The Mumpsimus

This afternoon, I will be flying to Los Angeles for the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference . Here's my schedule of events, in case you're in the area and want to say hello... Thursday, 3/31: Black Lawrence Press reading and party at CB1 Gallery , 7pm Friday, 4/1: Signing at Black Lawrence Press booth (#1526), 1-2pm Saturday, 4/2: signing at the GLBTQ Caucus Hospitality Booth (#633), 12-12.30pm And of course I'll be wandering around the conference and spending lots of time at the book fair.

Once again, chaos and luck have conspired to release another issue of the venerable Revelator magazine into the world! In this issue, you can read new fiction by Sofia Samatar and John Chu; an excursion into musical history by Brian Francis Slattery; surreal prose poems by Peter Dubé; an essay by Minsoo Kang; revelatory, rare, and historical Wizard of Oz comics; art by Chad Woody; and, among other esoterica, shotgunned books! Go forth now, my friends, and revel in The Truth ... and All!

Posting here is likely to continue to be sparse for a while, aside from occasional announcement-type notes such as this one. I'm preparing for Ph.D. qualifying exams and anything not related to that and/or to the impending release of Blood: Stories has been cut from my waking hours since this summer. Blood: Stories has an official release date of February 20. It is at the printer now as I write this, and can be ordered not only from the publisher, but also from Amazon (U.S.), Barnes & Noble , and Small Press Distribution . (It hasn't hit Book Depository yet, but when/if it does, I'll post a link, as that's often the least expensive way to order internationally.) There will be an e-book version eventually, but not until this summer at the earliest. BLP also has a new subscription series for their books , which has various options, all of which are less expensive than buying the books individually. I'll be in New York City this coming weekend to read at ...

In honor of the blog's 10th anniversary , I thought it might be nice to spruce things up around here a bit. Thus, a new design. Some of the design details will be in flux for a bit while I try it all out in different browsers and on different computers. Please pardon any mess!

Oliver is not impressed with Rambo I've promised myself to devote the month of January primarily to work on a book manuscript (about 1980s action movies and their relationship to the Reagan presidency) that a certain academic publisher is interested in. Thus, I need to get work done. The internet looms as an endless temptation, and I am more than skilled at losing hours to idle surfing. I've also got other writing assignments that need doing, classes to prepare for, etc. So I'm signing off at least until February, barring interesting announcements or cosmic events or just an overwhelming desire to violate my own resolutions. (It usually happens.) I will also likely be only slowly or vaguely responsive to emails, etc. Please don't take it personally. I've got three weeks in which to get real work done, then life returns to its normal craziness.

For the Advanced Prose Workshop class that I'm teaching at Plymouth State University this term, I had the students create and manage a blog. They've been playing with it for a little while now, testing out templates and figuring out how to post different types of things. We opened it up to the world today. I'm pretty much letting them do what they want with it, hoping that having a real audience for their work will be both educational and encouraging. With that in mind, I encourage you to take a glance and leave a comment, particularly if something they've written especially interests you. For many of these students, this is the first audience they've ever had beyond friends, family, and teachers. They're really just getting started with posting, but there should be a steady stream of material over the next few weeks. (And as I've warned before, my own blogging here is likely to be light through December.)

I don't generally publicize Kickstarter projects, etc., here, because it would be easy to get overwhelmed, but here's one I've got multiple personal interests in: Unstuck: New Literature of the Fantastic and Surreal . Unstuck  is a new(ish) annual(ish) journal out of Texas. Their first issue included fiction by Aimee Bender, Matthew Derby, Amelia Gray, J. Robert Lennon, Meghan McCarron, Rachel Swirsky, Leslie What, and others who are just too fabulous to name. Their upcoming (at the end of the year) second issue will include work by Other People You Know, plus me (a very short story about Victrolas and turtles that I read last year at Readercon). The rewards for funding the project are pretty great. Also, one of the editors is Meghan McCarron , someone whose life I nearly ruined once by hiring her to teach at a boarding school in New Hampshire. She's beginning to forgive me. She'll forgive me more if you fund this project. (But don't use that as an exc...

