the Newis Glad:

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:

Eyelids a-Twitch– Played again– How she Might hear– “The hell with the milk”–

Eyelids twitching over mud-colored eyes that widen, startled, but then she smiles, stretching under the comforter, lifting her bare arms up and out and sighing deeply, turning on her side. There’s Ysabel sitting on the floor by the futon, chin on her folded hands. “You’re awake,” she whispers.

“Yup,” says Jo, reaching out to stroke her cheek, leaning in for a kiss.

“He isn’t,” mutters Ysabel, against her lips.

Jo rolls back. There on the other pillow a cap of black hair turned away, a broad brown back, hillocks and bunches of muscle soft and still. “Poor tuckered boy,” she says.

“This must be the first he’s slept since you were struck.”

“He stepped out, just for a minute, and that’s when I woke up. He was, so apologetic,” her hand laid gently on that great shoulder.

“Come,” says Ysabel, getting to her feet, and Jo rolls back, looks up to her standing over the futon, a bulky fisherman’s sweater over a loose white gown, a hand held out. “I’m,” says Jo, the comforter clutched to her chest, “I need to,” and Ysabel steps back, “If you must,” she says, headed for the door. “But come.”

Jo sits up. Drops the comforter. Luys doesn’t stir. She’s looking down, at the clean pink line drawn down her skin, and her fist pressed over her heart.