YouTube, where each sonnet is read and can be read with its text presented in a font that replicates HPL's handwriting. Pretty sweet.

So I wrote my book and submitted it to Larry Roberts. He accepted the book today, and will publish it next year -- not only as a chapbook but with a limited hardcover edition of 100 copies! So I shall have two cool hardcovers out next year, this new book and The Tangled Muse, both beautifully design'd & presented so as to emphasize their decadent nature. I am unutterably delighted.

I've been joking that I may have four new books publish'd next year: but maybe it's no joke!
The Tangled Muse, publish'd by Centipede Press in a limited edition illustrated hardcover edition;
Uncommon Places, published in paperback by Hippocampus Press;
The Strange Dark One--Tales of Nyarlathotep, probably trade pb but possibly as hardcover as well, from Mythos Books;
Some Unknown Gulf of Night, as chapbook & limited edition hardcover from Arcane Wisdom.
Talk about glutting ye field! Now I need to slow down and just do two books next year.
Thanks to y'all for visiting my blog, and I wish ye all a Fabulous New Year!
--Willy

poftscriptum:-- My buddy Jerry Worthington has agreed to write an Introduction to Some Unknown Gulf of Night -- I actually sent him new segments of the thing as I wrote them and thus he experienced the work unfolding before him, and he was gracious enough to proof each segment and give comments that not only helped me correct some things within ye text but also influenced the direction of some of the segments. He has just sent me ye rough of his Intro and it is exactly right. J. D. is an astute student of the genre and H. P. Lovecraft, and his amazing insights may be found at the Science Fiction Fantasy Chronicles Forum:
http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum

SO MANY BOOKS

2010-12-09T22:30:00.000-08:00

So many books -- so little time. But now this refers to the books I want to write. I cannot understand what is going on with me -- maybe it's just the fact that I am able to write full-time -- but the more work I produce the more I want to produce, it's like a ruddy mania. I finally completely finish'd proofing the new book last night, after deciding I needed to completely rewrite segment XXII, that whut was my "poetic commentary" on Lovecraft's sonnet, "Azathoth." The prose-poem that I had initially compos'd was less than 200 words, & when I went to proof it I look'd at the wee thing and snarl'd, "This is my prose response to one of ye finest sonnets in Fungi from Yuggoth? This insipid fluff of nothing? No, girlfriend, I don't think so!" So I wrote out a new response in rough, a wee weird tale that brought Some Unknown Gulf of Night's entire word count up to 37,000. That I could write 37,000 words of polish in six weeks is a miracle -- but it was part of the ritual in which I engag'd, the ritual of "wanting to be like Lovecraft" that absolutely dictates my writing life. Lovecraft penned his sonnet cycle in a concentrated rush, beginning it on December 27 and completing it on January 4. One of the ways I wanted my sequence to emulate HPL's accomplishment was to write my new book is a concentrated rush, to be so entirely caught up in it that it would spill from my crack'd skull before I leave for MythosCon at ye end of this month. I wrote ye damn thing in six weeks. They were works of the strangest aesthetic enchantment I have ever experienc'd, where I could not stop writing, where I wrote in a state of creative fever. I don't know if that was a good or bad thing -- but I mean to let the work stand as it is, a testimony of Lovecraftian ambition & obsession.

But the more I do the more I crave to do. Now I want to write a novel about Randolph Carter that takes place after the events of "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," wherein Carter finds a way to mortal existence once again yet also finds his powerful dream life, which assists him in writing new novels that are exquisite macabre fantasies. So to-night I have started a slow critical reading of that collaboration with E. Hoffmann Price during which I am taking notes.

Another future project, perhaps for 2012, will be a collection of poetry and prose inspir'd by the Works of Clark Ashton Smith. I now have all five volumes of his weird fiction and his complete poetry in three stunning volumes. I'd like to begin work on a CASian sonnet sequence next year, take my time on it and make it something worthy of his memory, and then spend most of 2012 on a series of weird phantasies inspir'd by his tales. I feel a deep need to write such a book, & then I can dedicate it to my buddy Scott Connors.

As soon as I return from MythosCon I begin working with Maryanne on our novel, and I begin to write a book of "traditional" Cthulhu Mythos fiction for Miskatonic River Press -- a book that I want to be substantial. And, blast my soul, I still have a hankering to write (for that book) a weird tale about Richard Upton Pickman visiting Sesqua Valley and finding his way into the Dreamlands at a place in the Sesquan woodland that conjoins with the forests of the Dreamlands; for as HPL wrote in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: "....the furtive and secretive zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream-world and a few of the waking world, since the wood at two places touches the lands of men, though it would be disastrous to say where." One of those two places is Sesqua Valley. The story in Weird Inhabitants of Sesqua Valley that has Pickman visiting Sesqua sucks ichor -- I need to write a good story of that theme.

So -- the writing mania will not, I think (I hope) abate.

