Publishing Pirate Poetry In a Perilous Pandemic

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” -H.P. Lovecraft

So it has been a long time since I have written and posted anything in my blog. Life has certainly taken a turn down a dark, strange, and terrifying alley since my last post several months ago with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S.A. in the Spring of 2020. I have been fortunate to have been able to work from home all this time and continue to support myself and family and be able to isolate myself from the general public and possible exposure to the virus. Most of our necessities are able to be delivered or obtained with contact free curbside pickup fortunately which my wonderful wife Ali has been able to take care of, allowing me to focus on work and other things.

I haven’t been writing much unfortunately other than bits of poetry from time to time. However, I have been able to get three poems of mine published in an anthology which was released in October 2020. Island Terrors and Sea Horrors is edited by Ethan Nahté and features twenty short stories and sixteen poems from Ethan Nahté, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Alfred  Lord Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Washinton Irving, and more.

Included are my poems “Drag Me Down to the Depths of the Sea” “A Pirate Adrift”  and “Doom of Destiny” which I have recited at many events as my pirate persona Lars Shortshanks, with The Seadog Slam piratical performing troup. Ethan asked me earlier this year if I wanted to contribute to this anthology that he was putting together and if I had any stories or poems I thought would fit with the theme of the book.

I’m really grateful for the opportunity to be included amongst so many great authors. Coleridge, Poe, Lovecraft, Stevenson, and Tennyson are some of my favorite classic poetry and prose writers and I really like Ethan Nahté’s stories and poetry. I’ve recited some of his poems which are included in this anthology at some of the pirate shows at which I’ve performed. Ethan’s writing has the quality of being able to evoke a powerfully visceral emotional response from the reader, especially in his horror stories that leave one terrified, shocked, and gripping the book,  anticipating what will happen next.

Ethan and I did an interview together about the book and other topics on internet radio station tmvcafe.com with William Snider a.k.a. Zombie Zak on his live broadcast show After Rot.  Below is  the link to the archived recording of the show.

AR394 – Larry Atchley Jr and Ethan Nahté

Also noteworthy of late, I recently joined The Fort Worth Poetry Society which was established in the year 1910 and is the oldest continuously run poetry society in the  Southwest. Steve Sanders, my friend and fellow shipmate in the Seadog Slam pirate poetry performing troupe, and former President of the Fort Worth Poetry Society invited me to join at the end of last year. I had considered joining for some time, and Steve’s urging me to become a member sealed the deal so to say. I attended my first meeting with the other members in December. We all met using Zoom which is how I will most likely continue to attend even after the Pandemic is over because the meetings are held quite far from where I live and work so it will be difficult to make it there in person most months. Here’s a link to their site: https://fortworthpoetrysociety.wordpress.com/

I’ve been re-reading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings which is something I do every few years as it’s one of my favorite fantasy books and a great influence on and inspiration of my own fantasy writing. I also have set myself the task of reading all of Robert E. Howard’s stories and poems which I started at the beginning of this year in 2021. I’ve read a lot of his work over the years but there is still much of his prolific writings that I’ve yet to read. He wrote I believe, over 300 stories and more than 100 poems so this is a considerable task to read them all, but I want to experience to entire range of his work, including historical fiction, westerns, weird west, action adventure, boxing, horror, and not just the primarily sword & sorcery Conan and Kull tales that I have mostly focused on in the past.

I am going to wrap this post up, as it’s getting quite long and I had intended on finishing and posting it a few weeks ago but things in the world and my own personal life caused me to put it off again. About those things, maybe I’ll include in my next post. Until then I bid you all to take care, stay well, healthy, safe, and in good spirits. And keep reading everything you can get your hands on.

Special Guest Tonight on TMV Cafe Internet Radio

“I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.”

Oscar Wilde

I will be a guest on the TMV Cafe internet radio show Free Pie Night, tonight, at 9:00 PM Central Standard Time. There is also a chatroom on the website where you can interact with the fans, guests and hosts of the show. Go to www.tmvcafe.com to join the fun.  I will be talking about how I got my big break of being a published author, and about my experiences writing for the shared world anthology series Heroes in Hell, created and edited by Janet Morris and Chris Morris. My story “Remember, Remember, Hell in November” was published in the book Lawyers in Hell, in 2011. I have a story, “Ragnarok & Roll”  in the latest book, Rogues in Hell, which will be published this Summer in 2012.

Also I will try to mention some of the other anthologies I have been writing for which will be published in the next few months, like Sha’Daa Pawns, created by Michael H. Hanson, and What Scares the Boogeyman, a horror anthology created by John Manning. I also have a poem called “The Shadow People”,  that will be published in the collection A Book of Night, created by Richard Groller, which will be my first poem to be published in a book. I had a couple of poems that were printed in a collection of art and poetry contributed by students, that Grapevine High School created during my senior year, but this will be the first time my poetry is released by a real publisher.

I have been busy working a lot of overtime hours at my day job, trying to pay the bills, so I haven’t had much time or energy for writing lately unfortunately. Some of my works in progress though include a fantasy novel, a fantasy adventure short story, and a story for the next book in the Sha’Daa series. I am also working on ideas and an outline for a story to submit for the next Heroes in Hell book, tentatively titled, Dreamers in Hell. My goal is to have a story included in all of the new books in the series, so I am hoping this one will get the stamp of approval from Janet and Chris. I am thinking this will be a much more  introspective sort of story than my last two. I’m bringing in a new main character, noted psychologist and spiritualist, William James, who is going to psychoanalyze Anton LaVey for his post-life identity crisis of finding himself in a hell he never believed existed, serving a fallen angel that he denied even being real. Guy Fawkes will also return again from my first two stories, and try to blow things up as always, including possibly the pearly gates of Heaven itself.  It will be a fun story to write, and I hope, to read also.

I’m behind on my blogging about the various conventions I’ve attended as a guest  in the last couple of months, so you can expect my report on ConDFW, All-Con, and The Nightmare Machine, at some point when I get around to writing those. They were all loads of fun and I met so many awesome people, as I always seem to do at cons. I really enjoyed being on the discussion panels and doing the story readings and it was an honor to be part of those events.

That’s about all that’s going on for now. I hope you will all tune in tonight to listen to me on the radio show. Also the show that airs before it at 8:00 PM CST, After Rot, is hosted by a friend of mine, who goes by the name Zombie Zak. He and his co-host Jazzy talk about all things to do with comics, movies, superheroes,  zombies and all kinds of other random stuff. It’s always a fun show, you should check it out.