My Monstrous Lecture on the Horror Genre: “Horror is the Removal of Masks”

I'm presently wrapping up a full semester of teaching Horror Writing to undergrads at Seton Hill University, and we've been having a blast doing all sorts of multimedia work -- especially work using SoundCloud for audio critiques. Along the way, I've been been playing with the site, too, uploading lecture excerpts and strange sound prompts and other weird things. I even recently gave a little presentation about the class experiments for a conference we held on campus called the iTeach gallery. During the term, I discovered the above excerpt (from my article in the wonderful book for dark authors, WRITER'S…

Live Instigation

Thought I'd toss up a quick reminder that I've been erratically posting Instigation prompts to twitter all month, which are feeding into the new Instigation Showcase page. I conceive of all this as being not only an extension of this department on the blog, but also the recently-released ebook. If you're on twitter, just follow @MikeArnzen -- if you're not, you can always see what I'm posting to that nefarious site on the archive I keep called "The Nest" right here at gorelets.com/nest. Here's a sampler of some recent favorites:     "Construct a scenario involving a contemporary equivalent to…

Outlaws At the Treffpunkt: the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly

In co-celebration of National Poetry Month with my friends at The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly, I'd like to take a moment to put the spotlight on a writer I am becoming fond of lately. His name is Angel Zapata. He doesn't know I'm doing this. And I don't know Angel at all. I only know him from a few pieces of writing I've seen online. And I think he's doing really interesting work. Angel Zapata strikes me as one of those guys who is writing for the love it. From my review of his website, I can tell that he…

National Poetry Writing Month 2013

[NOTE: The entries containing poems originally appearing on the calendar below were lost during a blog software update... I may be able to recover them at a later time.] I've signed up over at NaPoWriMo.net, committing to try to write and post a new poem every day throughout April for "National Poetry Writing Month". My plan is to mix things up regularly: to post twitter poems, full-length gorelets, some audio recordings, videos, word art, and more Fridge of the Damned magnet poetry pieces. Return to this calendar page for all this, which I'm posting off the main blog to avoid…

Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side – New E-book Now Available!

Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side by Michael Arnzen: Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side is a treasury of twisted tips, strange scenarios and disturbing sparks to help ignite the fuel in your creative furnace. Its aim? To push you into the danger zone of your imagination, by thinking in unconventional ways and trying things you never thought — or dared — to try before in your writing, art, or dreams. See the catalog page for more information. DIRECT PURCHASE FROM MASTICATION for $3.99: ALSO NOW AVAILABLE FROM: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | Kobo |…