DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

My thanks to the voting membership of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, who bestowed a 2nd place Rhysling Award (in the “long poem” category) on my poem “Hungry Constellations,” which first appeared as a feature presentation in the absolutely essential Goblin Fruit, and is now the title poem of my latest collection. This poem means a lot to me, so to have empirical evidence that it resonates with others is wonderful.
 
Regarding the other winners, I’m compelled to show off some of the hard-won Rhysling expertise I acquired back when I was president of the SFPA. First, congratulations to Mary Soon Lee, who actually won the long category, her first win. She’s been producing great poetry for many years and I’m glad to see her at last get the nod. Her poem “Interregnum” is part of an extensive interconnected cycle “The Sign of the Dragon,” of which I’ve read a few others; I look forward to seeing the completed book. Congratulations too to third place winner Rose Lemberg, an incredible poet receiving her first Rhysling nod for “I will show you a single treasure from the treasures of Shah Niyaz.” Her piece is also a part of a cycle of “Birdverse” poems and stories.
 
A special congratulations to Amal El-Mohtar, whose “Turning the Leaves” won the short poem category. This makes Amal the first woman to win the Rhysling Award three times. To my knowledge, she was already the first PoC to win the award (in 2009, with “Song for an Ancient City,” from Mythic Delirium, and don’t you think I’ll ever let anyone forget that watershed moment for the zine.) In addition, she also published this year’s 2nd and 3rd place long poem winners (by me & Rose!) — and this kind of writer/editor sweep isn’t new to her. In 2011, when her “Peach-Creamed Honey” won the short category, she was also the publisher of the long poem winner, C.S.E. Cooney’s “The Sea King’s Second Bride.”
 
I’d say “Congratulations to the following Mythic Delirium contributors who are winners…” but actually all the winners have appeared in Mythic Delirium over the years, heh.
 
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Posted in Awards, Poetry, Writing

Well, hey, here’s one of those rare and elusive poetry reviews one occasionally hears rumors of, spotted in the wild: Nameless Digest has published a very flattering review (by contributing editor Sunni Brock) of my new poetry collection Hungry Constellations:
 

Allen’s fiction ideas are very weird, and his poetry is weirder still. Wonderfully weird. … Classical themes combine with modern stylistic license in verses that defy the rules yet satisfy a timeless beauty. … It is rare to find genre poetry so artfully rendered. It is full of stars.

 
Let me once again thank Dominik Parisien for his efforts editing down 20 years of my work into something shiny. You can read the full review here.
 
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Posted in Poetry, Writing

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 by far my favorite screen capture from the entire affair:
 

 
And this one, which became possible when the paperback edition made a brief appearance on the list, is a close second:
 

 
And for sheer vanity’s sake, proof that the book actually broke into the top 10 in its category for about five minutes:
 

 
So suddenly I feel slightly less like a scribble in the margins. My thanks to all of you who’ve helped make that so. 😉
 
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Posted in Short stories, Signal boosts, Strangeness, Unseaming, Writing

My horror story “Tardigrade” is out in Jason V. Brock’s A Darke Phantastique anthology, which as a physical object is easily the most opulently baroque thing I’ve ever been in. I know this because my copy arrived today:
 

 
Other contributors: Joe R. Landsdale, Nancy Kilpatrick, S.T. Joshi, Greg Bear, William F. Nolan, Ray Garton, Melanie Tem, Dennis Etchison, Steve Rasnic Tem, Nicole Cushing, W. H. Pugmire, Gary A. Braunbeck and even more, with a forward by the late Ray Bradbury(!)
 

 

 

 

 
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Posted in Fiction, Short stories, Writing

I suppose I should start with the obvious: my first ever short story collection Unseaming is new this year and eligible in “best story collection” categories. Someone saw fit to suggest it be included in this completely unofficial list, which still tickles me to no end.
 
Of the new works of fiction I’ve had come out this year, the one I’m proudest of is “The Quiltmaker,” my horror novella that also happens to be a sequel to my best known story, “The Button Bin.” Its length, its stylistic weirdness and its grim nastiness kept it from finding a home prior to appearing in my collection Unseaming, but now that Unseaming is out (and doing shockingly well by the standards set by my books, heh — my thanks to all of you who have promoted and purchased it!) “The Quiltmaker” has gotten some encouraging attention.
 
