Book news

“Joys of Serf Culture” published in the “Best of Mad Swirl 2021” anthology

Online lit journal Mad Swirl has published a “best of” issue for the past five years; the volume for 2021 was just released and is now available in print on Amazon. I’m very pleased to be included with my poem “The Joys of Serf Culture,” which appeared in the journal last April.

Here’s the book hype direct from Mad Swirl editor Johnny Olson:

“2021 has been yet another extraordinarily challenging year. Thru it all, Mad Swirl was there, every one of the 365 days of this twisted year. We didn’t miss a beat. Those beats are what you’ll get when you dig into this year’s collection. Get your firsthand view of one helluva of a f*cking year. The Best of Mad Swirl : v2021 is a 107-page anthology featuring 52 poets, 12 short fiction writers, and four artists hailing from 5 continents (Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, & North America); 15 countries (Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Montenegro, Nigeria, Romania, Singapore, Syria, & USA [20 States]). We editors reviewed the entire year’s output to ensure this collection is truly “the best” of MadSwirl.com! The works represent diverse voices and vantages which speak to all aspects of this crazy swirl we call ‘life on earth.’

“Mad Swirl is an arts and literature creative outlet. It is a platform, a showcase, and a stage for artistic expression in this mad, mad world of ours; a diverse collection of as many poets, artists, and writers we can gather from around the world; from Nepal to Ireland, from England to China, from California to New York City and all the places in between. Our Poetry Forum features works from over 170 contributing poets, our Short Story Library has over 40 participating writers and our Mad Gallery has over 50 resident artists.”

Contributors include: Artists: J Gregory Cisneros, Alan Murphy, Thomas Riesner, Bleak Teeth

Poets: Jeff Bagato, Tohm Bakelas, Jon Bennett, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Jean Biegun, Jean Bohuslav, Casey Bush, Laurie Byro, PW Covington, John Dorroh, J.K. Durick, Michael Estabrook Joseph Farley, Robert Fleming, Susie Gharib, Iulia Gherghei, KJ Hannah Greenberg, John Grey, Paul Hostovsky, Ojo Victoria Ilemobayo, Mike James, Ivan Jenson, Sally Jo, Ferris Jones, Carl Kavadlo, Vyarka Kozareva, Padmini Krishnan, Tyler Malone, Robert L. Martin, Tom Montag, Ian Mullins, Madelyn Olson, Johnny Olson, Brittany M. Ortega, Irena Pasvinter, Patty Dickson Pieczka, Timothy Pilgrim,, Randall Rogers, Madu Chibueze Romanus, Sreemani Sengupta, Beate Sigriddaughter, Susandale, David Susswein, Rp Verlaine, Isaiah Vianese, Agnes Vojta, Trier Ward, Richard Weaver, Stefan White, Stephen Jarrell Williams, Catherine Zickgraf, Milenko Županović

Fiction: Jim Bates, Glenn Bresciani, Mike Fiorito, Susie Gharib, Jeff Grimshaw, Prapti Gupta, Flora Jardine, James Lawless, Edward N. McConnell, Vivek Nath Mishra, Randall Rogers, Chuck Taylor

Science fiction story “Ol’ Rocking Chair’s Got You” published in The Chamber
Picture from The Chamber’s Facebook post for the story.

If you’re wondering what a grandmother sitting in a rocking chair has to do with science fiction, you’ll need to read my short story, “Ol’ Rocking Chair’s Got You,” which appeared yesterday in online dark fiction magazine The Chamber. The grandmother and her chair reside in the future on a distant exoplanet. The chair is a caregiving robot; and its care is not what it seems at the outset. You can read the full story here. The magazine releases a new issue every week, so if you are a fan of dark fiction, you may want to check it out.

Halloween humor: Cthulhu Limericks

Cthulhu ad-sirens call

Looking for some Halloween humor? Cthulhu Limericks is available on Amazon! This collection of 70+ rhymed verses based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos combines horror and humor in equal measure to demonstrate that man’s view of himself as the center of a known space-time continuum remains laughably out of scale with the reality that ancient forces control his world.

Print version available here; kindle version here.

Night Garden Journal Summer 2017 Anthology released

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Night Garden Journal recently released its anthology of poems from last summer as a Lulu book. You can see the full list of authors above. I’m pleased to say my poem “The World is Ash” is included.

You can get a shipping discount (see image above) if you order today on Lulu at this link.

Night Garden Journal Autumn 2017 anthology published

night-garden-fall-2017-print

An online poetry journal focusing on dark and atmospheric work, Night Garden Journal has started compiling its offerings into quarterly anthologies. The Autumn 2017 Issue has just been released on Lulu. The cost is $5.99; you can probably get a coupon from Lulu to knock a percentage off that. You can buy the book here.

Two of my poems are included, “Future Dragons” and “Shattered Maps.”

