As dedicated readers of Dark Stories, Hidden Roads may remember, I’ve occasionally shared statistics on publications, submissions, etc. 2021 was a low-stats year, to put it mildly. My only fiction publication was a 50-word story, up recently over at Do Some Damage as part of an RVA City Writers challenge.
While I have a few things out there in the slush piles, my writing attention is currently bent toward novels. both the aforementioned one and the one that’s currently splashed around my office on a bulletin board, in jotted fragments, and in dozens of research documents and PDFs. This is the most research-y thing I’ve written for a while, at least since “There Has Never Been Anyone Here” (2018). I can fudge a lot, I can invent a lot, and I can research as I go, but sometimes a story requires more before it can reasonably get off the ground. This is one of those, and so I’ve been reading about some byways of Virginia’s history, architectural and otherwise.
My academic publications last year technically included “The Masks of E’ch-Pi-El: Interpreting the Life and Work of H.P. Lovecraft,” in Lovecraft in the 21st Century, edited by Tony Alcala and Carl Sederholm and published last month, though I don’t think copies are hitting stores or shelves until this month. This month will see the publication of Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, edited by Stefan Rabitsch, Michael Fuchs, and Stefan L. Brandt, containing my “Olympia, Wilderness, and Consumption in Laird Barron’s Old Leech Cycle.”
And with that, Happy New Year! May 2022 bring you peace, joy, respite. and triumphs.
J. T. Glover 