Ye Tangled Muse

Just heard from Jerad at Centipede Press to-day that my omnibus, The Tangled Muse, is just about to see print! Gawd, I feel a Lovecraftian faint coming on. It still seems like some unlikely dream to me that Centipede Press is going to do a collection of mine weird fiction. Their books are such beautiful works of art.

I have postponed working on a 20,000 word novella inspir'd by "The Dunwich Horror" -- far too ambitious a project for ye mood I find myself in, one of laziness and angst. Weirdly, I am back to studying "Pickman's Model," to which I find myself returning again, again. In Weird Inhabitants of Sesqua Valley I wrote a story in which Pickman visits Sesqua Valley and meets with a curious fate. I no longer like that tale because I was too unimaginative in my portrayal of Pickman -- the character could have been anyone. The story ends in a way that is simply too similar to other tales I've written. It's rotten. I want to have one really long Sesqua Valley story in my next Hippocampus Press collection, which will mostly be non-Lovecraftian prose poems, and thus I have decided to rewrite my tale of Pickman visiting Sesqua and turn it into a 10,000 or 15,000 word novelette. At one point in the rewrite, as I had Pickman and Simon Gregory Williams walk the woodland of the valley, I have Pickman quote from Poe's "Ulalume," and that got me thinking of using Poe's poem to lengthen the plot of the wee thing as I transform it into a novelette, combining Lovecraft with Poe. I now have three-thousand words and I am very pleased with it. It's Lovecraftian to ye core!