FEBRUARY

I have been reading a lot of H.P. Lovecraft lately, from a giant book of his collected works that I bought last year. This book is huge, by the way, and weighs enough to take down an elk. It's best read at night, in bed, in an old house at the top of a hill in a village with a churchyard, which is how I have been reading it.

February is definitely the perfect season to read Lovecraft, with the rain lashing the windows, and it is made all the more relevant by my current situation.

Like the narrator in several of Lovecraft’s stories, I have recently found myself moving back to my familial home, in the village where I grew up. The house is old; mid-18th century. It is full of old stuff that my parents spent the last forty-five years collecting. A walk to the local shops in the depths of winter takes on a Lovecrafrian tone as I wander past old houses that are set back from the road, around the old church, past old frame knitter's workshops and down the steep hill where victorian workers-cottages are perched high above me. Or if I want a change from that there's always the forest that sits to the west of the village, with a motorway running through it. A motorway I regularly used to drive up and down in my truck.

Lovecraft said that atmosphere is everything, and from the small portion of the book that I've read so far he certainly doesn't seem to be too concerned with plot. Reading his stories in the order he wrote them reveals the evolution of many of the things he would later become known for. The Rats in the Walls, for example, is described in its short introduction as being the culmination of Lovecraft’s ‘familial degeneracy’ trope. It's also interesting to encounter many of the things I know him for in the stories where they first appeared, like the first mention of Arkham in The Picture in the House and the Necrinomicon in The Hound.

I first became aware of Lovecraft in the 80s when a friend introduced me to the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu. At the time I liked the setting, but never actually read the original stories. In later years I played (and occasionally watched other people play) video games that take place in the Lovecraft universe, and though I am not generally a fan of horror, I do love the fact that the genre is its own thing that sort of sits outside of sci-fi, fantasy and horror, kind of at a perfect intersection of all three.

There is nothing else like it, and I don’t think anyone has ever really managed to successfully build upon it and do it any better in the century since Lovecraft wrote it.

So when I stumbled upon a stall selling Cthulu themed 'fighting-fantasy' books I leapt at the chance to buy a couple from the author, Simon Birks. The two books I bought were Innsmouth: The Stolen Child and The Curse of Cthulhu, both of which are in the choose-your-own-adventure style of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's books where 'you are the hero'. I read a lot of those books when I was writing the Quanta-B Tales as one of the later chapters in the book takes the reader through the multiple timelines of the narrator's complex backstory by presenting them as a CYOA book.

I was excited to start playing an adventure set in the Lovecraft universe and immediately started playing The Curse of Cthulhu, but quickly became bored by the sheer amount of 'admin' that was required to move around the map, pick stuff up and sneak my way from room to room. Compared to the original source material this was really dry stuff, with little to no attempt to describe the actual rooms in the depth required to give any sense of dread or foreboding. Most of the sections were pretty short and were restricted to mere lists of exits and options. I kept going, hoping that things would pick up, but abandoned the exercise after about an hour, thinking that I might as well go back to reading the man himself.

TALK

In December last year I was given a heads-up about a talk that was coming up at Leicester's Central Lending Library in February, and so booked it. The talk by W.A. Kelly was about self-publishing and how to navigate many of the pit-falls of the rapidly growing indie publishing industry.

I say 'industry' because there is a whole slew of authors now who are choosing the indie path rather than the traditional 'get an agent-sell a book for a huge advance-sell the book and get famous' route, which is now starting to flounder slightly in the face of the huge growth or platforms like Amazon and Ingram Spark. Even established authors are now realising the benefits of doing their own publishing and marketing, with potentially much greater rewards and complete creative freedom, but as the whole publishing industry is being disrupted, in much the same way that the music and tv industries have been since the turn of the century, it's hard to know whether going indie or trying to build a name as a traditionally published author is the right way to go.

I have found the whole experience of self-publishing a bit frustrating, though I didn't really have much of a choice. I don't think books like mine are an easy sell to publishers as they are too far outside of the mainstream, and as Wayne pointed out, the slush piles of agents and publishers are no so large that you don't even get rejection letters any more.

In Wayne's case, his first book was ultimately turned down by a publisher, though he came very close to getting a deal. The frustrating part as a writer is that you spend all of that time writing a book and then have to wait months, or years, to find out if it's going to be published, while self-publishing cuts all of that out.

If you would like to check out Wayne's website and find out more then please click the link.