If you're looking for something to do this evening, a panel of eight horror authors will be doing live readings from their books! It's at 6pm EST tonight, go here to find out more:

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/indie-horrorthon-1--/register

* Saint Walpurga, whose nacht this is, was hailed by the Christians of Germany for battling "pest, rabies and ( Read more... )

I might have claimed a prompt over on sshg_promptfest. Heh heh heh. And TWO of my prompts have been claimed ::preens::

On another fun note, I discovered something called Starship Sofa: The Audio Science Fiction Magazine. It's narrated by a couple of funny and fabulously-accented (I could listen to them all night) Irish guys, who are also well-read, ( Read more... )

Anita Brookner has died. The first thing of hers that I read was Hotel du Lac, a battered copy found on a bookshelf in a bed-and-breakfast in Germany; twenty-five years later it remains one of my favorite books. Her finely crafted novels, with their precision of description and compactness of focus, are like medieval miniatures. I'm sad there ( Read more... )

“The one test of the really weird [in writing] is simply this,” H. P. Lovecraft wrote in the introduction to “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” “whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the ( Read more... )

A wonderful interview with him over on Huffington Post:

"In my view, all these ideologies have destroyed literary study in the graduate schools and in the academies...All these "isms" are preposterous of course; they have nothing to do with the study of literature or with its originality. As I've said before, the esthetic is an individual and not ( Read more... )

I just learned that Tanith Lee died late last month. She has always been one of my favorite authors, and I'm so sorry she's gone. I bought her Red as Blood: Tales from the Sisters Grimmer from the Science Fiction Book Club (remember that?) decades ago; it was my first encounter with fairy tale reimaginings and engendered a lifelong love of that ( Read more... )

Apparently the 60th anniversary edition of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which I don't own but clearly need to possess, includes a new coda by the author. It is a masterpiece of literate laceration, in which he excoriates the obsession with political correctness which, taken to its extreme, leads to everything sounding just like everything else ( Read more... )

The Unbearable Solitude of Being an African Fangirl

Striking, illuminating, and poignant. The author, Chinelo Onwualu, is a young Nigerian author, graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop (more proof, if any were needed, that Clarion is the gold standard for speculative fiction writers). You can read one of her stories here on Ideomancer: ( Read more... )

Since mini-fest is posting and hoggywartyxmas is coming up soon, this seems appropriate:

"JK Rowling To Write Malfoy Story And Other New Harry Potter Content For
Christmas. The Yule Ball is of course a chance for us all to - er - let our hair
down..." Read more ==>

Do you suppose she'll finally admit that Harry and Draco are meant for each other lol?!

Holy %*(&#$ have I been busy the last six weeks. Since the last weekend in October I have done the following: an out-of-town wedding, two workshops, one conference, a fast trip home for my grandmother's 94th birthday, planned/hosted a luncheon for 22 people (for which I made THE most fun pirate-themed centerpieces, but forget to have Mr Psmith ( Read more... )