The latest issue of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (37.1) is out and includes "The Un-Simplification of a Great Man: Review of Adventurous Liberation," Kat Kerestman's most generous thoughts on my latest Lovecraft book.
As a retired librarian, one of those statements is 100% accurate and the other depends on who got the last donut in the breakroom.
At 6 AM, the dog woke me up to go out. He then went back to bed. At 9 AM, I had to get him up to feed him before I ran errands. He begrudgingly got up, ate and went back to bed.
It's 12:30. He's now napping in my office.
I never really understood the "It's a dog's life" expression until today.
I once had somebody walk up to me at the reference desk and ask for redemption. It took me a second to realize they were looking for the religion books, not absolution from overdue fines
You buy a book knowing it was self-pub, because that doesn't have the stigma it once had. Then you get a 600+ page monstrosity in left-justified, monospaced font with 1.15 line spacing and illustrations that appear to be multi-generation photocopies.
Could've been 300 pages, properly formatted.
This is the news the BHL community had been waiting for: the answer to BUT WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO THE BHL WEBSITE? We've been overwhelmed by outpourings of excitement and relief from BHL users across the globe – thank you #FieldMuseum! #ILoveBHL #BHLTransition
My favorite Lovecraft-adjacent porn will always be Teenage Twins (1976), starring the real-life twins Brooke and Taylor Young who were famous for doing anything in front of camera except act.
Friendly reminder:
If you bite a snake and you die, it was poisonous.
If the snake bites you and you die, it was venomous.
Either way, you are dead and you really should've quit messing around with snakes.
I am tracking down a citation that should never have been cited, let alone used in a book. 6 subdirectories in the URL, half all upper case, 5 tildes and underscores. I haven't seen a URL this bad since AOL bought Geocities.
I have a lot of research material in the form of booklets and pamphlets that are too easily lost or scattered on the shelves. So I put them in a loose leaf binder to keep them all together.
Naturally, I can't find the binder when I need it.
Cornish vicar Robert Stephen Hawker collected local folklore, preserving it in book form. He also created fakelore
Baring Gould notes the cleric would swim out in the sea & climb a rock. He'd put on a seaweed wig & wrap an oil skin to resemble a tail, then combed his hair while singing to the shore
KDP raised costs on smaller pubs, so I'll be declaring my monograph series out of print. Right now, recordkeeping costs more than any profit I make.
"Lovecraft and the Great Altar Stones of New England" and "The Westford Knight: A Selective Bibliography" will officially go OOP in March.
Referred to the Bridgewater Triangle today as "the Mulligan Stew of the paranormal."
I almost feel sorry for my editor at the publishing house.
I spent the afternoon digging holes and burying the decomposing iguanas.
And how is your valentine's day?
Oneof the biggest disappointments in my life was when I discovered BEAT BOBBY FLAY was just a cooking program.
Monster Quest is back and packed with artificial intelligence – Sharon A. Hill
sharonahill.com/monster-ques...
Unboxing day is the bestest day.
Mama always said if you can't say something good about a person, don't say anything.
Erich Von Daniken has died. Good.
I considered that, but if Beck visited RHB, CLM, AWD, AEPG, CAS et al, he had to know Morton, if only by passing mention. And JFM was easiest to visit unannounced - all he had to do is visit Paterson Museum
I think Beck was a purist and only wanted to meet SF/fanzine figures, not HPL correspondents
Today's deep pondering in a niche research field:
When Claire Beck hitchhiked cross-country in 1938, he made various stops to meet Lovecraft correspondents. Yet, he does not seek out James F. Morton while in Paterson, NJ.
Going to drop below 50°F in Southern Florida. The falling iguana alerts have been issued and the emergency shelters are on standby.
Now comes the "fun" part. Testing the heating coils in the A/C and spending the rest of the day with that lovely burnt dust and insect aroma wafting through the air.
Day 5 of the 12 Days of Cryptids
Chud, Chuchunaa, and Hidden Others – Modern Cryptozoology
moderncryptozoology.wordpress.com/2025/12/29/c...
Well, the next book is off to a flying start. I spent hours fine-tuning a proposed table of contents, carefully wrote up a proposal, and sent it to the publisher with a typo on the proposed word count. No, it is not a 10K book. It is a 100 K book.
Available on the Bold Venture Press website as of Sunday. Amazon is coming later in the week.
Today's quote without context:
"Tell that to the Latvians."
If anyone ever wondered what shape my financial records are in, I just finally shredded the 1995 medical records of my MIL, who died in 2002.
You know it's time to reassess how strong you like your coffee when you spill some on your pool deck and it holds the color better than the cement paint.
WHY AUTHORS DRINK
Next book goes pre-order next week, so I'm finishing the indexing to finalize the page count.
We realized my intro appears twice, so publisher deleted the extra text.
Which changed the pagination by 2 pages. But not consistently, of course.
Goodbye two weeks of indexing.
