Writing Lovecraftian Weird Fiction

 

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.