Soon, soon...

I was so totally ready to spend the day writing, although I was weary from having to be aware of my mother's state, as she was confused and too weak at 4.30 this morning to get out of bed to use the bathroom. When she is like that I have a habit of listening to her through most of the night to see if she is all right (I sleep in the room next to hers). I was in a good mood. I am one of some few writers who participated in writing a Lovecraftian round-robin story, which just sold to F&SF, and yesterday I got my cheque for $72, so I thought, cool, I'm gonna buy some Gladys Knight MP3 over at Amazon and then have some yummy Thai food for dinner. Nope. Mom's state worsened and I ended up dailing 911 and following an ambulance to ER -- this was at three in ye afternoon, we got home around seven tonight. Honey, I am so worn out. I have just spent about an hour looking at the story I am now writing, just kinda staring at the screen and trying to conjure forth the spirit of Poe and Lovecraft and write. I want the character I am now introducing to evoke some of Poe's verse, thus I am giving her hair that is raven black, and a face that is pallid and wan, and she will be wearing angel wings as she sits in the burying ground in Sesqua Valley where the soil breeds lunacy if one lingers upon it too long a time. And I just sat here staring at the laptop screen with a brain that refuses to work. Sucks.

Jerad at Centipede mail'd off my copy of Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle a few days ago, so I'll soon have a new Centipede Press box to open up before my webcam, Live On YouTube! Jerad also mention'd that my own Centipede Press omnibus, The Tangled Muse, is about to be printed -- and I won't believe this book is more than a dream until I hold it in my sweaty paw.

So I'm sitting here listening to Gladys Knight sing "Grandma's Hands" and wishing I could write fiction. But I'm too worn out from sitting for hours in Swedish Hospital with my poor old mum, trying to reassure her that everything was cool but it ain't never gonna be cool again.

So who has ye energy to write. I know absolutely that I don't have ye energy to work on my original idea of a 20,000 word novella -- but I am revising an elder tale, "Into the Depths of Dreams and Madness," which had its first publication in my last book. That version is some lame shite. It needs to be extensively revised and expanded and I plan on trying to lengthen it into a 10,000 or 15,000 word novelette -- but not tonight, girlfriend.

So it's a curious time in my life -- that rich combination of the really depressing and the soaring ecstasy of my writing life. It feels groovy to have a new book ready for next year, and Jeffrey Thomas sent me some of the art and it is so awesome, especially the cover. Hopefully I can finish this new book by ye end of ye year, as S. T. thinks he can find a "slot" for it in ye Hippocampus publishing schedule of next year. Coolness, two new books out in 2011. I thought the writing of this new book wou'd be so simple, cos it's bleedin' prose poetry, wee pretty scary things. Nope, to write a really concentrated bit of prose poetry is work, my child, and it demands concentration and rewrite and lots of dreaming.

So ye best thing now, I guess, is to go to bed, put on me headphones and listen to Gladys Knight and fall asleep and dream some sweet sick dreams that may, perhaps, be used for prose poem material.

Good-night, sweet-hearts.
Willy