DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

Writer/poet Francesca Forrest, who is also part of my volunteer “staff” for Mythic Delirium, is holding a guessing game contest. Enter it to win free copies of Issue 23 and Issue 24. For further details, click over to her blog.

Today, zany Tony Smith of Hugo Award-winning StarShipSofa posted my reading of Eric James Stone’s Nebula Award-winning, Hugo Award-nominated novelette “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made.” If you want a listen, click here. When Tony first asked me to make this recording, “Leviathan” was still

After a week full of rejections for both new poems and new stories — so it goes — I finished up with a nice poetry sale, to Strange Horizons. The poem is called “La Donna del Lago,” and it’s dedicated to Claire Cooney. It was

The first issue of Inkscrawl has just appeared, featuring a creepy little poem called “Unland, Unlife,” which I wrote based on a dream my wife had. Several other good pieces in this issue, though I feel a need to call special attention to Rose Lemberg’s

The latest podcast from Hugo Award-winning StarShipSofa features the second installment of Diane Severson’s Poetry Planet, which, in the name of exploring the theme of “first contact,” contains two of my poems, “The Thing in the Gutter” and “On Discovery of a Habitable World.” The

Last week Tor Books released Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, edited by Kevin J. Anderson. Its publication marks a nice milestone for me as an editor that I feel the need to make a little note of. The book reprints Saladin Ahmed’s “Hooves and the Hovel

My poem “Splendours to Devour” has just appeared in the June issue of Ideomancer. It’s a rather quirky end-of-the-world poem, inspired in part by a conversation with my pal Nicole Kornher-Stace. If you like it, I hope you’ll leave a comment there.

Last week I mentioned a poetry sale to a market so new it didn’t yet have an URL. Well, inkscrawl now has a URL, http://www.inkscrawl.net/, where submission guidelines can be found. Go check them out.

My brain is scrambled by the opposing forces of a virus invasion and the drugs that fight them, but I’m just coherent enough to make mention that I’ve sold another of the “Claire-dare” poems, “Heart’s Delight,” to Not One of Us. This poem in particular

Just a quick note that next edition of “Poetry Planet” at StarShipSofa will, as I understand, contain two poems by me, that you could call Golden Oldies: “On Discovery of a Habitable World” (which is, actually, the first sf poem I ever wrote, though it