James Dorr's Blog, page 144

Blurring the Line Available Now in Print Edition

On a weekend marred by real-life terror in Orlando Florida, perhaps there was a bit of prescience in Editor Marty Young’s request Friday evening for address updates for authors’ copies of BLURRING THE LINE.  BLURRING THE LINE is the Australian anthology (cf. December 3, November 26 2015, et al.) that asks the question of when fiction starts and reality ends.  Where, precisely, may that line be drawn.  But various other realities forced changes in the book’s publication schedule, the electronic version being released way back in late November last year, the printed book only available now (Sunday, although being fair, it might have come up as early as yesterday).  Don’t believe me?  Check it out on Amazon here.  Though in fairness too, all has not been idle during the interim, BLURRING THE LINE also recently winning an Australian Shadows Award for best anthology, not to mention having extremely good sales in its Kindle edition!

My offering in this one (on a day when it’s ninety-plus degrees outside with a summer thunderstorm just coming up) is a Christmas tale of young Dickensian witch hunters in London called “The Good Work.”  Could it really have happened?  Well maybe, maybe not, but there are claims at least that those caroling urchins we see in the movies, so cute, so sweet, so out of tune, may have actually been running an extortion racket.

And then one thing more:  It’s not easy to find in printable form, but I finally have a list of the contents of BLURRING THE LINE, with some powerful names including the late Tom Piccirilli (to whom the volume is dedicated), for which see below.

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Blurring The Line

Introduction – Marty Young

“Our Doom is Nigh” – Tom Piccirilli

Blurring the Line (non-fiction)

“Woolen Shirts and Gum Boots” – Lisa Morton

“Clown’s Kiss” – Tim Lebbon

Seeing is Believing (non-fiction)

“Empty Cars” – Lia Swope Mitchell

“How Father Bryant Saw the Light” – Alan Baxter

Candlelight and Circles (non-fiction)

“The Good Work” – James Dorr

“Fearful Asymmetries” – Peter Hagelslag

Big Brother is Watching (and Predicting) You (non-fiction)

“1-2-3 Red Light” – Gregory L. Norris

“Miskatonic Schrödinger” – Steven Lloyd Wilson

Monsters Don’t Exist (non-fiction)

“Old Green Eyes” – James A Moore

“A Peripheral Vision Sort of Friend” – Alex C. Renwick

The Undiscovered Supernatural (non-fiction)

“Consorting with Filth” – Lisa Hannett

“Hoarder” – Kealan Patrick Burke

Human Monsters (non-fiction)

“With These Hands” – Brett McBean

“The Body Finder” – Kaaron Warren

Building Frankenstein’s Monster (non-fiction)

What’s A Monster without Resurrection? (non-fiction)

“Salt on the Tongue” – Paul Mannering

“Every Time You Say I Love You” – Charles L Grant

“Honey” – Annie Neugebauer

The Voices Told Me To Do It (non-fiction)

“Distorted and Holy Desire” – Patricia J. Esposito

“Nita Kula” – Rena Mason

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(The book also begins and ends with two Biblical quotations, from DEUTERONOMY 28 and LEVITICUS 26 respectively.)

Darkest Horrors and Unspeakable Evils: Great Tomes II, Pavlov’s Puppies In Print, Contents Unveiled

A quick note this time to say Bards and Sages Publishing’s second GREAT TOMES volume, THE GREAT TOME OF DARKEST HORRORS AND UNSPEAKABLE EVILS (cf.March 4 ), is available now in print on Amazon, with a June 17 release date expected for Kindle.  Other online sellers should be on board by the end of the week as well, according to Bards and Sages Publishing.

For a preview of sorts, to quote Amazon’s blurb:  “This volume features eleven tales revolving around monsters, evil aliens, and otherworldly entities.”  Included in these, of course, is one by me, “Pavlov’s Dogs,” of a brash young scientist with a plan, and his possibly overly helpful girlfriend.  For the contents in full, see just below, but to decide whether mine falls in darkness or unspeakability one has little choice but to buy the book, for details on which one may press here.

Taylor Harbin: The Black Lady

Breath of the Black God by Robert Lee Whittaker

Bone Man and the Sleeping Kings by Heather Morris

Back for Blood by Milo James Fowler

Pillar of Fire by N. Immanuel Velez

Twenty Steps by Francis Sparks

The Taking of Michael McConnelly by Kevin Wallis

Hybrid by Lucas Pederson

Pavlov’s Dogs by James Dorr

Metamorphosis by Barbara Harvey Carter

A Candle for Imbolc by Julie Ann Dawson

Mocha Memoirs Press: Flightless Rats Chapbook Appearance Proceeds Apace; Louis XV’s Mechanical Duck

It seemed a mystery at first when it arrived.  From Nicole Kurtz of MOCHA MEMOIRS PRESS, the email read:

Dear Contest Winners:

Thank you for your patience, and congratulations on being our top ten finalist in our flash fiction contest.

