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At the beginning of a new year, many people often make resolutions to follow a healthy diet. mental_floss compiled a list of the “favorite workday snacks” of nine different authors. Jurassic Park novelist Michael Crichton enjoyed ham sandwiches while We Are Pirates author Daniel Handler enjoys raw carrots.

The other seven writers include Agatha Christie, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, John Steinbeck, Stephen King, Emily Dickinson, and H.P. Lovecraft. What do you think? Which snacks help you to stay focused while you’re writing?

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Have you ever written a scary story? In honor of the Halloween season, we are interviewing horror writers to learn about the craft of scaring readers.

We sat down with comics creator I.N.J. Culbard to discuss his new graphic novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Culbard adapted the story from H.P. Lovecraft’s novel. Check out the highlights from our interview below…

Q: How did you land your first book deal?
A: Back in 2004 I was enrolled in The New Recruits programme set up by Dark Horse comics. I had two stories appear in an anthology there and a short while after that, 2000AD publisher Rebellion published a short strip of mine called “Monsters in The Megazine.” Following the work I did there I got in contact with artist D’Israeli, who put me in contact with a long time collaborator of his, Ian Edginton.

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The 01 Publishing team hopes to raise $5,000 to produce print copies of the anthology, Whispers From the Abyss.

The writers who contributed the 33 short stories drew inspiration from famed horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. The book was designed “specifically for readers on the go.” We’ve embedded a video about the project above. Here’s more from the Kickstarter page:

“Whispers From the Abyss is a collection of Lovecraft inspired short stories. The anthology was released last year for the Kindle and was well received. Of the entire 01Publishing catalog, we have been consistently asked by fans to bring this title to print.”

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Writer Tro Rex and artist Eyo Bella are raising funds on Kickstarter for a kids’ book series called Littlest Lovecraft. The first book will be an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft‘s 1928 short story “The Call of Cthulhu.” We’ve embedded a video about the project above–what do you think?

Here’s more about the project: “We want to share Lovecraft’s works with a broader, younger audience that may have a hard time getting into the original text. It is our hope that our generation of Lovecraft enthusiasts will find our books useful in sharing their love with young Lovecraftians in the making!”

Welcome to our Kickstarter Publishing Project of the Week, a feature exploring how authors and publishers are using the fundraising site to raise money for book projects. If you want to start your own project, check out How To Use Kickstarter to Fund Your Publishing Project.

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Novelist Nathan Shumate has dominated the Smashwords section of our Self-Published Bestsellers List for three weeks with Space Eldritch, a pulp space opera collection inspired by H. P. Lovecraft.

To help GalleyCat readers discover self-published authors, we have compiled lists of the top eBooks in three major marketplaces for self-published digital books: Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords.

We update these lists every week, tracking how writers perform inside these booming marketplaces. You can read all the lists below, complete with links to each book. If you are an author, check out our Free Sites to Promote Your eBook post and our How To Sell Your Self-Published Book in Bookstores post and our How to Pitch Your Book to Online Outlets post.

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"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, right? Fear sounds like a great topic for a horror writer's blog, especially during October. Just don't tell anyone I haven't finished a story since March, okay? Besides, I'm a human being before I'm a horror writer. And this human being has faced a lot of fear in his life. Note the past tense: faced.

Last night, someone very dear to me asked if I was "scared" of the future. I took a minute to feel the the question, weigh it a little, and try to understand my feelings before I responded.

No. Not scared. I don't fear the future anymore. While I wrestle a bit with the unknown, it's a much healthier relationship than fear. Fear paralyzes and leads to poor judgement. Fear kills dreams and clogs the pathways to achieving goals. Maybe a better word than fear is anticipation, that heightened sense of reality when expecting something important, something big. Something challenging but wholly good. 

And the future is good. Life is good, even when it is a struggle. Even when awful tragedy happens, I still have the choice to focus on hope and goodness and the gifts I've been given. Yes, it may be impossible to feel hope and goodness in the midst of the tragic event. I know--I've been there. But the lesson looks different seven months later. None of us make it through life without scars, but scars become stories, and stories remind us of the preciousness of each day. Besides--when "bad things" happen, they will do so whether I allow fear to eat away my life or not. An abundance of fear makes no one safer. That is the lie that fear whispers to us. 

Wasted energy, if you ask me. I'd rather save my energy for the road ahead.

So how do I feel about the future? Hopeful. Filled with a healthy level of anticipation. Ready to roll up my sleeves and go to work. It's good.