I can tell I'm worn out cos I've made so many typos writing this blog.......hope I caight them all

New Inspiration

2010-12-06T11:44:00.000-08:00

I was unhappy with one segment of Some Unknown Gulf of Night -- the one that was inspir'd by Lovecraft's sonnet, "The Window" -- feeling it was too wee (around 300-hundred words) and not very interesting. My goal with this new work was to try and make it at least 35,000 words, a good size for a chapbook -- & thus I was let down that I arriv'd a mere 33,000 words. Then yesterday I got this new idea for a different weird tale based on :The Window," so I spent the morning writing ye rough and it came to around 2,000 words! I was up until one in ye morning typing the polish. I brought in a bunch of Lovecraftian tidbits, stolen from his Life & Works and blended into an eldrtich mix. I have the woman who appears on ye mound from "The Mound," aspects of "The Unnamable" and "The Statement of Randolph Carter" and "Nyarlathotep." My narrator is named Howard, and his buddies are Samuel and Maurice. One thing I neglected to do in Gulf was to include a new sonnet of mine own, so I used this new segment for that. It's a very strange and decadent mix and it has brought the work up to 35,000 words.

So now I have one more wee weird tale to write, and then I begin work with Maryanne K. Snyder on my first novel. We are going to set the novel in my invented city of exile, Gershom. The first two tales of Gershom, "Some Buried Memory" and "The Tangled Muse," will see their initial publication on my omnibus from Centipede Press next month. Gershom was to be my "urban" Sesqua Valley. I got the idea after reading an anthology of tales of the New Weird. I decided I needed to try and write some more modern stuff, try and be more up-to-date and cutting edge. I invented my town of exiles, Gershom -- a modern yet strange city. But when I think of exiles I immediately think of Oscar Wilde -- so one of my recurring characters in the Gershom tales is the poet/playwright, Sebastian Melmoth -- who is none other than Oscar Wilde. Then I brought in others from ye Victorian fin-de-siecle -- and thus my "modern" city became more of a blend of Wilde's London of ye 1890's and Baudelaire's Paris -- not very modern after all. The spirit of Oscar Wilde (to whom I paid homage in ye photograph above) is prevalent. So, write the novel with Maryanne, who inspires me in a magical way, will be interesting, and the book will be totally non-Lovecraftian.

But I do have a Lovecraftian-to-ye-core project for next year as well. Miskatonic River Press has asked me to write them a new collection of pure Mythos fiction. My idea is to set each tale in one of Lovecraft's mythical towns such as Arkham or Duwich or Kingsport, &c. And I want to make these weird tales very Mythos indeed. We shall see if I can do so.

Next year may have a lot of my books see print: The Tangled Muse from Centipede Press, The Strange Dark One--Tales of Nyarlathotep from Mythos Books, Uncommon Places from Hippocampus Press -- and, who knows, maybe Some Unknown Gulf of Night from Arcane Wisdom Press. I think I can slow down a bit now. I've been so ferociously busy because of my bad health, my congestive heart failure. My good friend, Joyce Ring, died unexpectedly last Summer from heart failure -- she was my age, 59. I was totally shocked and freaked-out by her death. My own heart complications have me convinc'd that I may not have long to live, so I became obsess'd with writing as many books as possible before I kick off. Silly, the things we dread. But look at the work it has gotten out of me! And now, the next challenge will be the writing of Lovecraftian novels. I have always wanted to try and write novels and ye attmepts have always floundered, but of late I am feeling such a bravado of confidence -- who knows? As soon as I return from MythosCon I begin work on a novel with Maryanne K. Snyder (that is her in ye photo below, where we sit in ye hilltop burying ground in Marblehead, and ye view outspread before us is that which so moved Lovecraft to ecstasy).

29,000 & Counting

2010-12-02T11:10:00.000-08:00

That's me at the LOVECRAFT UNBOUND reading at last year's WFC, and in my lap is the copy of the rare Arkham House book, Dreams and Fancies, that I found for $90 in ye dealer's room. These two books shew what a long way we have come as Lovecraftians, and how the Lovecraft scene today remains vital and active. Ellen's anthology was simply magnificent, gathering excellent tales from a wide range of artists, unique fiction that explores Lovecraftian themes with intelligence and ingenuity. The wee Arkham House book takes us back to a time when Lovecraft was not yet the icon he is today, but it helped to take him there and is a wonderful collection, a book I return to for inspiration and eldritch delight, with that fine cover by Richard Taylor.

Happily, Arkham House is still around and has arisen from its nameless slumber. This heightens the excitement of what it means to be a weird tale fan today. The plan for Arkham House is to publish books by older AH authors (new collections by past AH "house" writers is the way I think it would be phrased) and then newer books by modern writers -- Lois Gresh will have a collection from them next year, and I learned last night of another author who is working with them on his first AH collection. One of the greatest things about Arkham House were the fantastic anthologies of original fiction that August Derleth assembled, and Derleth's superb anthologies of weird poetry. Plans are assembled to bring forth a three-volume edition of the fabulous poetry anthology, Dark of the Moon, with many new and original poems by modern poets, and a new anthology of weird fiction may be in the works as well! It was my discovery of Arkham House and books such as H. P. Lovecraft's Selected Letters and Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos that turned me into an insanely obsess'd Lovecraftian and gave me my firm determination to become a professional Mythos writer. I owe Arkham House a lot.

I am now just past 29,000 words with Some Unknown Gulf of Night. I have five more sonnets in HPL's Fungi from Yuggoth on which to write prose segments: XXXII. Alienation, XXXIII. Harbour Whistles, XXXIV. Recapture, XXXV. Evening Star and XXXVI. Continuity. But I still want to make this wee chapbook a work of 40,000 words, which means that each new segment would need to be 2,000 words. Thus I am taking a new course, and these last five segments of the sequence will form portions of a new Sesqua Valley story, with each portion inspir'd in some way by the sonnet on which it is a comment. I wasn't going to have any references to Sesqua in this book, but then I thought, on, what the hell. & nigh I have this really perverse inclination to write a tale in which I kill off Simon Gregory Williams. I've been playing with this all day, & now the idea doesn't seem "right". I think I want to continue making each segment a direct "comment" on the sonnet that serves as inspiration, & yet I can hopefully make each of the last five segments 2,000 words. We shall see. It hath been quite amazing, writing this thing in a state of creative hypnosis almoft, where I feel my soul flowing through waves of creativity. I've never experienced anything like this in my writing life. I continue to grow as an artist, and much of that has been made possible by moving in with Mother and being able to write full time.

