You're allowed to do this on blogs, right?
I first read W.H. Pugmire's fiction in 2009. Lovecraft's fiction is another body of work that means a lot to me personally - obsessively re-reading HPL's stories helped me through my first serious brush with unemployment - and finding that there were writers who felt the same way and were adding to the legacy but not producing pastiche was a joy to me. Pugmire brings an aesthetic, decadent sensibility to his own version of the weird and eldritch, but he is also unmistakably working in the vein of Lovecraft. His was with poetic language and deeply strange magic is unique and he is only growing from strength to strength as a writer.
A year back I started writing a story entitled 'Vyvyan's Father' as an homage to Pugmire and especially his Sesqua Valley setting. This Monday I finally finished and, trembling with uncertainty, sent it to him to learn his opinion of it. I was thrilled to read this reply from him this morning on my facebook page and reproduce it here for posterity (you're allowed to do this on blogs, right?):
I first read W.H. Pugmire's fiction in 2009. Lovecraft's fiction is another body of work that means a lot to me personally - obsessively re-reading HPL's stories helped me through my first serious brush with unemployment - and finding that there were writers who felt the same way and were adding to the legacy but not producing pastiche was a joy to me. Pugmire brings an aesthetic, decadent sensibility to his own version of the weird and eldritch, but he is also unmistakably working in the vein of Lovecraft. His was with poetic language and deeply strange magic is unique and he is only growing from strength to strength as a writer.
A year back I started writing a story entitled 'Vyvyan's Father' as an homage to Pugmire and especially his Sesqua Valley setting. This Monday I finally finished and, trembling with uncertainty, sent it to him to learn his opinion of it. I was thrilled to read this reply from him this morning on my facebook page and reproduce it here for posterity (you're allowed to do this on blogs, right?):
I'm glad I overcame my self-defeating fear that I could never write a worthy tale in the manner of a writer I admire and I'm glad I overcame a certain innate diffidence enough to send it to him. Producing literature may be a solitary act, and so is consuming it, yet stories are somehow the very fabric of society and I am glad I could reach out with a story to someone whose stories have given me such excellent company.
I have read your Sesqua tale -- & it is fantastic, one of the finest tales of ye valley by another's hand that I have ever perused. I found it brilliant that you never name the valley, but describe it so potently that anyone who is a follower of my own work will "know." As a story in and of itself, it's brilliant and entirely effective. It flows, and your prose is superb. I feel honour'd, my friend, and thank ye!
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