A Friday Miscellany

• This will be my last rambling, bloggy post about “writing activity.” Two years ago I wrote a lengthy piece about stagnation in my writing, and since then I’ve thoroughly unstagnated. From regular productivity to setting goals to having projects lined up for at least the next six months, it would appear that writerly ennui is a luxury I can happily no longer afford, at least at such length.
• I have fiction forthcoming in multiple venues, one of which is the reborn Weirdbook. When I first got serious about writing many years ago, I would blog, or later Facebook, every bit of writing news (“I got a rejection with feedback!” “My story is being held for consideration!” etc.). This seems like a reasonable time to stop doing so much of that, not least to improve the signal:noise ratio.
• I have essays and critical non-fiction about horror or the Weird either forthcoming or with proposals accepted in multiple venues. One will be in a new non-fiction journal, Thinking Horror, and others will, all things going as planned, appear in 2017 publications. I also have various conference papers lined up  for 2016, so we’ll see how that goes.
• The tide of readers and critics of the Weird, literary/cosmic horror, etc. is rising. I’ll  have more to say about that elsewhere at some point, I expect, but I come across roughly one interesting new (to me or otherwise) blogger, essay, review, etc. in this vein per week. This week I’ve encountered two: Celluloid Wicker Man and ClaireQuip Books.
• The short story collection manuscript is one, or perhaps two, stories away from complete in rough. It’s lengthened and shortened a couple times now, but at this point it really does feel something like closing in on “done.” Various bits of polishing and editing remain, but my goal of finishing and submitting the ms before year’s end seems reasonable, if the rest of life cooperates.
• One of the unanticipated side-effects of creating the list of weird fiction publishers is that not a few publishers have been offering or sending me free fiction, journals, etc. As a slow reader, I’ve been eyeing my TBR pile, thinking about ethics in reviewing, etc. The answer will probably be a generic disclaimer somewhere on this site to the effect that I’m a bastion of unbiased something or other.
• Last weekend was Necronomicon 2015 in Providence, and not attending was one of the dark spots of the year, but I’ve been fortunate enough to attend  various literary conferences and conventions of late, learning a great deal in the process. I’ve come to realize that the people who attend the event make the event, but that most of us live in a world that doesn’t allow for infinite travel, and that many things make a literary community.
• Finally, I’ve been enjoying horror shorts lately. As with shorts generally, they vary in quality, but the length allows for a broad range of tasting. He Took His Skin Off For Me is a grotesque that I enjoyed very much, describing it elsewhere as maybe, kind of, what you’d get if Raymond Carver and Kelly Link had collaborated to write Hellraiser: