progress of a kind

I have broken ye tedious writer's block by finishing a new thing of merely 1,000 words, "Your Gift of Alchemy."  Looking at that title now, I have a vague feeling that I've used it before.  S. T. Joshi and David Schultz once chided me for beginning too many of my tales with "The"--and so I have, over these past few years, tried not to do so.  Thus, instead of "The Inhabitants of Wraithwood," the "The" is missing.  In my new chapbook, instead of "The Black Winged Ones," I have "These Black Winged Ones."  Now S. T. has said that I am overdoing avoiding "The" in my titles.  Some people are never satisfy'd.  When the new story is reprinted in my next volume from Centipede Press, its title will be "The Black Winged Ones."

The photo is me at one of my favourite burying grounds, St. John's Churchyard in Providence, a place haunted by Poe and Lovecraft when they lived.  I held a picnic there last year, on ye first day of NecronomiCon.  To-day I am going to try again to begin writing a story for S. T.'s forthcoming anthology, Gothic Lovecraft.  I have the story all imagined in my mind, but the three times I have try'd to begin writing it didn't work.  The opening sentence, originally, was something like, "I awakened to soft sunlight and removed the pennies from my eyelids."  Now I am debating whether to have the thing told in first or third person.   I prefer what I consider the "personal touch" of first person narrative.  I want this new story to combine the influence of Poe and Lovecraft.  I want to have mimes.  I see them dragging a cart of bones along the road of some antient town, pulling ye cart to some distant tower or abbey or some such thing.  There, they will assemble the bones as a kind of throne for the story's narrator, Madame Death.  Or some such thing.

Let's see if I can make any real progress on the story before ye end of day.