Rowling Revisits Cormoran Strike

J.K. Rowling's next Cormoran Strike book is called The Silkworm
and is due out in June.

Readers may recall that the first Strike novel The Cuckoo's Calling was released under the pen name Robert Galbraith but she was outed by a publisher. Apparently she is still using the pen name!

Via Snitchseeker

Private investigator Cormoran Strike returns in a new mystery from Robert Galbraith, author of the #1 international bestseller The Cuckoo's Calling.

When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days--as he has done before--and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.
But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were to be published, it would ruin lives--meaning that there are a lot of people who might want him silenced.

When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any Strike has encountered before...
A compulsively readable crime novel with twists at every turn, THE SILKWORM is the second in the highly acclaimed series featuring Cormoran Strike and his determined young assistant, Robin Ellacott.

Carcosa and The King in Yellow ~ True Detective and American Literature

I loved the HBO Series "True Detective" because it was as darkly Southern Gothic as it could be, and you could write several books just on the use of religious symbolism in the plot. They really went all the way with every character, especially the flawed and misunderstood Rust Cohle who is becomes identical to Jesus by the end, scarred by a knife wound (like a Roman sword) and resurrected after the battle against the evil killer Childress in the Coliseum-like Carcosa, sitting up in bed like the figure from the Shroud of Turin with a large computer tablet beside him that resembles a Bible on a pulpit, Rust transforms into the Light of the World. And of course in the end he explains to his friend Marty that he really did die and go to heaven where he felt the love of his daughter (and his Father) but was sent back to earth again again for reasons he didn't understand. But I totally understood and enjoyed all the religious symbolism, having grown up a Southern Baptist.



However, the English Major in me kept wondering who the "Yellow King" was, and where did the name "Carcosa"  come from? I racked my brain from William Faulkner to Shakespeare, but could remember nothing on those two references.

Well, it turns out there is a long literary tradition about both the Yellow King and Carcosa, and it goes back to two American writers: Ambrose Bierce and Robert Chambers.

Ambrose Bierce wrote the story called "An Inhabitant of Carcosa."
Read it Here

The King in Yellow Wikia Site has a snippet about the Ambrose Bierce connection:

Ambrose Bierce's tale An Inhabitant of Carcosa is arguably the wellspring of the whole Yellow Mythos. It employs an exoticism of setting unusual for the author, and sprang from the alienation that dogged Bierce all his life. The story's genesis came from a terrible dream he had in his youth, in which he wandered through a blasted landscape and entered a colossal, deserted castle. The castle's dusty, echoing corriders filled him with the feeling that the entire universe was long extinct:

Man is long ages dead in every zone
The angels all are gone to graves unknown
The devils, too, are cold enough at last
And God lies dead before the great white throne.

In this cosmic tomb, young Ambrose found a bed on which lay a horribly decayed corpse. The cadaver's eyes opened, and Bierce saw, to his horror, that they were his own: "That hateful and abhorrent scrap of mortality, still sentient after the death of God and his angels, was I!"

That story by Bierce inspired Robert Chambers, who in 1895 wrote a collection of short stories that mention a play called "The King in Yellow." The place-name "Carcosa" is mentioned in the epigraph to the story collection as an excerpt from the fictional play.

Free eBook Here on Project Gutenberg

THE KING IN YELLOW
BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

Original publication date: 1895

THE KING IN YELLOW
IS DEDICATED
TO
MY BROTHER

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.

Cassilda's Song in "The King in Yellow," Act i, Scene 2.

Rust Enters the Ruins of Carcosa


More from the University of Texas

Journalist and short-story writer Ambrose Bierce wrote the horror story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” in 1886. The story explores death, light, and darkness and is about a man who awakens from a sickness-induced sleep to find himself lost in an unfamiliar wilderness. Sound familiar?
. . . Writer Robert W. Chambers borrows the name of Ambrose’s ancient city, Carcosa, and builds it into a mysterious and cursed city in his collection of short stories The King in Yellow. The stories in the book are linked by a fictional play of the same name, which induces despair and insanity in those who read it or see it performed. Considered “weird fiction” under the subgenre of speculative fiction, Chamber’s The King in Yellow has inspired many writers, including H. P. Lovecraft.

