as weird as weird can be...

Age changes your personality, I find. In ye olde days, I almoft never left home without wearing a shoggoth-load of makeup. I cannot, this morning, recall ye last time I wore makeup. I've simply lost interest in taking time to put all that stuff on me mug. Part of this results from no longer using publick transportation. It was such a trudge, taking the bus just to do grocery shopping. If I had to make all that effort going out, I wou'd make it amusing and look punk-queer. Part of ye exhibitionist thrill of punk, for me, was the variety of ways people reacted. It allow'd me to interact with people who wou'd otherwise never speak to me. Usually the people who stopped to speak were as kind as they were curious. It was only the blockheads who shouted insults from a safe distance. Another reason for no longer feeling ye need to dress up is, I think, a secure identity. In younger years I cultivated a variety of identities with which I proclaim'd myself in publick: queer, punk, transvestite, freak, ghoul, whutever. Now I have one solid identity: Lovecraftian author. 

One of ye great pleasures of writing and being publish'd, I find, is having my work illustrated. I cannot draw, and I admire those who have that wonderful talent. When they use that talent to bring to visual life a moment from one of my weird tales, oh honey, it thrills me. Check it out:

This is ye newest illustration by Tom Brown for my forthcoming Centipede Press book, An Ecstasy of Fear and Others. It is one ye strangest things my eyes have ever feasted on--eerie and hypnotic. I love his shading--and then, those two bright pinpoints that are daemonic eyes! Ia!! This illustrates a segment from my prose-poem sequence, "Some Unknown Gulf of Night," I believe. 

I find that I really have ye ache to write new stories. I'm just having a wee bit of difficulty getting started. Out of practice, so I am.