Me, Interviewed

There's a new micro interview up at Innsmouth Free Press. This one, though, is a bit different. I am no longer the interviewer. Instead, I got interviewed. If you want to know a bit more about my interest in publishing (and me in general), you should head on over and check it out.

Beyond the Shrinking World, now at Podcastle

Last week, Podcastle posted a recording of my short story Beyond the Shrinking World (which originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies almost a year ago) read by the fantastic Dominick Rabrun. It's totally free to download or listen to, and you should check it out. This is, without a doubt, one of the coolest things that I have ever got to experience in publishing. Dominick does a great job reading the story, and hearing someone else's interpretation of every sentence I wrote and every character's voice in the thing... can anything possibly be cooler than that?

The answer's no, but the fun doesn't stop there, because the story begins with an editorial/introduction from Dave Thompson. The broader topic is grimdark, and, while I don't think I would ultimately place my work in that category, it's interesting to view it in that light. Ultimately, Dave agrees that I probably don't fit there, but he says that my work is extremely dark and almost Lovecraftian at times -- both of those, needless to say, are characterizations that had me grinning ear to ear to hear. Oh, and the bit about how he really liked the story and will be first in line to read anything else I write in the world didn't hurt.

There's also an Escape Artists forum where people can discuss the story, and you should clearly head over there and write paragraph after paragraph of drooling praise (or, uh, whatever you'd like to write). As to what people have said already, it's fascinating to read. The reaction's mixed, and while I won't lie that I (like every writer out there, I'd imagine) would be quite happy with everyone loving my work, I expected that. I know I have turned into a bit of an oddball when it comes to taste, and I think I might be a bit too self-consciously pretentious and nihilistic for universal appeal (I say this, I must stress, as a condemnation of my own, admitted personal obsessions rather than as a bitter stab at readers at large). Hearing that my prose, world-building, and general darkness worked is great, and the more negative comments about packing too much in to too little space had a far point that I hope I can address a bit in future works in the world and in general -- though those readers really should have seen the first draft, which had just as much content in far less space and was a total mess.

The only comment that made me really kick myself is about the German being flawed, because that one is totally My Bad. Looking back, thinking that an introductory class worth of experience was enough to pull another language off in print was ridiculous, and I'll certainly be returning to those sections before/if the piece ever has a third outing.

Anyway, enough rambling on my part. If you decide to give the piece a read or a listen, I hope that you enjoy it.

The Dream Journal of a Would-Be Insomniac

My Horror flash story "The Dream Journal of a Would-Be Insomniac" is now up and delectable on the Horror D'oeuvres site. It requires a subscription, but the fee gets you access to quite a bit of other quality shorts in addition to mine. Check it out!

Finals

This week is the delightful time of finals, which means that the time I would usually have to write and edit a review is being taken up by writing and studying antiquity, The Jungle, and the poetry of John Donne. Your regular (hopefully) in-depth and (possibly) insightful content will return next week.

Painting Nothing

The Gloaming has now released its final issue. The magazine's closing is a sad event for dark fiction. The issue's release, however, brings with it some great stuff.

Amidst a myriad of downright snazzy tales, it also has one of mine, a piece of Horror flash entitled "Painting Nothing." I wrote it a long while back, drafting it the night I finished Thomas Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco. So yeah, it's basically a few hundred words of worship. But I think it's not bad worship, as these things go. The coolest part of the publication, though, may be that there is an illustration next to it. Seeing how any part of your work is interpreted by an artist is just, well, totally and incredibly awesome.

Check it out, and don't forget to read the rest of the issue while you're at it.

Mr. Regali's Coffin

This is a (very) short Horror-ish vignette I wrote some time ago when in the mood to try my hand at something like what Thomas Ligotti's accomplished in Noctuary's "Notebook of the Night." It's a bit too simple to really evolve into a full fledged tale, but I do enjoy its mood and figured I would post it on here in case any of you do as well. Enjoy...

The shop is the center of town. The windows give glimpses of nothing, and the swaying wooden sign bears only a name: MR. REGALI. The townspeople come every year to tell their stories. Each has their own sheet of paper, and, while they speak, Mr. Regali draws with calculated abandon, pencil veering wildly up and down to create bizarre, shifting lines that encompass every word they've said. When the paper is filled, every glimpse of lively white smothered in sterile graphite, he announces their time of death, and they only come one more time to his shop.

The people who tell their life stories are a destitute lot like any other. The aggregate of their stories is a helpless picture, an image of man locked in a cage and dreaming of being free. The various protagonists Mr. Regali meets are helpless and hopeless, and he wishes he could save them. But he can only help in one way.

