To Write Well…

The following is an excerpt from the front page of my Fiction Writing syllabus at SHU, which I posted to scribd and soundcloud as part of the course. I was surprised to find out tonight that it was highlighted as a "Featured Document" by scribd.com! Neat. To Write Well Here's the audio version, recorded for the students in the class to respond to. Teaching does take time away from my writing, but it's just as rewarding to me, and it's fun to share in the students' creative spirits. Our class is going to be doing a lot of experiments with…

Preview of New Broadside: “Anonymous”

Earlier this year, the first people who kindly pre-ordered the hardcover edition of The Gorelets Omnibus after it was initially announced by the publisher were promised a free exclusive broadside as a bonus. If that's you, let me assure you the delay was entirely my fault -- the poem that I wrote for this cause just wasn't quite right, and I try to treat these things special. But now I've got something done that I'm proud of and it is heading out in the mail to you. Enjoy! Here's a purposely-blurry preview, so you can see what's to come. The…

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.…

Happy New Year 2011!

As I work on the next issue of The Goreletter, I thought I'd post a little New Year's round up of recent activity and news of some exciting things to spill soon out of the cracks in the Arnzen brainbox. Earlier today, I uploaded scans of a few rare broadsides from days of yore to the new "Arnzen Manuscripts and Rarities" collection on Scribd.com. I thought fans of my book, Proverbs for Monsters, might like to get a peek at the history behind some of the stories. (Dark Regions Press is selling Proverbs for Monsters at a nice discount right…