Michael A. Arnzen's Blog: News from Gorelets.com, page 29

Alternative Rorschach

"Card Eight" from the Alternative Rorschach series... What do you see?

Encouraged by early feedback, I'm starting a new digital art series on my flickr gallery called "Alternative Rorschach." Check it out, free associate, and tell me what you see in the comments section on flickr or on facebook.

I've only done three "cards" so far; and if feedback keeps coming I will do the entire deck of psychologist inkstains in my own weird way in the weeks to come, so keep coming back (see Rorschach Inkblots page on wikipedia to learn more about the source of this stuff).

Fan the New Facebook Page for Gorelets.com

I'll try to come up with something original to do with it soon….

Michael Arnzen – Gorelets.com

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Magazine of Bizarro Fiction

Mag of Bizarro Fiction #4

Just learned that issue #4 of The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction is now being mailed (early birds can order it now from amazon.com). This special "Werewolves and Shapeshifters" issue was edited by John Skipp, and includes the first appearance of the piece I read at last year's Bizarro Day event at Backlist Bookstore, called "Endless Shrimp." Other great writers, including Jeremy Robert Johnson, Nicole Cushing, Robert Devereaux, D. Harlan Wilson, and Cody Coodfellow, also appear within. These are all some of the smartest and weirdest writers I know, so this is sure to be a great volume.

p.s. Speaking of John Skipp… he's currently running a great kickstarter campaign asking for pledges to help fund a 3D Zombie Puppet Musical called Rose. Chuck him a buck to support this ambitiously fun project…or donate a large chunk of change and get a bit part (literally) in the film!

Resort to Cannibalism

Two survivors. Adrift at sea. On a raft for days. Starvation sets in. Mike Lacher at Wonder-Tonic asks:

Who will resort to cannibalism first?

Happy New Year 2011!

Happy New Year 2011!

As I work on the next issue of The Goreletter, I thought I'd post a little New Year's round up of recent activity and news of some exciting things to spill soon out of the cracks in the Arnzen brainbox.

Earlier today, I uploaded scans of a few rare broadsides from days of yore to the new "Arnzen Manuscripts and Rarities" collection on Scribd.com. I thought fans of my book, Proverbs for Monsters, might like to get a peek at the history behind some of the stories. (Dark Regions Press is selling Proverbs for Monsters at a nice discount right now… visit them at darkregions.com ). I'll likely keep updating this site with various oddities, and excerpts from forthcoming titles, so if you're on scribd, please follow me or leave comments.

New artwork continues to be posted to my flickr gallery on a semi-regular basis, like the image above. This one reminded me of the story, "Spring Ahead, Fall Back" so I called it that. There are also new things going up every now and again to the Gorelets.com gallery on this very website (like several poster art pieces I discovered recently, when going through my old files).

And the big news:

Many of you might realize that the name of this website, gorelets.com, refers to my poetry experiment — and subsequent poetry chapbook — called Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems. This webpage was originally just a platform for distributing short-short horror poems to people with handheld computers long before there was a twitter or even a Kindle. 2011 will mark a DECADE since launching that experiment, so to celebrate, I am compiling a HUGE e-collection of poetry, articles, and other fun related to the gorelets project called The Gorelets Omnibus, which should be available on Amazon.com as a Mastication Publications title in the weeks ahead. The original Gorelets collection had just 52 poems — which really is quite a few. But last I counted, this new ominbus edition will have something like 183 poems in it! I will likely create enough exclusives to bring that number up to 200, just because I like round numbers and because I like to make each edition of a book a little special. Anyway, if you're a regular visitor to this site, I think you'll enjoy it a great deal.

2010 was a sluggish year for me due to some setbacks and work commitments, but the haze of the year is settling and I'm excited about the year — nay, the decade — to come. Right now I'm juggling four book-length projects, I have several short stories I've promised to horror anthologies in development, and lots of stuff on publisher's desks getting typeset as we speak. So I suspect 2011 will be a very happy new weird. I wish you all the best.

Much more to come soon! Subscribe to the email edition of The Goreletter so you don't miss a beat.

