Essay in LampLight 6.1 / Upcoming Lovecraft Talk

For those who didn’t catch my essay on horror in flash fiction, originally published in Thinking Horror 1, it’s now available in LampLight. Volume 6.1 is currently available in e-book and will soon be available in print. The issue includes the usual array of goodness, and it features Damien Angelica Walters.

Next week I’ll have the pleasure and honor of giving a brown bag talk at the English Faculty Forum at my university (VCU). It will be Wednesday, November 8, 2017. “Aesthetic Experiments: H. P. Lovecraft and ‘Pickman’s Model’ in 1927.” Noon-1:00, in 308 Hibbs Hall. Free and open to the community at large. I’ll be speaking with my “librarian hat” on, although as time goes by, the different hats seem to be increasingly difficult of distinction. This talk is part of a project that I’ve been poking at from multiple angles in recent years, and which is starting to resemble an academic monograph. TBD.

For those finding this site before the talk at VCU and wanting to know more about what I do, the “About” and “Publications” pages linked above should be of some help. The “Weird Fiction Publishers” page is a list of publishers I update occasionally and maintain for my own use and that of the community of weird fiction readers, writers, publishers, etc. If you want an idea of what people look for here, these are some of the most popular posts:

752 views — Anthropocene Ghosts and Other Collateral Damage in Moldova (Spectral, 2016)
519 views — Finding Women in Horror and Weird Fiction
514 views — On the Existence of the Female Tentacle
409 views — The Hugos: Shenanigans & Unpopular Opinions
246 views — Release the Leeches!
184 views — Aickman’s Heirs
147 views — Lovecraft, Joshi, The Head, and Fantasy in 2014 (and 2100)

A Pagan Suckled in a Creed Outworn

For the last couple months I’ve been on social media very little. This was on account of sundry deadlines, projects, and all the other reasons people typically get offline. I’ve been happier and measurably healthier since then, albeit missing the connection. The horrors of this past week have spurred me to political participation, but not to dwell constantly on injustice, and I’m so glad not to be as much in places where the parade of atrocities never ends. I still hew to Wordsworth’s famous formulation, and I’m endeavoring to live for the things I care about most.

At times when the world does press in, I think it’s important to remember the things that don’t. This week I was talking with James Jenkins of Valancourt Books about the merits of reading classic (or simply older) fiction, and I don’t think it can be overstated. One of the best things I’ve done for myself as a reader or writer in the last year was read all of M.R. James‘ tales, of which I’d previously read some, but not all. No one asked me to do so; as a rule, dead authors are not particularly demanding. Still, the desire was there in me, and it led in a roundabout way to my writing “En Plein Air,” a short story that will appear this October in volume two of Nightscript, and which I think is one of the most effective things I’ve written to date.

Last week I placed an order for a small pile of books, using some of the earnings from my Richmond Young Writers gig, recent things that I’ve read from the library or about which I’ve heard really excellent advance praise. What I also look forward to reading are the things that nobody is urging me to read. Part of that involves plumbing bibliographies and reference books, part of it involves finding reprints, and part of it involves hewing to the titular requirement of this post.

The survival of work from the past can be a chancy thing, and what is saved is not necessarily good, and what is lost is sometimes better forgotten. The finding of it, however, is part of a quiet and almost Gnostic kind of quest that demands nothing. It is the sort of thing that many authors have engaged in over the years, and which cannot—perhaps should not—always be repackaged for the demands of social media. Some quests are public, some private, but either way, I think that we forget our quests at the peril of our lives, to say nothing of our art.

My Greatest Hits, by the Numbers

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a guy with a strong interest in literature and the arts, particularly the dark and fantastic, my blog/site is of interest to y’all for things about literature and the arts. A few perhaps-interesting spikes in the data…

• My comments about 2015’s Hugos kerfuffle are my single most-read post to date. You might want people to read X, Y, or Z of what you write, but when the people want K, it shows.
• Since its publication in June of last year, my “Weird Fiction Publishers” list has outstripped everything else, and many people visit it via links or have it bookmarked, to go by the fact that it’s more popular than my “Home page / Archives.”
• Things Lovecraftian/weird/cosmic horror are, unsurprisingly, prominent.
• People read my comments on books, movies, art shows, etc. when I first post them, but they have a much longer life than I would have expected. I still get substantial continued traffic for pieces from years ago. My post about Mary Chiaramonte’s 2012 show at Eric Schindler Gallery here in Richmond, for instance, is my fourth most popular post that’s not a dedicated page on the site.

Finally, a snapshot of my most popular tags:

Throwback Thursday, You Say?

In the mood for some Throwback Thursday action? Below are links to the top five posts I’ve written here…

“On the Existence of the Female Tentacle” — 312 views — All about women who write Lovecraftian fiction.

“Release the Leeches!” — 175 views — Release day and my writeup, lo those several months ago, for The Children of Old Leech.

“Mary Chiaramonte / Land of Strangers / Eric Schindler Gallery” — 134 views — Review of Mary Chiaramonte’s 2012 show.

“All the Colors of the Night” — 134 views — Review of Thomas Van Auken’s 2012 show at Eric Schindler Gallery.

“Writing Year 2013: Statistics, Lies, Stagnation, and the Human Heart” — 115 views — An analysis with charts and statistics of my writing activities over a seven-year period.

Writing year 2014: Blog Readership Interlude

This morning I’m doing a little spreadsheet upkeep, and I thought I’d look at my blog’s reach. This is over a few years, but still: I never would have expected this as a kid. I had high hopes in terms of productivity that haven’t worked out, and my younger self says “Closing in on 40, and you haven’t published a novel yet, let alone 20? Loser!”

That said, my blog is read by robots people from around the world, and by year’s end I’ll have published at least a dozen stories in toto. I’m shooting for more, but it’s a milestone. Maybe one of these days I’ll start thinking seriously about a short story collection, and how to make that happen. Until then, the work reaches where it reaches, be it short story or blog post. To wit:

International Renown, What Ho!