Floor Jansen has announced officially that she is a mommy for the second time. In celebration, here she is in her younger days with After Forever, the band that launched her 25+ year music career.

An ape walks into a cafe. Looks around, sighs, and grabs the vacuum, mop, and cleaning cloths. After half an hour or so, the place is all spiffy.

Coffee is PC Gourmet Medium. Teas are Yorkshire Gold and Earl Grey. Pitchers of iced tea and lemonade are washed and refilled.

Yorkshire Gold is new to me, but seems to be a fairly popular blend. I swear that I read somewhere that the late Queen Elizabeth II drank it and I know that Canadian folk-pop-rock singer songwriter Rufus Wainwright had his dressing room stocked with it during recent gigs at Royal Albert Hall.

Cool. Sounds like a fun day.

There's PC West Coast Dark brewing for the coffee crowd. Teas are Canadian Breakfast and Russian Caravan. Cold beverages are refreshed.

Kicking around a couple ideas for my next story here. Not quite sure where either goes yet. Just weird ideas at this point.

Economy. Maybe if I drove highways more I would lean more to performance but I rack up mostly city km.

Gas or Electric (or split the difference and get a Hybrid)?

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The Great Googley Eye of God

I am so using this as a title someday (if you don't beat me to it). Though "Great Googley Eye" would be a terrific band name, too.

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I've actually written a story for it. I haven't posted a story since 2021! I should change that.

Oh yes, more Molly, please. You really had me going with that one. See my comment.

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While you wait for the comp and considering it's Spooky Season, my favorite time of year(I need to read Mendalla's story), I wanted to remind everyone about one of the writing prompts.

I was interested in that prompt at the time it went up, but then got off on to other writing projects and it kind of slipped out of my head. I already have a new project in mind (we'll see if it goes anywhere) but I will start looking back at the old prompts and challenges again if it falls through.

And will put in the time to read yours. I've been very concerned about the degree to which stuff like micro, flash, and poetry has been dominating since the last comp so glad I am not the only one still posting longer works on here.

And since we have spooky cookies, I've made some of the suitably named Death Wish Coffee. There's two pots, one of their regular dark roast and one of their pumpkin spice. Teas are Canadian Breakfast and Pumpkin Spice Chai. And there's the usual cold beverages if you want/need one of those.

Later, alligators.

One of my goals with this story was to create something vaguely in the vein of a Cthulhu Mythos story but without some of the more annoying tropes. So you've got the dark multi-generational family secrets, a terrible something lurking at the edge of reality, and even a creepy book in a forgotten language. However, you don't have letter salad names, reams of adjectives, or an italicised over-dramatic closing line. All in all, I think I managed to get some of the atmosphere of a Lovecraftian tale without the bits that don't stand up well today.

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New story is queued. It's my (sort of) annual shot at a horror piece for Halloween. I think I nailed it. Kind of a creepy family secret in a Lovecraftian way kind of thing.

And poof, just like that, it is up! Thanks to Gil!!

Down In the Well

A spooky tale with some Lovecraftian elements is my contribution for Halloween this year. It all begins with a return to a decaying family home.

Down In The Well

Curious to hear reactions to both story and to the cover image. It's one of the better ones I have generated using AI (I use a site called Nightcafe that offers access to multiple image generation algorithms).

Hose - Nose

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I'm reading Larry McMurtry:A Life. Just got to the part where he is writing Terms of Endearment. Then I am going reread Lonesome Dove for the third time.

Funny, but I always forget Terms of Endearment was his. I always associate him with Westerns because of Lonesome Dove. Never read either, just know the media adaptations.

New story is queued. It's my (sort of) annual shot at a horror piece for Halloween. I think I nailed it. Kind of a creepy family secret in a Lovecraftian way kind of thing.

Good morning! Condolences to ball fans whose teams did not make it and cheers to those who did. I barely notice the sport anymore.

Coffee is a Costa Rican medium from Fire-Roasted. Teas are English Breakfast and Lemon. Pitchers are washed and fresh iced tea and lemonade mixed up. Soda inventoried and stocked, as are the various add-ins and condiments.

Even gave the place a nice cleaning.

That's my Halloween horror story swooping into the queue (soon, doing one more read through).

Uh oh. Braves eliminated? Or just lost a crucial game?

Putting on some PC Gourmet Medium in the coffee pot. Teas are Scottish Breakfast and Black Currant. Cold bevvies are refreshed.

Later, alligators.

Unsweet. Better to be able to add sweetner to taste. The iced teas up here all tend to be sweetened to the point of being tea-flavoured pop so one of my favourite things about travelling in the US, esp. the South, is getting unsweet iced tea.

Podcasts or music in the car?

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curried butternut squash soup

Excuse the puddle of drool on the floor. Butternut squash soup is stunningly yummy to start with, but add curry? Never had it, but I anticipate a good time if I ever do. Our favourite local buffet had butternut squash soup on their soup table for their combined Moon Festival/Thanksgiving menu.

Yawn. Sorry I'm late but it seems quiet here anyhow. PC West Coast Dark is in the coffee pot. Teas are Assam and Irish Breakfast. Pitchers are washed and refilled.

Later, alligators.

Going back a bit further in Post's long career (he won his first Grammy at the age of 23 for doing the instrumental arrangements for Mason Williams' famed "Classical Gas").

Apparently he was so busy scoring TV shows during the peak of his career, Post actually employed a staff of other composers who did a lot of the actual writing for specific scenes and episodes.