New Website Launched for MANY GENRES, ONE CRAFT

One of my big nonfiction projects this past year was co-editing a huge, 130,000 word collection of instructional articles for writers, called MANY GENRES, ONE CRAFT: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction, with writer Heidi Ruby Miller. It's early, but the website for the book has launched, and many insightful features are planned for it in the months leading up to the book's release this coming Spring:

http://manygenres.blogspot.com

If you write or teach writing, no matter what genre, this book is for you. Horror readers will likely be familiar with some of the names in the book. Gary Braunbeck launches the book with an article on first lines; Mary SanGiovanni appears in the book with an essay on "Mood and Atmosphere in Horror"; David Morrell contributes an insightful gathering of "Five Pieces of Advice for Potential Thriller Writers"; Thomas Montelelone shares the lessons learned from editing his classic Borderlands anthology in an article called "No Such Thing as Original Sin"; Steven Piziks discusses how he got media novelizations for titles like Exorcist IV; Lucy Snyder talks about how to network at genre conventions; Michael Bracken discusses the art of the short story… for my part, I also contributed four articles, including an essay on "The Element of Surprise: Psyching-Out Readers of Horror, Mystery and Suspense." And that's just a small sampling of this very large book (60 contributors!).

If you like the "Instigation" prompts on The Goreletter, then this will likely appeal to you. But even if you don't write, you might find the insights of your favorite writers, talking "behind the scenes" about their genre work, of high interest. As editor, I can tell you that the quality of the advice in this book is really quite impressive. You can review the full contents list via a link the MANY GENRES weblog.

Winter Chills: Arnzen Interview with Non-Horror Reader Survey

Like reading, but don't really like horror fiction? WD Prescott, is running an interesting website bluntly called The Non-Horror Reader Survey that is studying what today's readers think about the modern horror genre. It features interviews with various readers, writers, and scholars, along with a research questionnaire you can fill out, if you want to participate. It's an interesting idea and you should chime in and get the discussion going.

Prescott interviewed me this week. See "Winter Chills with Mike Arnzen". I talk about The Popular Uncanny, teaching horror in college, horror's relationship with humor and poetry, and all sorts of scholarly things you wouldn't expect the creator of "Dear Santa" to talk about. And I make confessions like this:

I simply like to get a reaction out of readers, and myself, whenever I write. And as a horror fan, I simply enjoy laughing, gagging, and chortling with wicked glee. It's all clownery, even if the facepaint is black. You should see me in a movie theater. I'm usually the only one cackling from somewhere in the back row, while everyone else is cowering and biting their nails.

Read the rest at Non-Horror Reader Survey.

"Dear Santa": The Lost 1989 Manuscript

HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Against my better judgment, for a gift I give you this Christmas story — "Dear Santa" — a long lost manuscript of the very first horror story I ever sold (to GAS magazine in 1989), but which ultimately never saw print. On the one hand, this is old and amateur enough to be most embarrassing. On the other hand, I think I've made a career of embarrassing myself. Enjoy?

"Dear Santa" – a lost 1989 manuscript by Michael Arnzen

(If you cannot read the above, see if you can click on the "view fullscreen" link at the top of the reader. Or just head on over to scribd.com, a neat site for document sharing that I have just joined. Comments, "follows" and offers to buy my old manuscripts for heaps of gold bullion are always more than welcome!)

Have a great holiday season…

Graveyard Studies

"Revenant" : Graveyard Study VII

I have been posting a series of digital experiments with cemetery photographs at my flickr account, like "Revenant" above.  Drop by my gallery on flickr and check out the "Graveyard Studies" set.  I'll keep posting new things there as they develop.  Please feel free to comment here or on the gallery itself.

Food Folks and Fun with Zombies at the Morgantown Poets

Reading "Food, Folks and Fun w/Zombies" (10/2010)

The Morgantown Poets society has posted video excerpts from my Halloween season poetry reading in Morgantown, West Virginia last month.  It was a goofy gory night of the bizarre, which I titled "Food, Folks and Fun with Zombies."

I read three courses of horror:  a batch of gory "food" poems from a variety of sources (including crazy twitter poems and pieces from The Goreletter e-edition), a "folksy" ghost story (from the just-released collection, Legends of the Mountain State IV — not appearing on the vid), and then I ended with a "fun" batch of zombie poems from my book, Rigormarole.  The lighting is dark, the sound is hit-and-miss, but the video captures the jist of what my readings are like.  It was fun to read in an art gallery to a very indulgent audience, who was enormously generous with their time, patience, and laughter.

Look for "Endless Shrimp" — delivered in the 2nd of the 3 short video clips  — to appear in an upcoming issue of The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, edited by John Skipp.

[In other, totally unrelated news: I've posted two new artpieces to the gorelets' "scrawl" gallery:  "Graveyard Study III" and "Fallen Lamp."]