SO MANY BOOKS

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