Man Plans, and God Laughs

Courtesy of Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, via The Commons at flickr

Happy October, monsters!

Has there been a more common post since the long, strange years of blogging’s heyday than “it’s been a long time since my last post?” Certainly not on this blog, dear readers. What are the haps, you ask? In quasi-brief…

My short story “Questionable Things” appeared in Synth #2 (as alluded to previously). It’s a SF story intimately tied to Blade Runner that I wrote some years ago. I shopped it around for quite some time, but it was a “bridesmaid” story, terminally getting “I loved it, but” rejections. I trunked it after playing Shadowrun Returns, on account of that game also involving SF, Seattle, and a serial killer (no spoilers, I hope, as all that’s clear from the first paragraph of my story).  Ultimately, I decided I liked it too much to let it go, polished it up, and C.M. Muller accepted it for his year-long project of publishing dark SF. (Vol. V of his excellent Nightscript series is available now.)

The novel I was working on last year collapsed under its own weight. I’d tried three different versions of it, two with substantially different plot points and an epistolary version  of one of those, but no dice. I got a short story out of it that I’m shopping around, but other than that, I’ve trunked it and moved on.

Other things outside of The Writing rose up and took over frequently this year. I’d like to say that I powered through and wrote every day during that time, but it ain’t so. Many’s the writer who talks about setting up your life around writing, and sticking to your guns despite all manner of personal difficulty, but I haven’t managed it. I am, however, working on a novel, a couple essays, etc., and I’m reading any number of good things — most recently Peter Clines’ The Fold. It’s old-school SF with enough contemporary goodness to feel fresh, and a few elements that I think might appeal to readers of this particular blog, heh-heh-heh…

Halloween Season and WFC 2018

Greetings, all you ghouls! Here’s hoping your Halloween Season has been as creepy and disturbing as mine… I’ve been reading Orrin Grey‘s Guignol and Other Sardonic Tales lately, along with watching things like Night Tide (1961), Hocus Pocus (1993), and other dark delights. So, actually, a little more witchy-ghosty than stabby-despairy (those are the official horror taxonomies, don’t you know?).

Late summer/early autumn has seen the release of a number of publications including my work. For all that I’ve only completed a few new pieces this year, it’s been a bumper crop the last month or so…

• As I wrote previously, volume one of The Silent Garden, a new annual publication from Undertow, contains an essay by yours truly (“Translating the Ritual”) about the move of Adam Nevill‘s The Ritual from page to screen.
• This year’s edition of Nightscript (volume four) contains my “There Has Never Been Anyone Here,” a semi-epistolary story that goes down as probably the most complicated story I’ve ever written, from research to formatting. My thanks to Nightscript editor C.M. Muller for doing such a lovely job in retaining my intentions for the final version.
• My first peer-reviewed piece of literary scholarship has now been published in Sean Moreland’s New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature: The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft. “Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in Literature and the Course of Weird Fiction” took some time to get right, and I’m proud of it. (Please note that this volume is priced for the academic market, and you might want to consider suggesting your local/institutional library purchase a copy.)

In the next month or so, I’ll have work in Dead Reckonings and a reprint in Pseudopod. A few other things floating around out there might yet appear before 2019.

Last but definitely not least, I’ll be at World Fantasy in Baltimore this year! I’m attending with both my writer and my librarian hats on, so I’ll be swanning around and doubtless asking questions about writers’ research practices. I’m delighted to say that I’m scheduled to read on Thursday, November 1, at 5:30 p.m. in room Federal Hill. Please come to witness the spectacle of…

Terror in Glover-o-Vision!

Well, perhaps not quite all that, but I do loathe a dull reading! Hopefully attendees will be at least entertained, and perhaps even encounter a bit of pleasing terror on the journey…

Story Selected for Best New Horror #28

My “En Plein Air,” a short story that first appeared in Nightscript 2, will appear in Best New Horror #28. I’m gratified that Stephen Jones liked the story enough to include it in his anthology, and I look forward to it finding new readers. My thanks to C.M. Muller for first publishing it in his fine and darksome anthology, and to the readers who’ve been pleased to encounter it, both in print and when I read it last year at ICFA.