Not only that, but a long planned limited edition hardcover of “The Quiltmaker” is underway, forthcoming from the wonderful Erzebet YellowBoy’s Papaveria Press. The proofs are sitting on my bookshelf regarding me forlornly because they happened to arrive at the same time as three other ongoing projects — but please believe me when I say I am SO excited about this.
 
I should mention too that though I consider it the longest of long shots, “The Quiltmaker” is available free for SFWA members to read in the forum section for Nebula eligible novellas. (By the way, I’ve also uploaded copies to the forum of all the short stories published in Mythic Delirium in 2014; more about that in this post.)
 
I’ve also had six short stories published this year, which for me is some sort of record. All are horror/dark fantasy/weird/whatever:
 

“The Lead Between the Panes,” first appeared in Lakeside Circus, reprinted in Unseaming

“Monster,” first appeared in Nameless, reprinted in Unseaming

“Gutter,” first appeared in Unseaming

“Condolences,” first appeared in Unseaming

“The Vintage Dress,” written especially for my employer, The Roanoke Times

“Tardigrade,” written especially for Jason V. Brock’s anthology A Darke Phantastique

 
Poems: Only had three new ones appear this year; two have ties to short stories of mine.
 

“The Paper Boy” in Strange Horizons (“Gutter”)

“Dearly Beloved” in Postscripts to Darkness (“Twa Sisters,” “Still Life With Skull”)

“To Sail the Leaden Sky,” original to my new collection Hungry Constellations

 
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Posted in Awards, Fiction, Poetry, Short stories, Unseaming, Writing

Continuing my gradual catch-up between projects (more on what those projects are in future entries):
 
I’ve sold a new short story, a sweetly nasty tongue-in-grotesque-cheek little short called “Tick Flick.” It’s kind of horror, kind of sci-fi, kind of within the margins of “the weird,” a bit of a black comedy, but mostly it’s gross, except that it’s also sort of touching. The Drabblecast has offered to publish it in print and audio, my first sale there.
 
Funny story behind this: I originally completed this story (an idea that’s been with me for a couple years) for a specific market, which turned it down. Later, I composed a tweet about “pondering where to send a short, weirdly sweet yet spectacularly gross horror story” — but realized afterward that in fact that description did not match the story as written. It was only “spectacularly gross.” So I revised the tale to match the pitch. And lo! and behold, Nathaniel Lee with Drabblecast told me, “The shift into ‘Aww’ at the end saves this one for me, I think. I get enough gooey gory; it’s nice to have some good friends and empathy for a change.”
 
A curious habit of mine is that characters in my first drafts are often extremely unsympathetic and have to be humanized in subsequent drafts. I suppose that effect was amplified in a story where the main characters are oversized, sentient ticks.
 
And speaking of bizarre characters in even stranger settings, my poem “Dearly Beloved,” which appeared earlier this year in Postscripts to Darkness, got a nice writeup in a review of the issue at Just a Cup of the Good Stuff:
 

Inspired by Italian painter Alessandro Bavari’s series of grotesqueries, “Sodom and Gomorrah”, Allen cultivates a chilling series of images, of people willingly and happily transmogrified. In this poem, they have gathered in rapture and celebration, dancing and warping their forms even further, revealing non-static bodies, while they wait with bated breath to see what greater forms may be birthed before their very eyes. It is interesting and logical that, in describing these new forms, Allen makes generous use of gender neutral pronouns, reminding us that we can’t force our own labels on such an obscure world. It is a world that Allen has worked with before, in his “Twa Sisters” and “Still Life with Skull”, so it will be interesting to see just how these works could flesh out this surreal poem even more.

 
Funny side note: Postscripts to Darkness poetry editor Dominik Parisien and I both had the same reaction at the same time — “Wow! A review that mentioned the poetry!”
 
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Posted in Fiction, Poetry, Reviews, Short stories, Writing

My friend Michael M. Jones interviewed me for an impressive roundup article about how crowdfunding is changing the sf/f/h publishing landscape. The article, “Defying the Traditional Model: Crowdfunding in science fiction and fantasy,” appeared last week at Publishers Weekly, and contains quotes from a number of luminaries: Ellen Datlow, John Joseph Adams, Julia Rios and Alisa Krasnostein, Tim Pratt, C.E. Murphy: that’s amazing company to find myself in.
 
