Hey everybody, M. here,
Seemed like I was about due to post an end-of-year wrap-up blog, so I’ll start off with a teaser. I’ve got some VERY exciting news about a story that should be on the way next year and I am waiting for the go-ahead to talk about it publicly. So keep an eye out over the next few months (and follow me on Facebook) to get the news when it drops.
In terms of stuff that I can currently talk about, here’s a recap what I already have slated to hit the shelves in 2024.
What’s lined up for next year so far
Other than the story I alluded to above, I’ve got a few others already in the hopper for some very exciting upcoming anthologies. As I announced over the summer, my story of urban isolation, paranoia, cosmically horrific catastrophe, and love or something like it, titled Sticky, is slated to appear in a 2024 issue of Chthonic Matter. That’s the quarterly anthology edited by C.M. Muller and the successor to his wildly popular Nightscript anthology series which ran from the mid-’10s through 2022. Keep an eye out for it (or a tooth, as it were! What could I possibly mean by that? You’ll have to wait and find out…).
And as I’ve more recently announced, my story Hearts Synchronize will be appearing in The Necronomi-RomCom anthology. If you liked the tone and sensibility of my story in From Beyond The Threshold then this is one you’re not going to want to miss. I had actually been taking a bit of a pause writing fiction using figures, settings, concepts, etc., directly from the Cthulhu Mythos (however unconventionally my stories might use them), as calls for Mythos fiction have grown comparatively rare with respect to where they were a few years ago at the peak of the most recent Lovecraft boom. I’ve got a few written that I absolutely love and hope will see the light of day, but the presence of Mi-Gos and other Lovecraftian Easter Eggs is making them a tougher sell these days.
That said, when I saw the submission call for The Necronomi-RomCom, the concept seemed so perfectly in my wheelhouse that it seemed like a mistake not to try to sell a story there. So I wrote up something brand new, sent it over, and was beyond thrilled to get an acceptance. “Hearts Synchronize” is filled with hilarity, horror, Hallmark moments (and a few references to Post-Cage experimental composition that you might not necessarily see in a Lifetime Original, but that you certainly should!).
I’m unbelievably excited to see the TOC and other stuff on both of these as things develop.
Stories that came out in 2023
What would the passing of a year be without one of these next-to-impossible to take photographs of the anthologies I’ve appeared in this year? So here’s a pic of most of the books my stories appeared in throughout 2023 (one I never received, I gather because of some shakeups at the fledgling publisher).
The photo may be blurry but I’m happy to share that my work has appeared in some damn handsome volumes this year–and every one is filled with solid stories.
As far as stories from me, you’ve got my action-packed leap into sword-and-sorcery with The Tears of Blood in the highly-acclaimed Die By The Sword anthology from DMR Books. You’ve got a story of urban goofballery and a roommate search gone cosmically horrific with A Roommate Named Lazarus Black in the Tim Mendees-curated From Beyond the Threshold anthology from Eerie River Publishing.
In Lovecraftiana: The Magazine of Eldritch Horror first you’ve got The Study of Worms, a story of a reprobate in the mid-’90s journeying through dream dimensions and weird worlds in search of arcane knowledge, finding it, and facing the vicissitudes of life and fatherhood with Elder Gods and eldritch forces ever looming in the background. And finally you’ve got Something Missing, an experimental, eschatological, and very busy rom-com that delves into esoteric religious practice, biblical apocrypha, online cults, the machinations of an indifferent Lovecraftian demiurge and the unbearable tedium of working a job in the suburbs, looking for love, and trying to figure out what the hell to do–even as the end is nigh. (Note for if you pick up the last one: the original version of that issue featured another author’s bio under my name at the end of the book, I am not sure if it has been corrected).
They’re all still available online, check out my full list of published work to see where you can pick them up.
Anyway time for me to motivate — I’ve got some other stuff I wanted to explore in this post that popped up this year, for instance I’d like to write a bit about how much I loathe generative AI, but that topic and some other stuff I’ve long planned to write about might serve better as standalone blog posts. I’d make a New Year’s resolution to post more here and focus more on that type of essay-style content, and maybe even get back to writing movie reviews, but I can’t make any promises, just playing it by ear as always.
Happy New Year everyone, take care,
-M.