Call for Submissions: Outsiders Within

After years of reading cosmic horror and publishing books, I'm fusing the two like some eldritch phenomena. I'm looking for tales of cosmic dread about people with embarrassing secrets, hobbies they don't mention, and other things that make them different from what those around them believe. Full details here. If you know someone else who …

Mythaxis Review Platform, Issue 1

The inaugural issue of Mythaxis Review Platform, featuring an article on changes to Amazon's KDP Reports beta site, is now out. In addition to my thoughts on Amazon's potential replacement for their current author-publisher reporting screens, there are other articles about indie and trad publishing, along with reviews of technology, art, and science-fiction including: ‘The …

…With More Feeling!

Thoughts on double-plus good writing are double-plus good. This morning, I discovered some notes I'd made years ago, which included this quote from Cliff Seal: "No one has ever been offended by proper grammar or proper sentence structure. No one has ever emailed you to say I really wish you would use six more exclamation …

Literature Lacks Character

While binaries are almost never true, there is a common division in fiction critique between literature (seen as worthy) and genre (seen as second-rate)—or, to reverse it, between literature (seen as pretentious tedium) and genre (seen as genuine entertainment). Many of those who fall into the second perspective go further, claiming that—rather than a division …

UnOccult Secrets

Matt Larkin (author of some rather spiffing riffs on Nordic mythology) posted an article recently suggesting fantasy novels can benefit from the lack of systematized magic. While I find his arguments engaging, for me the best answer lies in what is revealed rather than what is systematized. Larkin's thesis is that magic—at least magic that …

Anent the Prose of that Indescribable Scrivener

Discussion of Lovecraft's work tends to focus on three things: racism, cosmic dread, and tentacles. However, as anyone who's spoken to witnesses to an event knows, the same story becomes different depending on the author: so, while a tale of a Englishman who discovers a debased African tribe summoning a writhing horror and is traumatised …

Pulping the Classics

I had a conversation over the weekend about whether certain genres need to be about particular things or whether they can be an aesthetic. And, as is common with discussion of genre boundaries, the discussion soon sent out a tendril into the field of literature vs. genre fiction. While the difference—if any—between literary and genre …

Pause For Nuanced Effect

Through the vagaries of the Internet, this article proposing new punctuation marks floated across my section of the aether. While the article is satire, the underlying issue of miscommunication is very real. In the spirit of which, I'd like to propose three useful signifiers of my own. The Seriousicon A symbol for indicating that one …

ImmerseOrDie Might Be Too Mellow

One of the accusations levelled at ImmerseOrDie is that Jeff, Bryce, or I look for reasons to fail a book, that readers don't judge books the way we do. I've never been inside Bryce's head, but I feel a deep joy when a book makes it to the line; and we're not alone in noticing …

Fleeting Ink by Miriam Joy

Joy weaves together hymns in praise of feeling rather than deconstructing poetry with evidence that words cannot be other than a structure around anything of actual meaning, elegantly capturing both the power of language to show reality and its failure. This collection contains twenty-nine of Joy’s poems inspired by the concept of writing. The eponymous …