Note: Updates below. Here's the Readercon harassment policy  in writing: Readercon has always had a zero-tolerance harassment policy. Harassment of any kind — including physical assault, battery, deliberate intimidation, stalking, or unwelcome physical attentions — will not be tolerated at Readercon and will result in permanent suspension of membership. As always, Readercon reserves the right to strip membership at its discretion. Here's the Readercon harassment policy in practice: Earlier today I was contacted by a Readercon representative, who let me know that by decision of the Board, my harasser has been suspended from Readercon. For two years. I was not given the reasoning behind the decision; the board’s deliberations, I was told, were confidential. I was assured the board had taken everything into account – my report, my eyewitnesses, others who had come forward with information they declined to detail. They asked me if I felt they had taken my complaint...

I will be at Readercon 23 in a few weeks. It's the one convention I attend every year, and I'm especially excited about this year because the panels are especially interesting, the guest list is awesome, and one of the guests of honor is Peter Straub, whose work I am in awe of and who is among the most delightful people to hear on panels or in interviews or readings or, really, anywhere. (Honestly, if Peter Straub were a train conductor, I'd follow him from car to car. He'd get freaked out and call the police, and I'd get arrested for being a weirdo, but it would be so worth it!) Also, we get to celebrate 50 years of Samuel Delany's work. And we give out the Shirley Jackson Awards ! Before posting my schedule, I wanted to note the Readercon Book Club selections for this year. These are panel discussions of specific books, a "classic" and a recent work of fiction and nonfiction each. This year's are:

A quick site note: I've neglected to update the Fiction page on the blog here for some time, so I just did so. It now contains not just links to stories originally published online, but information about all the fiction I can remember publishing over the last 10 years or so. A couple old links were dead, and I found two stories completely available via Google Books ( "The Lake" and "In Exile" ), which made me very happy, because those are two of my personal favorites (which is to hint that reader reaction to them has been decidedly ... mixed...), and I had thought they were inaccessible and obscure. But no! (Well, their content  may be inaccessible and obscure — or, as some have maintained, pretentious, arrogant, presumptuous, artsyfartsy, and — or maybe that was somebody describing my cats...) You can even still buy the whole zine or book in which they appeared, which you should, indeed, do, because you are a supporter of small presses! (Though you should r...

I am a juror for this year's Shirley Jackson Awards (along with Laird Barron, Maura McHugh, Kaaron Warren, and Gary K. Wolfe), for which the nominees have just been announced . It's a diverse and interesting list, I think, but then, I'm one fifth of the people responsible for it, so I'm a bit biased. The winners will be announced at Readercon in July. NOVEL The Devil All the Time , Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday) The Dracula Papers , Reggie Oliver (Chômu Press) The Great Lover , Michael Cisco (Chômu Press) Knock Knock , S. P. Miskowski (Omnium Gatherum Media) The Last Werewolf , Glen Duncan (Canongate Books, Ltd.) Witches on the Road Tonight , Sheri Holman (Grove Press) NOVELLA “And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living, ” Deborah Biancotti ( Ishtar , Gilgamesh Press) “A Child’s Problem,”  Reggie Oliver ( A Book of Horrors , Jo Fletcher Books) “Displacement,”  Michael Marano ( Stories from the Plague Years , Cemetery Dance Publications) The Men Upst...

I was bored with the old look of this site, so decided to change things around a bit. (If you're reading this via RSS or a mobile device or something, check out the actual website to see.) There may be some adjustments as I try it out on other computers and browsers, but for now this will do. Until I decide to go all neon green. Because clearly the internet needs more neon green.

Things have been mostly quiet here for a few months because of general busy-ness on my part since September. Not just with teaching, though that has eaten up more time than usual, but also with my membership on the jury of the Shirley Jackson Awards and the board of our local domestic violence shelter and resource center, Voices Against Violence . (Operating a domestic violence shelter and resource center that offers entirely free services in these economic times in a state where the legislature is full of anti-government, anti-spending fanatics is not the easiest job on Earth.) Free time and sleep have not been things I've experienced much for the past few months, and that took a toll as well, since I'm now recovering from a rather nasty virus. But we soldier on! And there should be a bit more time for blogging in the coming months, so I've begun to make some plans. First, the usual reflection on the term's classes, which even if it ends up being terribly boring ...

