Wednesday evening. It could be any Wednesday. Cold out. Perhaps a spot of rain on the morrow.
I've been re-reading the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. If you don't know him, he is credited with inventing the Sword and Sorcery genre of of fiction.

He wrote over 500 stories and died at the age of 26. I find that volume of output, and many of these stories, the bulk of them, were published.

I've read other authors criticize his writing as puerile, or adolescent, but I reject such things. Who is to say these things? Some very famous authors have taken shots at him, but he died at such an early age, before he could mature, who knows what he might have created?

For myself, when I read his writing as a teenager, Howard, more than any other of his peers or those who followed, wrote with such fire, such intensity, at his best, he seemed to be writing of things he'd really seen, of fantastic cities and beautiful women and monsters and creatures of the outer cosmos, that he had experienced. Yes, he wrote for the pulps, an artisan, producing huge volumes at penurious rates to keep body and soul together. But, critics be damned whether named King or Moorcock, who published "legitimate" works with publishing houses, but despite that, between them they produced only a handful of books that had nearly the sheer pulse pounding impact, the visceral power of Howard's Texas based prose.

Say what you will about him, he was a true story teller. A yarn spinner, and by the gods he could make you feel the sweat in your hauberk, the blood pounding in your veins when you slashed and bled and sometimes died in worlds of his imaginings.

He is not as known as Edgar Rice Burroughs, or dozens of other writers of that era an style, but his creation CONAN, that singular character is ubiquitous, around the world his name has carried for all these decades. And for that alone he should be honored.

I too am a simple artisan, a craftsman whose work I hope will entertain you, excite you, carry you to places you might not otherwise have journeyed to. I don't compare myself to him or to any others.

I do know one thing, now in a different season of my life, having known the travails of outrageous fortune, of having had loves and lost them, had good and bad, flights of fancy and depths of despair, that as I go back through his stories, some of them, not all, but some, carry me still on dragons wings to the dark lands of the nether gods, to the green sward of ancient ruins where dragons lurk and beautiful women fight beside their warrior kings or thieves.

His works have fallen out of copyright, so many of them are available for free, and to ride on the wings of the dark beings without a tithe seems unfair, but such is the fate of those who create and go to dust, as all we must too. Read him sometime when youth fires your imagination and that damned idiot critic can be shut up for a short time. Then come and fly with these long ago written tales and enjoy the ride.

Blood and damnation they will pay afore yet I fall......