Friday Five for November 20, 2015

1. Help put the love back into Lovecraft! Dragon Roost Press is raising funds on Indiegogo to publish Eldritch Embraces. I have a steampunk mytho story in the collection called "What Lay Below." Please consider helping this awesome anthology. These funds include paying the authors!

2. I had two short story acceptances and three rejections in the past few weeks. I've also written a new flash fiction story which my local critique group will tear apart this Saturday. I tried to get a little fancy with this one, trying something new. That's the fun of shorter works. You can experiment with new genres and styles.

3. Next Wednesday, Lovelorn Spirits, the final book of my Paramours trilogy will be released. I'm excited. This is the best one of the three. I've booked a tour for the Paramours the first week of February. It's the month of love, and I do love the paranormal!

4. I've been working hard on the second book of my Totem series. I hope to have it finished in a few days. I've been having a ton of fun writing this one. Of course, any story I can make geek jokes makes me happy.

5. I have a couple of posts scheduled for next week, but I'll be scarce. It's off to visit the in-laws for the American Thanksgiving. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend, and to my American friends and family, have a happy Thanksgiving.

Montrous Monday Blogfest

This frightening and fun blogfest is hosted by Timothy Brannan. The rules are simple. Post a monster. It can be any monster. One from your current WIP or from your favorite movie. Tell us why you love/hate/worship it. Then visit the other participants and check out their monsters.

There's so many good monsters out there. Oh, the fun ones I could tell you about from Syfy Channel! I want to introduce you to an ancient creature, though. One that has stuck in my head since recently reading the new YA series by Caitlin Kittredge called the Iron Codex. Loved the books. So very Lovecraftian. At one point, the heroes come across an oozing nightmare. A thing called a shoggoth.

A shoggoth is a monster created by H.P. Lovecraft. It's part of the Cthulhu Mythos. I didn't include a picture here not because I was fearful of an artist getting upset about me using his work, but because I couldn't find an image that fit exactly what I imagined a shoggoth to look like.

Here's what Lovecraft says in At The Mountains of Madness: "It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter."

I imagine it as a gigantic tar-like blob with several bulbous eyes and mouths with sharp teeth. It has no body shape and seemingly no heart or brain. Yet some might have a keen intellect. It moves faster than you expect for something of its size. It engulfs its victims and slowly digests them.

They say true fear cannot be given a shape. That's because it's a shoggoth.