Here’s what I read in July and August of 2025. Finally, I had the chance to finish up some books I’ve been reading for ages, along with reading some new things I just recently discovered. One note: I’ve separated RPG books from everything else, since some people are not interested in that stuff.
A while back, I found myself in a kind of Lovecraftian mode. I was writing specifically stories that sort of merged my own version of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands setting with his Cthulhu stories, the stuff set in a world like ours, but with a horrifying alien-god conspiracy hidden in its shadows. I’ve long felt like this would be an interesting synthesis, something Lovecraft might have gotten around to himself if he’d lived longer–and there are hints of it, here and there, in the Dreamlands stories–but which is, nonetheless, very much my own take on things. My crit group at the time …
I love finding literary easter eggs in unexpected places, as in this description of a drive up to a summer camp to drop off a boy dreading the experience to come: — They drove through a lot of beautiful scenery, for hours and hours and hours. The camp was far to the north. That was one of its special qualities. — Great forests now received the travelers, as they had once received the French; and the car passed though towns with historic churchyards followed by stony farms that bore witness to various sublethal crop diseases which had originated in Dunwich, …
For the last few days, I’ve been taking medicine for an ear infection I suddenly developed. It’s not completely clear what caused the infection: contamination of the water in the pool where I swim is possible, but it’s just as likely that it’s a side effect of a particular asthma medication I’ve been taking. In any case, it’s not completely resolved, but it is a lot better than it was… yesterday, I was worried my eardrum might burst from the pressure, but today it’s almost normal again. (On the one side, at least.) Anyway, as a result, I’ve been unable …
I have a huge list of links marked “to post” which, to be honest, I find kind of daunting. I used to post links a lot more, but lately my blog is mostly devoted to housing my ongoing project, Blogging Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, along with occasional posts on SF or Korea-related issues. But I have had a few tabs open on my browser for over a week, which seem worth posting to me, and having been delayed for my critique group’s meeting by an annoying fridge-related disaster (though less delayed than another member), I am now sitting in a …
Ever since writing the script for “The Music of Jo Hyeja” I’ve been caught up in a welter of Lovecraftian writing: revising an old story that I realized worked better as a Lovecraftian tale, drafting others, and playing with ideas for a feature-length film Lovecraftian screenplay set in South Korea. I certainly don’t want to get stuck in this mode: I have my own stories to tell, my own worlds to create. But the Lovecraft thing has been crawling around in my unconscious for a while now, and it’s infested a lot of what I’m working on, and I figure, …
I’m still thinking this over, since I first mentioned it last January. Had an interesting talk on a couple of weekends ago with some of my Korean SF-fan friends about Lovecraft, the contents of which surprised me. I though ol’ H.P. was popular here, given that a large number of his works had been translated and published — in some cases, there are collections containing some of the same stories, worked over by different translators, put out by different publishers, even. But I was told that Lovecraft hasn’t really caught on in any appreciable way, which also makes it hard …
Too busy to post that review of my trip to Italy–it’s coming soon–so here are some links: not really a “walking cactus” but a look at some weird critters from 520 million years ago, this looks right out of HPL’s nightmares like Lovecraft? Facebook’s got a feed for the Lovecraft e-zine, so you can sign up for tidbits… and of course go look at the zine itself! here’s a free ebook containing (almost) all of Lovecraft’s prose works, courtesy of Cthulhu Chick (yes, yes, most of it has been available online since forever, but it’s all in one single file, …