Who’s to blame for this mess: Dirck de Lint is not the Dutch actor of almost exactly the same name, nor is he related to well-known Canadian author Charles de Lint (except maybe in some very distant and completely unresearched way, because it’s not that common a name). He is a large anthropoid of the sort common to North America, is a very minor scholar on fountain pens, if you can believe it, and fancies that he’d like to one day make as much of a name for himself in writing as at least one other person with the same last name.
It should be noted too that Dirck de Lint has never written about Dirck de Lint in the third person quite as much as he has done in these two short paragraphs, and he’s not entirely comfortable with the exercise. The remainer of this page will thus shift back into a more companionable first-person voice.
You can find me making noises in a regular way on Twitter, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, and I keep up another blog which once had stream of consciousness screeds about (mostly) fountain pen doings until I got serious about writing, and now its almost completely just declarations of word counts (and yet, somehow, still has a following). You can find things I’ve published elsewhere linked to in my bibliography, and somehow I’ve ended up with a page on the Internet Science Fiction Database and a passing mention on the Internet Movie Database.
What’s happening here: The writing at which I would like to make a name for myself is, mainly, Horror. Not the gore-based sort (although there’s no absolute injunction against spurting fluids, unlikely growths, and unpleasant transfixings) but rather the sort of horror that lies under the heading of “weird.” This has been described as bringing about the sensation of discovering that everything in your house has been replaced with a duplicate; less a yelping jump than a persistent qualm. This breed of Horror tends to overlap with Fantasy, so one may expect to find my name stuck on things of that genre as well. Thanks to a childhood spent sucking up Star Wars, H.G. Wells and H. Beam Piper (with a finishing dose of William Gibson when he was the Next Big Thing), there is some dabbling in SF as well, but an inability to keep ahead of any given technological development curve means the S is more likely to stand for “Speculative” than “Science.”
The ideal is to present at least two short stories a month here; practically, that is massively optimistic until someone actually starts paying me to write instead of performing what is in essence data-entry in a comfortable setting. Have I mentioned that I have a Patreon account?
An explanation of this “Living Skies” malarkey: The province in which I live declared itself, for the purposes of licence plate motto, “Land of the Living Skies” about a decade ago; this is a phrase which certainly evokes the kind of changeable weather and cloud patterns we get around here. It also instantly stuck me as intensely sinister, to the point I’ve been suggesting an unofficial sub-motto of “eyes up, heads down.” The concept it brings to my mind has appeared in a wonderfully creepy bit of art you may well have seen as a mislabeled thing on Facebook (so let me link you to the creator’s page so you may see it). Since I still live here, and since my writing leans in the direction it does, I thought I would adopt the motto into this site’s title. After all, I’m crouching under them as I write, feeling the shifting, numberless eyes upon me whenever I’m near a window….
All writing on this site, unless otherwise indicated, is ©Dirck de Lint. I may occasionally drag in a photograph for embellishment, too, but it’s more likely to be something with an open licence from Wikimedia Commons (with citation in the metadata if not the caption).
Dirck de Lint's Missives from the Living Skies 