First, my horror story "The Button Bin" is now a finalist for this year's Nebula Awards (short story category). Color me gobsmacked. Anita and I will be traveling to Los Angeles the weekend of April 25 for the award ceremony — likely to watch someone else win — but man, it's such a thrill to be in the running.
Second, I'm about to publish the 20th issue of my little poetry journal, Mythic Delirium (our 10th Anniversary issue); and that issue is going to contain an original and brand new poem by Neil Gaiman. (I don't think I need to tell you who he is.) As Neil himself succinctly put it on his blog, "Mike has been asking me for a poem for years, and finally he asked me when I'd written one. In this case, one about a trout heart." The poem is called "Conjunctions" (it's actually a companion piece to an Amanda Palmer song called "Trout Heart Replica") and we're proud to be showcasing it, along with a lot of other fine work in this extra large issue.
These two things kind of came together all at once. It was really hard to concentrate much on day-to-day activities for a while. As a result I've been interviewed for several websites. One interview, in which I discuss matteres Mythic Delirium at great length, has already appeared at Cabinet des Fées. I've recorded a podcast of "The Button Bin," due to appear April 2 at StarShipSofa, and Psuedopod will do their own podcast of the story later this year.
Nonetheless these haven't been the only things to unfold since the start of the year. I've had three new poems appear so far; my Thomas Disch tribute, "Ascending," at Strange Horizons; my double acrostic puzzle-poem "Cosmic Secrets" at Ideomancer; and a strange lyric called "Long Sad Notes" in The Magazine of Speculative Poetry. I also recorded a podcast for Clarkesworld to go with Ken Scholes' short story "The Last Gift Given."
In the meantime, review copies of Clockwork Phoenix 2 are being readied for their first venture into the world. And Clockwork Phoenix made the 2008 Locus Recommended Reading List.
No, not a bad start at all.
Unrelated directly to writing things, I'll have a small speaking part in a movie written by my playwright friend Dwayne Yancey, called "My Kid Could Paint That," in which I'll play a rich (ha!) art parton. At least (for once) I'm not the Devil.
It seems like a good time to break my web silence (at least on this site, over on LiveJournal I'm yattering away)and review what's gone on this year.
It looked kinda like this:
Aside from the big event
Clockwork Phoenix,
I had two new stories published this year:
And two of last year's short stories were reprinted online, more or less:
I also had a slew of new poems publish this year, not the best I've ever done, but not the worst either:
Most of my new poems appeared as originals in the collection The Journey to Kailash, though there's some overlap. From the collection:
The Journey to Kailash reprinted 46 poems. I would feel silly listing all of them in this entry; they'll eventually make it to my biblio page. However, I did have a few poems reprinted in other places.
The other thing I did that I havne't yet mentioned here was give a presentation at the Roanoke Arts Festival in November about the life and fiction of my late friend Nelson Bond. That was a ton of fun to be part of; my friend Paul Dellinger hosted the event, and a fellow (former) newspaperman, Bill Ruehlman, paid tribute to another local writer, columnist Jack Kestner. For my part, I used clips from some of the old radio shows that were based on Nelson's stories, which I think surprised the audience, in a good way.
And this just in: Deborah Biancotti's story "The Tailor of Time" from Clockwork Phoenix is up for an Aurealis Award. Congratulations to Deb and good luck!
I was guest at ReaderCon last month, where I once again hosted the Rhysling Award ceremony (congratulations to Catherynne Valente , who has contributed to Mythic Delirium, Mythic and Clockwork Phoenix, and to F.J. Bergmann, whose poem from Mythic Delirium 17, "Eating Light," won in the short poem category.) I also gave a presentation about the fiction of my late friend and mentor Nelson Bond, complete with a snippet from an NBC radio broadcast of one of his stories; and of course, I hosted the launch reading for Clockwork Phoenix , with readings from the book by Vandana Singh, Cat Rambo, Michael J. DeLuca, Leah Bobet and Laird Barron. (Ekaterina Sedia was also scheduled to read, but her train was delayed, alas.)