Dorchester Publishing closed earlier this year and sold 1,000 titles to Amazon. Now the publisher is working to transfer rights back to its authors, but they have a long list of writers that they cannot contact.

Click here to see the list of authors Dorchester hopes to contact. If you know any of these authors, help them connect with Dorchester and complete the revision process. Oddly enough, the list includes a few authors who have passed away, including Louis L’Amour, Robert Louis Stevenson and H.P. Lovecraft.

Check it out: “Thank you for your support over the last 75 years. At this time, we are completing the reversion process, transferring all titles back to their respective authors. Though we have made great strides, our research has uncovered a number of authors for whom we have no contact information. In addition, there are a number of titles without corresponding authors. To complete this reversion process, we will need your help.” (Via Stacia Kane & Sarah Weinman)

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World domination just got even cuter. Cute Cthulhu Necklace is made just for you–Cthulhu fan. You alone can harness the power of the Pendant and bring the world to its knees. This little creature is based off a H.P. Lovecraft story Call of Cthulhu. He is a green squid chibi and I call him Cutethulhu.
The glass cameo pendant is set in a 1″ x 1″ antique bronze heart shaped bezel.It comes with a Antique inspired bronze chain. The chain is 24″ in length but can easily be adjusted to any length.

Today is the birthday of the late horror novelist H. P. Lovecraft. You can explore his life and work at The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

In honor of Lovecraft’s 122nd birthday, this GalleyCat editor collected some practical writing advice from the prolific author, all published in a 1920 essay called “Literary Composition.”

Here’s an excerpt; it still works after all these years: “All attempts at gaining literary polish must begin with judicious reading, and the learner must never cease to hold this phase uppermost. In many cases, the usage of good authors will be found a more effective guide than any amount of precept. A page of [Joseph Addison] or of [Washington Irving] will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of [Edgar Allan Poe]‘s will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook. Let every student read unceasingly the best writers.”

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What if Dr. Seuss had adapted H.P. Lovecraft‘s horrific masterpiece, The Call of Cthulhu? As you can see by the pages embedded above, artist DrFaustusAU has undertaken the task of creating a Seuss-ian version of the novel.

Follow this link to read all the sample pages. Below, we’ve embedded another compelling page.

Here’s more from the artist: “More Call of Cthulhu pages will be up shortly. I have returned to my mild-mannered day job this week, so I have had to momentarily turn my attention to a classroom full of screaming teenagers. Lovecraft fans truly are some of the best people in the world, and your encouragement has been awesome – so as I say, the adaptation will definitely continue.” (Via io9)

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H. P. Lovecraft never published his full-length fantasy novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Jason B. Thompson intends to rectify that with his graphic novel adaptation.

Above, we’ve embedded a video about the project. In addition to Dream-Quest, he has also created comic versions of Celephais, The White Ship and The Strange High House. He has already released these comics on the web, but hopes to go back, re-touch the artwork and print all four stories in one collective volume.

Here’s more about the project: “To cover printing and shipping costs, I need your help raising $10,000. I’m taking Kickstarter pledges of all levels, and I’m offering rewards ranging from a printed copy of the book, to original artwork and sketches, to a poster map of the Dreamlands, to a never-before-printed Lovecraftian RPG adventure inspired by ‘Hypnos,’ ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’ and ‘The Green Meadow.’ If you’re really inspired, for $1000 and up I’ll even do a complete new comic of the short Lovecraft story of your choice!”

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I remember watching American Beauty, and Kevin Spacey asks his creepy, drug-dealing neighbor if he can stop by and get that movie they were talking about. “Re-Animator,” he says. At the time, I just enjoyed watching American Beauty. I didn’t think about the hyphenated words “Re-Animator” until several years later, when Matt Dobie—my B-horror-movie-loving little bro—said, “I’m coming over. We’re watching Re-Animator.”

The first time I watched Re-Animator, I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. The movie takes place in a hospital. There’s a normal med student (Dan), who’s dating the med school dean’s daughter (Megan). Then there’s the not-so-normal med student, Herbert West (played by the always creepy Jeffrey Combs). Herbert West is obsessed with the idea of re-animating dead tissue. It starts innocently enough: small animals. It moves on to humans (of course it does; it’s a horror movie). Everything kind of goes to gory hell from there …

On one hand, Re-Animator is a horror movie. But on the other hand—the preferred hand—it’s a comedy, in the same way that Evil Dead and Army of Darkness are comedies. They’re campy, gross, and totally inappropriate. One of the best lines in Re-Animator takes place when Dan comes home to find his cat dead in West’s freezer. West explains he was going to tell Dan about the cat when he got home. He didn’t want to leave a note … “What would a note say, Dan? Cat dead; details later?”

As I’ve mentioned, I recently revisited some of the so-called literary horror greats—Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and H.P. Lovecraft. I vaguely remember during the opening credits of Re-Animator, something about “H.P. Lovecraft.” I didn’t know Lovecraft had written a short story entitled “Herbert West—Re-Animator” until I picked up a collection of his work, and poof! There it was: Re-Animator, in literary form!

Lovecraft is not for everyone. He uses huge, antiquated words (you can’t judge him on this, since he wrote “Re-Animator” in the early 1900s). Sentences in Lovecraft stories can span anywhere from four to sixteen lines. I’m not kidding. Sometimes, I had to go back and read a line over, because by the end of it, I would forget how it had started. However, the man is good with the creep factor. It’s in the lengthy descriptions and the way he makes his narrators feel something bad behind them—all the time. “Herbert West—Re-Animator” is no exception.

Okay, it’s true: there is no decapitated, reanimated head running around (with the help of his body, of course), molesting young women, as in the film version. That said, there is a living head, running around, giving orders in the short story, so how is that really different? (I’m joking.) My advice to you: read the H.P. Lovecraft short story first; then, check out the cult classic B-horror movie, Re-Animator. You will then understand that random bit of dialogue in American Beauty, and personally, I believe you will be better for it.

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I know, it's the third weekend and this is update #2. So I'm a slacker.

Anyway, I managed to ship off my third Write 1 / Sub 1 entry this week, a flash story titled "The Fisherman's Son" to Cezanne's Carrot. I subbed another story, a rewritten flash piece, to 100 Stories for Queensland, but I'd written it last year, so no "working ahead" here.

I also received my first rejection for a Write 1 / Sub 1 story (one other piece is still "out there"). But, as the wheel turns, I did place a pseudo-Lovecraftian tale, "The Wings of Çatalhöyük" with the Gloaming Magazine. I guess that's one of those give/take sort of things.

Here's a little inspiration for "Wings" (you can click the link for the rest of the article):

The vulture frescos at Çatalhöyük may show excarnation practices. Bodies were exposed, as in Tibet or among the Jains, in open funeral houses, to the tearing beak of the griffin vulture which stripped the skeletons of soft tissue.

Now if that doesn't get you thinking about something weird...

Over at SnagFilms, you can watch a free documentary about the life and legacy of the great horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft. We’ve embedded a preview of Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown above–follow this link to watch the whole film.

The film traces Lovecraft’s influence on modern writers like Neil Gaiman (Coraline),  Caitlin Kiernan (“Daughter of Hounds”) and Peter Straub (“Ghost Story”).”

Here’s more about the documentary: “The influence of his Cthulhu mythos can be seen in film (Re-animator, Hellboy, and Alien), games (The Call of Cthulhu role playing enterprise), music (Metallica, Iron Maiden) and pop culture in general.  But what led an Old World, xenophobic gentleman to create one of literature’s most far-reaching mythologies?  What attracts even the minds of the 21st century to these stories of unspeakable abominations and cosmic gods?”

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Artist Murray Groat has drawn an great series of imaginary book covers mashing up the Herge’s  Tintin with the horror novels of H.P. Lovecraft.

io9 has more: “Tintin is known for visiting exotic locales, and artist Murray Groat has plopped the adventurer in such fantastical destinations as Innsmouth and R’leyh. Watch Herge’s boy adventurer run afoul of the Reanimator and Cthulhu. Seventy-seven shuffling shambling shifty-eyed shoggoths!”

See all the images at this link. If you want to read the stories behind the art follow these free digital links: “Herbert West—Reanimator,” At the Mountains of Madness, “The Call of Cthulhu,” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”

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The Big Book of Horror: 21 Tales to Make You Tremble

Adapted by Alissa Heyman

Illustrated by Pedro Rodriguez

Sterling Publishing, 2006

ISBN: 978-1-4027-3860-9

Collections of 'spooky' short stories for middle-grade readers are easy to come by, but you don't frequently happen upon a collection for kids that features 19th century classic horror writers.  We were unbelievably excited to find this volume while cruising our local bookstore!

The book features 21 classic horror stories by a plethora of famous writers: The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe; The Outsider by H.P. Lovecraft; The Vampire by John William Polidori; and The Hand by Guy de Maupassant, to name just a few.  The tales are separated into four sections: Death,  Disease and Madness, The Power of the Mind, and Evil.