My first short story publication of 2015 is now available for your reading pleasure. Well … it’s available for you to purchase anyway. As to whether there’ll be any pleasure involved … that’s something you’ll have to decide later.

I’m pleased to see this story in print for a number of reasons. One is that not only was it the first story I wrote in 2014, it was also the first story I’d managed to write in several years, ending a fiction drought caused by the demands of my day job. Another is that it’s a 13,000-word story, not the easiest length to place, but I managed to place it anyway. And of course, Dark Discoveries is a great horror magazine, which makes the fact that my story, “Becoming Invisible, Becoming Seen,” is the lead story this issue all the more sweet.

And, hey—who doesn’t like to see their name first on the cover list of contributors?

“Becoming Invisible, Becoming Seen” is a dark but (hopefully) uplifting horror story of love and obsession, and you can read it by ordering a copy here. If not for me, then how about for Storm Constantine, Cecilia Tan, Ray Garton, and all the other wonderful writers you’ll find there?

I told you this day would come—and now it’s finally here. My first short story collection, These Words Are Haunted, long available only in an expensive hardcover edition, is finally out in paperback.

If you’ve held off since 2001 from buying the $37.95 hardcover, you can now pick up a paperback version for only $13.99.

What’s in it? Well, according to the back-cover blurb …

Zombies spar with humans for dominance of a post-apocalyptic Manhattan in the Stoker-nominated “A Plague on Both Your Houses.” The King returns to prove that rock ‘n’ roll will never die in “The Elvis Syndrome.” And a dying boy is the catalyst for a deal with a decidedly different devil in “Making Peace with the Leader.” These and ten other nightmarish tales form a bizarre baker’s dozen in Scott Edelman’s acclaimed horror collection.

Check out a few further details here.

If those words make you want to buy a copy, head on over to Amazon or Barnes & Noble, depending on your vendor preference.

And thanks as always for your support!

I was skimming through my old diaries in search of what I’d had to say about an incident which I remembered occurring in the early ’80s (an incident I’m not going to tell you about, so there), and in the course of that search came across something completely different—a mysterious job opportunity mentioned in an entry from November 16, 1979—

I responded to this ad in the Village Voice yesterday: “WRITER—Gag writer needed to collaborate w/cartoonist for cartoon strip. Call Richard Maneely [phone numbers redacted].” Well, I did, and gave my name and phone number to an answering service. Maneely called back this morning, and it turns out he is the AGENT for a cartoonist who tried to do a strip years ago with a writer. The strip failed to sell, the writer quit, and the cartoonist has been doing work in advertising the past years. He’d like to revive the project with a different writer now. Maneely is mailing me copies of the strip to look at. If I like it I’m supposed to call Maneely back and then we can work out a deal and the artist (whoever it is) and I can start working together.

I’d completely that this had ever happened.

Also forgotten? What happened next.

Why exactly did I never get get involved in this comic strip?

Did I see take one look at the samples and decide the collaboration would never work? Or did I, on the other hand, like the strip and want to move forward, only to get shot down by the artist?

In fact—did the samples ever show up the mail for us to even get that far?

No idea.

I looked carefully through my diaries—in which I’ve written on a near-daily basis since November 2, 1978—and found that I never referenced this project again. Whatever happened to it is a total mystery.

So I’m going to toss out these very thin facts to the comic strip gurus and ask—do you know of a strip growing out of this kind of relationship during that time period? Perhaps some other writer got the chance to script a strip I don’t think I even got a chance to see.

What say you, experts?

