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BACK TO MAIN
Welcome to Autumn Planet
 Welcome to my special Autumnal website (October Mood). In New England, it's called Fall. As I discovered while building this website (an afterthought in my webplex), I've been an October Poet most of my life. I write with passion year 'round, but in early Fall I really feel the juices flowing. I've picked some of my work here, based on a certain autumnal resonance.
NOTE: This page was formerly part of a separate website titled Autumn Planet. The original linked website titles are now the folder headings you see on the starting page (MAIN). I have chosen to retain much of the original flavoring for the overall Autumn into Winter months. [JTC]
Authors and Readers Thrill. I've been a poet and author for well over half a century, and I always relish October as my favorite month of the year. I've lived for long periods in several countries on two continents, and I know the coming of autumn to be a universal cause of gladness, oddly another 'quickening' (as our forbears called the waking of the earth from its winter sleep). I'll pursue this line of poetic thought on the About and Autumn Day pages of this site. For now, let's join the spirit of the late, great Ray Bradbury in celebrating the seasonal turning of the earth, and our lives upon it.
Focus: Writings. The purpose of this website is to assemble— for myself and for any willing and interested readers—a celebration of the Fall season (as one calls Autumn in New England). I had intended to just link up a few stories here, and found myself picking through my long ensemble of DarkSF and other writings. As I point out on the DarkSF website, I coined this term not to describe gruesome or violent tales, not even necessarily scary ones. The 'dark' in DarkSF refers to the luxurious texture of the finest art and poetry rendered by the artisans of imaginative fiction. As Ray Bradbury did with a shrug, and laughed about it (and the purist in me sort of cringes, but here we go): it's an ehilarating blend of fantasy and logic, like mixing different colors so they swirl and glisten in the can before we dip the brush to paint. DarkSF isn't about cheap thrills or shallow characters, but the finest speculative fiction and film from Gilgamesh and the Odyssey to Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and much, much else besides.
The October Country. Ray Bradbury, a great author (Fahrenheit 451, etc.) and one of my favorites over the years, combined poetry and prose in his celebrations of U.S. life, and his dreams of a future that was by turns terrifying, wondrous, alien, and thoroughly human. He brought us The Golden Apples of the Sun, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The October Country, all of them anthems to a world now lost that lives on in memory. On this site, I will collect the harvest of my own life's work, or at least the subset I call DarkSF. I had intended for this little site, with its bookshop, to simply bring together a few literally Hallow E'en stories and some autumn poetry, but I soon realized that the spirit of autumn melancholy and joy lives in much of my work.
Music, Article, and More. I will liven up and enrich your Autumn experience here—should you choose to visit, and stay, to enjoy, and hopefully return again—with a button-box selection of odds and ends that might grace a dusty drawer under a cobweb, whose geometry gleams with moonbeams, just before midnight in a creaky, whispering attic somewhere out in the middle of nowhere—or maybe just as haunting and far more noisy a dark corner in a tall old brick building high above a lamp-lit street corner in a great city someplace (the sort of image Edward Hopper might have painted). Please stand by—there is (much) more to come.
Legal. All of my work is registered with the Library of Congress as my intellectual property, as Copyright © 2017 by John T. Cullen aka Jean-Thomas Cullen aka John Argo aka (etc) (year and title as appropriate) going at least as far back as the 1960s, 1970s, etc for various works.
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