YE SPIRIT OF REVISION

One new title that I am especially looking forward to is THE SPIRIT OF REVISION: H. P. LOVECRAFT'S LETTERS TO ZELIA BISHOP, whut will soon be available from ye H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society www.cthulhulives.org. Part of my excitement concerning this book is that it is a product of ye HPLHS--because their products are so amazingly fun and inventive. Here is their description of this new book:

"In 2014 a collection of letters from H. P. Lovecraft to Zelia Brown Reed Bishop was discovered in an old trunk in a basement. Mrs. Bishop was an aspiring young writer who became a client of Lovecraft, making use of his service of revising and improving other author's stories to help them get published. In this collection of never before seen letters, we see how Lovecraft ran his business and how he mentored an aspiring writer. Lovecraft and Mrs. Bishop went on to collaborate on the stories 'The Curse of Yig', 'The Mound' and 'Medusa's Coil'.
"The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society has carefully scanned and transcribed the original manuscripts which date from 1927 to 1936. The thirty-six new letters to Mrs. Bishop are presented in sequence with eighteen previously known letters to create the most thorough picture of the correspondence between Lovecraft and Bishop possible. The collection is extensively annotated by Sean Branney and Andrew Leman and includes pictures of reference documents which Lovecraft recommended to his clients, newspaper clippings about topics he describes, facsimiles of some letters, a cartoon by Lovecraft and much more. THE SPIRIT OF REVISION features an introduction by pre-eminent Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, and offers a fascinating glimpse of Lovecraft as teacher, correspondent and collaborator."

At this time in my life, I have this really strange connection with E'ch-Pi-El--a kind of fantasy in my brain that makes me feel like I am one of Lovecraft's posthumous "clients". I have been reading his fiction and publish'd letters since ye early 1970's--non-stop. I feel a kind of intimate connection with Lovecraft, one that is cemented with my work as writer. So much of that work is rooted in returning to Lovecraft's texts, to examining his life through his correspondence and modern biographies. Lovecraft is an element in my core being, and his aura is very like the air I breathe in order to exist. 

This new publication of letters, indeed, has inspir'd a new story idea that I am working with, of a cache of letters from Richard Upton Pickman that have been discover'd in an old trunk in the attic of an elderly woman who, when young, was one of Pickman's models. These are ye wheels that turn my imagination--always, always....