Literary Chorizo

I continue to labor away at The King of Nightspore's Crown, the sequel to Dragonfly. Various things are going into the stew, including ancient Athenian lawgivers, Prairie School architecture, medieval bestiaries, the national park system, Heart of Darkness, Andrew Lang's fairy tale collections, the history of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, and assorted giant monsters and prehistoric creatures, not to mention all the usual suspects among my favorite genre writers. They say you should never watch sausage being made (or, around where I live, chorizo), but I tend to assume that people who visit my blog have strong stomachs.

Incidentally, I have a story called "The Scale-Tree" coming out in Beneath Ceaseless Skies sometime in the not-so-distant future, which will provide interested readers a glimpse into the topological-mythological underpinnings of the counter-earth at the cosmic antipodes.

It's kind of strange, really, but I get the feeling sometimes that I'm exploring a world that's already there, rather than inventing a new one of my own. It's a bit like mathematics, which is accomplished much more by fiat than people suspect. The mathematician says, Let it be so!, and it is so, and he or she goes down into the world that he or she has made and explores it. That's how I feel about Antellus. Its axioms established, it developed on its own, down to the least detail. Fortunately, as Gödel's incompleteness theorems have established, I still have infinitely many avenues of freedom open to me. Or something like that.

 

In other news, I'm toying with the idea of creating a new edition of a public domain fantasy classic, like The Worm Ouroboros, for sale through Hythloday House. I have sketch of a wrap-around cover inspired by Persian miniatures that I may try to work up over the remainder of the summer. I have no idea if there'd be a market for such a thing (well, ha ha, of course there's not, but I'm Quixotic that way), but it would please me to produce it all the same. To my knowledge there's never been an edition with a map, so there's that.