As pledged: inkscrawl URL

/ May 26th, 2011 / No Comments »

Last week I mentioned a poetry sale to a market so new it didn’t yet have an URL. Well, inkscrawl now has a URL, http://www.inkscrawl.net/, where submission guidelines can be found. Go check them out.

Another poetry sale

/ May 25th, 2011 / No Comments »

My brain is scrambled by the opposing forces of a virus invasion and the drugs that fight them, but I’m just coherent enough to make mention that I’ve sold another of the “Claire-dare” poems, “Heart’s Delight,” to Not One of Us. This poem in particular was prompted by Nicole Kornher-Stace, who offered me this delightful image to work with:

Mythic Delirium 24: a cover (at last) and a review

/ May 25th, 2011 / No Comments »

Presenting, at last, the cover art for Mythic Delirium 24:

So, obviously, the issue itself won’t be reaching folks until June. We apologize sincerely for the delay.

I can however offer some proof that the issue is worth the wait. Alexa Seidel has written a review that’s now up at the Fantastique Unfettered website:

“[A] venture into lightheartedness” is what editor Mike Allen calls this latest issue of Mythic Delirium. The poetry assembled here certainly makes for an excellent adventure, and lightheartedness often plays a part, but even so, all these lyrical quests have a weighty center.

Congrats to contributors Elissa Malcohn, Ian Watson, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, Lucien E.G. Spelman, Serena Fusek and Shira Lipkin, whose poems receive special mention.

Strange sounds at Poetry Planet

/ May 19th, 2011 / No Comments »

Just a quick note that next edition of “Poetry Planet” at StarShipSofa will, as I understand, contain two poems by me, that you could call Golden Oldies: “On Discovery of a Habitable World” (which is, actually, the first sf poem I ever wrote, though it evolved a bit after that first draft over 20 years ago) and “The Thing in the Gutter.” Both poems are “first contact” poems — or rather, my odd takes on the concept.

A new poetry sale

/ May 19th, 2011 / 1 Comment »

I’m pleased to announce that a short, eerie poem I co-wrote with Anita (her idea, my words) called “Unland, Unlife” has just sold to the electronic poetry zine inkscrawl, edited by Mitchell Hart, which is so new it doesn’t yet have a URL. More information coming (such as said URL) when I have it.

Anthology to benefit Red Cross tornado relief out on Smashwords & Kindle

/ May 17th, 2011 / No Comments »

T.J. McIntyre’s Southern Fried Weirdness: Reconstruction — all proceeds from which go to the Red Cross to help with tornado relief in the South — is out now on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle, with stories and poems from a cutting edge and up-and-coming roster including Nicole Kornher-Stace, Rae Bryant, Mari Ness, Berrien C. Henderson, Jaime Lee Moyer, Marshall Payne, Gustavo Bondini, Marsheila Rockwell, F. Brett Cox, Fabio Fernandes, Danny Adams and many others. (Click here to see the complete table of contents.)

The anthology also contains a folk tale-tinted horror story of mine that absolutely fits the “Southern Fried Weirdness” motif: “The Music of Bremen Farm.” Here’s a sample of the opening.

But for a flat tire, no one would have ever known that Old Hag Bremen was dead.

Her forebears, like other settlers from Germany, staked out plots in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains even before the white colonies declared themselves a nation. Throughout the rolling hills, where houses regard each other across wide vales, and narrow roads still ford streams with wooden bridges held together by iron spikes, the Anglicized names speak from rusting mailboxes: Anselm. Flohr. Krone. Newman. Schrader.

Yet even in this place of isolation, with corn blanketing the hills for miles before giving way to ancient mountain slopes and defiant oak, the Bremens stayed a world apart. They sent no sons to fight in the War of Northern Aggression. They did not come to the whitewashed A-frame churches. They did not grow crops, or ask for work in others’ cattle farms or dairies or tobacco fields. Those few who knew the business of the Bremen family left them to it, and spoke of it at most in late night whispers that by morning seemed like troubled and half-forgotten dreams.

By the time the single-lane dirt ruts finally gave way to asphalt, only one Bremen remained, a sad, solitary heir rattling alone inside a rambling home more than three hundred years old: still with an outhouse, still with a kitchen standing separate from the building where she made her bed. Only the squirrels and wasps that took shelter in the walls kept her company.

In all its formats the anthology is only $2.99. I hope you’ll check it out.

A new review and a review PDF offer

/ May 11th, 2011 / No Comments »

Sam Tomaino at SF Revu tackles the stories in Apex Magazine 23 and makes mention of my “Button Bin“:

“The Button Bin” by Mike Allen (originally appeared in Helix: Speculative Fiction Quarterly, 2007) is quite the horror story. Our narrator is after a man named Lenahan who has taken his niece, his half-sister’s daughter and done something horrible with her. He confronts the man with a gun but things take an unexpected turn and we find out why Lenahan is called the “Button Man”. We also find out some nasty things about our narrator. All in all, quite an effective piece.

Speaking of reviews, I’ve created a review PDF of the interior pages of the soon-to-be-released Mythic Delirium 24. If there are any reviewers or bloggers (this means you!) interested in a copy, just let me know! (You can email me or just post that you wannit.)

And one more poetry sale

/ May 8th, 2011 / No Comments »

I learned tonight, to my delight, that Fantastique Unfettered is also accepting my poem “Binary.” This is a surreal, dark magic- and dark relationship-themed piece, another of the “Claire-dare” poems, inspired by this painting shown to me by Claire Cooney.

And another poetry sale!

/ May 7th, 2011 / 2 Comments »

Dan Campbell, poetry editor for Durham, N.C. magazine Bull Spec informed me this morning that he’s accepting my poem “Sad Wisps of Empty Smoke.”

The title comes from John Hall Wheelock’s “Sunday Evening in the Common,” but the topic is quasi-personal — with all the details changed, of course — in general, it’s about an abusive person who later in life, in failing health, becomes dependent on the person who was the target of the abuse. It was also the first poem in what I call the “Claire-dare” series, which I attempted to describe in this previous entry. Specifically, I had to write this poem before I could write in response to Claire Cooney’s prompts. Take that how you will.

Dan asked me if “Sad Wisps” had any connection to my poem “Requited.” It doesn’t, directly, but thematically I suppose they tread related ground.

A poetry sale

/ May 5th, 2011 / 1 Comment »

I’m pleased to announce the sale of my poem “Sisyphus Crawls” to the new speculative fiction/poetry market Fantastique Unfettered.

And congratulations to fellow poet Alexandra Seidel, who was appointed Poetry Editor there just days ago.

“Sisyphus Crawls” is a part of what I call the “Claire-dare” series, a group of poems I produced last October after my buddy Claire Cooney (and her friend and mine, Nicole Kornher-Stace, and Claire’s mom, Sita Aluna) started bombarding me with prompts. Some of the poems resulted directly from the prompts, some came about simply by virtue of having my “poet’s block” dynamited loose. This poem is one of the latter. It’s not a sequel exactly to my poem “Sisyphus Walks,” but it sort of ups the thematic ante — if “Walks” takes place at the first level of Hell, “Crawls” belongs in the ninth.

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