30th Anniversary Celebration Interview and Sale: Part One
Mike Allen / Friday, September 23rd, 2022 / No Comments »1992 was the year I graduated from Virginia Tech, and also the year Anita and I got married. We celebrated that anniversary with a two-part adventure; the first part took us on an artists’ retreat by beautiful Burke’s Garden in Tazewell County, Virginia; the second part saw us in Pennsylvania, visiting the Mutter Museum, witnessing the Philadelphia performance of Rammstein’s Stadium Tour, and making music of sorts at Ringing Rocks Park.
That anniversary, however, is not the one I’m celebrating here on my long-time, often-neglected homepage. That same summer of ’92, my first published short story appeared in a small press magazine — and from there began a long and strange career.
Inspired by “The Button Bin” and “The Quiltmaker”
I wanted to celebrate 30 years of this life in some way; at first I contemplated a reading but the logistics were daunting and any announcement seemed like it would be easy to miss in the continuing climate of alarming news and social media chaos. I settled on something more permanent and in a way more casual — but even this I could not have pulled off without considerable help. My thanks to Sydney Macias, Assistant Editor for Mythic Delirium Books, who came up with questions that could guide my ramblings as I went on a lengthy, multipart look back. My thanks too for the especially fun contributions from Cassandra Khaw, Carlos Hernandez and C. S. E. Cooney, who fed words and characters of mine from more than twenty years worth of short stories into Midjourney and provided me with inspiring results that could serve as illustrations for my odyssey.
It made sense to me as well to make the fruit of this thirty-year labor available cheap with an early Halloween discount:
Dark Fantasy and Horror E-books: 99¢ Discount Sale!
A Map of How My Stories Connect
… and what books they appear in.
Added note: “The Comforter” appears in the anthology A Sinister Quartet
The 30th Anniversary Interview: Part One
How has your writing changed between the start of your career and now?
I think back on the version of me that existed in 1990, 91, 92, meandering toward the end of my days as an undergraduate, starting to get somewhat serious about submitting stories and poems to magazines, and the preconceptions I had then about how writing worked, how publishing worked, how readers chose what they want to read, and I can’t help but think that every single one of those preconceptions has proven wrong in some way.
That’s not so surprising. In those pre-household internet, pre-social media days, growing up in Appalachia, I didn’t meet anyone who shared my particular set of interests in significant numbers until late high school and college, and even then my specific set of eccentricities made me the square peg — though I note with tongue-in-cheek that I was more like a multi-pointed star of some sort, really, when it came to fitting in. Certainly I had no one to compare notes to when it came to getting published.
Inspired by “The Spider Tapestries”
I did receive some vital encouragement from my creative writing professors at Virginia Tech, Ed Falco and Lucinda Roy — especially Falco. Though I was just one of many hundreds of their students over the years, those interactions meant a lot when it came to focusing my resolve, as I didn’t start college thinking of writing as a lifestyle choice.
I also honed storytelling skills running a four-year long Dungeons and Dragons campaign, that served as the locus of my social life, and ended on the final day of my senior year. One of the consequences of my increasing need to devote spare time to straight up writing is that gaming fell by the wayside. Back then, who would have thought?
From one angle, it was a small miracle that I made that first short story sale right as I graduated. (Hokie Class of ’92!) And yet, if I’m being honest, I think that, viewed from an angle of quality, those very first small press, pay-in-copy short story sales that I pulled off thirty years ago happened before they should have. (My first monetary payment happened two years later: $10 for a two-line poem, ha ha!) I sold those stories during the desktop publishing revolution that enabled a proliferation of zines of all kinds, creating a proving ground for aspiring writers — since essentially anyone with access to the right software and a sturdy laser printer could become an editor and publisher. I mean no disparagement by that; after all, that’s how my own path to being and editor and publisher eventually materialized.
Inspired by “Let There Be Darkness”
But, were I to receive any of those stories in my inbox today as a submission to an anthology, I’d reject them without thinking too hard about it. They have imaginative moments but they’re pretty disheveled in the prose and plot departments.
What those early successes did do was encourage me to keep trying in the face of many subsequent rejections, and gradually, with practice, get better. I sometimes fret as to whether writers getting started in the 2020s have any equivalent environment for joining the game at the entry level, at least when it comes to over-the-transom encouragement to refine one’s craft. I’m aware that there are all sorts of information and support networks available for writers that weren’t so easy to find thirty years ago, but networking doesn’t help everyone equally.
Those early successes also set me up for a bit of a humbling once I enrolled in the M.A. in Creative Writing program at Hollins College (soon to become Hollins University). Here’s a thing you should never do: submit your already-published work to your critique group, thinking this will result in a round of admiring comments. Nope! I got to hear all about the story’s flaws. That brief embarrassment turned into a vital lesson that I had more work to do.
At the very end of my year at Hollins, I wrote the beginning of a novelette that would prove — five years later! — to be my first professional fiction sale (at least as some define professional). For the record, it was “Stolen Souls,” which you can read nowadays as its own e-book or as part of The Spider Tapestries.
Inspired by “The Spider Tapestries”
I learned that above all else, the key to pursuing writing as any sort of career or side hustle has to be perseverance. Don’t bank all your hopes on any one piece. Keep trying. Seek out feedback, and use what feels right for what your creation needs. Accept that every draft has room for improvement, and learn how to make those improvements. Being a writer requires holding two thoughts in one’s head essentially simultaneously, that the things you create are amazing and deserve to be showcased, and that the things you create are raw clay that require extensive refinement.
I suppose the main difference between my writing then and now comes with all the accumulated lessons in between. The inspirations still spark from more or less the same places: hallucinatory art, heavy metal music, dreams, disturbing life experiences.