Here are our next steps.

1. The stories are being edited.

2. They will be published in a promotional horror chapbook from Mocha Memoirs in both ebook and print versions.

3. Cover art is being considered.

But . . . contest?  Chapbook?  Something dim stirred.  I did a search on Mocha Memoirs — yes, they had published a story of mine in the past as well, maybe more than one, but this was something different.  I had a vague memory. . . .

And then it clicked!  Women in Horror Month, February 2016.  And this, dated February 23, Now it has been revealed!  My story, “Flightless Rats,” has made the list of finalists for the Mocha Memoirs Press Women in Horror Month Flash Fiction contest.  Or, in the official wording:  “The following stories have been chosen as the TOP TEN Flash Stories of 2016!  These stories (pending various technical stuffs) will be compiled into a micro-anthology for use by the press.  However, now we need YOUR VOTES to determine the winner of the GRAND PRIZE — $20 Amazon GC!

The voting is long over, of course, the winner announced.  The top ten finalists, “Diabolique” by Tracy Vincent, “Flightless Rats” by James Dorr, “Pickman’s Model” by Jason Ellis, “Hell on Earth” by Carrie Martin, “The Damned” by Melissa McArthur, “Servant Girl Anihilator” by Robert Perret, “Staying” by Myriah Strozykowsky, “Hag” by Marcia Wilson, “What the Dollhouse Saw” by Karen Bovenmeyer, and “Thin Ice” by Marcia Colette, with the grand winner being Myriah Strozykowsky’s “Staying.”  “Flightless Rats” was originally published in T. GENE DAVIS’S SPECULATIVE BLOG, a.k.a. FREE SCIENCE FICTION, on January 12 2015 (cf. that date, below), and starred the New Orleanian vampiress Aimée (who we may recall from “Casket Girls” in DAILY SCIENCE FICTION, see April 17 2014 et al.) about a century after her original 1728 arrival in New France.

So here will be a chance to make one’s acquaintance again in the presumably fairly near future.

Then, speaking of Eighteenth Century France and King Louis XV, a very interesting article — especially for science fiction fans with steampunk proclivities (speaking of “clockworkpunk,” just below) — also turned up in my (e)mailbox this afternoon.  On automata of that time and before, it comes courtesy of ELECTRIC LITERATURE (ELECTRICLITERATURE.COM) by Michael Peck, “The Impossible Bleeding Man:  On the History and Mythology of Artificial Life,” and begins with the bringing to the French king’s attention an amazingly lifelike mechanical duck.  But if ducks, why not men — at least model men, for the betterment of the study of medicine?  Or, as some might say, might that not be taking science too far (believe it or not, a pre-Mary Shelly inventor named “Frankenstein” appeared in France in 1790 in THE LOOKING GLASS OF ACTUALITY, OR BEAUTY TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER by François-Félix Nogaret)?  To see more, press here.

(The flying thing at upper left in the picture, however, is not a duck but a bat; while the standing figure, while it conceivably could be Aimée, is actually Carol Borland in the 1935 movie MARK OF THE VAMPIRE.)

As Good as Gold (Corrections, Corrections); Singular Irregularity Kickstarter Meets First Goal, August Release a “Go”

I know, I know.  “Gold” is the story’s title, slated for publication in Alessandro Manzetti’s anthology THE BEAUTY OF DEATH (see May 28, April 19, January 23) later on this month.  A story of greed and too great a love for the yellow metal, but is it death this H. Rider Haggardish tale will bring, or a kind of godhood, of immortality in its way?  And to keep it on schedule, yesterday brought the proof copy with final editorial changes, in this case mostly tiny grammatical touchings up; tonight will send the email back with perhaps one change plus one additional tweak my reading discovered as well.

Then, speaking of greed, today brought news from Editor Kimber Grey that the kickstarter for SINGULAR IRREGULARITY, “An Anthology About Time Travel Gone Terribly Wrong” (cf. May 23, et al.), has reached its first goal more than a day before its Wednesday morning close.  Thus authors will be paid, at least semi-pro wages, and all appears to be still on schedule for an early August GenCon premiere.  But that isn’t all — there are still “stretch goals,” with more money raised to help raise author rates, and the initial run doesn’t end itself until, officially, June 28 at 7:37 a.m. PDT.  And that’s even later, at 10:37 a.m., here in Indiana with our “double daylight” Eastern (New York) time.

