Sonnets
I've just sold a three-sonnet sequence to ye online journal of speculative poetry , Eye to the Telescope. The sale is especially sweet to me since I have had a hankering to return to writing poetry but this yen has been quashed by my need to write books of weird fiction. I have a wee ache to write my own Lovecraftian version of Shakespeare's sonnets--numbering 154. Instead, I am planning on writing a new novelette that takes it plot from Shakespeare's sonnets. My working title for the novelette is "Dark Lady," and that was going to be the story's title until I saw this:
I'll find some nice phrase in ye sonnets to use as my title after I've compos'd ye tale. The idea has been a Lovecraftian obsession of mine for some time. Lovecraft mention'd, in correspondence, of wanting to write a novelette set in Arkham about a bloke who inherits a house on French Hill and is compelled to dig in an antient graveyard on Hangman's Hill. I've toy'd with this idea in one or two wee things in prose-poem and vignette sequences--but now I am determined to write HPL's unwritten novelette. I'm shooting for 13,000 words. I had such adolescent fun writing an 11,000 word novelette that was my own version of Grandpa's "The Lurking Fear," I want to do it again. This time I have no completed story to bastardize--just a wee idea; but it hath fired my imagination, and I can use elements from "The Dreams in the Witch House" in my own novelette. My "dark lady" will be my recurring character, Marceline Dubois, of Sesqua Valley, who is spending time in Arkham as a Shakespearean actress, perhaps in a production of Antony and Cleopatra. I want to write fully and suggestively of that island mention'd in Lovecraft's tale; and I want to play with the idea of Nyarlathotep as Black Man, perhaps, one of the elements that so disappoints me in "The Dreams in the Witch House," as Lovecraft's use of Nyarlathotep in that tale seems to me extremely uninspir'd. And I want to play with the Shakespearean motif of father and daughters, and of the lure of the Dark Lady of ye sonnets. Lots to play with, hopefully enough for me to conjure forth a work of 13,000 words.
a moment of inspiration while walking ye lanes of Providence. |
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