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?)