I Quake To Tell Thee......

I just got an idea for a new book I wanna write--but...but...

How many blogs have I written, telling y'all about this great new book I'm gonna write, onlie to have the idea wilt and die?  How many times have I announced, "I'm writing a novel!"?  I should be cautious.  Instead of announcing the books I want to create, those books of which I dream and scheme, I should only write about the books that are being actually worked on, or that have been written.

Caution is so boring.  I throw it to ye wind.

I've been reading David West's superb edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and as always when I dip into ye sonnets, I feel a wee ache to write more of my own.  I wrote a new sonnet for the story that I just sold to S. T. Joshi.  But -- I want to write a really long sonnet cycle.  My one experience with writing a sonnet sequence, for my book Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts, was unhappy.  I was too experimental, too bizarre, too unfocused -- and many of the sonnets suck death.

So, I was just sitting in my bed, and I had this idea hatch within my haunted brain.  The first 17 sonnets by Shakespeare urge a young man to marry, so as to preserve his intense beauty.  My idea is to write a book-length collection of sonnets that are audaciously tied to Shakespeare's in form and content; but they will be keenly colored by Poe and Lovecraft.  Thus, the first 17 of my sonnets could relate to the beauty of a dead loved one, in the tradition of Poe.  Even if I cannot find my way to further the story into a cycle of 150--or even fifty--sonnets, I'll have that opening batch of seventeen.  Dark Regions Press has been poking me about submitting a collection of poetry to them, and if I could this off it would be perfect.

I love the sonnet form.  Here is my sonnet in memory of Oscar Wilde:

Shakespeare's sonnet sequence ends with his nasty sonnets of lust concerning a "dark lady", and thus I could end mine with the nasty resurrection of the dead one of the opening 17 sonnets, who is now a hungry revenant of doom.  Yeah.  Endless poetic possibilities, methinks.  I shall keep ye posted.  It may be that I will first want to write this idea out in prose form, as a new novelette for the book I am currently working on.  Aye, I could write it out as a weird tale in the Poe tradition.  That may be quite enjoyable.  And that will return me to the tales and poems of Poe.  How delicious.