I am so looking forward to meeting some of you there, in Phoenix!

OH BOY!

2010-11-22T19:43:00.000-08:00

How I love ye Fungi from Yuggoth -- and, Great Yuggoth, how it hath inspir'd me! The writing of my new book has been a magical experience. I have never -- nevah nevah evah! -- felt this inspir'd or had a work spill so easily from that warped realm called me brain. I am now at 25,200 words as I work, unexpectedly, on the vignette inspir'd by Sonnet XXXVII--"The Elder Pharos."

I say "unexpectedly" because I have just been invited to write a wee weird tale for an anthology that will be publish'd by a House that I have ached to write for since the early 1970's, & to be invited to finally pen a Lovecraftian weird tale for them has me so excited I have trouble sleeping. I'm so far along with SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT that I thought I could now cease work on it for a while and plunge into the writing of this new 5,000 word weird tale, "This Weave of Dreaming." -- in which I will have aspects of "Nyarlathotep" and "Medusa's Coil," although the tale will not to be sequel or any such thing to anything Lovecraft wrote. But then in to-day's post there arriv'd a new disc of Will Hart's reading of ye Fungi from Yuggoth in an MP4 File that actually shews the text (in Lovecraft's handwriting!) as the audio reads each sonnet. And Will's readings are so wonderful that it put me into the mood to not stop work on Gulf, so to-night I have begun segment XXVII. I will work on both the new book and the story for this fabulous editor who has invited me to write for a book I cannot yet discuss as much as I want to proclaim it to ye Woild, and I hope to have a nice polish of the new story finish'd by end of month.

I've entered a delicious era in my life as a Lovecraftian author. The circumstances are not wonderful -- I had to move in with mom because she has grown too crippled and eccentric to live alone -- but it, and another aspect that is the awesome miracle of my life, has made it possible for me to write full time. It's flipping awesome! And I've reached this phase of, I guess I have to call it "professionalism," where I am now able to do the projects that I have in mind, instead of merely dream about them. I told myself I want to write a prose-poem/vignette sequence of 35,000/40,000 words inspir'd by Fungi from Yuggoth and have it mostly completed in two months' time. Now, three years ago, if you had told me I'd be able to accomplish such a feat, I would have laughed my ass off. But now I think it's actually going to happen. Writing has become much easier now that I am doing everything on Microsoft Word, including rough drafts which I then print out and read from as I type ye polish drafts. Indeed, it is now impossible for me to work on a rough draft with pen and pad, as I always used to do. I need to do it all on keyboard.

Okay, must put Mother to bed, turn up the heat (it's been snowing all day) and return to work. Hope y'all who celebrate Thanksgiving have a nice day. We order'd ye Holiday Turkey meal from Safeway, and my prayer is that all the snow is gone when I go to pick the food up on Wednesday cos I have never driven in snow & the idea of doing so has me fairly terrify'd!

Almoft Half-way There

2010-11-12T00:17:00.000-08:00

My sequence of prose-poems, vignettes & short-shorts, Some Unknown Gulf of Night, has reached 18,200 words. I am working, to-night, on segment XX, whut is based on the sonnet "Night-Gaunts" in Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth sequence. Up until now I was feeling very inspir'd & ye writing came so easily; but now I feel a need to shift things a bit and go a different direction imaginatively. The next few sonnets of Lovecraft's sequence, "Night-Gaunts," "Nyarlathotep," and "Azathoth" touch on aspects that have become central to ye Cthulhu Mythos, I want my sequences inspir'd by them to echo that. My idea now is to shift ye scene to the dreamlands and explore the dark beauty of that realm. This shift hath slow'd me down, as I really need to study Lovecraft and think deeply about where my sequence is headed. The reason I am here writing on my blog to-night is because I am stunk in ye writing of Gulf and don't know how to advance, so I've come for a bit of distraction.

I have many things I want yet to do with this work. I am especially hopeful to use some segments so as to remember my wonderful week in Providence, Rhode Island, and I want to set one sequence in the Fleur-de-Lys Building at 7 Thomas Street. My friends and I were actually allow'd inside the building for a wee tour, & thus I was able to roam the huge lower room (pictured above, where I pose reading from S. T.'s Penguin Classics edition, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, reading from the book's title story, in which the building wherein I am dwelling is featured) -- so I need to set a segment of my sequence inside that wondrous place.

The writing of this new work has been so satisfying artistically. Best of all, it has return'd me to H. P. Lovecraft, my ever-Muse. It gives me such happiness to know that I will be able to continue to delve into the Works of HPL & find therein never-ending inspiration. Now that I am at segment XX, I am close to half-way completed with ye writing of this wee chapbook, which I hope will be around 40,000 words. This feels really weird, to be so far along -- I've been kind of hypnotized while working on this thing, & Time has been a thing of naught. My plan was to have the book completed before we head off for MythosCon in January -- but I am so far along & it's only ye 11th of Novembyr! How wonderful it is, to get so lost within one's work that it flows & flows. Of course, it is work, & there have been times when things would not express yemselves; but moftly it has come easily & swiftly. I shall be very surpris'd if I cannot deliver ye polish to my publisher at end of year.