Mr. Regali is not some factory provider of garden-variety caskets for garden-variety corpses. He does not believe in one size fits all death, and each coffin is custom ordered, tailored to its occupant like a fine suit. Merchant of the paraphernalia of death he might be, but his work is no less essential than any of life's other major purchases - tuition, house, car, ring - and is arguably the most long lasting of all those ephemeral boons.

Every one of the coffins is the same. They are eighty-four inches from toe to head, twenty-eight from left to right, and twenty-three from ground to top. None have decorative fittings. The coffins are all identical, but they are made unique. Mr. Regali keeps no standardizing blueprints, consults no limiting specifications. He reaches the same conclusions in a different way for each individual, crafting the disparate pieces to match the heights and depths of the future occupant's oh-so-generic soul.

Mr. Regali has a masterpiece. No one's ever seen it, but I think I know what it is. I think that it's a coffin like and unlike all the others, being built piece by piece over the decades that his shop has been the climax of town life. I think that, somewhere in the backrooms of the establishment, there is a piece of paper for Mr. Regali and erratic pencil lines to mark his life. I think that, someday, Mr. Regali will shut the lid over himself as he's shut it over so many others - leaving us alone, adrift at the edge of death with no guide to lead us beyond.

"Hope Immortal" and "Solo"

I know what you are thinking. That Katz guy is a great writer, but where are the spaceships? Can he even call himself a Science Fiction fan? Well, I have good news for you, my SF-demanding (and totally not hypothetical) reader: the SF has arrived. The year’s end saw not only one but two of my Science Fiction tales hit the (e)shelves.

First up is my story “Hope Immortal” in Earthbound Fiction’s Dark Stars anthology. What's it about? Well, we start with dear Naryk waking up, alone, on a ship hurtling through space. And the air is running out. I'll give you the first small section as a little sampler:

Naryk woke and could not breathe. He was pressed against an unyielding barrier, 

and black spots danced against a darker backdrop in his eyes, like stars. He realized he 

was standing up, his hands crossed over his chest and his legs tight together.

There was a button, wasn’t there? Men in crumpled uniforms had told him, told 

all of them, about a button. 

What button?

There was no air. His fingers were intertwined, and he didn’t have the space to 

separate his hands. He was dying; he would die here in the dark, alone.

His hands were wrapped around the button, that’s where it was. A button for 

emergencies right beneath his intertwined fingers. 

He pushed it.

The glass slid away, and a hissing filled the air, a lone harbinger of sound almost 

unbearable after the silence that had come before. Naryk fell into a new world of light 

and pain.

Alone.

I wrote "Hope Immortal" a long time ago, but I think that it's held up extremely well, and I hope that you do too. Of course, it's not the only piece in the anthology. For your three bucks, you also get tales by Samuel Mae, Deborah Walker, and a whole host of others.

Then there is the matter of "Solo," which is a quirky little piece that I quite like. Interstellar Fiction has it up to read, and for free, so there is really no conceivable or earthly reason to not pop over right now and devour every delectable sentence of the thing. It is, to give the briefest possible account I can, a Science Fiction reenactment of Lovecraft's themes that aims to both effectively execute them and to be downright silly and a great deal of fun throughout.

Enjoy!

"A Game of Distance" in Plasma Frequency Magazine

Plasma Frequency Magazine just released its third issue, and my Fantasy short "A Game of Distance" is the first story in it.

Were I to sum up "A Game of Distance" in three words, I think I'd go with espionage, magic, and friendship. Unless, of course, I could just write awesome in triplicate. Years back, the story was inspired by  a scene in Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn trilogy, in which a spy grows to know their quarry, and was the first flash piece I wrote. It's been touched up a bit since, and I doubt it has any actual similarities to Hamilton's Science Fiction epic, but I do quite like the little piece. Hopefully you do too.

The issue does, though, have a bevy of other fiction and other content as well. The print edition is ten bucks, but you can also read for free. Check it out!

News: Editorial Assistant, Publication v9, and the Kenyon Collegian

Though I’ve been horrifically dilatory about finally mentioning it on here, I’ve spent the last few weeks as an Editorial Assistant over at Innsmouth Free Press. In that time, I’ve begun a column about upcoming Horror releases, contacted reviewers for the upcoming anthology Fungi, and participated in numerous dark rituals. Wait, scratch that last part. You aren’t supposed to know about that yet.

Anyway, it’s a rather exciting position that involves working with some great people and on some great books. As for what it means round these parts, the answer is, at least for the moment: not a great deal. Reviews shall continue as they have been. I will, though, link future new release columns up so any interested readers can hop on over and take a look. The one that just passed is here. If you are a Horror writer with a book coming out, feel free to email me for inclusion, but know that I would strongly prefer you do so only a week or two before release date. If you are a Horror reviewer and would like a crack at Fungi, email me about that too.

