It's a New World

Ah--I remember when an S. T. Joshi publication was a thing of somber seriousness.  How things have mutated!  Rather delightful, really, and I'm always happy to see my name on a cover.

I've been rereading THE STRANGE DARK ONE, looking for errors that slipped by me when I scanned over the pdf file.  I should have done more than scan, but I was confident that all of the errors had been caught by Jeffrey Thomas and myself--we really studied the stories for typos.  But it is ye cosmic rule: typos will not be caught.  The worst, for me, is in a story where I quote some lines from Clark Ashton Smith's poem, "The Dark Eidolon."  The first quoted line, as it appears in my book, is thus:

"A wizard wind goes drying eerily..."

Drying???  oy...

I shall be reprinting the story "The Strange Dark One" in my next book, Bohemians of Sesqua Valley (Arcane Wisdom Press), because it fits so well with ye theme of that book.  At the end of the story, one of my recurring characters, a child of Sesqua Valley, is stolen by an Outer One and taken to the Dreamlands.  Reading over "The Strange Dark One" as I corrected and revised its text for its hardcover publication, it came to me that I'd like to write a sequel to my own tale, in which Simon Gregory Williams goes into the Dreamlands so as to rescue the stolen child.  I think I can have some jolly fun with that idea.

Speaking of Simon, the amazing artist, Joe Broers, has captured ye Beast in sculpture:

Quite wonderful!