Fantastic new art for THE TANGLED MUSE

2010-11-04T12:07:00.000-07:00

The magnificent Swiss artist, Gwabryel, who has done so many wonderful works for Centipede Press, has delivered five new pieces of black & white art for the much-delay'd new edition of The Tangled Muse, art that will take the place of the works that had to be removed from the book. Shewn here is his piece for my prose poem sequence, "In Memoriam: Oscar Wilde," whut will see it's first publication in the Centipede Press omnibus -- now scheduled for a late January release. I am so thrill'd with this new artwork! I love his style, & feel it compliments the eeriness of my prose.

Happily, Gwabryel will also be working on new artwork, including a colour cover, for my forthcoming collection from Hippocampus Press, Uncommon Places. I spent yesterday with S. T. Joshi, & he is hopeful that my new Hippocampus book can be publish'd late next year, perhaps in time for WFC -- but isn't dead certain, as Hippocampus Press has so many titles that must come forth before mine own.

S. T. shew'd me the pre-publication copy of his periodical, Weird Fiction Review, that is forthcoming from Centipede Press, & it looks amazing! He also had lots and lots of news concerning his meeting with publishers at WFC and the future looks great for S. T.'s future as an editor of Mythos anthologies, &c &c! He is also ready to begin serious work on his biographical novel concerning H. P. Lovecraft!

Some Unknown Gulf of Night continues slowly but steadily, & I now have up to 7,000 words. I've not had time to work on it for a few days, but I hope to make up for that by writing 2,000 or 3,000 words today! It is proving an exciting and satisfying experiment in writing prose poems and vignettes inspir'd by Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth yet retaining my own perverse & peculiar stamp. I hope to have ye majority of the thing completed before heading off for MythosCon.

SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT

2010-10-24T13:44:00.000-07:00

Will Hart has an amazing website, CthulhuWho1, where a number of wonderful offerings may be sampled. Some wee time ago he downloaded his reading of the entire Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet cycle over at YouTube, one video for each sonnet, with each poem reproduced in text using the H. P. Lovecraft font available from the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society -- so it looks as if each sonnet had been penned in HPL's handwriting. Will's reading voice is magnificent, and this is, for me, the definitive recording of ye Fungi. This sonnet cycle has long been one of my keen Lovecraftian obsessions, and when S. T. Joshi led a wee pack of us on a walking tour in Providence, I had my pb edition of Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems (a reprinting of the Arkham House Collected Poems that reproduced Utpatel's fabulous illustrations) in hand, and as I stood before 10 Barnes Street, where Lovecraft wrote ye Fungi, I recorded the incident in ye book. I have long wanted to write some work that was absolutely inspir'd by Lovecraft's sonnets; & at first I thought this wou'd be a sonnet cycle of mine own. I wrote my sonnets for Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts, but I've come to dislike moft of yem, I was too experimental with ye sonnet form, wrote the cycle too quickly, &c &c.

My new love as an author is to compose my prose-poem/vignette sequences, the most ambitious of which is "Uncommon Places," which in its final form reached 25,000 words. I have now started work on a new sequence that will be entirely based on Fungi from Yuggoth. I've just completed the first one and it seems okay. My initial plan was to try and make each of the thirty-six segments around 1,000 words, which wou'd bring ye total work to around 40,000 words, whut I cou'd then submit to someone as a potential small press chapbook. But the first one came to only 800; & if any of the future segments need 2,000 words to tell their tale, cool. Most of the segments will be wee prose poems, but I fancy that some of them will blossom into short-shorts of 2,000 or 3,000 words. We shall see. My hope is to have moft of this thing written by the time we attend MythosCon in January -- and perhaps that is a lunatic hope, but I am sure gonna try.

By clicking on ye title on this blog ye will be taken to Will's fabulous site!

YE TANGLED MUSE nigh available for pre-order!

2010-10-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

THE TANGLED MUSE will be delayed so that we may incorporate some wonderful original art by the Swiss artist, Gwabryel. Great Yuggoth, he is such a fantastic artist! He will be illustrating my prose poem sequences in memory of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Poe, and he has a strange illustration for "The Zanies of Sorrow," a story that I consider one of my most original. So, it will be worth the wait! Gwabryel has worked often with Jerad, and samples of his artwork may be seen on ye Centipede Press website. He has some really eerie work in that fabulous H. P. Lovecraft art book that Jerad publish'd a couple years ago. I am ecstatic about this fellow's artwork, it is so original, so unique, and it absolutely compliments the decadent "feel" of my book! Hooray!

New Story Sale

2010-10-06T17:33:00.000-07:00

I've been working with Maryanne K. Snyder on a book of collaborative work, and she has proved an absolute delight to work with. I prefer to write alone, collaborating is a lot more work for me; but often writing with someone else can take you to places you would never otherwise discover writing on your own.

Our first story together, "The House of Idiot Children," was publish'd in Weird Tales and will be reprinted in The Tangled Muse. Perhaps our strangest tale, "With Softer Gleam," has just been accepted by Jason V Brock and William F. Nolan for their second volume of the anthology, The Bleeding Edge. The first anthology was spectacular, and I am excited and very pleas'd to be in ye second.

