Friends, the website has a great new look courtesy of my friend Mike Johnson, and I’m taking the new look seriously by promising to blog frequently and faithfully. Used to be that I’d blog maybe two or three times a year because I got it in my head that I needed to write reasonably thoughtful essays.
I like those essays, and I may yet have a few of them left in me, but the gist of this blog from now on is going to be putting down my thoughts of the moment—primarily about writing, the art and practice of, or jabber about what I have in the works.
Publishing? Such as it is these days, we can talk about it.
I want to talk about friends of mine who write and their projects.
Leigh Brackett–her writing style was singular and remarkable. I’m going to discuss that.
Sometime Lofty Towers, that art-epic sword-and-sorcery literary novel of mine that I’ve been at work on, off and on, since this time in 1997? You’re going to hear about that. I’m up to more than 40,000 words and we’re about to get into the big battle scene that will go on for who knows how long and, if I know what I’m doing, will be as spooky as hell.
I might even talk about the legendary and god-awful silent-movie version of The Whisperer in Darkness I made in 1975 with some friends in northeast Ohio. Long vilified and treated as a joke. Maybe I’ll share some thoughts on that.
Books I’ve read or am reading. How do I reconcile the philosopher John Gray’s excellent, reductionist Straw Dogs with Ptolemy Tompkins’s The Modern Book of the Dead-—the former a brilliant, pithy takedown of the modern West’s fetish with progress (among other topics), the latter a fascinating study by a former materialist-minded thinker as he pieces together, in a book that is superbly written-—a map of the afterlife based on evidence and insights from a plethora of sources, most of them dismissed by modern science.
Psychics. They’re real, and their gifts are bona fide.
Words. Grammar, English grammar.
Movies. Lots about movies, I’m sure.
We’ll see where this goes.
In the meantime, enjoy this newly designed website, which, coincidentally, strikes exactly the right tone of the Halloween season.