Mike Allen's Blog, page 30

Free Kindle stories! A sinister Black Friday celebration

In honor of the wickedly dubious achievement of the three volumes of Clockwork Phoenix having sold a total of 666 copies in e-book form as of today, I am making my three strange short stories on Kindle (“She Who Runs,” “Sleepless, Burning Life,” “Stolen Souls“) available free for any and all to download on Amazon, starting today and continuing through Tuesday. Consider it an Evil Friday gift. (Click on the covers below or the links above to go nab. Also, any help anyone can give signal boosting much appreciated, desperately needed, in fact — feel free to repost this in total or in part.)

(Interested in the promotion? Don’t have a Kindle? E-mail me and we’ll chat.)

“Machine Guns Loaded with Pomegranate Seeds” appears at Strange Horizons

My tongue-in-cheek anti-Persephone-poem poem “Machine Guns Loaded with Pomegranate Seeds” appeared today at Strange Horizons. My thanks to Sonya Taaffe for giving this piece a home. My thanks also to Amal El-Mohtar for this delightful Twitter review:

Only @mythicdelirium could make me burst out laughing at a poem that opens with “A thousand Persephones lie bleeding in the Lethe.”

— Amal El-Mohtar (@tithenai) November 19, 2012

A new “Tour of the Abattoir” at Tales to Terrify

The latest Tales to Terrify podcast contains my newest “Tour of the Abattoir” column, in which I review stories from the first two issue of John Joseph Adams’ new publishing venture Nightmare Magazine, by Jonathan Maberry, Genevieve Valentine, Sarah Langan and Desirina Boskovich.

 

Mythic Delirium 27 on its way to mailboxes around the world

Cover by Paula Friedlander.

The newest issue of Mythic Delirium shipped out yesterday to destinations in all corners of the globe. There’s a darkly romantic theme to its offerings, with a new steampunk sonnet from Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner Ken Liu, as well as contributions from Rachel Swirsky, Theodora Goss, Sonya Taaffe, Shira Lipkin, Sofía Rhei (translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel,) Sandi Leibowitz, Rose Lemberg, Alex Dally MacFarlane, S. Brackett Robertson, Alexandra Seidel, Gwynne Garfinkle, Anna Sykora and Lida Broadhurst. If you want your own copy, here’s how you get one (there’s just a few of the first run left.)

Look for these to start going out in the mail Wednesday

If you want to make sure you get one, here’s how.

Mythic Delirium 27 just a week away

The newest issue of the zine, featuring Ken Liu, Theodora Goss, Rachel Swirsky, Shira Lipkin, Sonya Taaffe, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Rose Lemberg and more, has made the transition to a physical object. Tomorrow it will go to the printer for binding. Evidence below:

Clockwork Phoenix 4 submissions update

If you submitted a story to Clockwork Phoenix 4 in October and you haven’t received a response, it’s either because I’m holding your story for further consideration, or it somehow fell through the cracks in my submission system. Either way I encourage you to query.

We received about 500 submissions in October. In November so far we’ve gotten about 120. In allowing multiple submissions but barring simultaneous submissions, I feel I have an obligation to get back to everyone in a timely fashion so no one ends up with several stories tied up for a ridiculous length of time. My heartfelt thanks to my assistant editors, Sally Brackett Robertson and Sabrina West, who are helping me keep the task manageable.

A Clockwork Phoenix guidelines clarification: “rococo sf”

At prezzey.net, Bogi Takács asked me for a clarification of what “rococo sf” means in the Clockwork Phoenix guidelines.

This was my response:

My plea for “rococo sf” has caused puzzlement before. I recognize that recommending that people read the books to see what I mean is both obvious and futile, but if you read the sf stories I’ve actually published in the Clockwork Phoenix volumes (“Palisade” by Cat Sparks, “Oblivion: A Journey” by Vandana Singh, “Choosers of the Slain” and “Murder in Metachronopolis” by John C. Wright, “The Endangered Camp” by Ann Leckie, “Surrogates” by Cat Rambo, etc.) youll see that there is some element of the bizarre and/or the avant garde and/or the poetic and/or the dream-like that permeate them. Most writers who tackle elements like this in their prose and plots choose to do it as fantasy, but it can also be incorporated into convincing science fiction, and when someone pulls it off it makes me very, very happy.

Other sf stories in the pages of Clockwork Phoenix include Jennifer Crow’s “Seven Scenes from Harrai’s Sacred Mountain,” C.S. MacCath’s “Akhila, Divided,” Barbara Krasnoff’s “Rosemary, That’s For Remembrance,” Leah Bobet’s “Six” and arguments can be made for other stories that cross over from the slipstream side, such as Tanith Lee’s “The Woman” or Gregory Frost’s “Lucyna’s Gaze.”

You might ask why not call it “avant garde sf” or “surreal sf”? Well, to my mind that isn’t correct, because though I want the sf in Clockwork Phoenix to have that sumptuous strangeness, I also want it to be comprehensible. So I picked “rococo,” roughly meaning in this case “elegant and ornate” and also “florid” or “artistically complex,” in an attempt to give a sense of what’s different about what I select. Really, those descriptors apply to almost everything I pick in some way. Except when they don’t. (*Insert evil laugh here.*)

Mythic Delirium 27 cover complete

I wanted to show off how Tim Mullins handled adding the poet names to Paula Friedlander’s art.

Next comes printing. Now is a good time to subscribe.