"With Softer Gleam" is set in London in the late 1870's, at the time when Oscar Wilde began to live in London with the artist Frank Miles. However, the 1870's was also the time when Simon Gregory Williams, the first-born spawn of Sesqua Valley's shadow-land, was awakened by they who began to settle in the valley. In this tale, a newly mortal Simon ventures to London and encounters Wilde and Miles, and taints them with his sorcerer's debauchery. It is a very strange tale indeed.

Maryanne and her husband Greg (he is the hero of this past week-end's H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival & CthulhuCon) took me on a three-week tour of New England and New York, and thus I was able to dwell in Lovecraft's Providence. By nameless coincidence, S. T. Joshi was also in town, working at ye John Hay Library on some Clark Ashton Smith poetry. It was a journey that still reverberates in my weird fiction. One of the pieces I spoke at my reading at HPLFF was inspir'd by our stopping at Gloucester, Massachusetts, whut partially inspir'd Lovecraft's creation of Innsmouth. The day was beautifully gray and atmospheric, and we stopped so as to walk upon a pier. Being of adventurous blood, Maryanne removed her shoes and socks and walked out onto the sand and shallow water, toward deeper water and moving waves. Being a loyal husband, Greggie join'd her, waving me to do so, but I declin'd. I watched them go farther from where I stood on my safe bit of solid timber. Suddenly, from the distant depths beyond Maryanne, two figures rose from out the waves. These foreboding creatures were black, rubbery, faceless -- like wingless night-gaunts. I realis'd, after my initial shock, that they were two swimmers in scuba-gear -- but, Great Yuggoth!, what a superb Lovecraftian moment they inspir'd! Ye prose poem that I penned inspir'd by this is part of my "Uncommon Places" sequence, which hath seen its first publication in The Tangled Muse, in a version of 15,000 words. A revised version of 25,000 words will see it's first publication next year, in my new Hippocampus Press book, Uncommon Places.

Maryanne and I begin work immediately on our first, yet unnamed novel, a decadent supernatural thing that will be set in my city of exiles, Gershom. My first-written tales of Gershom, "Some Buried Memory" and "The Tangled Muse," have just seen their first publication in my Centipede Press omnibus.

GREAT YUGGOTH WHUT A WONDERFUL WEEK-END !!!

2010-10-06T10:53:00.000-07:00

I had such a great week-end at the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival & CthulhuCon. I rode down to Portland with S. T., after we had recorded a wee video on YouTube about some of his new & forthcoming books. I shared a motel room with Jerad Walters, who owns and operates Centipede Books. He was at the theatre setting up his table in ye dealer's room when we finally arriv'd, & so our room was empty as I walked in. I immediately notic'd a book on my bedside table on which there was -- a yellow book!!!!! My heart jolted as I approached the wondrous thing. A yellow book with an Aubrey Beardsley illustration on it of an old fellow whose face resembled mine when I'm in drag.

THE TANGLED MUSE!

I had told Jerad that I wanted the boards to be yellow, that I wanted the book to look as though it had been publish'd in Oscar Wilde's fin-de-siecle. I took up the book and kept muttering, "Oh my gawd, oh Great Yuggoth, I can't believe, oh my freaking gawd..." I had to go out and shew ye tome to others. Not bothering to unpack or anything, I departed ye motel room and stagger'd outside. I went first to Greg and Maryanne's motel room and knock'd on their door, wanting so to shew yem ye tome as it is dedicated to them & their charming son Victor. Scott Connors and others were nearby, so I shew'd yem ye book & they thought it exquisitely design'd. I left and almost waltz'd to ye theatre, where I found Greg, to whom Jerad had already shewn ye book. Finding Jerad's table, I saw other copies of the book. It is not the official edition but one of six unsign'd pre-publication editions, thus making them the rarest and probably most collectible edition of the book. Jerad hoped to sell the other five copies for $75@ -- & did so promptly. Jerad is still here visiting his friend who lives in Renton and has opened a wee cafe here in Seattle; he returns home to-morrow and will then update his website so that the official sign'd edition of The Tangled Muse may be order'd directly from Centipede Press for $125 per copy. The print run is a mere 150 copies and there seems to be a buzz about ye book, so we are hoping it sells well. I've shewn it on camera on some YouTube videos on my MrWilum channel, one of which I recorded with Jerad at my side. The book is simply spectacular in design.

I can tell that age and ill-health hath really affected me. It was difficult to walk to and from the theatre to ye motel, a mere three blocks. I know my congestive heart failure has really affected things, but had no idea I was so unable to walk any distance without becoming instantly worn out. I was so weary after each night that I did not once attend the after-hours gathering at Tony Starlight's and thus did not imbibe the absinthe cocktails as was my plot. But I got to hang out with writers and others, got to meet and be on a panel with the remarkable Caitlin R. Kiernan. My reading went very well, although I got rather choked up when reading from "Letters from an Old Gent," a sequence of prose poems in the form of letters perhaps written to his friends and loved ones. I read the two address'd to his wife and papa, and it was while reading ye latter that tears began to well. I have such an emotional link to Lovecraft.

One of the best days was Sunday, when I finally met my hardcore punk friend, Connie. She was one of my readers when I was doing my Punk Lust fanzine in ye early 1980's. We used to correspond, lost contact, and she recently found me on Facebook. I had no idea she was now living in Portland. She attended my Sunday panel and reading (and took ye photos above; & that's her sitting next to me outside ye theatre), and then we joined her charming husband Frank for a wonderful meal at Dot's. I love hanging out with old school punx, & they were delightful in every way.

