This is my site for information about the fantasy world known as the 
Lands of Hope. I have the usual bio and buy pages, also Maps and a free Compendium of lore, plus a cool notification feature if you want to see posts in your email box. Sign up for that and you get two quick Tales for free. Because no one should have to wait for a little Hope.
Continue reading Welcome to the Lands
As of February 15th 2021, my first release in the series of shorter tales by pulp-giant Clark Ashton Smith is now available at retail outlets.
The Double Shadow tells the grim and eerie tale of an ambitious acolyte to a great wizard, searching for secrets and unable to resist exploring forbidden lore when they find an incantation from impossible ancient times. I’m hoping fans of the erudite, elevated prose of this master storyteller will enjoy a quick bite of the horror and strangeness in his work.
The Double Shadow is the first of a half-dozen CAS tales I’ve targeted for recording, after obtaining the gracious permission of CASiana Literary Enterprises. I’ll be recording and releasing them throughout the spring and I hope you enjoy curling up in a corner for a quick dose of the weird.
Here are the retail locations where you can get the tale.
I’m always looking for new projects, ways forward that can widen my platform and bring me new challenges. As 2020 finally left our lives, it gave me a final gift in December with a positive Covid diagnosis. The symptoms were fairly mild and I recovered as so many others have done, grateful for my family’s safety and the new year.
But the cough remains. Just a nagging occasional thing, but enough to screw with the spirit of a hopeful audiobook narrator. I’m taking different meds trying to beat it, but in the meantime it’s tough to audition for new projects, because I can’t stick to a schedule with my hack rising up all of a sudden.
I need to keep doing projects.
But they can’t be long.
And Lord knows, I can’t do much with short! The Book of Tales represents my output of shorter-than-
novella length writing for the past three years, and maybe the next three too.
Once again, it’s better to be lucky than good.
A friend and fellow author sometimes writes and enthuses about one of the old pulp masters- what a great tale this is, here’s a link if you want to read it, etc. I sometimes click, and in January I did for a Clark Ashton Smith yarn entitled The Double Shadow. It was perfect; as soon as I started reading I could just hear the tale, the voices, the effects, the whole thing.
And with acknowledgements, opening and closing files, the whole thing was less than forty minutes. I recorded it in a single morning. And became hooked on a feeling…
I was always more of a Robert E. Howard guy. His tales are more rollicking, a bit more classic. The good guys win fairly often- I like that part, so sue me. I had read a lot of Burroughs and Lovecraft too and they have their features.
But something about Smith. I couldn’t tell you how many of his works I read back then, but there’s this high-flown vocabulary (real tongue-twisters!), words that make my Kindle dictionary cry for mercy just piled thick on each paragraph. I sincerely believe that’s the kind of challenge I can take on, and I loved doing The Double Shadow. My author friend mentioned it was in the public domain–more about that later!– and an idea began to form in my brain.
You may see occasionally a famous tale, for example a Sherlock Holmes mystery or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, being issued as an audiobook by an ambitious narrator. If the work was performed roughly a lifetime ago and no estate or other person picks up the “estate”, then others can simply come in and make use of the work themselves.
Sort of.
I blew through Double Shadow in a heartbeat, as I said; it stoked me up, and I started the process of publication on Findaway Voices. And I laid out a plan, to do maybe five or six of these tales. Maybe it would get a little notice. Maybe I would become known as “the voice of Clark Ashton Smith”!
Then I got a bad feeling and decided to check into whether his work was really freely available.
Maybe I would get myself in trouble.
I searched some forums and learned that there IS a rights-holder for CAS’ work (or some of it, anyway) and like the commenters said, it’s just good manners to ask. So I wrote to the gentleman at CASiana Literary Enterprises and he confirmed. It’s complicated.
CAS works are not simply in the public domain, but some versions of his tales probably are. The folks at CASiana and Night Shade books collated and edited the latest, clearest and most official versions of Smith’s canon and those works ARE copyrighted, under The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith.
Having said that, he asked me what my intentions were and I told him. And he graciously gave permission for me to proceed. My sense of it is, the folks minding the Smith estate haven’t thought very much about audiobooks, and the gentleman figured my work might have some merit and attract new customers. I’m on board with that!
So my project is up and running, starting with publication of The Double Shadow due February 15th followed by The Death of Malygris by March 1st. This should keep me out of trouble for a while as I wait for this damn cough to go away… and I can take comfort that my tale seems to be ending much better than most of Mr. Smith’s! These will be fun little horror tales you can curl up with in a loose half-hour or so, but don’t expect to hear of marvelous sunsets and couples kissing. CAS wrote some of the most exotic, bizarre, and usually hero-less tales in all of pulp. I hope it made him happy. Trying to voice and relate his stories to a new audience is certainly giving me joy and satisfaction.
I’ll have plenty of free Author House codes for anyone who would like to take a listen and maybe leave a review. Just let me know in the comments below and I’ll hook you up.