In the article I’m my usual cheerful self:
 

“I’ve seen a fair amount of fretting online about how supporting a publication such as a magazine via Kickstarter alone isn’t viable, because, of course, if your campaign fails to reach goal, you get no money and your magazine is dead. But I think what folks fail to realize is that these days, there is no reliable model for keeping a subscription base healthy.”

 
Publishers Weekly is also offering a free PDF download of a special “best of the year” issue that contains all its starred reviews published in 2014. I’m in this issue twice (!!!), for my story collection Unseaming and for the first trade paperback Mythic Delirium anthology, which I co-edited with Anita. (I note the pages those links lead to now have the correct cover images in place, woohoo!) Given all the other books highlighted, it’s an honor to be included, and more than a little humbling. This has been an amazing year.
 

Photo by Francesca Forrest

 
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Posted in Clockwork Phoenix, Editing, Fiction, Interviews, Kickstarter, Mythic Delirium, Reviews, Short stories, Unseaming, Writing

So, the successive obligational pile-ons of preparing for the 2014 World Fantasy Convention, then attending said convention (with the whirlwind of first meetings and reunions that entailed), then catching up on unfinished tasks afterward (which, actually, I still haven’t quite managed) all mean that I’ve fallen way behind on sharing news of things. Luckily most everything is relatively evergreen.
 
The Review Review, a site devoted to reviews of literary journals, graciously allowed me to write a second guest post for their “Publishing Tips” column. “The Oasis and the Mirage: Adventures in Fiction Publishing” uses the Publishers Weekly starred review of Unseaming as a jumping off point for talking about how bloody hard it was to get each of the individual stories, then the book itself, into print.
 
My reason for doing this comes from my feeling that all the chirpy little “here’s some writing tips, and by the way, here’s how you cope with a rejection letter” articles out there don’t do much at all to prepare an aspiring writer for what’s really in store for them if they’re foolhardy enough to pursue writing as a long-term career. As I phrased it in the essay:
 

Reflecting on this review got me to thinking about the years-long ordeal that culminated in the making of this book: not a glamorous epic quest but a black comedy of repeated frustration and failure. Which led me to come up with this post, which isn’t so much about how the sausage gets made as it is about how the sausage gets contaminated and you still have to survive eating it. There’s another post on The Review Review about surviving rejection. Folks, rejection is just the first trap in the maze.

 
My thanks to Alicia Cole for lending me soapbox space once again (the first post I wrote for her, “On Crowdfunding, Paying Writers, and the Shift to Digital: An Editor Tells His Story,” is here), to Anita, Shveta Thakrar and Virginia Mohlere for helping me assemble these thoughts, and to Nick Mamatas for providing a rhetorical model I could work from, heh.
 
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Posted in Fiction, Interviews, Short stories, Signal boosts, Unseaming, Writing

 
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Posted in Appearances, Short stories, Unseaming

It’s only fitting that Halloween was a busy week for me, beyond reading submissions for Mythic Delirium and all the little things I’m doing to promote Unseaming.
 
My editor at The Roanoke Times once again asked me to write an original ghost story for the paper, the result, based on a suggestion from Anita, appeared on Halloween proper: “The Vintage Dress.” I crafted it as a sequel of sorts to “The Helping Hand,” my first horror tale for the Times. The fact that I get to make up ghost stories for my day job is pretty damn awesome. (My boss has told me to start thinking about next year’s story, heh.)
 
I also wrote a Halloween-themed guest post for The Little Red Reviewer called “Building My Own Haunted House” that, naturally, delves a bit more into why I write horror. Embedded in that guest post is the complete text of my flash fiction “Six Waking Nightmares Poe Gave Me in Third Grade,” which originally appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of Weird Tales. My thanks to Andrea Johnson for lending me her soapbox.
 
Finally, the anthology A Darke Phantastique (containing my new story “Tardigrade”) has been spotted in the wild! Alas, I will not be anywhere near the big Nov. 6 book signing in Los Angeles where the book makes its official debut, but I’ll certainly be there in spirit … or in other words, I’ll be haunting it.
 
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Posted in Appearances, Editing, Fiction, Mythic Delirium, Short stories, Signal boosts, Unseaming, Writing