New Writing Project

I have propos'd a new book to S. T. Joshi, as I thought perhaps Hippocampus Press would be the only Press to want to take a chance on it or would have an real interest in it. I used to write very wee tales -- 2,000 words was my limit. With my last few books I have been experimenting with writing longer stories, and it has been a great thing, to actually write a story that was over 13,000 words. This culminated in the novelette I wrote for S. T.'s forthcoming anthology of modern Lovecraftian tales, Black Wings. But when I worked with S. T. as my editor on The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams, I wrote the first of what I call my prose-poem sequences; & I liked the doing of it so much that I have since written a number of them, "In Remembrance: Edgar A. Poe," "In Memoriam: Oscar Wilde," and -- most ambitious of all -- "Uncommon Places," a sequence of 15,000 word with each entry inspir'd in some way by H. P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book. The prose poem is such a wonderful form, and with it one can do many things, investigate so many moods. Our beloved weird tale and phantasy genre has many practitioners of the form, including H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar A. Poe, Donald Wandrei, and Samuel Loveman. The form itself seems to inspire writers to create fantastic things -- perhaps things not really of our genre, but closely linked thereto. I've just purchas'd an amazing book of what may be called prose poetry, The Miner's Pale Children, by W. S.Merwin. I love what he has to say about the writing of this book:
"I am still not certain what to call the pieces that took shape from that beginning, and almost at once this seemed to me a valuable condition, an advantage that I wanted to retain. I realized that I did not want these writings, if they ever came to comprise a substantial group, to qualify for membership in some recognizable genre."
Here, for me,m we find the voice of The Outsider -- & that is the voice I work to cultivate in my own weird fiction, which I do so-call because I am writing within a specific genre.

It is my own profound belief that we who wrote Lovecraftian horror and tales of ye Cthulhu Mythos can do so with intensity & originality. Reading the amazingstories in Ellen Datlow's Lovecraft Unbound and S. T. Joshi's Black Wings has convinc'd me that there is so much more to be done within this subgenre. I hope to be doing such work in the prose poem form, not necessarily with things that may be called "Mythos," but certainly with that which may be named "Lovecraftian horror."