This is probably my favorite story I’ve written about Richmond, with scenes set on Cherokee Road, at the VMFA, etc. While I won’t say too much more about that, I will say that this forthcoming appearance is a validation, not least that the approach I took to the story was fruitful, from the background work to the way I went about the writing. It has resulted in the first instance of any work of mine making it to an annual anthologies, let alone one of such long standing as the Best New Horror series. I couldn’t be happier.

A Couple Nice Notices

Once I was talking with a good friend who’s also a writer, and we were lamenting the frustrations of the writerly life. Part of that’s never knowing who is reading your stuff, whether anyone likes it, etc. As my friend said, “you publish this stuff, and maybe no one reads it. It sucks.”

The great maybe-read, maybe-not question makes it all the nicer when you encounter someone with something to say about your work. As a writer without a book of my own (yet!), I most often hear things about stories I have in anthologies, and that’s the case with the two nice reviews here.

• Des Lewis often posts reviews of work that he’s reading, while he’s reading, and I regularly see them floating around social media. I was delighted by his kind words about my short story “En Plein Air,” which appears in Nightscript 2.
• Goodreads user Adamjames recently had kind words for “Pale Apostle,” which Jesse Bullington and I co-wrote for The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron a couple years back.

I’m grateful to the gents in question, and likewise to you, dear readers, for your time. And that’s it for a sleepy, falling-back sort of Sunday. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Nightscripts, Symposia, and More

It’s October, which means that Nightscript Volume 2 has arrived [Amazon]. This volume of the annual anthology that debuted last year contains stories from Michael Griffin, Kristi DeMeester, Christopher Slatsky, Eric J. Guignard, Malcolm Devlin, Gwendolyn Kiste, Ralph Robert Moore, Christopher Ropes, Steve Rasnic Tem, Jason A. Wyckoff, Gordon White, Nina Shepardson, Kurt Fawver, Rowley Amato, Charles Wilkinson, H.V. Chao, Daniel Mills, Rebecca J. Allred, Matthew M. Bartlett, José Cruz, and noted rapscallion J.T. Glover. I’m looking forward to reading this volume, as I very much enjoyed the inaugural edition of Nightscript. It’s on the strange and dark side, more subtle than some books, with a flavor that’s somewhere between M.R. James and Shirley Jackson and Robert Aickman.

My story for the volume is entitled “En Plein Air.” As you might guess, painting is involved, and it’s set here in Richmond. I had the pleasure of reading it this past spring at an ICFA group reading, to a warm reception. Authors are prone to say their most recent story is their best, and so I’m not going to say that, but I will say that I’m proud of it, and I think it’s good. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

My other big thing this month in the realm of the dark, weird, etc. is a paper I’ll be delivering with my critical, bibliographic hat on this Friday at James Madison University’s Pulp Studies Symposium. My paper, “The Selected Authorship of H.P. Lovecraft,” is intended to treat Lovecraft’s letters and authorial identity. As I’ve been revising it, however, it’s evolving into something a little more holistic that’s (I hope!) on point for the symposium’s focus.

The paper I’m giving is one piece of a larger argument I’m groping toward about Lovecraft’s literary reputation, reception, and afterlife. Another part of it will hopefully be appearing in 2017 or so in an edited critical volume, and another part of it will (hopefully; less certain) be given at a conference next year. While I didn’t plan my thinking as such, I am starting to see possibilities for ways these ideas could be presented as a monograph. Whether they will or not is another question, but I do think Lovecraft is an odd literary figure, stranger than he is usually considered, and I believe that I have some useful things to say about that, particularly given my viewpoint as a writer and a scholar.

Last but not least, I’ll point you toward Nick Mamatas‘ “The People of Horror and Me,” in Nightmare Magazine‘s “The H Word” series. Published in September, Nick’s essay covers various aspects of the formation of the horror field, and he has a few things to say about the paper I delivered at ICFA earlier this year (subsequently republished at Postscripts to Darkness). Much scholarship goes unread and unheard, doing little beyond existing. I’m glad that this paper has done neither, and proved a useful stimulus.