the Newis Glad:

Newport News.

Work proceeds apace: I have reached the part of the draft of the 46th novelette where I can loop back to finish the unfinished draft of the 45th novelette, and when that’s done I can skip ahead to what of the 46th novelette follows immediately thereafter to write that down and then, finally, settle back to finish what’s left of them both. And then? Revision, and polish, and cut to fit, and to press; and then, the third season will finally have begun.

Meanwhile: might I draw your attention to an avenue of support, for the city? There’s Patreon, for those who favor the tried and true, more commercial end of the market, but also Comradery, for the scrappy upstart end—

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of point of view.

This is a good place to discuss point of view in The Emperor of Gladness. Perhaps it is dry, technical, and petty, but point of view matters a great deal to me as a reader. Point of view describes the organizing intelligence of a story. It controls the time signature, the outlay of information, the mode of telling, the mediation of backstory, the integration of event and description into experience, which itself compounds into meaning. Point of view isn’t just first, second, or third person. It’s also verb tense. It’s whether something is experiential or summarized. It’s whether or not a story is retrospective. Whether it’s told focalized through this character or that other character. It controls what feels right in a story versus what feels extraneous or improper.

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of sitting bolt upright in that straight-backed chair.

Many readers of The Night Land, and more still who give up on the book, gag on its prose; The Night Land is a famously “difficult read.” For The Night Land, Hodgson devised an eccentric, faux seventeenth- or eighteenth-century style, convoluted and orotund, which even Lovecraft found “grotesque and absurd.” A few critics have supported Hodgson’s stylistic choice (Greer Gilman in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Nigel Brown in “An Apology for the Linguistic Architecture of The Night Land”), but Murphy mounts an innovative defense. He asks us to see the difficulty of reading as an intrinsic element of weird fiction, a twinning of the reader’s efforts with those of the characters’—

#IZM2025.

I've written before, about my, well, I wouldn't say discomfort with the zine scene, no, I mean, maybe I'd go as high as out-of-placeness, but you put it like that, I mean, I tend to feel out of place just about anywhere I go, so. City of Roses is a number of things, a website, some books, an epic, an oddity, what I do with what time I can spare, but it has always been a zine.

the most Recent installment:

The light                        

the light, bounced from water to glass, reflected, refracted, tinted and coppery softened, dimmed, steeping the shadows about them both. “Five hundred years?” he says, sat on the carpet, back to the wall beside her. “Fifty.” A sigh. “I don’t know.”

She says, “Is she up there? Is that where she went?”

“I was so angry at them both,” he says. “Vincent, for just, quitting, walking away from a fight, but John for forcing the fight in the first place. I wasn’t on his side, or his side, I was– I wanted to go back, to before there were any sides at all.”

“I even,” she says, “made it over to our old place, our first place, in the Kafoury building? Just in case, I mean, maybe, but it, there was nobody there. And I tried to find the VC. Back where it all began, right?” Leaning away from the flower, shoulder brushing his. “It’s gone. Somebody put up a fucking skyscraper.”

“I wish you’d seen it,” he says, her hand in his. “When it all finally came together? It was, it was glorious. It worked. It worked!” A giddy little laugh. “So many of them came, from all over the world,” looking up, “and there were rooms enough for them all.”