Toward Ecosophy

I've had several readers ask me how I'd feel if they wrote stories set in the fictive world of The Weird of Hali, my epic fantasy with tentacles. Those weren't questions I could answer off the cuff. Partly, like many other authors of fiction, I invest a lot of my own emotional life in my stories; many of the characters might as well be close personal friends, and many of the settings are as thick with memories for me as any place where I've spent a lot of time and had a lot of vivid experiences.  By writing about them, I've invited my readers to meet the characters and visit the places, but it's another matter to have people come in and start remodeling the rooms and inviting their friends. 

For complex reasons, too, The Weird of Hali has a stronger place in my emotional life than my other fiction. Partly, I'm sure, it's the sheer volume -- nine novels and counting -- but I also had the chance to weave quite a bit more of my own vision of the world into these stories than I usually do. No, I don't worship Cthulhu or cuddle up with shoggoths, but the gods and sorcery in the novels borrow quite a bit from my own spirituality, and the basic sense of things is mine: where Lovecraft saw the universe as blithely indifferent to human existence and shuddered in horror, I see exactly the same thing, breathe an immense sigh of relief, and notice how liberating it is to ditch the burden of hubris and delusion that treats humanity as the conqueror of nature, the summit of evolution, the measure of all things, blah blah foam-flecked blah, and get on with life. 

On the other side of the scale, though, is the massive point that I didn't invent the setting and the basic situation of The Weird of Hali.  H.P. Lovecraft and his friends invented it as one of the first great shared settings for fiction, and of course it's been picked up by many writers since Lovecraft's time. What's more, I'm not the only writer who's taken the Lovecraftian cosmos and spun the moral compass 180 degrees; Ruthanna Emrys has done the same thing in a very different way with the two novels and a novella (so far) of her Innsmouth Legacy series. (No, I haven't read them yet.  When I'm in creative mode, I'm very easily influenced by the work of other authors, especially if they're any good.  That's why I wallowed in weird tales from the Golden Age between the wars and before then while writing The Weird of Hali, and strictly avoided anything of more recent vintage.  Once I've finished the last of my tentacle novels, I plan on reading her entire series and I expect to enjoy them immensely.) 

So here's what I'd like to suggest for those who want to play with tentacled horrors in their own fiction...

1) Anything I didn't invent is free for the taking. The great majority of the material in The Weird of Hali is not original to me; from the towns to the eldritch tomes to such little details as the Mao games Jenny Chaudronnier plays to divine the future, I got it from existing weird-tale literature and I have no business telling anyone else what to do with it. If you've got questions about where something came from, so you can look up the details in their original habitat, ask me!

2) My main additions to the canon are the Radiance and its history, from the desecration of the seven temples through to the fulfillment of the Weird of Hali; the Weird itself; and certain modifications to the Great Old Ones -- for example, my version of Nyarlathotep is a free invention based on a variety of Pagan gods and the crossroads devil of blues tradition, and Phauz was simply a name in a letter by Clark Ashton Smith before she strolled into my imagination in the midst of a clowder of cats. Those are also fair game; just as Lovecraft made the Necronomicon available to others, I'm putting these into the common stash. 

3) If you want to use a character in one of my stories as a minor character in yours, cool. For example, if you've got a character who's taking classes at Miskatonic University who happens to take a class from Miriam Akeley, and she appears a couple of times, no problem. If you want to turn one of my minor characters into a central character, please ask -- I often have further details of canon that you may not know. 

4) Please don't do stories that are primarily about one of my major characters. They're personal friends, as noted above. 

5) If you're doing slash or other forms of fanfic pornography, I don't want to know about it. Seriously, don't mention it to me and don't parade it anywhere I might see it, or I might decide to get crunchy about it. 

So basically that's what I'd like to ask. Comments? Questions? Tentacled horrors await...

 A heads up to Lovecraftiana fans -- a short story of mine, "The Black Goat's Servant," has just been published in the anthology Swords Against Cthulhu III: A New Dark Age from Rogue Planet Press. Yes, it's a sword-and-sorcery yarn; yes, it's set in a future dark age, after the Great Old Ones resume their briefly interrupted mastery over the planet; it's closer to straight Lovecraft than my Weird of Hali stories, and not connected to them, but it's got sex, violence, eldritch horrors, and a journey across a deindustrial Ohio rather different from the one Trey sunna Gwen visited in Star's Reach. Those interested can pick up a squamous, rugose copy here.