The Spoons That Are My Ears!

This creature is the dreaded Kojakalhu... Half New York City detective, half unspeakable cosmic octopus, he is one of the monsters to be found in my Plutonian Parodies chapbook. And now he's in a position to announce the results of the Poe-themed competition I ran last week. The winner is Ross Warren, who managed to get 9 out of the 13 references. In second place came Ricardo Tinoco. I hope both these fellows will enjoy their prizes when they get them. This was a fiendishly difficult competition. Full details of all the references in the photograph can be found here. Meanwhile, these other drawings have nothing to do with my chapbooks as far as I'm aware, but you never know...
I have finally crossed the Two Million Words (in total) mark! But I still have another 11,000 words to write to reach 200,000 words for the year 2009. I'll do that with a story I'm about to start writing for a Bulgakov tribute book. Some writers truly need tribute volumes; and Bulgakov is one of the most deserving. Another is Milorad Pavic, who died yesterday. One of the greatest writers of the 20th Century, he was a vast influence on my own writing: among many other techniques he taught me the value of creating an utterly original metaphor and then stretching it so far that it snaps, making a uniquely musical sound...