I’m behind in reading Locus, so I’ve only just now gotten to the magazine’s interview with Simon Ings from its February 2015 issue. You can read excerpts here, though this section, which resonated with me the most, wasn’t included—

My ex is the agent for Lawrence Durrell’s estate. What’s interesting about Durrell is the amount he threw away. This was a man who could write for his country. He was extraordinarily prolific. But although his body of published work is quite extensive, it’s really tiny compared to what he churned out, and he was very good at throwing stuff away. Because it’s been his centenary, every squirrelly academic from every Midwestem college is saying, “There’s this lost Larry Durrell manuscript that we must publish!” The house is full of bad Larry Durrell, and the agency and the estate are constantly turning down these academics. “He threw this away. The only reason he didn’t discard it in a bin is because he’s a writer and he might need that scene later. This is not for publication.” That’s part of the writer’s job. They published an unpub!ished John Wyndham novel. There’s a reason why it was unpublished. It does him no service whatsoever, because that’s now part of his canon, which is ridiculous because he couldn’t make it work.

Milan Kundera is always on about this: you should be able to lose work.

Why did this passage touch me? Because I’ve been doing my best for years to “lose work,” in part to make sure no future “squirrelly academic” will ever have a reason to make that kind of demand on my heirs. (Not that my work is important enough one ever would, but humor me here.)

My first 25 or so unsold short stories? Destroyed! (Well, save for the first, which I’ve been hanging on to for sentimental reasons.)

My first three unsold novels? Also destroyed!

The first drafts of every other novel or short story I’ve ever written? Save for a few pages from a new piece set aside specifically for the Kickstarter campaign of the anthology Genius Loci—shredded!

I’ve done my best to ensure that any work which doesn’t live up to the rules Kenneth Koch stated in “The Art of Poetry” no longer exists.

As for my early work that did get published but probably shouldn’t have gotten published, well, there’s little I can do about that now save make a promise that while I live it will remain forever uncollected. What happens after I’m gone I know is out of my control.

But what is within my control is to make whatever work no longer says what I want it to say as best as I can say it … disappear.

That Milan Kundera sure is wise. (Simon Ings, too.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few more old manuscripts to burn …

Last July, I sold a story to Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place, an anthology edited by Jaym Gates. Now it’s time to make that anthology a reality.

And making it a reality is up to you.

A couple of hours ago, Jaym launched a Kickstarter campaign for the project, which includes more than thirty stories by Seanan McGuire, Ken Liu, Andy Duncan, Alethea Kontis and others. But there are also all sorts of neat rewards in addition to the book itself.

When I started writing this post, I thought I’d be able to tell you that one of those rewards was the handwritten first draft of my contribution, “And the Trees Were Happy”—but I now see that those pages have already been snapped up! Don’t worry—there are still plenty of other bonuses that can be yours if you choose to help fund Genius Loci, such as Wendy Wagner’s grandmother’s WWII cookie recipe or an hour-long writing class over Skype with Sunil Patel.

I hope you’ll check out the Kickstarter campaign and help bring into print a poignant story of mine which has gotten me verklempt all three times I’ve read it aloud in public. Because there are a whole lot more people out there who need to be made weepy.

I published my first short story collection, These Words Are Haunted, back in 2001. It was a hardcover aimed primarily at the collector market, and cost $37.95. I’ve long wished the book could be available as an inexpensive paperback, so those unfamiliar with my writing and therefore unwilling to drop that big a chunk of change on an unknown might be more likely to give me a try.

Come April, that will finally happen, thanks to Ian Randal Strock, who runs Fantastic Books, which also published my science fiction short story collection What We Still Talk About.

Also requiring thanks—Memo Angeles, who created a Zombie Alphabet that won my heart (and brains!), plus Chris Kalb, who used that alphabet to design this awesome cover.

Here’s the press release announcing the book’s upcoming publication.

The paperback of These Words Are Haunted will be 224 pages, cost $13.99, and come out on April 7, 2015. It can’t be ordered yet—I’ll let you know when links go live—but I couldn’t resist teasing you now with that beauty of a cover.

Earlier today over at io9, Charlie Jane Anders posted about Archy and Mehitabel, the philosopher cockroach and the alley cat created by Don Marquis 99 years ago in the pages of the New York Sun. Back when I was a teenager living in Brooklyn, I was so in love with the prose poems purportedly written by Archy as he bounced from key to key on a manual typewriter that I did an homage for the student newspaper of South Shore High School.

