This month’s Locus has a familiar name on the cover…
Yeah, what? I dunno! At ICFA, back in March, Locus asked if they could interview me. I had a lovely time chatting with Liza Groen Trombi, who was so fun and interesting it was very hard to stay on topic, and then we goofed around taking ridiculous glamour shots of me for a while. Anyway, the result of that pleasantness is an interview entitled “Ghosts ‘n’ Shit,” which is apparently one of if not the cuss-heaviest interview they’ve run, according to another editor.
In it I talk about Vermilion, The Pleasure Merchant, and the novel I just turned in to my agent, The Ginger Eaters, along with some other stuff… like the journal I used to keep as a kid where I’d go about my day surrounded by invisible snarky dragons. You can legit buy this at like Barnes & Noble. It’s on the news stand! So cool. Many thanks to the Locus crew for the fun time, the I’m sure brutal process of editing my interview into something coherent, and the gorgeous design and layout.
Additionally, here’s the cover for Congress for our debut issue next month:
Stories by Livia Llewellyn, Robert Levy, Matthew Addison, and David Nickle. I’m really stoked about this. Not only does it look gorgeous (just wait until you see the site! Jeremy is a wizard) but the stories are all top-notch smut, this time all with a speculative bent. Not all issues will be so fantastical (or science fictional) but I’m excited it has a bit of genre flair.
I’m reading for the next issue already. If you have a pitch, query me. If you have a story with me, hold up I’mma gettin there.
Swords v Cthulhu is coming out this year, official cover release will be soon I hope, plus pre-ordering and such. Look for it soon! It’s pretty, and I’m so proud of the work our authors put into this book.
Otherwise… woof, I dunno. I’m working on the first short story I’ve written for myself, not for an anthology, in literally years, and it’s giving me back a bit of my joy over short form writing. This isn’t to say I’m not thrilled to have had two short stories accepted into anthologies already this year: “Cognac, Communism, and Cocaine,” co-authored with Nick Mamatas for Through a Mythos Darkly, ed. Glynn Owen Barass and Brian Sammons, and “That Nature Which Peers Out In Sleep,” for The Madness of Dr. Caligari, ed. Joe Pulver. It’s just that as someone who isn’t a particularly prolific short writer, having every single one I write be for a specific purpose, and for anthologies with lots of vision but a limited audience, has burned me out a little.
Perhaps I will muse on that more later. For now, I’m excited to finish this story—for love!—and begin the thrilling process of submitting to magazines again.
I have A Thing due in November (two things, actually, but one of them is a little scarier than the other), and it’s now September. I’ve been working well on it, sometimes, but now I need to be working well on it… all the time.
This is at odds with my desire to blog more, as I find it rewarding, my desire to exercise more (and more diversely) which I have to do as my first triathlon is officially twenty (NO! 19, shit) days away, somehow, and my desire to start sewing my own clothes more, as my mother and I made a dress together on her most recent trip out here and it was super fun. Oh well! This kind of busyness is what I’ve been desiring since day one of deciding to try this whole writing thang.
Speaking of…
I use that little “stickies” program for Mac to keep my monthly biz straight on my dashboard. Hours for my various freelance gigs, HTML code I use to do stuff, etc. I also had been keeping a running list of publishers who were looking at Vermilion since my agent put it out in the world. It occurred to me today I could clear that. The top left of my dashboard now looks strangely empty, but thrillingly so.
I was the Lovecraftian/Weird Author of the Week over at the Lovecraft eZine. Recently, Mike Davis has begun posting short interviews every week with “a Weird Fiction and/or Lovecraftian author that I feel deserves more attention.” I was very flattered he offered me a spot. But I got a little, I dunno, introspective… so be warned.
What is it about Lovecraftian horror and Weird Fiction that appeals to you?
[….] In Weird, and especially Lovecraftian Weird, the world doesn’t make sense to begin with, so all you can do when things go really wrong is… go crazy, or (better) stay sane and learn to cope with the knowledge that everything you believed or knew is garbage. The older I get, the more that… realism, I suppose, appeals to me. I already mentioned my dad passing away… maybe this is obvious, but that really affected me, when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Not just because I was suddenly confronted with the terrible knowledge that he was going to die sooner than I’d ever expected, but because my dad was always the healthiest guy. He cooked low-fat and low-sugar, walked and cycled and worked out with weights… and yet, earlier than most people are even diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he died of it. What the fuck is that shit? How is that fair? Well, it’s not. It’s just terrible.
Whee! Fun!
Uhhh, in other news, September’s issue of The Big Click went up today.
Here at The Big Click, we have pretty wide tastes in noir. We’ll publish stories about criminals, about psychopaths, barely reformed lowlifes, and the like. But only rarely will we do cops or private investigators. Partially because most of what is sent to us involving the police or PIs just isn’t noir: it’s hard-boiled, or a mystery with sex in it, or a procedural with booze in it. The rare cop-themed noir we do get tend to ultimately choose sides in a way that sends the story screaming into the hell of moral instruction. Trust us, we already know that doing drugs and killing people and hurting women is bad. (And if we didn’t think so, these stories would not persuade us.)
I think that’s it. My Dahl blog got pushed back from August into September, in part because the book came in late, so if I actually get that in to Pornokitch it should go up this week. It’ll be on Over to You, his RAF stories. Since the book I finally received also contains what should have been September’s stories, I should be able to get that in on time! Novel!
