M. R. James and Cthulhu

A sketch of Cthulhu made by

H. P. Lovecraft in May 1934.

When horror aficionados think of horror and tentacles, the first words that come to mind are H. P. Lovecraft and his creation Cthulhu. A malevolent monster combining elements of a human, octopus, and dragon, Cthulhu first appeared in Lovecraft's short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” published in Weird Tales in February 1928. Here's a passage from the story describing a statue of Cthulhu.

It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters.

My Writing Process Blog Hop

My good friend Stuart R. West (http://stuartrwest.blogspot.com/) of Neighborhood Watch and Tex, The Witch Boy fame tagged me for the My Writing Process blog hop. You can see what Stuart had to say about his writing process here.

What am I working on?

I'm working on a rewrite of a thriller novella as requested by a publisher. I'm also working on the first draft of a frontier story featuring zombies and a novella that I seem to have been working on for years based on "The Fall of the House of Usher." When I'm not working on the stories above, I'm writing chapters for a novel with Lyn Perry about werewolves among the Pilgrims.

Good King David Release

The anthology King David and the Spiders from Mars is now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. This is a fabulous collection of seven tales drawing their inspiration from Old Testament stories. I'm stoked that my offering, "Good King David," stands among them.

Hedge Witch Approaching

If you're a frequent visitor here, you'll already know about Simon Kewin. He's visited to discuss his cyberpunk novel The Genehunter and his steampunk tale Engn. We'll soon have another book from Simon: Hedge Witch, the first offering in the Cloven Land Trilogy. I've been waiting a long time to read this and if it's anything like Simon's other work, I'm sure it won't disappoint.

My Kingdom for a Synonym

I'm in the final stages of editing a novelette that I plan to publish sometime in March (no promises yet). My editor pointed out a paragraph in which I used the word door multiple times. I vaguely remembered noticing that myself during the initial drafting and revising, but since I was talking about removing doors, I let it go. My editor suggested I remove a few of them. A writer's first inclination is to use a synonym. English is such a rich language. It's chock full of synonyms with various shades of meaning and sound. Well, door is not one of those words. If you want a true synonym for door that you can hang in its place and keep the same meaning, you're out of luck.

Highway 24 -- 99 Cents Sale

My ghost story novelette Highway 24 is on sale through the month of February for only 99 cents. Grab a copy while you can at the MuseItUp Store or other retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo.

From the back cover (can an ebook have a back cover?):

On a lonely country highway, a young travelling salesman runs down a teenage girl. It was an accident. Why she was wandering around on a highway in a pink, formal dress, he can’t imagine. There’s no doubt she’s dead. Fear takes over and he flees the scene, absently taking one of her shoes with him. An old memory, something familiar about that shoe, struggles to surface. As he speeds away from the accident, he thinks his nightmare can’t get any worse, until he sees a pair of green eyes in his rear-view mirror. The shoe and those eyes lead him to a small town where he meets an all too knowing preacher and a sheriff obsessed with the girl’s tragic demise. As Paul digs deeper into the mystery of the girl and her shoe, he comes face-to-face with a dark secret from his father’s past.

Word of the Week: Cleave

Detail from The Bayeux Tapestry (circa 1080).

Here's another one of those funky words with opposite meanings depending on the context and a great word for fans of fantasy literature. Cleave can mean to adhere to something or to split something, as in skulls. Consider these examples:

The dwarves cleaved to their king as the goblin horde closed from all sides.

The dwarf cleaved the goblin's helm with a mighty swing of his ax.