Dark Promptings: Murder Ballads from Jason Jack Miller

"Dark Promptings" is a special series of guest-written creative writing prompts, aimed at sparking the imagination's gasoline for writers from any genre...but with a dark or devious discoloration, just like the Instigation department at Gorelets.com. The guest contributors are folks who wrote articles appearing in my fat new non-fiction book for fiction writers of all kinds, Many Genres, One Craft: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction, making a stop here at gorelets.com as part of their Virtual Book Tour across the web. (You can find my own VBT essays elsewhere). Writers and creative people: drop on by our book's meaty weblog…

2010 Halloween Haiku Contest Winners

The 2010 Halloween Haiku Caption Contest was difficult to judge, and all the entries were fantastic. Thank you for captioning all those weird art pieces!  We'll do it again sometime. It was difficult to pick one, but to me the clear winner is FJ Bergmann (fibitz.com), for penning a gross little number inspired by the art piece, "Fountain of Worm." Bergmann's haiku has dynamic action, impending doom, good reference to the image, and great language use, all telling a unique story in just 17 syllables!: FOUNTAIN OF WORM quivering with need undulating, gorged with blood the gut villi wait --…

Halloween Haiku Contest 2010

[Note: this contest is now closed to entries (though comments on the gallery are always welcomed, poetic or not). Winner announced soon. -MAA]. This one's easy. Post a haiku poem related to one of the artpieces on my gallery. Just enter it in the "comments" field, along with your byline (name) and e-mail address. This will automatically publish the poem. All adult language will be censored, so please don't use any -- suggest and evoke, instead. Entries are due by Halloween (Oct 31st) at Midnight. Arbitrary rule: I expect your haiku to be 3 lines long, in a 5-7-5 syllable…

RDSP Retrospective Event: Book Deal, Chat, and Writing Contest!

[UPDATE: The writing contest has now ended. I was asked to judge the finalists, and have submitted my selections to Raw Dog Screaming Press, who have now announced the winners and published the winning entry. Thanks to all who participated!] For the month of August, Raw Dog Screaming Press (publisher of my novel, Play Dead) is offering a sweet "Retrospective" book bundle of their bestselling short-story collections, which packages together my book, 100 JOLTS, with Jeremy C. Shipp's Sheep and Wolves and Adam Golaski's Worse Than Myself, for a VERY low price ($30 for paperbacks, $12 for Ebooks). Orders get…

20th Anniversary Contest Alert! Deadline Dec 13th.

Book Collectors, Arnzenophiliacs, and Ebayaholics, look out! Your chance to win some pretty rare swag in my 20th Anniversary Contest is ending sooner than you think! I'm extending the deadline to December 13th! Up for grabs are some exceptionally hard-to-find items: A "test design" pressing of the Live and Vile audio disc. This CD (pictured above) was released in only 26 lettered edition copies, bundled with the leather bound edition of my novella, The B*tchfight, from Bad Moon Books in 2008. It features a hilarious live reading from the Zombiefest convention and demo versions and outtakes from my recording sessions…