Tombs Cover Featured on ESP Facebook; Writers Guild Picnic Includes Two “City” Poems

A sultry, sunny weekend of lounging and iced coffee, being lazy and feeling excused for it.  But with a couple of happenings as well, the first with an announcement from Elder Signs Press on their Facebook page of the cover for TOMBS:  A CHRONICLE OF LATTER-DAY TIMES OF EARTH, plus a reprinting of an announcement (including a picture of me for any who care) from the Bloomington Writers Guild that I had received and signed the contract for TOMBS.  Also an announcement with a link from this blog (see January 22) giving the contents for two ESP anthologies scheduled for this fall, DARK HORIZONS (with my story “Dark of the Moon”) and CITY MAGICK (with “Bottles,” also reprinted in THE TEARS OF ISIS).  To see for oneself, one need but press here.

But for things in the air still, TOMBS is now being announced for “Spring/Summer 2017,” which could make it too late for a World Horror Convention and/or StokerCon premiere next year.  This might not be too terrible a thing though, as I probably wouldn’t be able to make both conventions myself and, hey, better to come out a few weeks late and do things right then to be on time but with errors, perhaps, that might have been avoided.  Also the cover, as depicted, has the short title “TOMBS” in nicely dramatic lettering, but omits the subtitle, although it might be on the spine and elsewhere — or possibly even back on the cover (though most likely still in much smaller letters) as things progress.

Then today brought the Bloomington Writers Guild’s annual summer picnic and open reading.  Lots of chicken and potato salad (plus ham rolls, melon, other salads, bread, cookies. . . .).  I brought lemonade and diet root beer, then when the time for readings came, two poems from a mini-poem cycle of six, originally published in GOTHIC.NET on successive weeks from August 2 through September 6 2002, and which also appear in the poetry section of DARKER LOVES:  TALES OF MYSTERY AND REGRET (for info on which one can press its picture in the center column).  Touted as being on the subjects of picnics and fellowship, respectively, the first was “Bon Appétit,” on things crows eat in the rather dark city the cycle as a whole depicts — and which itself is based on my early chapbook TOWERS OF DARKNESS, and the second, “Dig We Must,” on camaraderie among the inmates of a cemetery and how, through judicious tunneling beneath mourners above, one may add new friends.