Arnzen Over Frostburg, Summer 2015

If you are in 150 mile radius of the gentle town of Frostburg, Maryland, consider making the drive to come see me this summer in one of two events sponsored by the downtown Creative Writing Center at Frostburg State University. FIRST UP: MAY 2nd, Coffee with a Writer On May 2nd, 10am, meet me in downtown Frostburg at the FSU Creative Writing Center and join me in the morning for a cuppa joe. (Oh, who are we fooling? I will drink gallon drums of the stuff!). It's a happy little gig they call "Coffee with a Writer" -- an open-to-the-public…

Horror 101 – New Book for Writers

Horror 101: The Way Forward has just been released by Crystal Lake Publishing, and if you're a writer on the dark side, I highly recommend it. As Mort Castle wisely notes in the book's introduction, this book is a successor, of sorts, to JN Williamson's classic writer's guide, How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and enters the canon of "essential reference" for the dark fiction author, alongside the HWA's On Writing Horror and Michael Knost's Writer's Workshop of Horror. It's a great collection of "advice from seasoned professionals" on how to sustain a career in the…

THE RESOLUTION: A Twitter Story Contest – Sponsored by AuthorBee!

ANNOUNCING A NEW YEAR'S WRITING CONTEST in the Instigation Playground at AuthorBee Deadline for entries is 12/29/13 at Midnight est. WIN AN AMAZON GIFT CERTIFICATE FROM OUR HOST, @AUTHORBEE! Let's write a twisted tale together to ring (or is that "wring"?) in the New Year! The story is called "The Resolution." And it all begins with the following line: You're bound. A TV shows Times Square. "What's your resolution," a man holding a knife asks, "for the afterlife?" Consider yourself "instigated": YOU GO NEXT! You simply need to be a member of twitter to play along (it's free -- check…

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…

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…