As you may have noticed, prolific poster Keith Taylor hasn’t been appearing here as often as he was during the better part of 2011. That is because he has been busy as of late working a new batch of fiction pieces; after all, a guy has to eat and feed his family. But fear not, Keith says he loves blogging here on the TGR website and will be posting every chance he gets. In the meantime, here is an update on some of his upcoming fiction projects:
I’ve been working flat out in recent days on three new Kamose the Magician stories, One is slated for an anthology Darrell Schweitzer is producing – That is Not Dead — of yarns that feature aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos set in different times and places in history, The idea is that if those hideous cults and beings were really that old, and that widespread, then they’d have manifested themselves down the ages, around the world, not just in Lovecraft’s beloved New England in the early 20th century. Mine deals with a confrontation between Kamose and Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos in ancient Egypt.
Next was a story to round out a collection of Kamose yarns that I hope will be put together this year — all the ones that were published in Weird Tales plus two others that haven’t seen print yet – my working title is “The Shabti Assassin.”
Last of all, the one I’m still writing, is for Scott Oden’s planned anthology of stories about zombies in history Again, it’ll feature Kamose, but I’ll be harking back to a time some decades before the others I’ve written about him, (He achieved a greatly extended life-span in Damascus, in the reign of Pharaoh Seti I, How that occurred deserves a novel to itself, I believe, and I hope to get it written someday, He lived nearly two centuries before he finally cashed in.) This story is set in the reign of Rameses II, the Great, the one Yul Brynner played in The Ten Commandments, Kamose probably won’t be the Archpriest of Anubis as yet, just Third Prophet or some such position, An evil necromancer is raising the dead from their rest for his own purposes, Since Anubis is the funerary god and guide of souls, this would offend him considerably, and Kamose would be expected to do something about it.
If you are unfamiliar with Kamose, our buddy Deuce Richardson posted some additional background on the learned Egyptian magician over on the Conan Forums — it is definitely worth a read. And keep your eyes peeled for the new Kamose stories and for new posts from Keith here on the TGR blog.