In other news (which is to say, the news that tripped this news post from “I’ve really to to get on that” to “this delay is just getting embarrassing”), the good folks over at Plasma Frequency Magazine are to publish my short story “A Game of Distance” in their third issue, scheduled for release on December 5^th.

Finally, the Kenyon Collegian (which is to say, the newspaper of Kenyon College, that college at which I’ve been reading books for degrees and then relaxing by reading more for fun for some time now) has featured me in an article entitled "Existential Themes and Swordfights." Exciting stuff!

"Legwork" in Fantastic Frontiers Magazine

In all the excitement of late, I haven't had a chance to mention (or peruse myself) one other piece of absolutely fantastic news. The debut issue of Fantastic Frontiers Magazine is now available in the Apple marketplace, and, among numerous other worthy tales, is my short story "Legwork." To give you an idea of the story's contents and style, I wrote it fresh off the high of discovering not only VanderMeer's short stories but the writings of Haruki Murakami. I can't claim to have truly captured either of those titans' skill, but I think I did get something worthwhile out of the attempt.

Beyond the Shrinking World, Published

The newest issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies just hit the web, my story "Beyond the Shrinking World" in it. It's by far the best thing I've written and is free to read, besides. If swords, massive monsters, slippery metaphysics, shrinking worlds, sea voyages, apocalypses plural, and otherworldly knights appeal to you, you might want to head on over and give it a read. If not, do so anyway. While over there, don't forget to check out the issue's other piece, Peter Darbyshire's "The Angel Azrael Delivers Small Mercies," a sequel to his "The Angel Azrael Rode into the Town of Burnt Church on a Dead Horse."

Enjoy!

Publications 7 and 8

Over the past week or two, I've had two rather nice pieces of news that I didn't get a chance to report.

First, there's my horror flash Painting Nothing, which was just accepted by The Gloaming for publication. Painting Nothing was written rather early compared to most of my other horror stories, and it's admittedly not as subtle and is a bit more blatant in its worship of Thomas Ligotti (I wrote it as I finished Teatro Grottesco for the first time). Still, I think it's a nice tale, and I hope you all enjoy it when it surfaces.

Then there's the matter of Legwork, which is a rather strange fantasy short I wrote some time ago when high on the inspiration energy of having just discovered Haruki Murakami and the short fiction of Jeff VanderMeer. Fantastic Frontiers Magazine thought it worthy to be in their debut issue.

With these two sales, I have a total of four forthcoming stories, which is a rather unprecedented (but quite nice) experience. Oddly enough, the past months' onslaught of publications comes in a time when my output's been rather sluggish. Since the fall, I've only managed four stories (one of which sold to Beneath Ceaseless Skies), which is rather below last year's frenzied pace. Still, the summer should hopefully give me some time to get the numbers back up.

Publication v6

Over the last year and a bit, I've had a fair few publications to announce around these parts. In case you couldn't tell from the posts, I was grinning from ear to ear for each of them and, just maybe, doing a bit of jumping up and down. Well, I've another of them, and this one's a big deal. Maybe the biggest since the breakthrough of the very first. Though I haven't yet gotten to review one of their issues, Beneath Ceaseless Skies is one of my absolute favorite places to find fantasy stories. Just a few days ago, they accepted my story "Beyond the Shrinking World." To make an awesome thing even more awesome, this is not only my first fantasy sale, not only the sale of my longest story yet (by far), and not only a sale to an awesome market, but my first pro sale. So yeah, I'm pretty excited. I'll keep you guys updated as I know more.

Publication v5

The good folks over at Earthbound Fiction have snapped up my story "Hope Immortal" for their upcoming Dark Stars anthology of Science Fiction. This is really, really cool for a number of reasons. First, and by far the most important, is the obvious I-just-got-published-and-soon-people-I-don't-know-will-be-reading-and-hopefully-enjoying-my-work thing. This one, though, does have some nice bonuses. "Hope Immortal" is the first story I've sold that is not horror, nor flash (I love horror and flash fiction, of course. Just nice to branch out a bit.). And it's actually the oldest story I had up on submission, the first one that, looking back, was all there. I'm looking forward to getting to link to its published form.

Me, The Weaving Knight, and an Interview

My good friend Travis Knight just posted his interview of me over at his excellent blog, The Weaving Knight. It is, if I do say so myself, a rather interesting read, complete with a mention of my writerly beginnings in fanfiction of all things. Check it out.