In "The Call of the Cthulu" by Lovecraft there's even a Louisiana connection in this passage about an Inspector Legrasse out of New Orleans who goes out in the Bayou to investigate some type of Voodoo worship of the First Evil Cthulu (which is something like the "Green Spaghetti Monster" mentioned in True Detective):

On 1 November 1907, there had come to New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.

So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragments of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch towards the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.

The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypus thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.

. . . In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous ringshaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless bacchanale between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

And if there's still any doubt that True Detective has deep literary roots, the screenwriter of True Detective himself has mentioned that Chambers/Bierce were indeed his sources, although not his favorite writers. Instead, he was merely inspired by the American mythos of the names involved. And he also suggests checking out Faulkner and Joseph Conrad ("Heart of Darkness" to be sure), plus the Holy Bible, too, so my own analysis was pretty close to what he intended. :)

From HitFix

. . . you wrote this entire thing in a vacuum, as someone relatively new to television, not knowing how it was received. And the show comes on, and people go nuts about it, they are penning raves, coming up with elaborate theories about the Yellow King and Lovecraft and everything else. How did it feel to see your creation being received in all of these ways?

Nic Pizzolatto: I felt like, look, it's all good, and I really mean that. To me, that is what it means to connect and resonate with people. It means that they are going to project onto the work. There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because to some degree, I projected upon it. That said, I think I've made clear that my only interest in the Chambers stuff (Robert W. Chambers wrote "The King in Yellow") is as a story that has a place in American myth. And it's a story about a story that drives people into madness. That was mainly it. Beyond that, I'm interested in the atmosphere of cosmic horror, but that's about all I have to say about weird fiction. I did feel the perception was tilted more towards weird fiction than perhaps it should have been. For instance, if someone needs a book to read along with season 1 of "True Detective," I would recommend the King James Old Testament. I wouldn't tell anyone to go buy Robert Chambers. It's not that great a book. Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner I think are in there far more than Chambers or Lovecraft. But again, I guess I hope that these 8 chapters, once the totality of it is evident, it might provoke a re-evaluation. But if it doesn't, I'm very happy with the reaction we've had. It couldn't have been better. I'm just surprised by it. I remember talking to you three months ago and having to convince you: "This just sounds like every other show," "I know, I know." And now my wife read a comment the other day that said I live out in the desert, and I run some kind of cult. (laughs) I don't know what I can say about that. I think this show answers everything it told you to ask. The questions it didn't tell you to ask are questions best left to one's self.

Poetry Passion ~ Hope for Survival

The Laughing Heart 


your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

~ Charles Bukowski





Sayings from the Northern Ice

It is people at the edge who say
Things at the edge.: winter is towards knowing.
Sled runners before they meet have long talk apart.
There is a pup in every litter the wolves will have.
Rocks in the wind know their place: down low.

Over your shoulder is God; the dying deer sees him.
At the mouth of the long sack we fall in forever
Storms brighten the spikes of the stars.
Wind that buried bear skulls north of here
And beats moth wings for help outside the door
Is bringing bear skull wisdom, but do not ask the skull
Too large a question till summer.
Something too dark was held in that strong bone.
Better to end with a lucky saying:
Sled runners cannot decide to join or to part.
When they decide, it is a bad day.

~ William Stafford




The Wild Geese


You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~ Mary Oliver



Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte.
One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.



Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?





Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

~ Richard Hugo

Middle Earth Interactive on Google Chrome

Previous Related Post:
Book-Based Holiday Movies: Catching Fire, Saving Mr. Banks, and Desolation of Smaug

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This looks like so much fun for Fans of the Hobbit - a journey through Middle Earth.