Terri Windling is facing health and financial problems right now, and so a bunch of folks have banded together to create a giant auction of stuffs to raise money for her . If her name is unfamiliar to you, check out her Wikipedia page for a quick summary. photo by Beth Gwinn I don't know Terri Windling, but she has been a great help to many of my friends in their lives and careers, so I am distressed to hear of her distress. I've got dozens of books in the house with her name on them, and far more with her name on the acknowledgments page. Therefore, I decided to contribute an item to the auction, something I've had for a while and have been looking for a good cause to which to donate it. This seems perfect. Thus, if you would like to bid on a copy of Startling Mystery Stories  with Stephen King's second professionally-published story in it, follow this link. This issue of Startling Mystery  was the first magazine where King's name appeared on the c...

It's the final week of the Strange Horizons Fund Drive , and there are lots of fun prizes that have been donated by the various folks who support SH. But you shouldn't donate just to get a prize. You should donate because that's what keeps SH going, and has kept it going for 10 years now, long enough to make it venerable . Their staff is all volunteer, but they pay their writers good rates (think of it as the opposite of the Huffington Post that way). Here's some useful info: Where does my money go? Strange Horizons  is staffed entirely by volunteers, so everything you donate goes towards the running of the magazine. At the moment, our costs break down something like this: Your  $5 donation  will cover our administrative overhead costs for one week Your  $20 donation  pays for one poem or one review Your  $50 donation  pays for one article Your  $100 donation  allows us to sponsor a convention event Your  $250 donation ...

I was distraught to learn that Ann VanderMeer will no longer be the editor of Weird Tales . During Ann's tenure, first as fiction editor and then as editor-in-chief, the magazine has been more exciting, alive, and contemporary than it had been in at least 60 years, publishing all sorts of different types of fiction from writers young and old, new and famous; writers known within particular popular genres and writers known better among the literati. The magazine has been a joy to read. More than a joy, really, because it became an exciting magazine of surprises, and we need all those that we can get. Ann's a great editor and will go on to many marvelous things in the future, as will the rest of the extremely talented staff. They worked wonders with limited resources, and I have no doubt the future holds great things for them all. Today, though, is a sad one. Thank you to everybody at Weird Tales  over the last five years. You've got a lot to be proud...

The room in which The Mumpsimus was born. Photo from February 2007. Well, golly. Today marks eight years since I created this blog back in 2003. I didn't post anything beyond the definition of the word "mumpsimus" on that first day, but then things got going with a post about a story by James Patrick Kelly after a brief statement of purpose . The statement of purpose ended by saying, "Who knows what will come of all this?" What became of it was certainly more than I ever expected. The busiest time for the blog, in terms of posts and of visits from readers, were the first few years, particularly 2004 and 2005. There weren't a whole lot of other people doing what I was doing, and it felt like everybody who was writing blogs about books and literature of any sort knew and read each other (hence the creation of the Litblog Co-op ). But the blogosphere expanded rapidly, and one day it seemed like there were 1,000 book blogs out there. And a lot of us s...

I'm giving Google Plus a test run, because with the Start Google Plus browser extension , I've been able to link all of my Facebook and Twitter feeds in a way that is not overwhelming, and so it looks like I might be able to use Plus as a single hub from which to access various forms of social networking clearly. Using Plus's circles, it's really easy to keep track of various groups of people, so I'm perfectly happy to add folks I don't know, which I don't do with Facebook, because I hate just about everything with Facebook's interface. I don't promise to be a prolific poster on Plus (I'm not prolific on Facebook or Twitter), but if you want to add me, here's my profile , and I'll probably reciprocate. (I say probably because I'm still exploring the technology and don't want to make any categorical promises! My great fear is somehow I'll stop following somebody and then they'll think I hate them and I won't even hav...

The winner of this year's Caine Prize for African Writing is NoViolet Bulawayo for her story "Hitting Budapest" , originally published by Boston Review . "Hitting Budapest" was the first story we wrote about for the Caine Prize blogathon, and it's held up better in my memory than I expected it would. Despite my qualms about some aspects of it, there's a vividness to the language that gives it some freshness. Were I on the jury, it wouldn't have been my first choice (that would be "The Mistress's Dog" ), but it might have been second, or tied for second with "In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata" , though that's a story that, unlike "Hitting Budapest", has diminished in my memory.

The previous post, "The Sokal Hoax at 15" , was number 1,500 here at The Mumpsimus.