[And have no fear, book reviews will be returning come next Tuesday with a look at Poppy Z. Brite and Caitlin R. Kiernan's Wrong Things, by far the greatest piece of Weird (and horror) fiction I've experienced since I reread The Case of Charles Dexter Ward last October. Between now and then I do also have a small quotation/comparison between Lovecraft and a rather unexpected (and quite Christian) source that I'll be posting on, I believe, Friday.]

30,000

The Hat Rack got its thirty thousandth visitor earlier today. Of course, it took about two years to get there, and 30,000's certainly not the be all and end all of blog numbers. Then again, those bloggers far exceeding the stat generally have the brevity (sanity?) to keep their average post below a healthy two thousand or so words and the focus of their top page more rational than, at a brief glance, a mixture of Japanese surrealism, Science Fiction, Joss Whedon's various television shows, and atheism. Guess they're just not having as much crazy, excessive fun.

Anyway, thanks for clicking through, ye many thousands, and I hope it was worth your while.

Here's to another thirty thousand?

Publication v4

Tell me straight, dear readers: are your lives too cheerful at the moment? Are you lacking the necessary depressing horror? Missing all dark flair? Desperately requiring a short, sweet, and disturbing shock to the system? Well, let me try and fix that. On February 16th, Eschatology Journal will be publishing my short story Strings.

The Dummy and Bards and Sages

My short horror story The Dummy is now available in the newest issue of Bards and Sages Quarterly (print/kindle), and my name seems to be on the cover. The story's a compassionate, bright, and hopeful tale, about... Well, no. It's dark and disturbing. But hopefully quite enjoyable nonetheless. To either whet your appetite or put you off forever, here's the first paragraph:

The dummy was a work in progress, a Michael to torment and a Michael to love. It was an impromptu sculpture, a masterpiece of longing made from paint and wood, hand carved jewels for eyes and ivory for nails, and blood from a pin for its heart. Fleya spent thirty-three hours mastering every drift of hair, but the face was an abstraction, a swirl of paint and indentations. The dummy was half dream to look upon, and it was snow-cold to the touch.

The Metamorphosis of Jane Doe

A few weeks ago, the website hosting my second published story, Linger Fiction, ceased lingering. As I've always thought I should have a sample of my fiction writing here on this blog, I've decided to post it, and Halloween seems as good a day as any and better than many. So, enjoy...

Jane went because she hated herself, hated her life.

"Change," she told herself in the vacant lobby, past the empty elevator shaft, and onto the stairs. "Change," said as she pressed on a door with a hole where the knob should have been.

The room beyond was a studio apartment with linoleum floors and bare walls, all weakly illuminated by an electric lamp on its side. The odor was an olfactory hallucination, a rank impossibility in such a building: an all too real antiseptic – nauseating in its intensity – covering a natural aroma, a smell like entrails and sweat, dirt and hard sun.

"Change," whispered to herself, a prayer and a talisman.

A figure was hunched over in the far corner, beating his fingers on the ground, claws clacking on the tiles. "In or out," he said, breathing out lazy rings of smoke. "Come or go."

"I heard you can change me."

He wheezed and laughed. "A predator, right? Something with claws and guts, something that doesn't back down?" He threw his cigarette, and it rolled to a stop by her leg, smoking impotent on the ground.

He stopped laughing. "I'm always fucking right," he said. His head was surrounded by distant gold, a dull halo in the shadows.

Jane's head was swimming. "I don't want to be me anymore," she said, thinking of John.

He stood up and tottered over to her, features flat and furred. "It will all be okay," he said, grip too tight on her arm. "Might want to shut your eyes."

"Will it hurt?" she asked.

"Change isn't easy. Never as simple as you think it'll be." Then he was fumbling with something in the darkness, and the needle was sliding into her flesh. "And you never know what you're going to get."

He shoved her down, and she landed on her hands and knees. The antiseptic stench was parting, now, gates coming wide to reveal what was beyond. She felt lost, felt found, felt like her body was made of dripping cement.

"It's not like that," he said. "Not visiting some guy and telling him what you want to be."

Her eyes were wide open but she couldn't move. Her limbs were loose and weighted, her flesh flowing like a silt-filled tide.

"No one else can make you assertive," he said, then he dropped to all fours beside her, circling her with a natural gait that made a mockery of her crude writhing. His eyes shined in the dark.

Her nails dropped away, but prey's hooves came instead of hunter's claws. He was straddling her now, his too-large jaws just above her tender throat.

"All others can do," he said, "is hunt you down."

Jane Doe, prey to the end, didn't struggle beneath him.

The Model

Because great news comes in twos, my twitter story The Model is now up free at Trapeze. Check it out, it's brief and rather cheery. Or, at least, one of those.

[Note: since this fell on a Tuesday, this week's review will be posted on Friday.]