From Mashable

Fans have read about Middle Earth in J.R.R. Tolkien's novels and they've seen it in in the subsequent films directed by Peter Jackson, but now they can fly above the elf city of Rivendell or sneak through the dark Trollshaws, all with the tap of the keyboard's direction keys or the swipe of a finger across a smartphone.
Users have a choice of a few areas of exploration, all of which appear in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which came out last year, and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, which will hit theaters on Dec. 13. You can use your laptop, tablet, phone and anything else that supports chrome to fly over the whole fictional land, but you can currently only walk around the Trollshaws, Rivendell and the haunted fortress of Dol Guldur. Players must watch their step, as the eerie music that accompanies the video-game like experience foreshadows demons that can attack from nowhere to drag you away.

From The Hobbit Blog

The online experience takes fans through an adventure that unfolds across an interactive map of Middle-earth. Users can zoom in to explore Trollshaw Forest, Rivendell and Dol Guldur, with new locations set to be added in the weeks ahead. Each destination on the map gives the visitor access to its history and the characters who inhabit it, or presents unique survival challenges in which fans can test their wits.
“Journey Through Middle-earth” is the first Chrome Experiment designed to bring a full 3D experience to mobile, with technology support for WebGL in Chrome for Android on devices with high-end graphics cards. Although WebGL isn’t supported on iOS, Chrome users can still experience most of “Journey Through Middle-earth” on their iPhones and iPads.

Book-Based Holiday Movies ~ Catching Fire, Saving Mr. Banks, and The Desolation of Smaug

Wow, for book-lovers this Christmas has a wealth of great movies! Publishers are capitalizing on the publicity with new editions, so read the books first and then go to the movies!



From Publishers Weekly

Fans – and box-office bean-counters – are gearing up for the November 22 release of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. The Lionsgate film, based on the second book in Suzanne Collins’s blockbuster young adult series, marks the return of the love triangle comprising Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), and Gale (Liam Hemsworth). Following their unprecedented triumph in the games, Katniss and Peeta are targeted by the Capitol and forced to compete once more, this time in the 25-year anniversary games known as the Quarter Quell. Additions to the cast include Philip Seymour Hoffman as head gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee, and Sam Claflin, who plays tribute Finnick Odair, an ally to Katniss and Peeta.
. . . Off screen and on the page, the reach of the Hunger Games series remains formidable. Scholastic is greeting the forthcoming cinematic release with a tie-in edition of the novel featuring cover art from the film, an illustrated movie companion, as well as a boxed set containing paperback editions of the entire series. According to Scholastic, there are more than 65 million copies of the original three books in the Hunger Games trilogy in print and digital formats in the U.S.: more than 28 million copies of The Hunger Games, more than 19 million copies of Catching Fire, and more than 18 million copies of Mockingjay. Scholastic’s Hunger Games Facebook page has upwards of 4.8 million fans.

From Variety

There wasn’t anything as sweet as a spoonful of sugar behind the scenes of “Mary Poppins,” and it’s this little-known backstory that provides the spine for “Saving Mr. Banks,” which bows in limited release Dec. 13.
In the movie, (author P.L.) Travers battles Walt Disney after learning he wants to seize the rights to the book, her most prized creation. Even when she reluctantly agrees to leave London to spend two weeks in creative meetings at the Disney lot in Burbank, she lectures the crew and threatens not to sign the contract every time she doesn’t get her way.
Director John Lee Hancock (“The Blind Side”) says (Emma) Thompson told him early on that Travers was the most difficult character she had ever played. “At every turn, she’s different than you think she’s going to be,” Hancock says. “At one point, she seems old and brittle, and at another point, she seems sensual.”
. . . “Saving Mr. Banks” is garnering Thompson Oscar buzz for the first time in almost 20 years. “I’m praying that she gets nominated, for selfish reasons, because I’d love to play with her in the audience,” says her friend (and Oscar host) Ellen DeGeneres, who in 1997 featured Thompson in an episode of her former sitcom. “She deserves to be nominated, because she’s so brilliant. How often does a role come up to play a 54-year-old woman like that?”
Thompson recalls being around 7 when she first saw “Mary Poppins,” but has no memory of the actual theatrical experience. She just remembers how she felt. “I was profoundly moved by the songs,” the actress says. “ ‘Feed the Birds’ made me infinitely sad and melancholy as a child. ‘Let’s Go Fly a Kite’ made me cry

