Musings of Two Creative Minds

"The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” (Scottish poet Robert Burns (from his poem "To a Mouse" 1785) As most of you, if not all, are aware that I've been trying to bring to life the "Library of the Obscure" (LOTO for short here), over on YouTube. The idea behind the library has long been to introduce listeners to a whole range of authors and short stories from decades or even a hundred years or more ago. Now some of you might be asking yourselves, why? What's so fascinating about tales that were written so long ago, when we've got authors galore coming out with stories and books these days? Well, the answer is actually quite simple. You ask just about any well-known author what prompted them to write in their most well-known genres, and most will tell you they were inspired by pieces written by other authors. Take Stephen King, he'll tell you about some of his favorite authors like H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and others whose...

This year has been 'difficult' for me on a number of fronts, some of which I've already shared with you. Still there are others, that are still ongoing and taking up a lot of my time and brain power. I have actually done a number of audio short stories which are perfect for this time of year, I just haven't had the time to really gather and piece together videos to present on YouTube for my "Library of the Obscure" channel. However, if any of you wish to hear any those recordings (complete with sound effects), I'll be happy to post them as a prelude to the podcast itself here on this blog as well as on the Library of the Obscure YouTube channel. Please let me know what you think by leaving your thoughts in the comments section below. In the meantime, here's the link to a story by Lord Dunsany (one of HP Lovecraft's greatest influences), that I shared last year. I hope you enjoy this tale, and I thank you for your understanding... NOTE: I will be a...

I haven't posted much about writing lately, but this is not because I haven't been writing. On the contrary, I've been rather busy with stories lately. In fact, I recently completed one tale set during in World War I, involving our vampyre "Nathan" (from The Vampyre Blogs part of the Para-Earths Series) and a zeppelin. Sounds intriguing? Well, I'm afraid you'll have to wait until the 2nd anthology "Two for the Road" to come out, to read it.  Which with a little luck, and some actual work on my part, may actually happen later this year. We'll see... HAHAHAHA (I crack myself up some days). But seriously, I would like to see it happen, but if I've learned anything in the last few months is that "Life gets in the way...", so we'll see. Mind you I will try to keep you all in the loop as best I can. And speaking of stories, I've also been working on a second lengthy tale which will also appear in that same collection. This o...

It's been a while since I did a book review so I'd say we're do for a new one. Right? Well even if you said no, this post is going to be a book review anyway, especially since the book in question is by an author I've long heard about and was a huge influence on HP Lovecraft (one of my favorite authors of all time). Now some of you may have already figured out who I'm talking about, but for those who haven't caught on, I'm referring to Lord Dunsany (better known by friends and family as Edward Plunkett, the 18th Baron of Dunsany). Now as I said before, I've heard of Lord Dunsany from my collection of HP Lovecraft books which often reference his lordship as having a big influence on the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos. And I'd been rather interested in trying some of his work for some time. However, I'm one of those readers who likes shall we say... a sampling of an author's work before committing myself to a full novel. So, I read a lot of coll...

And I'm back, sort of. Okay, I'm still a bit unwell, but finally on the mend. In the meantime let's continue with that discussion about some of the things I learned putting together our first anthology. First off it was somewhat easier than creating an entire novel. With a novel you have to keep track of so many things like character development, interactions, subplots, pace of the story, etc.  Now with an anthology, you still have a lot of stories to contend with but each one is self-contained and has its own beginning and end. You don't have to be worried about how they fit into the main tale. Plus you can have a greater variety of characters and give each tale a flavor all its own. Sounds pretty easy so far right? Well, here's where things started to get a little more complicated for me.              Like a novel, an anthology does need to have a certain feeling of cohesiveness to it. There must be some facet or factor ...