Musings From Oblivion's Vault

Tanith Lee 19th September 1947 - 24th May 2015 Portrait by Dallas C. Goffin (From a photograph by Jerry Bauer) Something momentous and devastating happened on Sunday 24th May - the Mistress of Delirium, Tanith Lee, passed away. I find it almost impossible to express how much her work has affected me over the 30 or so years I have been reading and absorbing it's richness. I won't attempt to do that at the moment, but I will share the following piece which was written in June 1987 and published in Aklo (edited by Mark Valentine & Roger Dobson) Autumn 1992 . At the time the dedication to Tanith didn't appear, so I'd like to correct that now.   Dreamer's Soliloquy   (Dedication: Tanith Lee 1947-2015)   I shall draw the night from out the west, And wrap it about like a cloak; I will coax dim shadows from haunted woods, And plume my hair with their smoke. I shall take the moon from the curving sky, And hammer it into searin...

After the banality of the first post, I thought it would be nice to post the following prose piece, originally published in The Doppelganger Broadsheet (edited by Mr Colin Langeveld of West Derby, Liverpool, England) in 1997. A sunset of topaz falls over forests bronzen and amberous with autumn; and in a grove, sacred with the ghosts of antique prayers, a poet, wrapped in a robe of hyacinthine velvet, stands before an altar of carven marble on which he has placed ebony grapes, saffron-hued fruits, and blossoms of exquisite fragrances and gemmed tints. A faun reclines nearby, hidden in the copper grasses, and listens as the poet recites to the rich eventide from an unfurled scroll. Emerald and sapphire: Forest and ocean. Garnet and amethyst: Dawn and eventide. These are the bones, The bones of my dreams. Waves foam white, Curdled pale jewels. Woods sigh solemnly, Breath as incense. These are the bones, The bones of my dreams. Rain of garnet, Dawn on woods. Sky of almandine, Ado...

All this is very odd indeed: I'm on a week's holiday from the library, which I intended to devote to finishing off a new short story. However, although I have been working very hard on said story - A Mansion of Silent Ravens - I have not been working as hard as I should be. Everything, whilst writing, will become a distraction to me: a row of books that need tidying (when I should be writing); dust on a shelf that must now, this instant, be wiped away (when I should be writing); browsing through books, which I haven't given a thought to in decades, but which suddenly become very enticing indeed, like blossoms with gorgeously alien hues and alluring perfumes (when I really should be writing); popping into the garden after lunch only to find, four hours later, that I'd been vigorously weeding and hoeing, pruning shrubs, dead-heading plants, and somehow washed all the garden ornaments (when I definitely should have been writing). And now I find that I have set up a ...