Posted inArnzen News Instigation

New Website Launched for MANY GENRES, ONE CRAFT

One of my big nonfiction projects this past year was co-editing a huge, 130,000 word collection of instructional articles for writers, called MANY GENRES, ONE CRAFT: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction, with writer Heidi Ruby Miller. It's early, but the website for the book has launched, and many insightful features are planned for it in the months leading up to the book's release this coming Spring: http://manygenres.blogspot.com If you write or teach writing, no matter what genre, this book is for you. Horror readers will likely be familiar with some of the names in the book. Gary Braunbeck launches the…
December 24, 2010Posted inArnzen News, Instigation
Posted inArnzen News

Winter Chills: Arnzen Interview with Non-Horror Reader Survey

Like reading, but don't really like horror fiction? WD Prescott, is running an interesting website bluntly called The Non-Horror Reader Survey that is studying what today's readers think about the modern horror genre. It features interviews with various readers, writers, and scholars, along with a research questionnaire you can fill out, if you want to participate. It's an interesting idea and you should chime in and get the discussion going. Prescott interviewed me this week. See "Winter Chills with Mike Arnzen". I talk about The Popular Uncanny, teaching horror in college, horror's relationship with humor and poetry, and all sorts…
December 22, 2010Posted inArnzen News
Posted inNot Dead Yet: Print Reviews

A Double-Take on The New Uncanny

Last year's Shirley Jackson Award winner for "Best Anthology" -- The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease, edited by Sarah Eyre and Rah Page (Comma Press, 2008) -- is a knockout example of genre renewal. The book features some of the best British horror authors alive, including Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle, A.S. Byatt, Christopher Priest and many more...even Matthew Holness (whose comedic double from the BBC, Garth Merenghi, is echoed here). The book definitely deserved the Jackson Award for its ambition, because it makes for an interesting literary experiment. The book, essentially, was an assignment. All its contributors were challenged to…
October 31, 2009Posted inNot Dead Yet: Print Reviews
Posted inArnzen News

Kindle2 Opens the Ebook Watershed: The Time Has Come

It's time to go ebook, if you haven't already. Today amazon.com releases their next generation Kindle2 ebook reading device, which is now able to pull information out of the (cell phone) wireless networks internationally...and you don't have to subscribe to a cell phone service to do so.  This means that the medium has gone totally global; you can read an ebook anywhere -- and update/sync/buy anywhere, too.  So what? This means that publishers everywhere will now see a new way to reach millions of readers, so they're all going to push these electronic formats (if they haven't already). Readers like…
October 19, 2009Posted inArnzen News
Posted inArnzen News

The Writer’s Workshop of Horror

I'm pleased to appear in this brand new book of advice for those who want to improve their horror fiction, called order The Writer's Workshop of Horror (ed. Michael Knost, Woodland Press, Aug 2009). It's focused exclusively and deeply on the craft of scary storytelling, with a stellar line-up of contributors that include the likes of Clive Barker, Joe Lansdale, F. Paul Wilson, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Keene, Elizabeth Massie, and too many more to list:  from grand masters to rising stars, the book is a treasury of wisdom you'd be hard pressed to find elsewhere.  If the (also fantastic) Horror…
June 16, 2009Posted inArnzen News