Just heard that Nature have bought another one of my short stories for their Futures section.

When I sent it in I thought that this one was a real long shot, but I thought that when I sent the first story they published too.

Out within a few months I should think.

Pleased to say that I placed a short ghost story with Supernatural Tales and a five page horror strip with an upcoming Insomnia anthology.

Both out next year sometime, I should think.

Got my contributor copies of Wasted issue 2 today.

68 full colour pages including Holmes Has It Large by me and Adrian Bamforth.

The Bad Press/Wasted lads also have  a spanking new website up here.

Here’s another teasing peek at what Jim Boswell has been up to while working on our graphic novel . . .

“Innsmouth Free Press is a fictional newspaper publishing faux news as well as original short fiction stories. We also feature some of Lovecraft’s classic tales.“

They’ve already posted the full text of Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

The first issue launches on June 1st, 2009 and my short story Beneath The Cold Black Sea will be in the Autumn issue. Due out in the, ummm, Autumn.

I knew all that tentacle porn Lovecraft research would pay off.

I had an afternoon to kill in Dublin last week so went along to the WB Yeats exhibition at the National Library.

Some remarkable objects on display…

Samples of Yeats’s automatic writing.

Samples from his notebooks.

His elemental weapons, made while an “Adeptus Minor” in The Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn. Pentacle, Dagger, Wand and Cup.

Yeats was a member alongside Aleister Crowley (before Crowley was more or less chucked out following a great power struggle). Crowley fancied himself as a bit of a poet too and looking up my old copy of his Confessions has yielded some excellent quotes about Yeats…

“I remember one curious incident in connection with this volume. I had a set of paged proofs in my pocket one evening, when I went to call on W. B. Yeats. I had never thought much of his work; it seemed to me to lack virility. I have given an extended criticism of it in The Equinox (vol. I No. II, page 307). However, at that time I should have been glad to have a kindly word from an elder man. I showed him the proofs accordingly and he glanced through them. He forced himself to utter a few polite conventionalities, but I could see what the truth of the matter was.

I had by this time become fairly expert in clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience. But it would have been a very dull person indeed who failed to recognize the black, billious rage that shook him to the soul. I instance this as a proof that Yeats was a genuine poet at heart, for a mere charlatan would have known that he had no cause to fear an authentic poet. What hurt him was the knowledge of his own incomparable inferiority.

I saw little of him and George Moore. I have always been nauseated by pretentiousness; and the Celtic revival, so-called, had all the mincing, posturing qualities of the literary Plymouth Brother.”

and…

“There was one literary light, W. B. Yeats, a lank dishevelled demonologist who might have taken more pains with his personal appearance without incurring the reproach of dandyism…”

I’m almost certain I remember reading that Yeats later described Crowley as a “poet of merit.” But I can’t find the quote.

You can read one of Crowley’s earliest collections of poetry, White Stains, published under the pseudonym George Archibald Bishop and is full of thinly veiled erection metaphors like “My Gigantic Charms” here.

Our story “Intergalactic Bank Robbing Teenage Space Aliens On The Run” appears in issue 12.

Story by me, art by Jim Boswell.

Lots of other good stuff in there too!

Got my comp copies of the Spring ‘09 issue of The Stinging Fly today.

128 pages packed full of top quality fiction and poetry including my short story The Profligacy Show (in which someone pisses themselves, so, might be worth a punt for all the urine fetishists out there), plus poems by Knut Ødegård, and a short story by Booker Prize winner James Kelman.

Only seven euros . . . bargain!

Detective Comics #30 - August 1939.  Fred Guardineer cover.

MAN IN SUIT: HEY FELLA! YA WANNA BUY A KNIFE? I’M A KNIFE SALESMAN, SEE? ONLY IN TOWN FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW. THEN I FLY OUT TO THE WINDY CITY! THESE KNIVES ARE GREAT I TELL YA! I CAN DO YOU A DEAL FOR ONE DAY ONLY. TWO FOR THE PRICE OF - -

MAN IN SUIT: GAAHHHHH! MY FACE! MY PERFECT SALESMAN’S FAAAAACE!!!!!

Northern Haunts is a horror anthology containing 100 700-word short stories, including my contribution, Bad Place.

It’s available now on amazon.

Proceeds go to the American Cancer Society.

Fantastic Four #39 - June 1965.  Jack Kirby cover.

JOHNNY: FOR FUCK’S SAKE DD, WHERE ARE YOU GOING? DOCTOR DOOM IS RIGHT BEHIND US! ARE YOU FUCKING BLI--? OOOPS!

SUE: ->TCHT TCHT<- JOHNNY!

BEN: I’VE HAD UP TA HERE WITH THAT PUNK-ASS KID. HE AIN’T GOT NO RESPECT FOR HIS ELDERS, I TELLS YA! IT’S CLOBBERIN’ TIME!

DAREDEVIL: SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW LOUD YOU’RE BEING???

Some kindly soul has put up several old clips of Jeff Lint’s seminal but often misunderstood cartoon Catty and the Major on youtube.

My first exposure to Lint was around fifteen years ago when a work colleague loaned me a tattered, weather beaten copy of Lint’s début novel One Less Bastard, along with a “like new” copy of 1966’s Prepare To Learn.

And learn I did.

My friend refused to take them back, and that was fine by me.

Unfortunately, both books were lost in a fire some years ago.

January, 1966.  Frank Frazetta art.

“GRRNNNT!!! FEEL MY BLADE YOU FILTHY NAZI PIG-DOG!! ”

“AAAIIIEEEEE!!!!!”

Shove over Iskanders, with your surly, disagreeable staff and your “if you’re not so pissed you haven’t already shat yourself, you can’t come in” door policy.  Last time I was in there it was about half past two in the morning and there was an English guy with his forehead split open, blood pissing down all over his face, who was insisting on having a kebab before his equally inebriated “mates” brought him to wherever it was they were going to bring him to.  Not the hospital, obviously. Probably to Tripod or some other equally disheartening back-alley whore house.  He got served, not an eyelid was batted.

I admit that I was drunk too, but in a reserved and charming kind of way.

Mezza on Parliament Street (right opposite The Turk’s Head) now officially have the best kebabs in Dublin.  Official because I say they’re the best kebabs I’ve ever had, and I’m a man who likes his kebabs.

Look at the size of this Lamb Shawarma.

The picture doesn’t do it justice.  That pile of exquisitely seasoned lamb is almost two and a half inches tall.  That works out at easily over half a pound of slaughtered and slowly-cooked infant sheep.

I had to abandon the salad a third of the way through and just concentrate on the lamb.  I still wasn’t able to finish it.  Then I got the meat sweats.

A friend of mine posits that the reason Iskanders is always crammed with belligerent drunks is due to simple muscle memory.  They’ve been there before and so they go there again.  On auto-pilot.  A bit like the zombies in Dawn Of The Dead, only not as fresh or bright-eyed or intelligent.  Or as well-dressed.  Also, zombies, as a rule, don’t tend to accuse you of skipping the queue before you’ve even had a chance to join it.

So, take my advice.  Try Mezza.  That’s Mezza, for kebabs.

Jim Boswell has started work on Project Luna: 1947.

Here’s a tiny peek at what he’s been up to . . .

I especially like the fact that the fellow on the right somehow ended up looking like HP Lovecraft.  This makes me strangely happy.

More images over on Jim’s blog.