Six Vampire Poems to Appear in Moonshadow; The Tears of Isis Pre-Halloween Promo for Oct. 21

Sometimes you just have to be an opportunist in this business.  Wednesday, more or less minding my business, I was reading email when one message took me to some place on Facebook, which in turn led me to Alban Lake’s page — I don’t remember exactly why — but while there my eye fell on a “reminder” that there was an editor “still looking for vampire poetry for his MOONSHADOWS (sic., the actual name is MOONSHADOW, I think) anthology.”  No guidelines, no hints that might serve to narrow the subject or at least say whether to send attachments, just the name and an email address, plus a mention of a contributor’s copy and $2.00 a poem.  I scrolled down to find the original announcement (after all, it said “still”) but the only difference there was that MOONSHADOW had lost its trailing S.  Still (to pardon the expression) I have a backlog of vampire poetry and, even though $2.00 isn’t much, publication is still publication.  So, the bat flying blind as it were, I gathered six poems I thought offered a variety in style and, pasting them into a cover letter, off it went.

Flash forward two days.  Yesterday, Friday, an answer came from Editor Henry Lewis Sanders.  All have been accepted for MOONSHADOW:  A COLLECTION OF VAMPIRE POETRY with a hoped-for publication date of November 2013.  The poems in question are “Social Climber,” “The Neophyte,” “Seven Reflections on a Phrase, ‘After the Rain,’” “Blood and Sand,” “Ancient Music,” and  (my personal favorite) “My Pet Bat.”  And all because I happened upon the right place at the right time and decided, what the heck, why not take a chance?

And then another opportune thing, later last night I received an announcement that blogger Kate Hill, whose interview of me appeared just this Tuesday (see August 13), was gearing up for “the 9th annual Halloween page at my website.  This year the theme is a haunted library.  There will be a main Halloween page as usual and everyone’s info will be posted on it through the entire month of October.  In addition, there are twenty feature spots on my blog that will be filled on a first come first serve basis.”

So Kate’s site “focuses on romance and erotic romance,” as she says herself, but other genres are welcome too, so, even if it was nearly 10 p.m. when I got the word, I stayed up to answer the basic questions, and then the extras for one of the featured promotion spots for (need I say?) THE TEARS OF ISIS.  I honed my answers, I polished my presentation, I sent it in finally amidst (as I found out) a flurry of replies from other competing authors.

But the thing is, I was still in time, while not to appear Halloween week itself as I’d hoped at first, for a spot for Monday the week before on October 21.