And one more ReaderCon thing, possibly with pizza

/ July 13th, 2011 / No Comments »

Anita and I intend to host a book launch for C.S.E. Cooney’s Jack o’ the Hills and Nicole Kornher-Stace’s The Winter Triptych from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday — it should serve as something of a bridge between the Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories reading and the Interstitial Arts Exchange. Pizza may well be involved. Check with us at the con (we arrive tomorrow eve!) for further details.

Last Minute ReaderCon things

/ July 12th, 2011 / No Comments »

UTMOST IMPORTANCE: If you did not just receive an e-mail from me about the Rhysling Award Poetry Slan at ReaderCon (which I am still hosting, FYI) at 3 p.m. Saturday, and/or you did not just receive an e-mail from me about the Goblin Fruit/Mythic Delirium reading at 4 p.m. Friday, which I am co-hosting with Nicole Kornher-Stace and you want to be in one or the other or both of these readings, please contact me ASAP at mythicdelirium@gmail.com At the moment, the Rhysling reading looks jam-packed, FYI, but there is potentially room in the GF/MD gathering.

IMPORTANT FOR A DIFFERENT REASON: My autograph session with David Lunde at 2 p.m. Friday will take place outside the door to the Bookshop, which won’t be open yet. I plan to have copies of Clockwork Phoenix with me and maybe a couple other things. I’m sure my hordes of fans (ahem!) appreciate the notice…

A weekend of villainy

/ July 10th, 2011 / No Comments »

Having played a villainous 19th century pharmacist in Dwayne Yancey’s “Strong as a Bull” last night as part of Mill Mountain Theatre’s Overnight Sensations, I continue my period villainy tonight, playing Carl Denham in the play you see in the poster.

Crazy weekend gets crazier

/ July 8th, 2011 / No Comments »

Tomorrow night, I will be performing in “Overnight Sensations” at Mill Mountain Theatre (see poster to the left) — six plays get created in 24 hours, starting tonight. I’ll be one of the actors. (And I’m going to write about it afterward, so there’s a plan for photographer to be documenting what I do. Yikes!)

And, I’ve completed my first assignment for the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose competition at ReaderCon next weekend. *shudder*

Clockwork Phoenix 3 stories receive honorable mentions in Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction

/ July 7th, 2011 / No Comments »

Congratulations to the following writers from Clockwork Phoenix 3: New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness who have received honorable mentions from Gardner Dozois in the newest edition of The Year’s Best Science Fiction.

  • “Braiding the Ghosts,” C.S.E. Cooney
  • “Hell Friend,” Gemma Files
  • “Lucyna’s Gaze,” Gregory Frost
  • “Where Shadows Go at Low Midnight,” John Grant
  • “Surrogates,” Cat Rambo
  • “Murder in Metachronopolis,” John C. Wright

I’d like to extend further congratulations to Claire Cooney, whose “Braiding the Ghosts” has just been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2011 and to Nicole Kornher-Stace, whose “To Seek Her Fortune” has been selected for The Mammoth Book of Steampunk.

Win free copies of Mythic Delirium 23 & 24

/ July 5th, 2011 / No Comments »

Writer/poet Francesca Forrest, who is also part of my volunteer “staff” for Mythic Delirium, is holding a guessing game contest. Enter it to win free copies of Issue 23 and Issue 24. For further details, click over to her blog.

New poetry sale

/ July 1st, 2011 / No Comments »

Yesterday Alexa Seidel with Fantastique Unfettered informed me she’ll be adding my poem “Seed the Earth, Burn the Sky” to the pair (“Sisyphus Crawls,” “Binary”) she already has lined up for the Nov./Dec. issue, making it a triptych. I also understand the issue’s cover will be based on one of the poems. How cool.

“Seed the Earth, Burn the Sky” is another of my “Claire-dare” poems. I originally wrote 12 last October. There’s now only three left available. That’s quite satisfying, too.

ReaderCon schedule [UPDATED 7/2]

/ June 24th, 2011 / No Comments »

Today, I got the bulk of my schedule for ReaderCon.

Updated and complete on 6/27 and confirmed as complete schedule on 7/2:

Thursday July 14

9:00 PM RI    Speculative Poetry Workshop. Mike Allen. This is a basic workshop that challenges participants to write and share poems in various forms dealing with SF, fantasy, horror, and related topics.

Friday July 15

2:00 PM E    Autographs. Mike Allen, David Lunde.

4:00 PM NH    Mythic Delirium/Goblin Fruit group reading. Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Theodora Goss, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Shira Lipkin, Sonya Taaffe. Contributors to the Mythic Delirium and Goblin Fruit speculative poetry magazines read selections from their work.

5:00 PM NH    Steam-powered I & II group reading. Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Matthew Kressel, Shira Lipkin, Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft. Contributors to Steam-powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and Steam-powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories read selections from their work.

Saturday July 16

2:00 PM RI    How We Wrote “The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves“. Mike Allen, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Sonya Taaffe. Mike Allen, Nicole Kornher-Stace, and Sonya Taaffe discuss the collaborative writing of their epic speculative poem.

