Word on the street has it that we have now passed into the season of summer, per the seasonal governing body's regulation that summer is to begin following the festivities of Memorial Day. A look at the outside world, however, tells me that something is clearly amiss. Summer is supposed to be characterized by sunny weather, frolicking, and beach volleyball; I have seen none of these things for the past two weeks. A casual observer (such as myself) would have no choice but to conclude that the Earth is now traveling backwards along its orbital path, and will be regressing through the seasons in a manner which is likely to disrupt ecosystems with untimely frost and flames, and lead mankind to its inevitable environmental Armageddon.
Being scientifically minded, on Tuesday I launched a weather balloon with strict instructions to observe the stratosphere and return promptly with relevant statistics, measurements, and analyses of air currents and other climatological jibber-jabber. In a clear example of of rank disobedience it has yet to return, and the mystery yet goes unsolved.
In other news, the website's greatest albatross has finally been cast off; I speak of course of the many installments of my European adventure, which are now recorded for posterity and need never be recorded again, so thoroughly have they been recorded. The true purpose of the WFJ can now be resumed with no psychic resistance or guilt: to produce original literary content. Along those lines, I am now well-prepared to continue.
At the end of this weekend I should have posted the fourth installment of the poetry jam series, which will include more poems than ever before, because my backlog is over a year old and getting a little ridiculous. Once again, I make the usual caveats about my limited skill in verse and my pitifully loose grasp of the technical intricacies of rhyme and meter.
As for the following weeks, oh have I got a treat for you. Monday the 14th should see the first installment of my new short feature, The Wolf of Albright, a horror tale in the Gothic style. I am unsure how exactly to classify this story, as it is much longer than my typical short stories, but not quite long enough to be considered a novella (at least not yet; the composition remains ongoing). In any event, it shall have to be broken up into three parts, for the sake of the reader's sanity and to artificially enhance the element of suspense via cliff-hangers. That's how we do it in this business.
The Wolf is a bit of a departure for me, because it is fairly gruesome, and delves into some psychologically nasty stuff. If it were a movie, it would surely deserve an R rating (though it probably would not receive one, as it has only the slightest hint of sex). It would probably be a better movie than most modern horror flicks, because that standard has been set drearily low by the producers of schlock and nonsense. The story is, in fact, a self-conscious homage to horror stories I have enjoyed over the years, with elements drawn from hither and thither to produce an unsettling whole.
Once The Wolf is done, I have a few pieces which cry out to me at night, begging for completion. Chief among these is New St. Luces, which will have to come last if I am ever to turn these fragments into something enjoyable. New St. Luces is a novella-length (perhaps even novel-length) undertaking, and will require a lot of time to forge into its final form.
And that's what's on the horizon. I leave you now with some sand art and seasonally appropriate Vivaldi:
It's not exactly frolicking, but it'll do.
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