Resolution

I have been invited by Mary and S. T. to dine with them this New Year's Day--Derrick of Hippocampus Press sent them a delectable Virginian Ham as Christmas present, and Mary is an excellent cook!  Too, to spend time with S. T. is always a balm for this Lovecraftian, because he knows so much and shares my deep passion for HPL.  This month will see the release of his three volumes of The Variorum Lovecraft, an astounding achievement! 

My New Year's Resolution is to make this a year of writing non-Lovecraftian weird fiction.  I want to explore my decadent fin-de-siecle nature as an artist.  I read, last night, a review of Year's Best Weird Fiction in which, although the reviewer had good things to say about my story, felt that I wear my influences too obviously.  Yes, that has been one of ye raison d'etre of my entire oeuvre--to write fiction that is audaciously Lovecraftian.  And I feel I still have much to say as an author of Lovecraftian weird fiction.  But I want this year's work to reflect other aspects of my soul.  Of course this means I will ape other favourites:  Wilde, Kafka, Woolf, James, Baudelaire.  But there is much darkness that is not Lovecraftian, and I feel an ache to evoke it.  The books I will be working on this year are my next collection for Centipede Press (I've decided to call the book Unhallowed Places), and my second collection of Enoch Coffin stories written with Jeffrey Thomas.  When this second book was initially going to be a novel, Jeff and I had already decided to make it non-Lovecraftian.  

I am, at last, really in the mood to write--and for me that means constructing a book, writing stories that belong as a group and have similar motifs, mood, &c.  

Of course, this year will be a year in which gobs of my Lovecraftian writing will be published.  I have written tales for a number of Lovecraft-themed anthologies to be publish'd by PS Publishing, I've had a stories selected for various Lovecraftian anthologies, and my two books to be publish'd this year are Lovecraftian to ye core (indeed, one book is subtitled "Stories in the Lovecraft Tradition" or some such...).  

My thanx to the very positive comments concerning my last wee chapbook, These Black Winged Ones.  You know how you get those fixations in your noggin, something you just have to do.  That story was such a thing, an idea that kept scratching ye back of my brain and wouldn't let up until I had written it out.  I have revised the story and added several hundred words of new text, and that new version will be publish'd in England in Doug Draa's forthcoming anthology, The Fall of Cthulhu.  I revis'd the story so that it fits more with ye theme of his anthology.

Thanx for reading my blog.  It's good to be able to connect with Lovecraftians via the Internet; & since I will no longer be attending conventions of any kind, this will be the only way I can have contact with my readers.  I love writing, but a large portion of that joy comes from pleasing other Lovecraft fans.  I couldn't be bothered doing it if not for y'all.