DESCENT INTO LIGHT

My apocalyptic short story “Let There Be Darkness” has just appeared at Pseudopod, read with prophetic conviction by Christiana Ellis. (Click here to hear how the world will really end.) “Let There Be Darkness” will be included in my horror collection coming out later this year from Apex Books, The Button Bin and Other Horrors.

And, the same day the “Let There Be Darkness” podcast appeared, literary adventure fantasy webzine Beneath Ceaseless Skies bought a short story from me, a dark tale (imagine!) called “The Ivy-Smothered Palisade.” A slew of awesome people helped me polish this tale before I submitted it anywhere, and it sold the first place it went to. My sincere thanks to all of them: Sally Brackett Robertson, Sonya Taaffe, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Erik Amundsen, Alexandra Seidel, Jennifer Crow, Rick Herndon, Elizabeth Campbell and Virginia Mohlere. And of course, Anita Allen!

I’m pleased to announce that my highly experimental sf short story “Twa Sisters” has sold to John Benson at Not One of Us, scheduled for his April issue.

The story was inspired by this set of artwork shown to me by buddy Patty Templeton. I consider it the “spiritual sequel” to my novelette “Stolen Souls” that just got reprinted in Fantastique Unfettered. But while “Stolen Souls” was an example of how far my imagination could push its limit in the 1990s, “Twa Sisters” is about how far I can push it now. In other words, considerably farther out.

The story contains zany visual formatting (not dissimilar in places from what Kendall Evans, David C. Kopaska-Merkel and I did in our poem “Rattlebox III.”) I’m grateful John’s willing to tackle it, multiple text columns and all.

Some nice recognitions for my poetry over the past few days.

First, the poem that I co-wrote with Sonya Taaffe and Nicole Kornher-Stace, “The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves,” selected by Catherynne M. Valente for publication in Apex Magazine last year, has been nominated for a Rhysling Award. I can’t help but be pleased, as of all the new things I had published in 2011 this piece is hands-down my favorite.

Second, the Fantasy Literature blog has posted a review of Phantasmagorium issue 2, and bless Terry Weyna for once again taking the time to also review the poetry, a duty most reviewers shirk. She writes this about my poem “Budding”:

…about parents troubled by the apparent artistic talent of their baby, who seems to be painting like Francis Bacon while still in her crib. Those parents are proud as can be, but worried – maybe even scared. It’s a successful horror poem with some nice imagery (“sketched houses with screams for doors,” for instance).

My new poem “Carrington’s Ferry” has just appeared in Strange Horizons, a piece inspired by the life and works of Leonora Carrington. It’s the first installment in my “Disturbing Muses” cycle of poems since “Mondrian’s War” in 2008 (which, interestingly enough, also appeared in Strange Horizons.)

My poem “Budding” is now available in Issue 2 of Phantasmagorium, edited by new master of horror Laird Barron. I understand there will be a print edition to come, but as of now the new issue of the zine is available in PDF, .epub and .mobi format. Click here to learn more.

I’m still pretty giddy from the news that I’ve sold my first short story collection, but I had another sale earlier this week. New Star*Line editor F.J. Bergmann has accepted my poem “The Duelists” for her fall issue. Woo-hoo!

You might recall this post I made last month about creating an e-book collection of my horror tales?

Well, scratch that plan. Much to my delight, and with immense gratitude to Jason Sizemore: Apex Publications is going to do it. And it will be available in trade paperback too. Official press release here at the Apex blog.

The tentative table of contents (nothing set in stone yet, of course) looks like this (Anita helped me figure it out.)

• The Button Bin
• The Blessed Days
• Humpty
• Her Acres of Pastoral Playground
• An Invitation via E-mail
• The Hiker’s Tale
• The Music of Bremen Farm
• Stone Flowers
• Let There Be Darkness
• The Quiltmaker

That’s a lot of concentrated evil in one book.

I should note, the Papaveria Press special hand-bound hardcover edition of “The Quiltmaker” (the novella-length sequel to “The Button Bin”) is still a go. (And still seeking fabric.)

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:

I already did a long blog post in which I talked about the contents of Fantastique Unfettered 4 in some depth, so I’ll stick to the most important information (from my perspective):

First, it’s out! You can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and soon at other places.

Second, there’s much reason for me to crow: the issue contains my sf novelette “Stolen Souls,” a joint interview conducted by Alexandra Seidel with me and Hal Duncan, and three poems by me, “Binary,” “Sisyphus Crawls” and “Seed the Earth, Burn the Sky.” The cover art by Luis Beltrán is based on my poem “Binary.”