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…

Gorelets.com Returns to its Mobile-Friendly Roots

While "responsive" is a word I usually associate with "Things Doctors Say In Intensive Care Units," it's also a word that now applies to this website. "Responsive" means that the site automatically recognizes if you're reading it with a touchscreen device and it changes to make it more mobile-friendly. [The same is true of the Arnzen Social Network page at http://michaelarnzen.com/ and most of the other main pages linked in my menu.] While I doubt it's perfect, you can now far more easily read the text and browse pages while on the road, riding in the back of your hearse…

The Dream People Hand You a Cookie

The latest issue of the bizarro journal, The Dream People, includes my story, "The Fortune Cookie," excerpted from The Gorelets Omnibus. You may have seen this before, but go check out The Dream People anyway, because it's got some good features this issue, including a focus on my Master's thesis advisor from way back when, the inimitable Lance Olsen (who I recently learned won a Guggenheim Fellowship...way to go, Lance!).

Horror Poetry Writing Workshop in The Gorelets Omnibus

My fellow weird writers might want to take note of this. One of the neat bonus features available only in the hardcover edition of The Gorelets Omnibus is a "horror poetry writing workshop" that includes a handful of essays I've written about the craft over the years (for places like Byline magazine and the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Star*Line magazine, among others). The chapter titles are: "The Poetics of Horror" "The Element of Fear in Horror Poetry" "Horror Haiku" "The Dead Draft: When Poetry Fails" "New Media Horror: Six Lessons from an E-Poet" Rounding out this virtual workshop in the…

Preorder: MANY GENRES, ONE CRAFT

Readers of this blog who have the writing bug might want to hop on over to Amazon.com and put in an order for my latest book (co-edited with Heidi Ruby Miller), called Many Genres, One Craft: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction. Modeled after the graduate program where I teach -- the MFA in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University -- Many Genres is a thick hardcover collection of over sixty essays by prominent writers who look under the hood of both the craft of writing for a genre audience and the business of penning novels in today's publishing world.…