Futures Trading Anthology Five released

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An online journal of experimental poetry, Futures Trading compiles its issues into print anthologies. The fifth book was just released as an on-demand paperback, available via Amazon. It’s something of a who’s who of the international experimental poetry “scene,” including work by Mark Young, Volodymyr Bilyk, Eileen Tabios, Mark Cunnngham, Sanjeev Sethi, and many others. I’m pleased to be included with four poems from four different online issues.

Xmas rip offs: Kill Santa Claus app? $600 copy of Kill Claus?

I present two rip offs related to my bizarro Christmas novel Kill Claus!

First up, this game app: “Kill Santa Claus,” created by some company called ChipPOW and available through Amazon. Apparently, it encourages players to take revenge for bad or missing gifts by shooting Santa Claus.

killsanta-app

The description of game play seriously needs a grammar and syntax intervention:

Kill Christmas old man!

Santa Claus did not bring you a gift dreams? Behaves like rudolph! Start the game Kill Santa Claus as a snowball! Shoot on target! This pathetic old holly is not going anywhere from a sniper rifle rudolph! Try role grinch, destroy Christmas!

Each year promises rudolph gifts, only they do not! Hatred grew as snowball. Shoot to destroy all the Santa Claus! Suggests sight and tap on the shot. Your timer is 5 minutes to clean the territory grinch. You have to win the game Kill Santa Claus!

How old were killed – see on the screen, there statistics rudolph. Take care of snowball cartridges and do not shoot into the air. Aim, shoot and then holly. So you can do away with the silly holiday Christmas!

One user gave the game a single star and declared they were deleting the game.

For the record, my surreal science fiction novel Kill Claus! does not involve shooting Santa with any sort of firearm. So the game is not technically the result of plagiarism. However, I’d like to think the app grew out of a superficial glance at the title of my book.

As a shameless plug, Kill Claus! is still available on Amazon and Lulu as both a eBook and paperback. The eBook can be downloaded for a mere $1.99 from either site. On Lulu, the paperback costs $13.50. As for the Amazon paperback, you can choose between two price points, either 15 bucks, or $609.11!

kill-claus-$600

I love seeing these inflated prices on my books. It’s just further proof that when you put something out in the world, it takes on a life of its own.

Amazon sale on Savage Night and Other Stories

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Goofing around on Amazon today, I noticed they are offering copies of my book Savage Night and Other Stories for only $4.41. That’s a huge discount on the $19.99 list price! What a great opportunity to grab a copy if you’re interested. Check it out here.

This book collects a bunch of my early experimental science fiction stories alongside my early science fiction novel Savage Night, which uses the Ancient Egyptian myth of crossing the Land of the Dead to describe a journey into the self. Thematically, everything here seems to follow the classic sex or death duality, often at the same time.

Not sure how many they have at this price. I would buy them all, but I still have a couple big boxes of them from the last time I saw the price drop. After my royalty payment, I got copies for a buck each.

Although the back cover synopsis is available on the listing, here it is anyway:

Two books in one this collection includes a short novel Savage Night and a group of stories exploring similar themes of death control self actualization and the conflict between the socialized self and the True or inner self. In Savage Night, Jean Savage is a crew member on an industrial ship forced to land on a desolate planet so its parent corporation can form an alliance with the ultimate enforcers of control the serpent headed demons of the Duat, a nocturnal underworld the Ancient Egyptians visualized in their funereal text The Book of Coming into Day. Not content to own the bodies of its employees, the RA corporation wants to exploit their souls as well In the Duat there are no enemies of RA. Not anymore. Fighting a guerilla war using sex magic rituals and protective spells, Jean struggles against the corporation and its demon allies to keep her true self alive until the dawn that brings escape. But her biggest challenge is finding her own soul her True Self ,which has been lost in layers of social psychological and corporate control.

“Other Stories” features two early Jean Savage texts exploring similar themes in different contexts where she is a juvenile delinquent struggling against the hostile influences of family and society. There are also stories involving killer clowns spreading a bizarre sex virus, pirates seeking immortality in deep space, a trio of eco terrorist mermaids, and the gingerbread man as a computer hacker. Using black humor, social satire, violent eroticism, science fiction motifs, and experimental narrative structures, these compelling yarns perform themselves in the cinema of the mind s eye.

“The Nature of Crime” in The Five-Two

Screen Shot 2017-07-31 at 9.15.43 AMThe Five-Two is an online journal focusing exclusively on “crime poetry,” that is, poems about crime in some form or another. A different poem is featured each week. I’m pleased to say that starting today, my poem “The Nature of Crime” is this week’s featured poem. The journal also includes a couple bonuses for its poems: a “confession” by the writer about the inspiration for the work, and a reading of the poem in question. So you can also read my confession and hear me read the piece. It’s all here.