A grim vision of what might have happened had Lovecraft lived until the 1950s, with his estate then falling into the hands of commercialising distant relatives…

Full version at Flickr.

20 days to go to raise the $1,300 that Propnomicon needs to create a Creative Commons “Arkham Sanitarium Prop Package”…

The “Arkham Sanitarium Prop Package” is a collection of documents and items that place Lovecraft’s fictional creation in the real world, building on the foundation of his writing and historical references. At a minimum the package itself will consist of an embroidered uniform patch and lapel pin reproducing the Sanitarium’s logo, two vintage-style postcards, and a notebook. All the images and documents produced as part of the project will be released under a Creative Commons license to that anyone can reuse and remix it as they see fit.

Ghost towns of the Namib desert: a photo-set…

I’m wondering how much Lovecraft travelled vicariously like this, through publications such as National Geographic? What magazines and journals did he have access to on the journal shelves of the local public library in Providence? And later at the New York public libraries and at Brown University library?

FantasticFest has an interview with the designer of their beautiful Lovecraftian/1970s-retro poster, Mike Saputo…

Sounds like someone’s having a whole lot of fun in Chicago…

“Artists are being sought for the first Summer of Lovecraft Art Show. The event will be 14th August 2010 in the 5800 block of Sixth Avenue, beginning at 4 p.m. The show is similar to Dale “Dr. Destruction” Wamboldt’s annual Dorian Gray art show — “for artists who may not have found a fit at other art venues,” Wamboldt said. The Gypsy Museum of the Macabre will be there, and there will be a Twilight lookalike contest, along with appearances by Dr. Cryptocis, Dedgar Winter and Dr. Destruction. For more information, e-mail crimsontheatre@sbcglobal.net

I’m still finding Lovecraft related links for the front-page directory of this blog. Such as Arkham Tales: the magazine of weird fiction, which has five free PDF issues online. Leucrota Press are now publishing the magazine. They have issue #6, and the just published latest issue #7, for download at a very reasonable $1.99 each. Perfect PDFs for your new Kindle or netbook.

Cover art by Mari Anne Werier.

Why are gems like this so hard to find out about (and I’m an expert web researcher and link finder)? And why are Lovecraft websites so sparsely interlinked with each other? For instance, according to a link:arkhamtales.leucrotapress.com search of Google, no-one links to Arkham Tales. No one. Which means that Google will completely bury the link in its search results.

In terms of sustainability of this sort of project, people, linking to it is almost as important as subscribing to it.

News just in. James Cameron has reportedly stepped into the uncertainly over Guillermo del Toro’s big-budget film adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness. Presumably carrying a sack-load of profits from Avatar. At the Mountains of Madness is now apparently set to be a full-blown stereo-3D adaptation, directed by del Toro and produced by Cameron. Let’s hope Cameron doesn’t request that the story be updated to the modern day, so they can tediously wheel in teen-friendly things like helicopters firing missiles, as we saw in the mess that was Avatar. I want a beautifully restrained 1930s valve-punk adaptation, full of incredible Sky Captain-like machines.

The full exclusive story has just been broken by Deadline.

Murray Ewing has an interesting long account of promoting his Alice at R’lyeh…

“…different subcultures have very different attitudes to self-publishing. In the UK comics scene, there is a thriving self-publishing community, which sees the fact that something is self-published as a genuine plus-point. It actively welcomes the diversity of the sort of things people produce when they’re let loose on their own. Other areas, though, see self-publishing as an active minus-point, if not an outright automatic rejection. Searching for places to send a review copy of Alice at R’lyeh to, I often came across “no self-published work” notices, which started to annoy me as much as the “no fantasy, science fiction or children’s fiction” notices you find in The Writers & Artist’s Yearbook list of literary agents.”

Personally I have distant but strong roots in comics and SF fandom, and a more recent interest in artists’ books and print-on-demand. So I see self-publishing — if done with care — as perfectly fine and as adding a nice frisson of authenticity.

Ewing usefully points to the fannish conventions as places to sell. But unless you’re going anyway, then the travel + ticket + table costs would seem likely to drain any profit from your sales. For instance, Continue reading →

I’ve made a new photomontage to celebrate the start of this blog, and called it “The Thing found in Shroveport Quarry”…

It’s a combination of five different public-domain old photographs.

Also a not-quite so successful “ship attack” picture, which ended up looking more like a still frame from a 1920s film…

I’ve found another Lovecraft “mash up”. Murray Ewing gives a long and useful account of self-publishing his Alice at R’lyeh, This is a new Carrollian nonsense poem, with illustrations, which imagines a combination of Alice and Lovecraft. Predictably, and as I know myself, embedding the required fonts in a PDF and getting it to print to the required page size was a nightmare of Lovecraftian proportions. But in the end, he writes…

“I could get 100 16-page booklets for a little over £100 […] I went with www.thedigitalprinters.com […] I got the quote, uploaded my PDF, got an email back suggesting a lamination for the covers, okayed that, and then, a week later, I had my box of Alice at R’lyeh booklets. That moment — receiving your actual finished, physical copies, tangy with the scent of fresh ink and peppered with paper-dust — is the first heaven of self-publishing.”

The story of promoting it comes in Part two.