DESCENT INTO LIGHT

Tales to Terrify is the new sister podcast to StarShipSofa, focused exclusively on horror.

Madman Tony C. Smith invited me to contribute a monthly column to Tales to Terrify. I just finished recording the first installment. I’m calling it “Tour of the Abattoir.” Said abattoir being my brain, as many of the characters from my stories could attest.

I hope folks enjoy it. I’m also grateful that Tony is a patient madman because (ulp!) it’s two weeks late…

Earlier this week I was contacted out of the blue by Denmark denizen Knud Larn, the editor of an old school sf fanzine called Fandom Forever, distributed by the Fantasy Amateur Press Association. “There is too little poetry in fanzines nowadays,” he said, made a nice offer and asked if I would contribute a new poem and four reprints. And so, I’m pleased to report that my poem “A Prayer,” a part of the “Claire-dare” series from 2010, will be appearing in Larn’s next issue, due out Feb. 1 (my birthday!) He’s also reprinting my sf-tinged poems “Strange Cargo,” “retrovirus,” “Tithonus on the Shore of Ocean” and “Charon Finds a Woman on the Gridshore,” specifically the “preferred text” versions from my 2008 collection The Journey to Kailash.

I’ve had another long term “surprise sale” recently come to a conclusion just this past Monday. Back in May I read my poem “Sisyphus Crawls” (another Claire-dare piece, now available in the latest issue of Fantastique Unfettered) aloud to the audience at No Shame Theatre here in Roanoke. Afterward a fellow named Luke Davis approached me and told me he liked the poem so much he’d happily pay me for a hand-written, framed version of it.

It took me a long time to get around to doing this. Part of it was all the work I was doing rewriting my first novel. Part of it was that, though I have a vestigial visual arts background — I started college as an art major, didn’t figure out writing was what really interested me more than anything else until my senior year — creating this piece was something now so far outside my usual paradigm that I couldn’t quite get my mind around it.

But I finally made it happen:

As part of my rather complex leap into the e-book breach, I’ve mentioned that I plan to release a small collection of my previously published horror stories.

Toward that end, paper cutout artist and frequent Mythic Delirium contributor Paula Friedlander made this for me after reading the stories I plan to include:

I think what Paula does is fascinating — and that it’s also easy to be fooled into think she’s working in ink. So I’m including a few details in this post, just to give you a better idea:

My thanks to Steve Breeding for aiming this at me.

I’m pleased to announce that Erzebet Yellowboy Carr of Papaveria Press plans next year to create a limited (18-copy) special edition of “The Quiltmaker,” my novella that’s a direct sequel to my Nebula Award-nominated horror story “The Button Bin.”

And she’ll be working with my wife Anita to create these handbound volumes. This is really exciting … the last time Erzebet and Anita colluded, the result was the “Honey Corset,” created from the pages of Amal El-Mohtar’s The Honey Month for the author to wear.

The Honey Corset, side view

In that instance, a book got repurposed for wearing. In this instance … the books will wear you.

Here’s what Anita has in mind: she needs 18 people to send her fabric that matches their skin tone as exactly as possible. If you have a distinguishing birthmark, tattoo or other visual feature that marks your skin as distinctly yours, she’d like photos. She’ll recreate said mark on the fabric and use it to create the buttoned-together “Quiltmaker” book covers for Papaveria.

If you’re twisted enough to want in on this (and surely you must be if you’ve read this far) contact Anita at anita[dot]d[dot]allen[at]gmail[dot]com (replace bracketed words with corresponding characters) to get the finer details.

The cruellest month is over!

So I wound up posting fourteen free poems total in honor of National Poetry Month — and mini-posts about the making of most of them — for no greater reason than the thought that it might be a fun thing to do. And, as it turned out, it was.

If you missed any part of it, and for some reason decide you want to unmiss it, here’s a recap with links to all the poems and notes.

Poem Zero: “Phase Shift”

Poems from The Journey to Kailash:

I. “Defacing the Moon” (note about)
II. “Requited” (note about)
III. “A Curtain of Stars” (note about)
IV. “Bacchanal” (note about)
V. “Midnight Rendezvous, Boston” (note about)
VI. “Manifest Density” (note about)
VII. “Petals” (note about)
VIII. “Giving Back to the Muse” (note about)
IX. “Disaster at the BrainBank™ ATM” (note about)
X. “No One” (note about)
XI. “Sisyphus Walks” (note about)
XII. “The Strip Search” (note about)
XIII. “The Thirteenth Hell” (note about)

And as a final bit of fun, inspired by Saladin Ahmed … since I’ve been exploring my last poetry collection in the course of doing all this, I thought it would be fun to plug the whole thing into Wordle and see what I come up with.

Let’s just say I’m a poet who is prone to simile:

At the Fantasy Literature blog, there’s a review of the March 2011 issue of Apex Magazine that includes mention of the poetry. Reviewer Terry Weyna has this to say about “The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves,” the poem I co-wrote with Sonya Taaffe and Nicole Kornher-Stace:

…the imagery is drawn with immense care, and the language is chosen to great effect. This poem, though, doesn’t just draw pictures — a noble enough quest for a poem standing alone, of course, if not the goal of this trio of poets — it tells the tale of the rivalry between the King of Cats and the Queen of Wolves across time. This is a perfect poem to read to celebrate April, which, after all, is National Poetry Month.

It’s always nice to see the poetry included in a review of a genre publication.

On top of that, Francesca Forrest, who interviewed myself, Sonya and Nicole about “King, Queen,” has created a piece of fan art based on the poem’s middle section. She posted it first on her LiveJournal. Check it out: