Spyder Spyder crawling light
Through my office in the night
What immortal hand or kiss
Could frame thy fearful creepiness?

(with affection and apology to William Blake)

Tiny spider on my hand
From my person you are banned
Please don’t take it personally
It’s just that your feet tickle me

Tiny spider, legs of eight
Prowling ’round my office late
With all the places you could be
Why’d you pick in front of me?

My wife is one hell of a wordsmith and her work has recently reminded me of how much I enjoy well-written prose. To that end, I present the following (thank you Shadow Manor):

The Spider’s Web (A Natural History)

The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising,
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.

And all that journey down through space,
In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.

Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.

– E.B. White

Gothic.net sought out my thoughts on a variety of topics as we launched 2011. As somebody who designed Gothic.net’s look at the turn of the last century, I find this immensely rewarding.

READ ON

Thank you OryCon for making my first Guest of Honor experience memorable and a helluva lot of fun!

I walk into my office today and this is on my laptop:

Which doesn’t mean much to anybody but us, until you watch this:

The little window garden just got a bit weirder. Yes, that’s a Venus Flytrap next to the mini-pumpkin plant. Now if I can just get Missus Savage to wear a black dress, feed it with a spoon and speak French…

After a perfect crisp, cool September day where every other store we drove past featured its 2010 Halloween decorations and wares, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I broke out the Halloween Music Collection for The Season.

This is no small thing. I’ve been making Halloween mix-CDs since 1999 and, with the advent of MP3s and websites dedicated to the Halloween Ephemera of Yesteryear, any given year could produce a huge amount of music and up to 5 mixes for that given season. Eleven years hence, and it’s safe to say I have a ginormous collection of Halloween-themed and Halloween-related music, sound effects, audio-dramas, stories and related recordings.

And whoa, I’m small potatoes. Jonathon over at Rotting Flesh Radio claims a Terabyte of pure Halloween Goodness, and I believe him. That’s a LOT of Halloween music.

BUT! Because of the way I was raised, I won’t listen to any of it outside of September/October. I usually wait until later in September, but the day was just SO PERFECTLY SEPTEMBER-Y, and the Halloween stuff was JUST SO HALLOWEEN-Y, that I couldn’t stand it. So I’m rocking out to 11 years’ worth of Halloween awesomeness. This year I have the added benefit of FINALLY understanding the importance of properly labeling and tagging ones MP3s, so besides listening to any given year’s mix, I can set the music player to play Genre HALLOWEEN on random, and I’m good to go for the next… oh, say, 200 hours.

I’ll post highlights here periodically, if I can. This is my busy season, after all, but I refuse to miss the season I love because I’m so busy during the season I love. Y’know?