Yeah, so yay!
Ungrammatical, maybe, but honest.
I’m getting near the finish line of some long-running projects. Chief among those are the Letters from Outside website ( a labor of love to be sure) and the Fear and Loathing in Innsmouth book.
The backend for the website is done, and all that remains is the copying and pasting, in reverse alphabetical order, of the stories and poems and comics and articles that make up the content. You can see for yourself by following the link embedded in the title. That website was deleted from the web by the buyout of Fortune City by Yahoo. I had originally planned to make it part of my regular webspace, but I thought better of that and it’ll have its own space instead.
The above illustration (Innsmouth Fishing Trip), by the ubertalented Will Jacques, is for the cover of the novel. That ms. is fully-edited and just needs to be formatted for various media to hit the “shelves” as an ebook and trade paperback.
Fourteen years it took to write that one, despite several pretty lucrative offers. I just couldn’t re-invoke the crazed energy and complete lack of style that the narrative cried out for. So it sat and sat and sat.
One fine day, looking for something to do, I pulled out the paper version and started scanning it. I looked at the notes for the ending, in longhand on a couple of index cards paperclipped to the ms.
I wrote it out. And then edited and rewrote and edited and rewrote some more, and the thing came forth, shambling dejectedly, dripping with a putrescent green ichor and smelling of corruption.
I crammed the kitchen sink down its gullet, studied the source material One More Time, and rewrote One Last Time.
And it was good.
So I put it away for a little while. Waited until the stars were right. May will be devoted to getting that thing into orbit.
RetroGrade A 