From LA Times Hero Complex

“The Desolation of Smaug” is Part 2 in Jackson’s new Tolkien trilogy, and the film picks up where last year’s box-office hit “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” left off, with hobbit Bilbo (Martin Freeman), wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and Thorin’s company continuing on their quest to help the dwarfs reclaim the treasure buried under the Lonely Mountain.
Like its predecessor, “The Desolation of Smaug” was shot in 3-D at 48 frames per second and will be released in 2-D, High Frame Rate 3-D, other 3-D formats and IMAX.

Harry Potter Stamps Come to America!

The U.S. Postal Service has issued five sheets of Harry Potter stamps, and to me these are long overdue. Many other countries have had HP stamps for years! And our Post Office has been complaining about low income for years, so maybe HP collectors will save the day.

See all the stamps on Snitchseeker

Order the HP stamps HERE

Which is my favorite? Snape of course! And he's on the same page with Dumbledore, McGonagall and Hagrid - teachers, not villains. I'm sure that will make some fans unhappy, LOL.
Description of the Teachers Page from USPS

At Hogwarts, the friends receive support and guidance from many of their professors, among them the four depicted on the third set of stamps-Rubeus Hagrid, Professor Minerva McGonagall, Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, and Professor Severus Snape.

The Snape stamp may not say "Always," but does say "Forever." (In the U.S. a "forever" stamp can be used even if rates are raised.)

The only child character missing from the set is Neville, unfortunately. I think they wanted to get in all the most popular Weasleys, so they had to leave out someone. It's too bad. Maybe they will issue a second set in a few years with Sirius, Lupin, the other teachers, etc.

May I just say, though, that I LOVE the hippogriff stamp! And Dobby!!!

It's November ~ NaNoWriMo Time Again

It's National Novel Writing Month or "NaNoWriMo" - that time after Halloween when would-be writers everywhere close themselves off from distractions and type as fast as they can to reach 50,000 words by the end of November.

It's only November 3rd - not too late to get started!

This is my fifth year participating and yet it feels the same as the first time - the blank page is scary, the words either flow or they just stop coming, and I have to make myself stop editing work from the day before. Coffee is a must, as well as chocolate. I've told my family the only meal I guarantee this month is Thanksgiving Dinner. I'm going to write my heart out during the week when most of the family is at work or school because weekends are just too hectic, and there's always Christmas shopping - arghhh!

I wrote poetry in college, but never much long fiction. So the first year I did this I had NO characters in mind and no clue about how to start, but with the encouragement of friends I got a notebook and just started writing down plots that came into my head. And to my surprise, characters started appearing. I knew what they were thinking and what they did every day. I knew them better than I know my neighbors of 20 years. They were part of me, but some of them were as different as night and day.

I actually drew a map of the setting so I could keep it all straight. I started looking on the internet for pictures that reminded me of my characters and where they lived, and saved them in a folder for inspiration. I played around with anagrams, and I researched old county records for historical facts. Yes these are tricks, but it's also a world of fun! And all writers have to just sit and think, often for hours, about plot points and tricky plot twists. No one ever said it was easy!

Yes, I was up to the challenge in years past. I wrote and wrote until I reached 50,000 words - hooray! But actually none of my novels have ever been completely finished - they have ragged edges. Reality intruded during the editing process, and one of my novels had a plot hole. I also realized that there was so much baggage and backstory attached to my characters that it was taking up space, so this year I'm starting over with a prequel that will be short and sweet and this time complete. (Hmm, if this fiction gig doesn't work out, maybe I should go back to poetry!)