(no subject)

robert e howard managed to turn depression and financial insecurity into full-time writing, always admired that a bit. minus the suicide. when I'm particularly depressed & financially insecure of course the last thing I do is write. won't trust a word of it.

I should start outlining a few stories I don't care about so I have something to work on when I hate myself.

Were there any other working class autodidacts out there that didn't quite so kill themselves?

The only Howard I've read and truly enjoyed was Queen of the Black Coast, and entirely for its throwaway descriptions, the music of it. Conan in that story is boorish and boring and the climactic battle pretty dumb but there's this air of dark and ancient and above all desperate mystery which permeates the words like a fog and it's painfully gorgeous.

This passage I've always wanted to use as an epigram for the adventure story I've been writing for six or seven years:

Strings of frozen iridescence hung between his dusky fingers; drops of red fire dripped from his hands, piled high with starlight and rainbow. It was as if a black titan stood straddle-legged in the bright pits of hell, his lifted hands full of stars.

The other epigram is from Blake. Thus were the stars in heaven created like a golden chain to bind the body of man to heaven from falling into the abyss.

What i'm saying is prose is more vital.