New Story Sale

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.