To check out the details and perhaps pre-order, the kickstarter page can be reached here.  My story in this by the way is “The Master of Time,” a clockworkpunk musing, if one will, in which time itself is in danger of stopping.

And if one is interested also in a link to THE BEAUTY OF DEATH, well, it all seems to be a deep, dark secret — which may be appropriate given the subject — until the official announcement comes out.  But when that happens, look for more here.

C’ Tales for Grownups: Isis’ Lead Story to Reprint Next Year

CREEPY CAMPFIRE STORIES (FOR GROWNUPS) began as a stand-alone anthology, launched on May 13, 2015.  The response from horror writers across the globe was phenomenal.  In less than four months, we received over 220 submissions from all over the globe, from the UK, including London, Ireland, Scotland & Wales; Italy; Belgrade, Serbia; Germany; Poland; Australia; New Zealand; Western Cape, South Africa; The United States; and Canada!  The quality of the stories streaming in was so exceptional that we were able to fill a full, 65,000 word anthology with absolutely amazing and high quality horror stories in less than two months!  In fact, we had to close our submissions early, moving our end date back from September 13, to July 13!

Closing our anthology’s submissions so much earlier than originally planned, however, left many authors shut out.  It soon became clear to us here at EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) Publishing, that there were just far too many quality horror writers out there to fit into one single anthology.  We next landed upon making the CREEPY CAMPFIRE STORIES (FOR GROWNUPS) brand an annual publication, every Fall/October, but as submissions to our original anthology continued to stream in, and the quality of the stories continued to astound us, we quickly realized that even an annual publication still wouldn’t fully accommodate the high number of amazingly talented authors of horror/extreme horror that exist today. . . . 

So began the guidelines, and thus was born “The Creepy Campfire Quarterly Publication (CCQ),” a.k.a. CREEPY CAMPFIRE QUARTERLY, to come out on the twentieth day of January, April, July, and October each year.  Billed not as a magazine but a “quarterly horror anthology,” each appearance will contain thirteen stories — no more, no less — for a total of 50,000-65,000 words, some of which are, yes, promised to be extreme.  No readers under 17 years old invited.

And slated now for the July 20 2017 number (that is, a year and a month away), is a tale by . . . me.

The email came lateish Saturday night from Senior Editor Jennifer Word.  As for the story, it is a reprint originally published in 69 FLAVORS OF PARANOIA in March-April 1999, about what happens to a body in which the mind remains that’s been left in the ocean to decompose — and which might slowly be coming around to thoughts of revenge.  The title is “In the Octopus’s Garden” and, for those who might want a preview of sorts, it’s also the leadoff story in my collection THE TEARS OF ISIS, of which, for readers 16 and under, I’d have to at least warn you read at your own risk.

Tears of Isis, et al., Royalty Received for June

Well, maybe it’s not really, truly “mammoth,” but it’s enough for an upscale meal at a local restaurant.  Including tip.  And it’s not entirely for THE TEARS OF ISIS, nor just this quarter (though that’s there as part of it, in itself enough for, maybe, a burger and fries and that’s something too).  Also included are moneys accumulated in past quarters, enough to make it worthwhile for Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing to cut a check, or more accurately a PayPal payment, for a pleasant start for the month of June.  A sign of summer, and nice times to come?

A small amount as well — perhaps a tad over a twentieth — is for my story, “Dead Girls, Dying Girls,” in the Kurt Vonnegut tribute anthology SO IT GOES (cf. May 27; also January 3 2013), also published by PMMP.  Anthology royalties generally are small since they have to be divided among a number of authors.  But the nice thing is, although the money is nice to have too (being on PayPal, it’ll actually most likely go to a couple or three horror DVDs, perhaps some somewhat rare or expensive ones that I might have otherwise put off buying — for what’s the point of having money if not to afford the occasional treat?) — but the nice thing is the reminder that a few dollars are being earned each quarter, a few more copies are being bought of THE TEARS OF ISIS.

For more information on THE TEARS OF ISIS (which also, I might add, has three “Tombs” stories), one is invited to click on its center column picture.  From that one may navigate to other books, including SO IT GOES if one desires.

And the thing is this — it all adds up.

