Blasphemous Words: Tit For Tat Reprint First 2017 Poetry Acceptance
There are some things one cannot resist. One example, an anthology titled THE BOOK OF BLASPHEMOUS WORDS, a weird fiction, horror, and speculative fiction anthology about humanity’s relationship with its gods. When we answer the call for salvation from the bondage of the material — when we believe in gods — we reach a hand into the unknown and risk losing it to something peckish. When we forget the power of the hearth, we risk a conflagration that can return civilization to the dirt from whence it came. Brave words those, and so I answered, the guidelines calling for stories, not [image error]poems, with a 32-line “story in verse” called “Tit for Tat.”
Originally published in James Ward Kirk’s GHOSTS: REVENGE anthology (see March 29, March 17, February 16 2015), “Tit for Tat” is a poem “of a type sometimes known as ‘Little Willies,’ about a naughty boy who either causes or comes to grief, resulting in the poet reacting with either glee, gross indifference, or sometimes drawing from it a tragically inappropriate moral” (Feb 16). And today the response came from Adrean Messmer for publisher A Murder of Storytellers: Thank you for sending us “Tit for Tat”. We all sat around a table and gushed about this story for a while. We would love to include it in BOOK OF BLASPHEMOUS WORDS.
Details followed, including a contract (to go back to them this afternoon), with a bio, etc., the usual things, between now and Friday, with a tentative publication date to be on or before January 31.
