WOW… A LOT TO catch up on. My last post here was more than six months ago…just about the time I got involved in helping out with the 2002 World Horror Convention. I took on the job of Publications Editor for the con, and that soaked up most of my free time from December-April. You can read about some of my experiences there and see some pictures from the con on my WHC 2002 Redux page.
You can also read my reports on spending a week in March attending the South By Southwest Convention in Austin, Texas, and on spending some time in Boston and Seattle in April. Over the past few months, I’ve also been tinkering with incidental music to be used by Lone Wolf Publications on its upcoming Carnival CD-ROM anthology. So…while I haven’t been writing much fiction, I’ve sure been busy! Things have finally settled down enough that I can catch this site and my Pop Stops columns archives up, and get back to doing some story writing.
In my last post, I wrote about getting accepted in the Twilight Tales anthology Freaks, Geeks and Sideshow Floozies with the story “…And Then Some.” Things got interesting the next month — I wrote another story about the same circus with appearances by a couple of the same characters from “…And Then Some.” I read that story — “After the Fifth Step” — at Twilight Tales, one of the editors heard it, and wanted to publish it in Freaks as well.
Ultimately, I wrote a “capping” piece at the editors’ request in January/February and turned it into a trilogy. So now my 13,000 word circus opus “Love and Sex and Rope and Dreams: A Circus in Three Acts” (including “…and Then Some,” “After the Fifth Step” and “Birth and Death”) closes the Freaks volume, which had a sneak preview debut at the 2002 World Horror Convention.
The official version of the book (a limited rough run was done for the con) should be out in a month or so.
In addition to selling the three-in-one story cycle to Freaks, my Nativity rewrite “Mary” appeared in February in Delirium Books’ controversial Dark Testament anthology. And “Anniversary,” a story which appeared in Dead of Night magazine in 1995 and in my collection Cage of Bones in 2000 was reprinted in the Prime Books anthology Tourniquet Heart this month.
And just this morning, I received word from editor Monica O’Rourke, that two of the stories that were original to Cage — “Dead Girl on the Side of the Road” and “Bloodroses” — will appear in the upcoming Flesh & Blood Press anthologies Decadence II and Decadence III. (The first volume came out through Prime Books.)
