DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

I am celebrating an important day for one of Mythic Delirium Books’ authors by sharing that both of the original stories that Theodora Goss wrote for her collection of fiction and poetry Snow White Learns Witchcraft are getting reprinted in year’s best collections. Both stories

Even though this news has been out for a couple of weeks, Anita and I are still thrilled to share it: our collection of stories and poems from Theodora Goss, Snow White Learns Witchcraft, is a finalist for the 2020 Locus Award for Best Collection,

It’s not been easy, being a journalist working from home during the COVID-19 crisis; and now I’m journalist placed on unpaid furlough for a week because of the dent that same crisis has made in advertising purchases. However! One positive development is that it gives

After a couple of years of what has felt to me like relative dormancy, I actually have a reasonably extensive list of shiny new stories and poems to highlight for the consideration of those who concern themselves with nominating and voting for awards, genre-related and

I put up a long post at the Mythic Delirium Books website about the World Fantasy Award nominations for my anthology Clockwork Phoenix 5 and for Rachael K. Jones’s story in it, “The Fall Shall Further the Flight in Me.” In that entry, I wrote

I’ve often broken the informal “three things make a blog post” law, but this time around I fully intended to combine three things in one post, heh. Thing One: I’m delighted that Clockwork Phoenix 5 made the 2016 Locus Recommending Reading List and thus is

Overall, 2016 was a pretty mixed year for us. We lost our dog, Loki, a sweet soul who’d been the cheerfully goofy center of our household since 2003. I had injury-related health issues that haven’t fully gone away and Anita had an unwelcome surprise on

Anita and I will be at the World Fantasy Convention this weekend, primarily to cheer on C.S.E. Cooney, whose book from our imprint, Bone Swans: Stories, is up for the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection against some very stiff competition. Our fingers are crossed

Last time I wrote an update, Anita and I were about to drive up to Readercon in Boston. A whole lot has happened since, some of it fun, most of it not fun at all, but for purposes of this update I’m sticking to the

Since mid-April, I’ve started a new chapter.   Not so much in any particular writing project, of which I have several ongoing, but in my writing life as a whole.   This “new chapter” feeling comes not from fresh goals I’ve set for myself, but