DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

I’m pleased to report my first new sale of the year (yes, it’s true) — The Queens of Air and Darkness at Goblin Fruit have accepted “Hungry Constellations,” which can be read as a cycle of 10 interlinked poems or, taken together, as possibly the

See? I write things too!   Pic by Anita, who knows how to make me look less ugly. ;-p #SFWApro The Black Fire Concerto is not available for sale just yet, unless you buy one from me. But it won’t be long now. (UPDATE: I

UPDATE: The first issue, Mythic Delirium 0.1, is ready. You can get it by backing the Kickstarter for Mythic Delirium or by ordering a subscription through the Mythic Delirium website.     As the Bard put it so eloquently, “Once more into the breach.” I’m

It all comes down to ReaderCon. Somehow I always manage to do this. However, ReaderCon has always been very good to me, so I suppose it’s in part the con’s fault for being so encouraging. Here’s everything that is supposed to happen, that I’m going

Since the beginning of May I have: Spent a weekend at the home of writer Nicole Kornher-Stace and her husband Dan at a gathering that was informally dubbed “CoalCon,” with the likes of Claire Suzanne Elizabeth Cooney, Francesca Forrest, Julia Rios, Caitlyn Paxson, Dominik Parisien,

I’m thrilled to at last be able to publicly reveal the amazing cover for my first novel, The Black Fire Concerto, which makes use of a spectacular digital painting by Lauren K. Cannon. Plans were made to be foiled, but at present the plan is

Writer and poet Francesca Forrest, who took on the daunting tasking of proofreading the soon-to-be-finalized (VERY soon!) manuscript of my Clockwork Phoenix 4 anthology, brazenly took to the Internet to share how much she liked what she had just read. I’m pleased to point people

I couldn’t attend the book launch of Solaris Rising 2 (lacking the financial and temporal freedom to jet to the U.K. and back for a weekend) but Solaris released this interview with editor Ian Whates and several of my fellow contributors that makes for a

Contemplating the balance the modern writer/editor has to strike between maintaining a social media presence and actually getting work done, I decided now would be a good time for an update on my juggling act. There’s a lot of exciting behind-the-scenes stuff going on with

To help promote the new anthology Solaris Rising 2 (which contains my short story “Still Life with Skull”) I wrote a guest post for the Solaris blog in response to a request by editor Ian Whates to discuss my favorite sf short story. “When Ian