First of all, I want to thank all the folks who have wished me well after the last post. Y’all are awesome! And to the rest of you who didn’t, well…I’m watching you and I know where you live. No, not really. Well, I do know where each and every one of you live, but I’m far too busy right now to dispatch any nightgaunts or zoogs to deliver any “friendly reminders,” so it’s all good.

Anyway, for the recently-passed seventh anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I was going to post a short little piece called “First Responder” that is kinda/sorta tangentially related to “City of Pillars,” but even though it’s just a few pages long, I’ve simply been too busy with work and General Bulshytt to finish the damn thing and post it! I’ll have it up this week, though. I started writing it just to get the juices flowing again before jumping back into the swirling chaos of Manhattan, and it’s definitely gotten the venom coursing into my tongue’s barbs again. Let’s just say that “City of Pillars” (and, to a lesser degree, “First Responder”) are rapidly turning into savage political satires as well as blood-and-slime-drenched monsterfests. Being of a rather conservative bent himself, I’m not sure Grandpa Theobald would particularly approve, but I’m pretty sure he’d be intrigued by the things I’m doing with his mythology.

On that note, there’s also a short essay that I’m writing as a promotional piece for Creative Commons licensing, explaining why I believe HPL and, for that matter, the “amateur journalism” subculture that he held so dear, would’ve loved CC-licensing, considering that many of them promulgated a doctrine of fair use and open sharing of ideas and content in the early 20th Century that anticipates contemporary “copyfighting” measure by nearly a century. Those dedicated men and women—protobloggers that they were—were quite ahead of their time and I believe they should finally get their due acknowledgement for their contribution to the development of open culture standards. But that’s still very much so Under Construction, and must naturally take a backseat to “City of Pillars” and further development of original content for this site, so….

Keep your eyes peeled to this space for Fresh Eldritch Content! I’ve begun to shake the cobwebs from my mind and build up a serious head of steam, which will be blasting your faces off in a few days!

Hey, folks—sorry it’s taken so long for me to crank out the next installment in “City of Pillars,” but I’ve been rather busy of late searching for a job. It’s prettymuch a futile quest as 1) I absolutely will not relocate for reasons I won’t even bother to explain and 2) who wants to hire an English teacher with a Master’s Degree in horror lit? More and more options dry up everyday….

But check it out: Chapters 3 and 4 are coming up shortly—I’m proofreading them now.

In the meantime, Footnotes to the Human Species has a new, intriguing feature: chapter soundtracks courtesy of a nifty li’l plugin called WordPress Audio Player! At the head of each chapter of “City of Pillars” is now a Flash-based streaming mp3 player that, at the click of a button, plays a particular track that I’ve found to be an apropos piece of musical accompaniment to that chapter. For example, Chapter 1 has The Tear Garden’s tense and foreboding “The Strong and Whining Toad,” and Chapter 2 has a particular minimalistic audiosculpture of my own, simply title “told.” Don’t worry: none of the audio tracks start playing automatically; there is very little in the world that I hate more than pages that open their own audio as soon as they load (*ahem*, MySpace). Nothing’s more irritating that loading up a page in a tab to look at later only to discover some strange dissonance creeping mysteriously into the Abba song you’ve already got blasting. But, hey, the tracks are there if you want to listen.

I’ve also started a changelog on the site to record any alterations to published material. I made a few minor edits to Chapter 1 the other day (just changed the name of Dave’s newspaper to the Sensation, since the San Diego City Paper just didn’t sound tabloid-y enough, and cleaned up some typos that I missed), and it’s duly noted in the changelog. The changelog only concerns textual edits, not site revamps or additions of extra cool stuff like, you know, music and—also coming this week—a gallery of Footnoteish artwork.

So give the chapter soundtracks a listen, even if you’ve already read the texts. And feel free to suggest music that you would consider good “background noise” for “City of Pillars” or any materials on this site—but I’ve already got a nice stock of incidental music, both by myself and others, ready to go: some Forma Tadre, Skinny Puppy (a must), Gary Numan, Synaesthesia, Download, Otto von Schirach, and many other pitch-black or sickeningly-lurid jams to ensure the subliminal messages from the Other Gods present in my work penetrate your cerebral cortices!

(No Technorati tags for this’n—who needs blogosphere links to other reclusive horror-writers/electronic-musicians talking about the new stuff they’ve added to their own sites, right?)