We left early, me and S. T. and Jerad. Jerad came to my pad and we did our video (he was really nervous about being on camera!), but Jerad has a sharp cat allergy and my three cats were getting to him, so I took him to his pal's cafe to hang out and we said our goodbyes. He said that my book will be available for order at the end of this week and then should ship late this month or early November.

Although this was Andrew's last year as director of The H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, there are others who are working to keep it alive and in Portland. Thus, with luck, I'll see y'all again next year in Portland. Now we concentrate on MythosCon, held in Phoenix in early January, and it is going to be a remarkable Lovecraftian gathering. I hope to see many of you's there.

Ye Leopold Return Tales

2010-09-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

So I read S. T. Joshi's cool mystery novel (whut we will be discussing in our vlog next Friday when he comes to drive me to Portland for ye HPLFF), and some thing in his excellent approach to the genre got me hankering to reread those books concerning my all-time favourite detective, Nero Wolfe. I think I may have read all of the Wolfe novels thirty or thirty-five years ago, and then five years ago I began to read them again but got distracted. This past week I reread In the Best Families, and this morning I began And Be a Villain. I also order'd ye DVD set of the A&E series starring the remarkable Maury Chaykin as Nero Wolfe. I seen a few of these, either on telly or I borrow'd yem from ye library -- but they are so fabulous and authentic that I want to watch them all.

It seems that I cannot have a literary passion these days without trying, in some fashion, to ape it. It hath long been one of my little literary aches to write a series of psychic detective tales, with my psychic being a child of Sesqua Valley. This poses some few problems, because the haunted valley is, as I have constructed it, a secretive place, and such a series of stories would involve clients coming to visit my detective at his house in the valley. But now I see that this can have entertainment value and dramatic effect, so my mind is working overtime on ideas for such a series of tales. I have vow'd to work on two books only this coming year--and whenever I make such a vow I can never keep it. I've got this weird feeling that I'll be writing three books in 2011, one of which will be Tales of Leopold Return, who will be my psychic detective. The stories will be highly inspir'd by the Nero Wolfe novels, and Return's sidekick will be a female version of Archie Goodwin. Tough talking, probably lesbian; a woman of ravishing beauty who dresses mostly in masculine attire and ain't no wimp. Of course, the series won't comprise "serious" work of fiction, but fun (yet hopefully not trivial) tales in the tradition of Jules de Grandin and Carnaki.

I like being surprised by my sudden "needs" as an author, & to write a wee collection of amusing psychic detectives tales is suddenly a keen ache indeed. I'm not clever when it comes to plotting, so they won't be whodunits with intricate plotting and red herrings. They will be investigations of supernatural queerness. They will be mass fun to write.

HPLFF

2010-09-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

That's a great lineup, and I'm getting very excited about this. I'll be sharing a motel room with Jerad of Centipede Press, and he is bringing lots of book! How tempting it will be to me wallet, sleeping in a room filled with Centipede Press books! He hopes to have the Frank Belknap Long Masters of the Weird Tale omnibus there. Alas, my own Centipede Press book won't be ready in time for ye HPLFF, but I'll be doing a reading from it. Hope to see many of ye there!

New S. T. Joshi Video Interview on Octobye 1st!!!

2010-09-15T23:35:00.000-07:00

S. T. will be driving me down to Portland, Oregon for this very last H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, on Friday ye first of Octobyr. Just before we depart we're going to record another live video interview on me webcam for my MrWilum channel over at YouTube. Should be mass fun. He seems anxious to plug his mystery novel, The Removal Company, and discuss his life as a novelist. It has been his secret ambition all these decades to write fiction. His novel is quite good, and I believe a second book is ready for publication, probably under his own byline since there is another mystery novelist writing under ye name of J. K. Maxwell.

Of course S. T.'s moft astounding plot as fiction writer is to
write a biographical novel on the life of H. P. Lovecraft. He is certainly equipped to write such a book, as his definitive biography of H. P. Lovecraft, I Am Providence, has just been publish'd in two volumes by Hippocampus Press. Derrick now has had the books shipped to him and is frantically busy sending out ye order'd copies, the first 350 of which (out of 1,000, I believe) are sign'd by S. T. Gawd, an authentic novel about the life of Lovecraft, penned by ye World's Leading Lovecraft Scholar -- whut a rad treat that will be!!

Hope to see many of you's at ye Hollywood Theatre, & then come join me at the Tony Starlight's Supper Club & Lounge each night after ye festival and imbibe a glass of absinthe with me. We can drink a toast to Oscar Wilde, or Baudelaire!

S. T. has accepted UNCOMMON PLACES for publication!

2010-09-13T13:55:00.000-07:00

I am happy to report that S. T. has read, highly praised and accepted my newest book, Uncommon Places, and hopes to have Derrick bring it out as a Hippocampus Press title probably late next year. It may be that Mythos Books will bring out The Strange Dark One--Tales of Nyarlathotep, out next year as well, although I wou'd prefer that title to be releas'd in 2012. I'm still taking this month off and doing no writing, but it's so weird--I tell myself, I'll just take some time off and relax, but then, when I'm not writing, not working on a book, I get all antsy and can't relax! I feel restless, I get agitated, and it sucks death. The only way, at such times, that I can relax is to begin work on a new book. My work is my therapy, I guess. So I am doing the mental work for the new book, studying Lovecraft and dreaming dark dreams. I expect I'll begin writing in earnest, or trying to, when we return from the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival.

