DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

Laird Barron, one of my favorite horror writers of all time and a really generous guy (don’t miss his latest, Swift to Chase), started a series of posts over at his journal simply titled “Authors to Read.” Part I, from late February, highlighted great books

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

I’m very pleased about my final schedule of readings and panels at Readercon in Boston this weekend. Anita and I look forward to seeing old friends and making new ones.   We’ll also have copies of all our books with us (our big push will

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

This past week, Publishers Weekly reviewed my new short story collection, The Spider Tapestries, and I feel like one lucky author, because whoever wrote the review seems to have understood my super-strange little book on every level. The gist of the review: “Elegant language and

The second Mythic Delirium anthology, which I co-edited with Anita, came out at the very end of 2015, while I was in a frenzy of e-book preparation and mailing. When we released the first anthology in the series, waaaay back in 2014 (heh) we were

So I drop in a heap at the end of 2015 feeling like I’ve packed several years’ worth of creative living into one. This ain’t the first time for that, but even judged my often hyper-busy standard this has been a barnstormer of a year,