Base Details

Howard Jones (a.k.a. bg-editor) posted an interview this week at the Black Gate website. It’s with an opinionated semi-professional fantasy writer, but the questions are good questions, I think. If I had been thinking straight I would have remembered to mention the incredible art of Chuck Lukacs, which adorns the interview and the Morlock stories in Black Gate. His Morlock has a wounded intelligence I think perfectly fits the character.

The photo of the author troubles me (though I provided it, and it’s a reasonably accurate likeness). I’m not vain about my appearance, but as I get increasingly “fierce and bald and short of breath” it seems to me that I start to look a lot like Dick Cheney.

This is not something that anyone would brag about, and I even had a nightmare about it last night. I was in my grandmother’s house (which I haven’t seen the inside for almost thirty years: she died in 1978, if I remember right), and I was bantering with some people I didn’t know very well in the dream (or at all when I woke). They suggested that my hair was getting Rumsfeldian in its grayness. And I said, “No, no: it’s Cheney I really look like.” And I slumped my shoulders and gave the one-sided smile I share with the VPOTUS and said something foolish in the gravelly nasal quack Cheney uses at his most authoritarian.

The others froze up suddenly and looked behind me. As I turned I saw Cheney standing there with a wounded look on his face. He rushed away and I felt like a monster for mocking him.

Nowadays I have nightmares like this. When I was a lad, resting in my bed of straw after a long day of leaping from crag to crag on my native heath, I had nightmares about vampires, and zombies and soul-killing demons and sinister stone-eyed statues and shadows that inched ever closer as I could not move or speak. I don’t think I’ve exactly traded up.

Here’s hoping for more and better nightmares. While I’m actually asleep, anyway.