ARCANE WISDOM PRESS to publish my next book

If you've been watching my vlogs, you'll have seen my videos concerning all of the fabulous books that Larry Roberts is publishing with his Arcane Wisdom Press, including some really sensational anthologies edited by S. T. Joshi, who is also working with Larry on a line of Cthulhu Mythos titles.  Larry published Some Unknown Gulf of Night, perhaps my most unusual book & certainly my personal favourite of the books that I have written.  You can check out Larry's books at his Miskatonic Books site www.miskatonicbooks.com where he also has a fascinating and amusing blog.  (my young cat keeps walking on me keyboard and thus things are kinda messed up here......)  

I had no intention of writing a new book this year, as early in ye year I wasn't feeling so hot.  Happily, this has proved to be far more productive a year than I imagined it would be.  One surprise was writing a new collection, Bohemians of Sesqua Valley.  It's a wee book, under 50,000 words I think; but I had such a great time writing it over ye summer months.  It was fun to really sink into Sesqua Valley and portray new aspects of my fictive realm.  The Contents of the book, as I finalized it, is thus:
1. "In Memoriam: Robert Nelson" (364 words, publish'd in ye Lovecraft eZine)
2. "One Card Unturned" (written in collaboration with my sweet sister,  Maryanne K. Snyder; 9,000 words)
3. "An Ecstasy of Fear" (11,585 words)
4. "Unhallowed Places" (a new prose-poem sequence of 7,845 words)
5. "This Splendor of the Goat" (10,535 words)
6. "A Quest of Dream" (5,000 words)
and then I added the title story of my just-publish'd The Strange Dark One--Tales of Nyarlathotep, whut at 14,000 words is the longest tale I've yet written.  I wanted the story to have a hardcover publication, and it is perfect for a collection concerning bohemians in my haunted valley.  I was then  thinking of writing a sequel to "The Strange Dark One," but I have a feeling the idea may require semi-novel length, as it would concern Simon Gregory Williams infiltrating the Dreamlands so as to rescue a child of ye valley.  

 When I first invented Sesqua Valley, I was a clueless Cthulhu kid who just wanted to write cool Mythos stories.  One project was to write tales that featured the Mythos creatures of other writers such as Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth and others -- and the majority of those stories made up my first American collection, published by Jeffrey Thomas through his Necropolitan Press.  Since then, I have matured enough to see the vast potential of my creation, this supernatural vale.  One of my favorite ideas came from reading H. P. Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," wherein Grandpa writes:

"In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks

twine groping boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence

of strange fungi, dwell 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."

I love that, and it helped to explain why night-gaunts and Nyarlathotep were such frequent visitors to Sesqua Valley -- they lived next door in that alternative realm.  I have long wanted to write my "definitive" tale of night-gaunts in Sesqua Valley, and then have that story illustrate the jacket for a new collection.  So, for this new book I wrote "A Quest of Dream"--a wee poetic thing that evokes the dreamlands and their night-gaunts.  The book's artist, Gwabryel (he illustrated my last book from Hippocampus Press), has just sent me the painting that will be the book's jacket.

 I am thrilled beyond measure!

So, I will have two new hardcover collections out in 2013, the above-mentioned book from Arcane Wisdom Press, and Encounters with Enoch Coffin, written in collaboration with Jeffrey Thomas and to be publish'd by Dark Regions Press.  Enoch is a sexy and perverse New England artist (he resembles, physically, the actor Tom Berenger) who has a number of intimate and very Lovecraftian encounters with ye supernatural.  That book has some wonderful interior illustrations by artist Clint R. Leduc.  Here is one of my favorites.

I'm still having a very difficult time writing.  This household is crazy, chaotic, so loud that I cannot concentrate.  Before long, I shall be living upstairs alone, and then, in an atmosphere of silence & solitude, I hope to return to fever'd production, book after book after book.