Immortal Remains

In working on my next collection for Mythos Books, The Strange Dark One and Others, I realis'd that I had forgotten to include one old tale, "Immortal Remains," which is tied to "The Nameless City," one of my fave Lovecraft tales. The story will not be appearing in my Centipede Press book, so I thought I might as well include it in the new Mythos Books thing, as it has oblique mentions of Nyarlathotep. But it thinking it over just now, I see that I may be able to significantly as to the tale, enlarge it, and magnify the references to ye Strange Dark One, and also add some other bits of borrowings from HPL. And I want to set it in the year that Lovecraft wrote "The Nameless City" -- 1921. I think the story has had but one book appearance, in Sesqua Valley & Other Haunts -- (bollocks, my boldface won't shut off...) (ah, there we go) so it can stand a complete rewrite and expansion, and then ye new version will be a lovely wee addition to the new collection. So that is my project to-night. If I can stop listening to Lady Gaga, whom I find rather compelling...

I really enjoy reworking my older tales and seeing what I can do with those old ideas now, so many years later, when I have taught myself to imagine so much more fully as an author. When I wrote that first version of "Immortal Remains," most of my stories were around 2,000. The idea of writing something 3,000 words seemed an impossibility -- my imagination simply didn't work that way. I remember how excited I was when, at the urging of John Pelan, I worked and worked on my story for The Children of Cthulhu and finally penned something over three-thousand words! I felt so professional! And over the years I have experimented with writing tales of length, finally culminating in my longest and best story, "Inhabitants of Wraithwood," for S. T. Joshi's Black Wings. And now it is almost impossible for me to write a story under 3,000 words!

So now I am going to reread "The Nameless City" in the delicious Penguin Classics edition, The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, and as I read I shall, in some small pocket of my mind, dream of the Crawling Chaos, and then I shall see what I can do in recreating an antient tale and so make it new & nameless. Shalom.