 

Creative Aging Poems Fare for “Last Sunday”; Spiritualism as an Escape from Expected Norms

Sunday, for the Memorial Day Holiday Weekend, brought something new to the Bloomington Writers Guild’s normal “Last Sunday Poetry Reading.”  This one, also the last for the season as the Guild goes on its summer haitus, combined with a local Creative Aging Festival in conjunction with National Older Americans Month (so many things, so many goings on!), brought numerous guests for what amounted to an all-open mike session.  Most poets were also, therefore, on the elderly side themselves, though many of us in the Writers Guild seem to be so anyway.  But as for another difference from expected practice, even though I was invited to, I begged off from reading a poem myself on the grounds that I — who do not age creatively — didn’t have anything that seemed appropriate.

But what of “after-aging,” one might ask?  Poems on death, as on creatures undead, might not have been proper, but what should greet me afterward when I stopped by the library on the way home to look at email (their equipment being faster than the cave computer) but, via DIRGEMAG.COM, “The Victorian Séance:  The Ultimate Feminist Death Party” by Patricia Lundy.  The gist is that spiritualism offered an opportunity for women in a strictly defined male-dominated society to find a niche where they, themselves, were a center of power, however limited.  But spiritualism had become quite popular among men as well as women so, even if specialized, an ambitious practitioner could escape at least for a time her expected role.  As a medium conducting a séance, a woman had more status and opportunity than she did anywhere else in society.  Victorian society demanded that a woman satisfied her husband sexually whenever he wished, had no property or voting rights, and did not have the power to divorce her husband or even gain custody of her children if he divorced her.  Spiritualism offered her a way to fight the patriarchy — by communicating with the dead.  Although male mediums existed, female mediums were preferred because they were thought to have more spiritual faculties than their male counterparts:  “A female medium was often considered a better communicator than a male medium because she had allegedly a better predisposition to spiritual perfectibility.”(2)   Thus death with social history as well!

The article as a whole, though, is just a taste, the quote above covering much of Ms. Lundy’s ground in itself, but footnote “2” to which the quotation within the quote is attributed offers more depth for those who wish to delve.  This takes you to THE VICTORIAN WEB and Dr. Andrzej Diniejko, D. Litt. on “Victorian Spiritualism” (and which also has its own short set of bibliographical notes).  Dr. Diniejko’s piece can be found by pressing here, while Ms. Lundy’s piece is available here.

Beauty of Death Final Table of Contents, New Cover Revealed

The release date, also, should be in June, or so said this morning’s Facebook announcement.  The anthology, Alessandro Manzetti’s THE BEAUTY OF DEATH (cf. April 19, January 23), and the story, my H. Rider Haggardesque (sort of) “Gold,” printed here for the first time.  Elections are coming — shall we vote for greed?  Or at least the story pertains to greed, and how one with that to spare but little money did something about it.

So herewith the contents (look for me seventeen places down, a tad over a third of the way down the contents) as well as a whole new cover design.  Enjoy, enjoy!

Stories:

Blue Rose by Peter Straub

Above the World by Ramsey Campbell

In the Garden by Lisa Morton

Bleeding Rainbows by Shane McKenzie

Finding Water to Catch Fire by Linda D Addison

Mulholland Moonshine by John Palisano

Calcutta, Lord of Nerves by Poppy Z. Brite/Billy Martin

This is how we learn by John Skipp

White Trash Gothic by Edward Lee

12 by Gene O’Neill

Metamorphic Apotheosis by Rena Mason

Breaking Up by ‘Monica J. O’Rourke

The Dark River in His Flesh by Maria Alexander

Fathomless Tides by Tim Waggoner

Every Ghost Story Is A Ghost Story by Nick Mamatas

Cold Finale by Bruce Boston & Marge Simon

Gold by James Dorr

Season’s End by Colleen Anderson

Alley Oops by Del Howison

The Bitches of Madison County by John F.D. Taff

No place like home by JG Faherty

Rotten Apples by John Claude Smith

In Frigore Veritas by K Trap Jones

Dearly Beloved by Ron Breznay

How to make love and not turn to stone by Daniel Braum

Candy by Paolo Di Orazio

Contractions by Kevin David Anderson

Building Comdemned by Adrian Ludens

Professor Aligi’s Puppets by Nicola Lombardi

By the River She Wakes by Erinn Kemper

The Office by Kevin Lucia

The Carp-Faced boy by Thersa Matsuura

The Captain by Stefano Fantelli

Blacker Against the Deep Dark by Alexander Zelenyj

Larrie’s Tapes by Gigi Brigante Musolino

Game by Daniele Bonfanti

The I of the Beholder by Kathy Ptacek

Vestige by Annie Neugebauer Tilton

Kozmic Blues by Alessandro Manzetti

The Lady with the Stick by Simonetta Santamaria

Black-Eyed Susan by Mike Lester

Kurt Vonnegut on Man-Eating Lampreys . . . and More!

