DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

For the few and the proud who watch for it, I won’t be recording a “Tour of the Abattoir” column this month for Tales to Terrify. I had spent most of last week wrestling with the Clockwork Phoenix 4 submission pile, with plans to draft

At this point, if you haven’t heard from myself, Anita, Sally or Sabrina about your submission to Clockwork Phoenix 4, either you are a finalist or you slipped through the cracks somehow. Feel free to query at clockworkphoenix@gmail.com. If you are a finalist, I’m afraid

We finished up with more than 1,450 submissions in the pile. That’s by far the most received for any of the books in the series. I expect to have all the finalists chosen by the end of the weekend … Then it’s time to select

So yet another step in the Clockwork Phoenix Kickstarter reward process done. Next up, the special chapbook edition of Cherie Priest’s The Immigrant. Click photos to see the Facebook album.

Anita has completed the Clockwork Phoenix pins promised as rewards in the Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter. Check ’em out! (You can see more pictures at the Facebook page for her craft store, The Fairie Emporium.)

Get ’em while they’re hot.

Friday I launched a promotional giveaway of my three short stories available through Kindle. It continues through Tuesday night. Here’s what’s happened, what it may or may not mean, and what’s meaningless but definitely fun. I have six e-books uploaded to Kindle. Three of them

In honor of the wickedly dubious achievement of the three volumes of Clockwork Phoenix having sold a total of 666 copies in e-book form as of today, I am making my three strange short stories on Kindle (“She Who Runs,” “Sleepless, Burning Life,” “Stolen Souls“)

My tongue-in-cheek anti-Persephone-poem poem “Machine Guns Loaded with Pomegranate Seeds” appeared today at Strange Horizons. My thanks to Sonya Taaffe for giving this piece a home. My thanks also to Amal El-Mohtar for this delightful Twitter review: Only @mythicdelirium could make me burst out laughing

The latest Tales to Terrify podcast contains my newest “Tour of the Abattoir” column, in which I review stories from the first two issue of John Joseph Adams’ new publishing venture Nightmare Magazine, by Jonathan Maberry, Genevieve Valentine, Sarah Langan and Desirina Boskovich.