Here’s what I looked like back then. Here’s what I sounded like back then. And below, from the February 1973 issue of Shorelines, is what I wrote like back then, when I was but 17 years old.

Well … what I wrote like when I was 17 and channeling a cockroach anyway.

If I’m recalling correcting, the piece won me some sort of student journalism award from The New York Times. And no, I don’t know what they were thinking either.

But now that I’m in the fullness of my powers, however, it occurs to me that it might be time for another homage.

Hmmmm …

Turns out that the first story I wrote once I got back in the groove again at the beginning of 2014 will also be the first story of mine published in 2015—a 13,000-word tale titled “Becoming Invisible, Becoming Seen,” which will be out later this month in the quarterly horror magazine Dark Discoveries.

Editor Aaron French revealed the cover today over on Facebook, and as you can see from that list of names, I share the issue with an amazing group of writers.

Here’s what Aaron about to say about the contents of Dark Discoveries #30 —

The theme of this issue is Sinister Appetites and includes both erotic and non-erotic forms of desire and lust. Brand new stories from Storm Constantine, Scott Edelman, Ray Garton, John Everson, Cecilia Tan, D. Harlan Wilson, and Erinn Kemper. Also a great article on Robert Aickman by Lawrence C. Connolly and a piece on Aleister Crowley’s dark fiction by Donald Tyson. Plus awesome new columns from Gary A. Braunbeck, Yvonne Navarro, Michael Collings, Robert Morrish, and Richard Dansky, and the next comic installment by Patrick Freivald and Joe McKinney. New artwork from Steve G Santiago, Greg Chapman, and Luke Spooner as well. Plus so much more!

You can advance order a copy here. And if you do, be sure to let me know what you think of my story!

A few weeks ago, I read Joanna Russ’s 1975 review of the movie A Boy and His Dog, which had originally been published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. I hadn’t intended to, and wasn’t deliberately seeking it out. I just came upon it the way one often does online, clicking through from link to link, and eventually ending up somewhere unexpected but necessary.

It’s a wonderful piece, and deserves your attention, as all of her work does, but the passage that intrigued me the most was a paraphrase of something Chip Delany once wrote:

According to Samuel Delany, a literary characterization proceeds by means of three kinds of actions: gratuitous, purposeful, and habitual, and well-written characters perform all three. (This classification certainly applies to realistic fiction, and I suspect it applies to all fiction, however stylized.) Sexist literature produces two kinds of female characters, both imperfect: the Heroine, whose actions are all gratuitious, and the Villainess, whose actions are all purposeful. Neither performs habitual actions.

This stood out for me because, being a writer, I immediately wanted to understand more fully exactly what Delany meant by these three classifications. I could tell the concept would be helpful to my own writing. And as I thought, hmmm, how will I ever track down the source, I suddenly remembered that due to this connected world in which we live, I could simply ask the source directly, since Chip and I are friends on Facebook. So I reached out to query where I could find his full essay explicating this idea.

It turns out the essay “Letter to the Symposium on Women In Science Fiction” originally appeared in an issue of Khatru, and was then reprinted in his non-fiction collection The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. But not, unfortunately, my copy of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, as it’s a first edition. It can be found in the current expanded edition, though. I decided I’d pick up a copy at this year’s Readercon, where I could get him to autograph it, and then thought nothing more. (more…)

A tweet from the Horror Writers Association has alerted me to the fact that only 10 days remain to get in those Stoker Award recommendations. Which means it’s time for me to alert any voting members out there of my lone eligible piece of fiction from 2014—the short story “An Most Extraordinary Man,” which originally appeared in the anthology The Monkey’s Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead from NonStop Press.

If you happen to be one of those voting members, and would like to read the story for Stoker consideration, drop me a note and I’ll be glad to shoot a copy off to you.

But all of you, whether HWA member or not, can give a listen to me reading the piece aloud back in 2012 at the Chicago Worldcon.

I only hope Saki isn’t spinning in his grave …