Hyperactivity and hecticness (?) this week, so today will be a quick medley. I’m ultra-busy working on an exciting new venture – a magazine called Occult Detective Quarterly – and writing weird stories as fast as I can. I’m also converting our dogs into Top Trumps cards for no obvious reason. And we have a pile of lurcher queries to answer for next week.
Lurchers briefly and first. One of the oddities of running greydogtales is that lots of people find us on the Internet when they type in lurcher and longdog queries. I suspect that some of those people are a bit surprised by what they get, especially if they’re looking for serious or even veterinary-level answers. The bulk of what we post is true, sometimes even useful, but we tend to spin and focus on the weirdness. So we’ll have a look at some of the queries that have brought people here, and see if we can give relatively sensible answers to some of them in due course.
In the meantime, there are some useful tips in Lurchers for Beginners 4 (Beginners 4) and 5 (Beginners 5 ).
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The scary news here is that Sam Gafford and I are launching Occult Detective Quarterly this Autumn. ODQ will be a brand new magazine aimed at fans of supernatural sleuths, hard-boiled psychic investigators and people who interfere in occult matters generally.
This is a somewhat daring and daunting project, but we have the industrial might of Travis Neisler behind us. Travis has recently launched his own weird and wonderful publication Ravenwood Quarterly, so we’re looking at the two being sort of sister-magazines, coming out alternately.
Sam and I will be the editors. Listeners may remember that Sam is a fellow William Hope Hodgson enthusiast and scholar, an editor and also a fine author in his own write… sorry, right. He has his first novel The House of Nodens coming out next year, and already has many anthology credits, particularly in the Lovecraftian field.
We at Occult Detective Quarterly will be on the lookout for fiction, non-fiction, reviews and art over the next few months. Because we’d like this to become a regular market, we’re starting at 1 cent/word for original fiction contributions, and hoping to increase that rate as we go along. We will consider reprints, and of course if you illustrate or write articles and reviews on anything to do with occult detectives, we’d like to hear from you. If you go to our Facebook Page, you’ll find full submission guidelines for all types of contribution in the Files section.
Occult Detective Quarterly on Facebook
By the way, please DON’T send anything ODQ-related to greydogtales.com – Django might eat your submission.
On a personal editorial note, I like the weird, the wonderful and the unusual. I also like challenging the old stereotypes. I’m especially keen to see submissions from female writers, non-white writers and LGBT writers, for example. I’m not on a particular agenda – I just love hearing diverse voices and shaking things up. Likewise with the protagonist situation. Historical Chinese detectives investigating sorcery; dark doings in Africa; gay sleuths in period Paris – these are all good. Try not to give us a stream of Sam Spades and Constantines in rain-soaked macs. If the latter are fabulous, well-written stories, we’ll still use them, but let’s be creative out there…
The personal writing career continues, though more slowly with so many things going on. In an accidental example of literary incest, Sam is also publishing two new stories of mine this summer in his anthology Carnacki: The Lost Cases, from Ulthar Press. I can feel clean and pure here, because I actually wrote and submitted them last year, before I got to know Sam and found out that he was such a serious William Hope Hodgson buff. I was contemplating getting back into writing, and sent off both tales out of the blue. They are the only Carnacki stories I’ve ever written, as I rolled my sleeves up for a real workout on Tales of the Last Edwardian soon after.
CARNACKI: THE LOST CASES
Table of contents
- THE DARKNESS by A. F. KIDD
- THE SILENT GARDEN by JASON C. ECKHARDT
- THE SHADOW SUNS by JOHN HOWARD
- THE STEEPLE MONSTER CASE by CHARLES R. RUTLEDGE
- THE MOVING FUR CASE by PAUL R. McNAMEE
- THE DELPHIC BEE by JOSH REYNOLDS
- A HIDEOUS COMMUNION by JAMES GRACEY
- THE DARK TRADE by JOHN LINWOOD GRANT
- THE GRUNTING MAN by WILLIAM MEIKLE
- THE DARK LIGHT by ROBERT M. PRICE
- THE YELLOW FINGER EXPERIMENTS by JAMES BOJACIUK
- THE GREY DOG by JOHN LINWOOD GRANT
Some fine folk there as well. The Dark Trade is a serious pastiche and homage to Hodgson’s own occult detective, with a nasty twist of social history. Grey Dog is also a Carnacki story, but very much my own take, written from Carnacki’s point of view and reflecting on real life. I’m very fond of the last one because, as I’ve mentioned here before, this tale and our late grey lurcher Jade are the reasons for the name of this site. I also think it’s a good short story, one of my better ones.
That’s all we have time for. In a couple of days we have a neat interview with horror writer Rich Hawkins, and then lots of variety next week. Keep the faith, dear listener…