3:00 PM ME    The Rhysling Award Poetry Slan. Mike Allen (leader), David Lunde (moderator). A “poetry slan,” to be confused with “poetry slam,” is a poetry reading by SF folks, of course. The slan will be concluded by the presentation of this year’s Rhysling Awards.

8:00 PM F    The 25th Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition. Mike Allen, Craig Shaw Gardner (leader), Mary Robinette Kowal, Yves Meynard, Eric M. Van (moderator). Our traditional evening entertainment, named in memory of the pseudonym and alter ego of Jonathan Herovit of Barry N. Malzberg’s Herovit’s World. Here’s how it works: Ringleader Craig Shaw Gardner reads a passage of unidentified but genuine, published, bad sf, fantasy, or horror prose, which has been truncated in mid-sentence. Each of our panelists then reads an ending for the passage. One ending is the real one; the others are impostors. None of the players knows who wrote any passage other than their own, except for co-ringleader Eric M. Van, who gets to play God as a reward for the truly onerous duty of unearthing these gems. Craig then asks for the audience vote on the authenticity of each passage (recapping each in turn by quoting a pithy phrase or three from them), and the Ace Readercon Joint Census Team counts up each show of hands faster than you can say “Twinkies of Terror.” Eric then reveals the truth. Each contestant receives a point for each audience member they fooled, while the audience collectively scores a point for everyone who spots the real answer. As a rule, the audience finishes third or fourth. Warning: the Sturgeon General has determined that this trash is hazardous to your health; i.e., if it hurts to laugh, you’re in big trouble.

Sunday July 17

10:00 AM RI    Interstitial Arts Foundation Town Meeting. Mike Allen, K. Tempest Bradford, Ellen Kushner (leader), Shira Lipkin, JoSelle Vanderhooft. The IAF is a group of “Artists Without Borders” who celebrate art that is made in the interstices between genres and categories. It is art that flourishes in the borderlands between different disciplines, mediums, and cultures. The IAF provides border-crossing artists and art scholars a forum and a focus for their efforts. Rather than creating a new genre with new borders, they support the free movement of artists across the borders of their choice. They support the development of a new vocabulary with which to view and critique border-crossing works, and they celebrate the large community of interstitial artists working in North America and around the world. The annual Interstitial Arts Foundation Town Meeting at Readercon is an exciting opportunity to catch up with the IAF and its many supporters, hear about what they’re doing to support the interstitial art community in 2011, offer ideas for future projects, and contribute your voice to the development of interstitial art.

11:00 AM ME    Reconsidering Anthologies. Mike Allen, Leah Bobet, David Boop, Robert Killheffer, David Malki ! (leader). Anthologies are incredibly popular for writers to submit to and proudly display their work in–but who reads them? Why don’t they sell well? Is there some reason they occupy the same cultural mind-space as foreign films: culturally relevant, but rarely bothered with? David Malki !, editor of last year’s bestselling anthology Machine of Death, leads a discussion group about this outcast art form.

[RE: The Kirk Poland competition, a dilemma faces me: should I go for the laughs like I did last year, or should I seriously try to win?]

My audio reading of Eric James Stone’s “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” available at StarShipSofa

/ June 21st, 2011 / 7 Comments »

Today, zany Tony Smith of Hugo Award-winning StarShipSofa posted my reading of Eric James Stone’s Nebula Award-winning, Hugo Award-nominated novelette “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made.” If you want a listen, click here.

When Tony first asked me to make this recording, “Leviathan” was still a Nebula finalist. I didn’t actually make the recording until after Eric’s story won the Nebula and thanks to illness, didn’t get around to editing it until after some controversy stirred over Eric’s Nebula victory.

I parse the debate this way. A few prominent writers/bloggers with connections to the genre field — all quite accomplished themselves, most of whom I might characterize as outspoken progressives — have resoundingly condemned the novelette, in some cases to the point of suggesting that its win proffers proof that the Nebula voting system is broken.

Intriguingly, on the blog sites denouncing “Leviathan,” nobody tends to speak up to support it. However, it’s not hard to use Google to find at least a couple bloggers, admittedly not as prominent, who are ecstatic the story won — and who are devout Christians. That the camps don’t seem to have crossed swords anywhere might well speak to how fragmented sf fandom can be. (Eric Stone himself has stayed out of the debate. Smart man.)

Being the guy charged with converting this apparently controversial piece to audio, I’ve read the criticism with interest.

Read the rest of this entry »

A poem sale

/ June 20th, 2011 / No Comments »

After a week full of rejections for both new poems and new stories — so it goes — I finished up with a nice poetry sale, to Strange Horizons. The poem is called “La Donna del Lago,” and it’s dedicated to Claire Cooney. It was the final poem in what I call the “Claire-dare” series, a bunch of poems written last October in response to a bunch of prompts rustled up by Claire.

It’s cool to be back at Strange Horizons — you could say that’s where I’ve made my biggest mark poetry-wise, with 18 poems published there, most solo, some in collaboration, many of them Rhysling Award nominees, two of them Rhysling runner-ups, two of them Rhysling winners. And yet my last appearance there was in November ’09. My thanks to Sonya Taaffe for bringing me back on board.

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