Tag: The Art of Writing

By DMG Byrnes

Now I lay me down to sleep,
To prepare for eve and darkness, deep.
Should blackness come for me this night,
It will meet a vicious fight.

As I lay me down to sleep,
I arm for nightmares as they creep.
Waiting to slip into sleeping mind.
When I find them, I shall not be kind.

Here I lay me down to sleep,
That soul may rest and till morning, keep.
Defy the night and its reaching claws
Slip through its fingers and snapping jaws.

 

Paulus Moreelse self-portrait from the Rijksmuseum

I needed an image of a Renaissance self portrait for a recent post on my blog,  but having made an expensive mistake once, I’ve become hyper vigilant about sourcing free images.

In my search for digital images I could use free and clear, I made two discoveries worth sharing. First, I stumbled across Open Culture, which proclaims to be “the best free cultural and educational media on the web.” There, I found links to over twenty world-famous museums that make images of their collections available on-line.

Museum in Valencia, Spain. Photo by Margit Wallnery via pixabay.

Essentially, it’s possible to see a significant portion of the world’s great art with the ease of a few keystrokes. While this isn’t the same as visiting the Museum of New Zealand in person, for those of us in North America, it’s a lot cheaper…

Pigeons From Hell    by Robert E. Howard  (1938 Weird Tales)

Tuesday’s Tale of Terror  January 26, 2015

Come to the old south, to Blassenville Manor. Who doesn’t love a Southern Gothic horror story?  Blassenville Manor is long abandoned when two young men stumble upon this decaying mansion and decide to spend the night.

‘The old deserted house stimulated their imagination with its suggestion of antebellum splendor and ultimate decay. They left the automobile beside the rutty road, and as they went up the winding walk of crumbling bricks, almost lost in the tangle of rank growth, pigeons rose from the balustrades in a fluttering, feathery crowd and swept away with a low thunder of beating wings.

 ‘The oaken door sagged on broken hinges. Dust lay thick on the floor of the wide, dim hallway, on the broad steps of the stair that mounted up from the hall…

The Eschatologist is the fifth novella from Australian horror author and artist, Greg Chapman.

This post-apocalyptic horror novella, centers on a family being pursued by a murderous prophet after the world has been toppled by a biblical apocalypse.

David Brewer is trying to keep his family alive in a world torn asunder by a Biblical apocalypse. Yet there is salvation, in the guise of a stranger who offers survivors sanctuary. All they have to do is declare their faith in God’s final – and bloody – plan.

Chapman is the author of the novellas Torment, The Noctuary, The Last Night of October and the short story collection, Vaudeville and Other Nightmares. He is also an artist, with his comic book illustrations gracing the pages of MidnightEcho magazine and his graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times, with Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton, winning the Bram…