DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

So, at the end of 2010, I thought my days of writing poetry were behind me. I had gone from someone excited about speculative poetry, who advocated for it anywhere the opportunity arose, to someone so burned out and dejected by the state of the

Ticks are never easy to spot. An intelligent species of them would be especially evasive, n’est-ce pas?   Folks familiar with my work might find my short story “Tick Flick” an unusually sweet and sentimental depiction of friendship, except that the friends so depicted happen

As I’ve said, Amazon “bestseller” lists don’t mean much. That reiterated, Unseaming has so far been successful enough (by my standards) to afford me a fair amount of fun as it bobs up and down in the Kindle “Horror Short Stories” rankings.   This is

My thanks to everyone who has bought Unseaming so far — by the standards of one of my books (admittedly not a high bar) the collection is doing quite well, especially on Amazon. Ordinarily I only get to play these sorts of games when I’m

A whole lot of cool things happened last week, and thanks to that wonderful combination of too busy and too tired, I didn’t get to do much more about them then chirp enthusiastically on Twitter. Thus this week will bring a series of blog posts

Circumstances conspired so that I ended up giving an unplanned-for preview reading of my forthcoming story collection Unseaming at Inquiring Minds bookstore in New Paltz, NY, a couple weeks ago. It ended up being a cozy gathering of friends, which was fine and dandy. Unseaming

The newest issue of Postscripts to Darkness was just released, featuring my surreal far future sci-fi poem “Dearly Beloved.” This poem is set in the same universe as my short stories “Twa Sisters” and “Still Life with Skull,” and like them it’s heavily inspired by

Anita and I will be on all kinds of panels and workshops at the upcoming MystiCon convention right here in Roanoke. I’ll be reading from my novel The Black Fire Concerto and Anita and I together will be talking about Clockwork Phoenix and anthologies in

Last year this time I was ill and bedridden. This year, I’m simply inconvenienced thanks to a kaput computer. I consider this a step up.   In fact I was so sick at this time in 2012 that my year-end summary didn’t turn up until

The week before Christmas, a power surge took out my computer and our stove. The night of Christmas Eve, I learned that once again the excerpt from my novel The Black Fire Concerto was the most read story at Black Gate Magazine — Olyssa and