I'll be riding down to Portland with S. T., and maybe by that time we will all have copies of I Am Providence, whut I ache to begin reading, as I know that it will aid my Muse. Indeed, sometimes when I'm too weary to think like a writer, to concentrate or feel inspir'd, I will dip into my favourite portions of H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, & I am instantly rejuvenated as a Lovecraftian artist. Hanging out with hundreds of Lovecraftians also gets my writing mind boiling and bubbling over, & when I get home from such events my pen flies like a wild thing.

I look forward to seeing some of you's soon in Portland!

The Attic Window and Others, by Randolph Carter

2010-09-12T17:45:00.000-07:00

I love that spectral photograph of Grandpa--he looks both haunting & haunted.

Been reading over the new 10,000 word addition to "Uncommon Places," seeking yem typos that escaped my notice. Usually they are wrong words or incomplete words; like, I just found one where I typed "image" instead of "imagine"; & I found one sentence where I used "particularly" and "particular," so I'm altering the 2nd to "peculiar" so to avoid repetition. Proofing is a bore, but not catching the mistakes & having them infiltrate one's book is too grotesque.

Reading over the entire sequence of 25,000 words, I find it far more Lovecraftian than I remember'd -- or intended -- it to be. When I added the new portion of 10,000 words it was my aim to be totally Mythos, since the majority of the segments form'd a semi-sequel to J. Vernon Shea's "The Haunter of the Graveyard." What I did was I wrote one segment that was a portion of the short story, and then I followed it with an arty prose poem that was related to the story I was telling. Here's an example, with a wee portion of the story, followed by the prose poem inspir'd by it:

Uncommon Places Part XXII (climax)

And then I heard a cry from somewhere in the trees just beyond me, and at their sound a night wind rose, cool and smooth, that played with my length of hair; and as if in answer to the cry a dark cloud melted in the sky and thus was revealed the moon that had been secreted behind it, and I blinked as its dead light fell onto my eyes. Another sphere arose, as if from buried earth, small and delicate, with black pits where a human face would have worn eyes, and a scarlet mouth that parted.

"Ses yeux profonds sont faits de vide et de tenebres..."

The figure stopped its recitation and cocked its head. I watched as it hopped from the tabletop slab on which it stood and walked a few steps nearer, and I noticed that this stranger also held a book.

"I suppose you don't know French, judging from your dumb expression. Let me translate and sing the verse again, thus:
'Her eyes, made of the void, are deep and black;
Her skull, coiffured in flowers down the neck,
Sways slackly on the column of her back,
O charm of nothingness so madly decked!'
Delicious, is it not? And how clever of Luna to shew her form just now, so as to aid with ghastly light. One should always read poetry in moonlight, don't you agree?"

"Certainly, if the poet is Baudelaire."

"Ah! An educated soul." The voice was high and nasal, yet masculine. His eyes were concealed behind round black lens of what looked like antique wire spectacles. His fantastic mauve hair was piled high upon his dome in thick tube-like coils, and moonlight shimmered on the crimson gloss with which his simpering lips had been coated. "I've been looking for mine kindred dead, many of whom are planted here." He looked at me from behind his queer spectacles and did not smile as he spoke his name. "Randolph H. Carter, from Boston. And yes, I am ruefully related to the writer and man of mystery. Have you read his famous book?"

"I've inherited an edition, but haven't scanned it yet. What was his mystery?"

"He had many, actually. There is the mystery of what happened to his friend and mentor, Harley Warren, who was last seen with Randy on the day of Warren's disappearance. I actually know a direct relative of Warren's here in town, a fabulous painter who has a studio on French Hill. It was she, actually, who told me of this place; she often paints it and its denizens. Just now she is conjuring a life-size doppelganger of Obediah Carter, who was whispered to have been a wizard."

"That was his tomb you were standing on just now."

"I thought it might have been, although I couldn't quite make out its faded inscription."

"Perhaps," I ventured, "you should remove the shades..."

"Don't be absurd." He began to move away from me through the high dead grass, and so I held my lantern higher to light his way. We both saw the tree at the same time, and I could not suppress a shudder. "Some fool hanged himself on that tree last year." He turned and frowned at the expression on my face. "How sad you look; but then, who wouldn't dressed like that? You look like some Gothic hobo. Well, I should depart, morning classes at Miskatonic come so early. What are you reading?" I told him. "Ah," and he winked, "be on guard for the little people. This is their kind of demesne, I imagine." I watched him saunter toward the trees and disappear into their darkness, and suddenly I felt alone and vulnerable. Turning, I found my way homeward, climbed over the stone wall and examined my house. It looked a grotesque thing in the sallow moonlight, with its cupola, widow's walk and many gables. Lunar light feasted on the face of the gargoyle that Elmer Harrod had added as Gothic touch, and which had been featured in the opening shots for many of his episodes where he was seen before the house in his outlandish outfits and ghoulish make-up, costumes (such as the one I now wore) that usually had some connection to the horror film that he would introduce and mock throughout. Standing as it did at the end of a dead end street on which most of the decaying houses had been abandoned and uninhabited, the Victorian pile seemed especially desolate, a classic haunted house; and so it was, haunted by myself and my strange imagination, my conjurations, my spectral dreams.

Entering the lonesome place, I went to the library and found the collection of horror stories by Randolph Carter, The Attic Window and Others, which had been published by private hands some years after his strange vanishing act in 1928 had caused a sensation, resulting in his early and unpopular book being reprinted by a New York publisher. The new edition had been an enormous success. I was pleased to see that Harrod's copy was the original first edition. I began to read, oblivious to the subtle keening of windsong that emanated from the graveyartd next door; but soon my eyes grew heavy, and my long day came to an end in the cozy armchair of my quiet room.

Part XXIII.

She climbed the winding wooden steps that led to the small door, pushed it open and coughed into the dry air that, issuing from the attic room, assaulted her face. Her candle's feeble flame threw shadows into the room among the litter of antiques, the wooden crates, the shrouded figures. She was curious to see that their dark sartorial camouflage resembled her own, and she wondered if they, too, had hoped to conceal themselves from the world of men when roaming the streets at night. Pressing her hand against the breast of one still thing, she felt its torso of twisted wire; and then she lifted her face to its sad mask, the expression of which filled her with such remorse that she drifted from the thing, to the attic window. Bending before the small panes of glass, she gazed into their latticework at her peculiar wavering reflection, upon which shadows frolicked. She watched one patch of shadow sink into one particular reflected eye, and her eye of flesh experienced a bothersome tugging sensation, as if some playful thing were pinching it. She did not like how dark that eye looked on the window's glass, and so she brought her candle very near it, until its lashes were slightly singed.

The contents of the attic room began to spin, like leaves caught in a dance of wind, inviting her to trip the light fantastic; and so she rose and pirouetted around the place, one hand holding her taper, the other at her breast, beneath which she could feel a latticework of dainty bone. She gazed again at the dark shrouded ones who watched her with their awful masks and saw that on each mask one eye-hole was larger than the other, giving each faux countenance a slight distortion of feature. Raising a dainty hand, she stroked the rough surface of one mask, and then she gasped as the thing loosened from its mannequin and slipped into her hand, which grasped it. Gently, she lifted the mask to her face and pressed its rough surface to her soft soft skin, against which it adhered. Gracefully, lifting her free arm in imitation of the figures that began to move about her, she joined in their danse as candlelit shadows on walls watched unmoving. She capered until exhausted, and then fell once more upon her knees near to the attic window, toward which she turned so as to behold the reflection of her mask; but it was not the stiff papier-mache veil that appeared there, but rather a misty countenance that wore a beguiling and sinister smile. Setting her taper on the floor, she crept to the attic window and touched her finger to one of the small squares of glass, and she shivered as the image behind the window lifted its mouth so as to kiss her hand, which experienced sharp pain.

Falling away from the attic window, she lifted her hand and marveled at how the beads of blood that spilled from the slit thereon shimmered in the candlelight, like rarest gems. Beyond her hand she could espy the wavering of night's mist and the face within it, the face with a blemished eye and bloodstained mouth. It was a face that seeped through the reality of glass and wood and floated just before her, joined by spectral arms in antiquated dress that reached for her with hands that, taking hold of her mask, lifted it away.

check it out, my dears

2010-09-08T15:21:00.000-07:00

PULVER SAYS GIT TO WORK!

2010-09-06T12:52:00.000-07:00

Damn it, I've completed work on five bloody books these past two or three years and I deserve a holiday. True, a lot of the work on those books has merely been doing a light polish on older yarns, but lots of it has been ye composition of new weird fiction. So I told myself, okay, I'm taking the rest of the year off, no writing until I return from MythosCon. Four months of being lazy.

Joe Pulver says No Way. That's me and Joe standing at the grave of Robert W. Chambers. Joe also has a new collection forthcoming from Hippocampus Press, and S. T. Joshi told me he cannot yet read or comment on my newest book because he is busy reading a Joe Pulver novel. You have all ready Joe's first collection from Hippocampus Press, the magnificent Blood Will Have Its Season -- if you haven't, what the hell is wrong with ye? It's bloody brilliant! Thomas Ligotti praised it!

Well, I do have a new idea for a story I'm gonna write for my book from Miskatonic River Press, a tale set in Innsmouth. I need to write at least one lengthy Innsmouth story. So I got this idea of a young poet who has just graduated from Miskatonic University thirty years after the incidents in HPL's "The Thing on the Doorstep," who -- wanting to write a book of weird verse that will be powerful & evocative of Derby's verse -- journeys to Innsmouth for decadent squalid atmosphere. He finds an antique store run by the youngest of the three Innsmouth servants that were hired by the Derbys. In his bed and breakfast he meets a weird white dude who is actually Nyarlathotep in his The White Man disguise, who has come to Innsmouth in search of rare Deep Ones metals with which to build some amazing device using rare metals from Y'ha-nthlei and combine them with Innsmouth lightning so as to fashion a toy of doom & destruction. The idea looks idiotic set down but I think I can have fun with it and write something Mythos-up-ye-arse. So I've started taking notes and am nigh reading "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and "The Thing on the Doorstep" so as to fill me commonplace book with suggestive notations.

My buddy Greg, who along with Maryanne have taken me to the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival these past years, has just reminded me that every time I attend HPLFF, I come home so on fire to write that there's no way I will be able to take off for four months and do no writing. He's probably correct. I'll come home from this, ye very last HPLFF in Portland, with emotional & creative overload -- & onlie ye pen will save both sanity & soul.