Spat - Scat

Spam - Span

Plain tea (except oolong, which goes good with cream of all things)

Bag or looseleaf?

Got something new for folks to try. S'Mores Chai Tea. No, really. That's what it is called. It is basically chocolate chai made with Chinese Pu'erh tea. Not a fan myself. David's Tea sent me free samples as part of a program to try to get my business back. They could have done better. At least I can get 20% off my next order from them if I decide to order from there.

On the coffee front, there's President's Choice Great Canadian Medium Roast. Besides the (gag) S'mores Chai, I made a nice, normal English Breakfast. Cold beverages are mixed up in the pitchers. Soda stock is checked and replenished. And with hot chocolate season definitely in the air where I am, there's cocoa mix on hand and the first load of mini marshmallows is stored.

Later, alligators.

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Just a little reminder (as if any were needed) of the situation in Ukraine.

Actually, Israel is overshadowing them a bit right now so not a bad reminder. Within Temptation apparently addresses the Ukraine invasion a lot on their upcoming album and Sharon was waving a Ukrainian flag on stage at Hellfest (and presumably other dates on the current tour).

Was listening to my old favourites the Moody Blues this afternoon. I've created a playlist on Amazon Music that has everything from the 1967 to 1972 incarnation of the band, which produced their best work IMHO (not that the 1980s-90s version is terrible or anything, they put out some great music in that era, too). So for my walk today, I just put my buds and hit Shuffle on that list.

My favourite Moody has to be the late Ray Thomas. Best known as their flautist and backing vocalist, Ray got to sing lead a few times per album back then and his songs are often real gems.

Horror story is just moving along. Even with my tendency to anal, perfectionist editing I am at the point where I have it in Drafts with a cover image in place (thanks to my AI of choice for the latter). Probably will let it simmer now but maybe in a day or two if I don't find a major problem. Goes very, very dark, moreso than I was originally thinking it would.

grabs a turkey and a pie

Oddly, we are having cassava chicken soup, something my wife picked up when we were in Panama just before the pandemic.

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The Black Beacon Book of Horror

As I commented elsewhere, great title, even if Black Beacon is actually just the publisher.

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we are off to Albuquerque to see the eclipse on Thursday

Enjoy. I saw one from Bryce Canyon, Utah several years ago. Didn't plan around the eclipse, just worked out that way.

And every time someone talks about Albuquerque, I think of Bugs Bunny's line, "I took a wrong turn at Albuquerque."

I have not actually been to New Mexico yet. My trips to the Southwest have covered Nevada, Arizona, and Southern Utah so far.

The great-granddaddy of contemporary shared universes has got to be H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (Classical Mythology is an even further back ancestor). Right from the start, Lovecraft happily allowed friends and even fans (Robert Bloch, best known for Psycho, started out this way) to write in and add to the implied setting of his universe. A name dropped in one story would become the gibbering cosmic horror of the next. Lovecraft appeared in a Bloch story (and died horribly), then wrote a sequel in which "Robert Blake" also died horribly.

And even after Lovecraft's death, horror writers kept writing Mythos stories. Even King has gone to that well a few times. There have been an increasing number of movies, some adapted from or inspired by Lovecraft, others original stories incorporating elements of the Mythos (e.g. Underwater starring Kristen Stewart ends with an appearance by Cthulhu itself).

My own relationship to the Mythos is a long one. I think I first encountered it through roleplaying. The Mythos appeared in the first edition of the D&D book Deities and Demigods before being dropped from subsequent editions for copyright reasons (Lovecraft's work had not leaked into the public domain yet). But that got my group and I interested, leading us to Call of Cthulhu, the first and still most popular RPG based on Lovecraft (though many more have now appeared since the Mythos went into the public domain).

And it got me reading H. P. Lovecraft himself, along with many of his heirs and successors. While Lovecraft is a problematic read today (racist, classist, something of a fascist, more than a tad sexist), the ideas stuck. My favourite horror writer Ramsey Campbell, along with some of his contemporaries have done a bang-up job of modernizing the Mythos and getting away from the problematic element.

So naturally I started toying with writing Mythos stories. At one point, I even toyed with my own "Mythos", trying to divorce myself from having to ape the structures of the original. You can see this in Voice of Ice, whose first draft actually goes back to that period in my life. Of course, I failed miserably at that divorce and the whole academic discovering horror from reading ancient books is alive and well in that story. My recent The Summer Beast is probably closer to creating something in the cosmic horror vein that is not really part of that lineage, but it is not really all that cosmic. Though if I ever get a sequel going, who knows where I would go with it? I never did establish where the beast came from in that story.

And so, right now, I am writing a story that will be consciously Mythos, or at least Mythos-adjacent. Old books, horrors from beyond normal space and time, and so on. But I am hoping to put my own spin on the hoary old tradition, too. We shall see if I succeed.

(And, yes, there's a non-zero chance I might end up having this, The Summer Beast, and Voice of Ice be in the same universe. After all, the Mythos was not really deliberately created, just evolved out of Lovecraft dropping the same names and obscure references over and over. Sometimes stories that were not meant as Mythos stories even got sucked in by Lovecraft's name-dropping, e.g. Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow.)

I blow hot and cold, mostly cold, on Icelandic singer-songwriter Bjork. Not sure why, but she's just never appealed to me even if I find her work interesting.

However, this cover of Bjork's "Army of Me" by Brazilian singer Violet Orlandi at least has Violet's lovely alto voice and some interesting imagery going for it.