Lynda E. Rucker's Blog, page 21

keep those cards and letters coming…

A longtime friend of mine was digging through some old boxes and found some postcards and letters I'd sent him long ago (along with postcards from lots of other people, of course). He posted one of the postcards on Facebook and it led to a conversation about the end of postcard-sending and letter writing.

Most of the people who posted on the thread allowed as how they missed those days and that emails, or digital photos uploaded instantly to everyone online–awesome as that is–lack something...

about Machen

Arthur Machen is receiving a respectable release in a Penguin edition, with a selection of his stories including "The White People." Well, it's been out for a few months in the US, actually, but is only coming out in the UK next month. I'm not very good at playing favorites, but I think if I had to choose one favorite supernatural story, it might be "The White People," a long tale which consists largely of a young girl's rambling diary entries describing her encounters with something evil...

Ash-Tree Press offers eBooks

Good news for those who love quality supernatural and horror fiction, new and old: in the New Year (well, it started at the end of the Old Year, but no point living in the past, right?), Ash-Tree press is slowly releasing much of their catalog as e-books. You can download them at their website or go to Amazon to purchase a Kindle edition. Note that if you don't have a Kindle (I don't), you can get a free Kindle app for just about any device, including your PC. Reading on a laptop still isn't ...

some things to read

I've written a couple of things recently. No, actually, I've written tons of stuff recently, but most of it is stuff you can't read yet. But here are a couple of little pieces you can read.

I wrote briefly about women horror writers in Dark Enough: Women Writing Horror Fiction, and then surveyed some women writers for their recommendations for the online journal Sinescope. There are some wonderful fiction suggestions there by some excellent writers, so be sure to check it out!

I also wrote...

The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror

I received my contributor's copies of The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror this week, which includes my story "The Moon Will Look Strange," originally published in Black Static.  There are a lot of wonderful stories and authors in this volume, and I'm so pleased to be published alongside them.

a sale, reprint, and a tangent on tenacity

Sale! My story "The Burned House" has been accepted at the magazine Tales of the Unanticipated. Publication date TBA.

Also, "The Moon Will Look Strange," which appeared in Black Static #16, is going to be reprinted in The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror #2, edited by Paula Guran, out this August. I've mentioned that elsewhere, but not here.

That's two sales to American markets in the last month or two! For whatever reason, only UK editors have bought my fiction up to now. I am not certain w...

appreciating women in horror

In better late than never news, my post for the last day of Women in Horror Recognition Month has been up for a few days at the Black Static blog. I wrote about Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Red Tree, a book which, as you will see from my piece, I like quite a lot.

One of the things I touched on in my piece is my ambivalence about the month, and the idea of being a "woman writer" instead of just a writer. (Yes, I know I can be both.) But I can't deny that, now in its second year of its existence...

Cleaning cobwebs

I was going to come in here and make a remark about clearing cobwebs from this poor old blog, but then I wondered whether cobwebs might actually be an appropriate accoutrement for the blog of a horror writer?  And then I thought, god, no, that's cheesy and sad.

Anyway . . .

There are lots of things I've been wanting to write about here, and I've been especially remiss given that February is the second year of Women in Horror Recognition Month, dedicated to highlighting the work of women...

Boxing Day Horrors

Actually, this is a very  pleasant and kinda snowy day-after-Christmas. (The snow started last night, the first white Christmas here in over 100 years!) The "horrors" mentioned above just refer to some spooky links I've been collecting to share recently.

From Gemma Files, this weird little animated short, The Forbidden Forest

Film critic and writer Anne Billson made her first short film, the creepy Alouette, and posted it here

Someone on my Facebook page (sorry, forgot who!) posted this...

Podcast: "The Chance Walker"

"The Chance Walker," a story by me published in The Third Alternative back in 2003, is up now at Transmission from Beyond as a podcast. Read by me too!

I still like this story and since it's never been reprinted anywhere, I'm really pleased it's available again. The story comes from a couple of places. I taught English for a few months in the Czech Republic in the mid-90s, and while in Prague one day, I picked up a book of paintings by a Czech artist named Jiří Mocek. (In the past, googling...