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’—

the most Recent installment:

Muffled voices

Muffled voices on the other side of a door or a wall and she opens her eyes slowly, a richly periwinkle that almost seems to cast a bluish light upon the sheets. Only a weird words that I couldn’t no idea what she was. Stoned out of her mind on something. Gorgeously model tall like a different language, one of the Russians? He’s gonna fucking usually sell it, or living beneath this? With the stuff from the truck.

She sits up. And immediately puts a hand to the side of her head, there under the spill of clotted yellow-white curls. Both hands to her face now pulling it, stretching, breathing heavily through her nose. Frowning. A generic little room, beige walls, two queen-sized beds side-by-side, the one over there mounded high with, with stuff, duffel bags and paper shopping bags and nylon drawstring sacks stuffed full, balls, soccer balls and footballs wrapped in clear plastic, tubes of tennis balls, on the floor before the chest of drawers with a television on top a ziggurat of shoeboxes. Quickly but carefully on hands and knees she moves to the foot of her bed, there the ruins of a brief red dress, torn, mud-stained, wet. She lowers a filthy bare foot to the carpeted floor, follows it down in a crouch. In there, says the one voice, crisp and clear.

Yeah, says the other, high and wobbly. From behind not the main door up the short dark hall that way but the flimsy communicating door, flat in the wall by the television set, the panel on her side propped open with a doorstop that stretching across the floor she reaches for but a click, a clatter, someone’s hand on the knob on the other panel in the other room swinging open.