2014 marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of Stephen Jones’ Best New Horror series, and PS Publishing has just announced that to celebrate, it’ll start reissuing all of those volumes. I’m pleased that this will bring back into print the fourth book, which led off with my short story “The Suicide Artist.”

Even cooler is that all of the covers for the series will be repurposed art from pre-Comics Code comic books. (more…)

I can’t read, write, or speak in Spanish, but if you’d like to read one of my zombie short stories in that language anyway, you’re in luck. A new Spanish-language printing of the anthology The Book of All Flesh, titled El libro de los zombies, will be out shortly from Edge.

James Lowder edited the original book, which had its first English-language edition in 2001. My Thorton Wilder-inspired short story “Live People Don’t Understand” appears there as … “Los vivos no lo comprenden.”

Please let me know whether, thanks to translators José Luis Viruete and Gustavo A. Díaz, I read better in Spanish than I do in English.

I sure hope so. I need all the help I can get!

I told you it was coming—and now it’s here. My contributor’s copy of The Monkey’s Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead, which contains my homage to Saki’s “The Open Window,” is in my own paws, which means it can soon be in yours, too.

If you’d like to hear me read the story before buying the book, you can check it out here.

The Monkey’s Other Paw, from NonStop Press, is available both as a trade paperback and a hardcover. My story appears alongside tales from Damien Broderick, Paul Di Filippo, Barry N. Malzberg, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Don Webb.

What’s the next story of mine that’ll be published? No idea. That was last of my sold but unpublished pieces.

I recently sent two new stories to market, though—a 13,000-word horror story and a 5,250-word comic fantasy—and I’m hopeful they’ll find amenable editors sooner rather than later. Fingers crossed!

I’ve been relatively quiet here lately due to last weekend’s Spring party, which required a lot of prep and recovery time, combined with the editing of my new short story, which has been occupying most of writing mind. Because whenever I’ve been thinking of posting, I’ve then thought that if I have energy to blog, I should, since I have a story near completion, instead keep revising, revising, revising!

And so the story continues to successfully coalesce, and might even be ready to send to market in a week or two, but surprisingly, I’ve no final title yet, just many working titles which have been toyed with and then almost immediately rejected.

Which is odd for me. Usually, my titles come quickly, sometimes even before I’ve started writing the story itself. And if not that early, then definitely somewhere in the middle of my first draft. I have no doubt that the necessary title will appear from my subconscious when it’s ready, probably popping into my head the same day I finalize the text, but I do find it odd.

In any case, here are the the titles I’ve rejected so far

“Passing for Normal”

“Dead Inside”

“We All Deserved Better”

“This Impossibility, This Inevitability”

“Impossibility, Inevitability, and the Space Between””

“Invisibility, Impossibility, Inevitability”

“Becoming Invisible, Becoming Seen”

“Objects in the Mirror Are More Normal Than They Appear”

“Bodies Do Not Lie”

“That Fear of Being Seen”

“The Presence of Absence”

Well, not all of them. There was one more working title—the first one, which was nothing more than a few words spelling out exactly what the story is about, with no obfuscation. But since I don’t want anybody to know exactly what the story is about until they sit down to read the story, I’m keeping that one to myself!

This morning, I finished the second draft of my first new short story in far too long. The second draft came in at 10,660 words vs. a first draft length of 5,338 words. I could have given you a ballpark figure for this new draft before I even began my revisions—my second drafts are invariably twice the length of my first drafts. It’s not intentional. I’m not deliberately aiming for that doubling. That’s just how my mind works when adding detail to the armature of a story.

As for the title, I don’t have one yet. Oh, I have plenty of working titles, but all of those have been tested and rejected. A few of the ones unlikely to end up attached to this tale are “People, Like Balloons,” “We All Deserved Better,” “This Impossibility, This Inevitability,” and “Impossibility, Inevitability, and the Space Between.”

There’ll be several more drafts before I’m ready to unleash the story on an editor. But why should you have to wait for a peek until someone else deems it worthy? Here’s some of the first draft which I been sharing immediately after having written it over on Instagram and Twitter. As you can see, I start off working in a longhand that’s scribbled so quickly and illegibly that the result is barely decipherable even to me.

Enjoy. Or something.

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If you’ve been wondering when you were going to get a chance to read for yourself the short story I real aloud at the 2012 Worldcon, that time is now!

The Monkey’s Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead has begun to ship from NonStop Press, and for a limited time, the shipping cost is on them.

So if you’d like to read my semi-sequel to Saki’s “The Open Window,” plus other homages from the likes of Don Webb, Barry N. Malzberg, Paul Di Filippo, Damien Broderick, and Steve Rasnic Tem—and save on the postage as well—here’s how to get the trade paperback or the hardcover.

Or both!

As I flipped through the March 2014 issue of Marvel Previews late last night—which I’d downloaded to my iPad, as that’s how I do most of my comics reading these days—I came across a listing for the upcoming Marvel Masterworks: Captain Marvel Volume 5, which will include my seven-issue run on that title.

Made my heart glad to see those comics getting renewed life. Back when I wrote them, I’d never have dreamed they’d be reprinted in a hardcover book.

If you ever wanted to get your hands on those issues without having to pore through the ’70s bins at your local comics shop, now’s your chance!

I checked out Richard Guion’s fun site Giant-Size Marvel today and was pleasantly surprised to see that he’d posted the original art to the cover of an issue of Captain Marvel I wrote a long, long time ago.

When I asked Richard where he’d found the art, he told me that it had sold yesterday at Heritage Auctions—for $26,290.00!

And if I’m correctly interpreting the Heritage stats, it’s the second highest price ever paid for a Gil Kane cover, exceeded only by the cover to The Avengers #134, which went for $41,825 on August 13, 2013.

I guess when I wrote, “oh, what a killer cover from Gil Kane,” I knew what I was talking about!

Since all the cool kids seem to be doing self-promotion this week, I might as well do it, too. So here are my awards-eligible stories that saw print in 2013. It was a light year for Scott Edelman fiction, with only two stories coming out.

“The Trembling Living Wire” appeared in Psycho-Mania! (note that the exclamation point is part of the anthology’s title), and is a contemporary horror story inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Israfel.” It’s approximately 8,500 words long.

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Way back on August 15, 1995, my life changed, only I didn’t know it at the time. That’s because on that date, Craig Engler launched Science Fiction Weekly, which a few years later he would sell to the SCI FI Channel. And a few years after that, over the Labor Day weekend in 2000 at the Chicago World Science Fiction Convention, he gave me the chance to take over from then-editor Brooks Peck.

Here’s how I looked that fateful weekend as I considered the offer, having tried to contact my wife so any decision to leave my then-current job at Satellite Orbit and sign on for the gig would be a joint one. I was wondering … will this Internet thing last? (Hey, it was a very different online world back then.)

Well, it has lasted, and I’ve worked for what’s now called Syfy for more than 13 years, editing Science Fiction Weekly, then SCI FI Wire, and for the past few years, Blastr. (And a print magazine for a while there, too.) But though the Internet and Syfy and Blastr go on, I do not, for today those 13+ years come to an end.

Today marks my final day working for Syfy. It was an amicable parting, but it means I’ll begin 2014 looking for new worlds to explore, both as an editor and a writer.

In my first Science Fiction Weekly editorial back in October of 2000, I explained who I was and why I thought I deserved to be there. (more…)