ReaderCon also served as the launchpad for my new chapbook, Follow the Wounded One, published by Not One of Us . It's a dark fantasy novelette that's a sequel to "The Hiker's Tale " (which has been graciously serialized here by Papaveria Press.) I also had hardcover copies of The Journey to Kailash, my new poetry collection from Norilana Books . There's a dedicated website for the book here, complete with audio readings of several of the poems.
I've made some new magazine appearances. The latest issue of Weird Tales holds my short, humorous horror story "An Invitation via Email"; the latest issue of Space & Time contains my satirical poem "The Problem with Science Fiction Poetry"; and the latest issue of Goblin Fruit has my dark fantasy piece "Midnight Rendezvous, Philly," along with an audio reading .
Last but not least, my short story "The Button Bin" is now available at Transcriptase, a rather unique website formed in reaction to allegations of troubling conduct on the part of a co-editor of Helix . For what it's worth, my own participation came about because of my displeasure with the way writers who raised concerns were treated. The entire situation has been explained here.
Tangentially related, I've been told that both "The Button Bin " and "The Hiker's Tale ," as well as my poem "The Hollow Sphere," will
be on the Honorable Mentions list in the upcoming volume of The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror.
The weekend after that, April 25 to 27, Anita and I will be turning up for some panels at this year's RavenCon.
In the meantime, nationally renowned poet Fred Chappell has honored my upcoming poetry collection The Journey to Kailash
with some very kind words: "It seems most proper that The Journey to Kailash should include a poem
about Jackson Pollock. Like that painter of large-scale states of mind, Mike Allen
pours everything he’s got onto his poem-canvases. Mythologies, science-fiction
scenarios, private memories and desires, and untestable ideas crowd and overlay
one another upon the pages as if flung from an overloaded brush. Here is a vividly
vertiginous collection of poems, all fun and mind-games."
And for that matter, I hope to have a third book with me at ReaderCon. Not One of Us is planning to bring out my dark fantasy novelette "Follow the Wounded One" as a standalone chapbook. The novelette is the direct sequel to my 2007 short story "The Hiker's Tale," picking up with the unnamed narrator just a couple weeks after the first story left off. It's meant to stand on its own, but it's also part of a sequence I'm writing that's slowly growing toward novelhood.
Meanwhile, Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 just appeared on bookstore shelves, featuring my 2006 Rhysling Award-winning poem "The Strip Search." I talked about the creation of that poem in an interview I did that year with Virginia Libraries, which is now available for free online.
Speaking of free online, I've had two new poems pop up so far this year, both of them in Helix: Speculative Fiction Quarterly. The first, "deathmask," was written after poetry editor Bud Webster's significant other, Mary Horton, showed me some of her creepy and surreal cloth masks. The second, "Zombie Bombs," is a darkly funny collaboration with my favorite bad influence from across the pond, Ian Watson.
Last but not least, under the Mythic Delirium banner I've published a new chapbook, Kendall Evans' bizarre and delightful play-poem hybrid In Deepspace Shadows, which SF Site coos over here.
Lots for you to check out, lots more for me to do...
Another short story of mine, "The Hiker's Tale," a yarn of spirits and demons that unfolds along the Appalachian Trail, has just appeared in Cabinet des Fees 2, out from Prime Books.
The newest issue of Mythic Delirium has gone out to subscribers and contributors, and new featured poems are up, featuring video of readings by Theodora Goss and Sonya Taaffe.
After a year of little happening on the new poetry front, I suddenly have a flurry.
I now have the complete list of my stories and poems that received
Honorable Mentions in the latest Year's
Best Fantasy and Horror: six total, including "The Music of
Bremen Farm" from Cabinet
des Fees (my first HM for fiction) and five for the following
poems from Strange
Wisdoms of the Dead: "Eating the Time Shark," "finale,"
"saecula saeculorum," "that strange man with the green petunias" and
"The Psychic Above Burritoville."