No, it’s not my headline this time but rather the title of an animated lecture/interview by Kurt Vonnegut on BLANKONBLANK.ORG/ PBS DIGITAL STUDIOS, delivered to a class at New York University on November 8 1970.  And please forgive the annoying Dropbox commercial toward the end.  But, speaking of SCIFI’s venture itself into academe (see post just below), I’d say that while this one was rather more exciting — the rocketship, for instance, vs. “Killer Kudzu”? —  I’d like to hope ultimately that  we’re all talking about the same thing.

And the man-eating lampreys as well?  To find out press here.

Kudos for indirectly leading me to BLANKONBLANK, etc., go to Mike Olson and ON THE EDGE CINEMA.  And if that weren’t enough, there are more of these animated interviews — times run to five or six minutes or so each — such as one with “Ray Bradbury on Madmen” (this time via Youtube and without commercial, at least not interrupting it toward the end like with Vonnegut’s session) which can be found here.

SF Writers Group (Temporarily) Joins Academe; Untreed Reads Spring Short Story Sale for May

SCIFI is its name and it stands for South Central Indiana Fiction Interface, or something like that.  I didn’t make it up, but for those who care, we generally pronounce it “skiffy.”  It’s the writers group that I belong to, monthly meetings involving critiquing one another’s stories.  But SCIFI went highfalutin this morning, with regulars Frida Westford, Christine Rains, and me as invited guests to Indiana University Associate Professor Joan Hawkins’s media class on Science Fiction Television.

No, we don’t write TV scripts, but the class is about how science fiction, and speculative fiction in general, “is a favored genre for reimagining, reworking and critiquing gender roles, human sexuality, the relationship between humans and technology, war, and racial stereotypes.  It is a place where utopic and dystopic notions of government and power are explored, a powerful lens for looking back at our own contemporary reality.”  And, Joan and I both (well, and Frida too, but she wasn’t there when this first came up) being in the Bloomington Writers Guild, she asked me if I, as a bona fide sometimes science fiction (or if not, horror’s close enough) writer, and colleagues if I could gather some, could come into her class one day to give her students an idea of how things work from the creators’ point of view.

And that was, among other things, my first official non-blog announcement that it looks like I’ve got a “Tombs” novel-in-stories coming down the pike (see post just below), allowing as well an example I could use in discussing, in this case, far-future dying-Earth themes.  In general it worked like a panel at a science fiction or horror convention with Joan starting off and then the students following with questions about such things as what draws us to speculative fiction, if and how it may allow us to explore topics we might have trouble with in more mainstream fiction, how one gets ideas and how they’re converted to stories, other writers we’re influenced by (Frida and I both cited Ray Bradbury and, specifically, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, to which I also added Poe, Allen Ginsberg, Bertolt Brecht, and the ancient Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides).  And, Heaven help us!, at one point I found myself actually explaining the plot line of my recent flash story “Killer Kudzu”  (cf. May 21, March 27).

“Killer Kudzu” aside (we also talked about vampire movies some), it was an interesting session and a good one, with the students responding well and coming up with some really good questions themselves.  And not only that, it was a chance to show off and do a Good Deed at the same time.

Also (cf. May 21, 5), “May is International Short Story Month, and what better way to celebrate than with great savings?” to quote from today’s email.  The sender this time is Jay Hartman of Untreed Reads Publishing who reminds us (cf., again, May 5):  “We’ve got tons of titles on sale in every genre, so get big savings on short reads!”  It goes on to say that from now until the end of the month, individual short story titles are $0.50 each and short story collections and anthologies will be available for up to 50 percent off.

These would include my story chapbooks PEDS, I’M DREAMING OF A. . . ., and VANITAS, with all three reachable by clicking one of their pictures in the center column.  And — *BONUS* — the page that will lead you to also includes the short story anthology YEAR’S END:  14 TALES OF HOLIDAY HORROR with its sale discount too.  And from there, of course, one can navigate to Untreed Reads’ main pages, of which they advise, “[b]e sure to explore all of our genres on the left side of our store page to see everything we have to offer,” adding though that one must hurry.  “Sale ends May 31st.”