Paper Fruit

It’s a more thematic title than you might imagine! Oooh, intriguing, right? Maybe.

Two things! First, last week I was on the Books and Booze podcast. It was a lot of fun! Renee, Dakota, and Jessica are awesome people who do this podcast thing weekly, where they interview emerging authors, musical artists, and talk about cocktails. You can listen at the link above, if you wish! We talk about all sorts of things—there are links in the show-notes—and I reveal the title of my forthcoming collection for Egaeus Press.

But, lest you have better things to do with your time than listen to me babble for over an hour about drinking, Victorian pornography, and Hong Kong cinema—you know, the usual for me—I’m announcing the title here on my blog! It’ll be called Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations. I posted the likely ToC in an earlier post, so you can scroll back a little if you didn’t catch that, but it’ll be my best stories, plus a new Lovecraftian cosmic horror piece, plus plus a novella that’s been retitled “Rumbullion” because my publisher and I, being the kind of people we are, discovered that “rum deal” was bootlegger slang, rather than something more period appropriate. Anyways, “Rumbullion” is an archaic name for rum, and also meant a brawl or altercation even before that. So… yeah. It’s basically “Rashomon” meets “The Queen of Spades,” whatever that means.

As the collection will not only contain stories, but thematic cocktail recipes, you can see how the theme of the week is… never mind. You figured it out already, I’m sure!

It’s hot. Really hot. A week ago today, I got back from a two-week stay in Florida, and I don’t think it was this hot down South. More humid, sure, and therefore grosser … but ugh, it’s hot.

I’ve been feeling a little drained, perhaps due to the heat, and likely in part due to some sort of mystery-problem with my right hand that has me wearing a brace for a few weeks. And yet, I have a lot of things to be excited about/working on, so I type, with this brace, an update to this blog:

I have a new story coming out! The fine people at Pornokitsch/Jurassic London are putting out a mummies anthology, called The Book of the Dead. It sounds awesome!

The Book of the Dead will be published in collaboration with the Egypt Exploration Society, the UK’s oldest independent funder of archaeological fieldwork and research in Egypt, dedicated to the promotion and understanding of ancient Egyptian history and culture.

Full ToC here. My story is called “Mysterium Tremendum” and is sort-of about Tesla, maybe, and definitely about why you shouldn’t trust cute boys.

Next, my forthcoming Egaeus Press collection doesn’t have a title yet, but I’m hard at work on the all-new novella. Here’s the unofficial ToC for that, in no particular order:

Herbert West in Love
Go, Go, Go, Said the Byakhee
In Sheep’s Clothing
Damnatio Memoriae
Tubby McMungus, Fat From Fungus
The Middle Passage (some all-new cosmic horror!)
How John Wilmot Contracted Syphilis
The Poison-Well
Rhum Deal (the aforementioned new novella!)

Very exciting! I wanted this collection to be a best-of-my-best, and so far I’m more than happy with how it’s shaping up. The new novella is causing me to tear my hair out at the moment, but that’s okay. I think it’ll all work out. Any troubles I’m having I lay at the feet of Nick Mamatas, who I heard one too many times mocking stories where “people do too much with their eyes, like raising their eyebrow while looking at someone over a glass of wine.” So here I am, writing about an 18th century dinner party full of fops, avoiding that. But how does one write about white-people angst without eyebrow-raising? I guess you’ll have to read it to find out.

Also, I don’t think I mentioned it here, but I was nominated for the British Fantasy Award, in the Best Newcomer Category (the Sydney J. Bounds Award), for A Pretty Mouth. Holy shit! The fact that I spaced on blogging has everything to do with the nomination coming two days before my Florida trip, because I am so stoked to be nominated for this. I decided to make good on that membership I bought to WFC in Brighton and go, because damn. So, see you in October, Brighton!

Oh, and speaking of A Pretty Mouth, there might be a hardcover edition at some point. Woah!