Adam Lowe is my new poetry editor. He's an awesome person. And the tale of how we met is hilarious.

You see, for a time I had two wordpress blogs with different log ins. Everyone who visited Rusty Nail regularly knew that I was Cussedness. It's been my handle since 2003. So I never paid any attention to which account I was logged into while posting comments there.

The thread / post at Rusty was about Dagstine and it derailed into analysis. I mistook the name of an award given to a magazine that had both Dagstine and Adam were connected to for an award given out at a gay sf convention. My comment was essentially innocent, especially coming from someone who has never made any secret of being a bi-sexual gender queer who leans most heavily toward women. I posted that comment from my janraefrank account.

Adam accused me of being a homophobe. I responded to that without noticing that I was logged into the other account. I just don't think about these things. And then Adam complimented Cussedness on being such an enlightened individual.

Soon after he discovered they were both me and we had a huge laugh over it.

And we have stayed in touch ever since.

________

Now, on other news.

I am finally worn out and tired of dealing with the 'horror community.' I requested that Nanci at Horror World remove my forum there.

I cleaned out my twitter account and no longer follow people connected to that community.

Although I'm writing about werewolves and vampires, which are classic horror tropes, I feel more at home in fantasy.

I am walking away and going back to my roots.

I have been moving in this direction for several years. Now I think I can safely say that it's over.

The Official launch date for Daverana Enterprises is August 19th.

We are proud to present a collection by Angeline Hawkes, Symphony for the Forgotten.

And here is the cover.

A Demon in Bed by Joel Wideman is one of the most original concepts I have come across in erotic horror. I love the cover also.

I promised a rant about writing, but instead of dealing with my original topic, an interesting exchange going on at Spinetinglers has inspired me to talk again about literary ghettos. That topic that gets me banned from messageboards.

The term 'ghetto fiction' or 'literary ghetto' was originally applied to science fiction in the early 1960s and extended to include fantasy. It has since been extended again to include horror.

What defines a literary ghetto is small advances or no advances, little or no promotion and a high turn over so that the books that do make it to the shelves in bookstores never stay there long.

I have worked in bookstores. The space on the racks and shelves is limited. Except for the larger names in genre, most of the books are removed from the shelves after a week to make space for more books that have come in within those genres.

They also tend to end up in the bargain book bins.

This currently happens to horror far more often than it does sf/f. The reason is that the audience is smaller.

And the audience appears to be shrinking.

Small press publications and 'underground' publications are part of that ghetto.

There is more small press horror than other genres and often the writing is not as good or solid as we see in fantasy or sf. It is far too limited. This results from the fact that so much of it has become a booga-booga scary face at the window ritual dance.

Instead of seeing the full possibilities of the darkness of the human soul that characterized classic horror, what we are seeing is a shrinking pond devoted and obsessed by a need to "deliver the scares."

For sf, the ghetto was a place hidden from the mainstream eye that allowed for extensive experimentation. It provided them a shelter where they could test and try things that the larger readership of novels was not prepared at the time to deal with.

Horror is currently very deep in the ghetto. However, instead of seizing upon its shelter as a place to test and try new things, it has become a stick in the mud. It just sits there.

The possibilities to experiement in that shelter away from the larger eyes that would love to put cages around any genre that violates its sensibilities are ignored. The possibilities are unexplored. The opportunities to be fully awake and aware and put reality under a metaphorical microscope are not fully taken advantage of.

Compare, for instance, the opening scenes in the average fantasy novel and the average horror novel. The technical skill of the fantasy novel will go way beyond the technical skill of the horror author.

This is something that does not have to be.

If the technical and stylistic quality was raised and given a dash of daring, horror would re-invent itself and become a force to be reckoned with in the halls of genre fiction.

But I am seeing very few authors do that. In short fiction, I believe that Jack Kincaid is a master. I also think that Mary Sangiovanni is a fabulous stylist. In novels, I think that Jonathan Maberry and Mark Rainey are ground breaking. They have the technical and stylistic skill to do amazing things. They also have sound characterization and are unafraid to delve deeply into the psyches of their characters. But where are the rest of the ones who break new ground?

Good horror is not scary, it is disturbing. It digs into our shadowed corners and follows us around, echoing through our minds as we go about our everyday tasks. You can't stop thinking about it long after you've read it. Scares are cheap. Things that disturb us to our very roots are the diamonds in an otherwise forgettable collection of rhinestones.

With the demise of Project Pulp, Clarkesworld books, and now Shocklines, the dominoes have begun to fall.

farewell Nocturne Press

I have said for a long time that horror needed to reinvent itself if it wished to rise out of the genre ghetto, or at least have a stable ghetto.

We are seeing more and more of how the obsession with simplistic booga booga ritual dances rapidly become empty and sterile.

When writers get back to old fashioned story telling that cares about the characters and can make the reader care about the characters, I believe that horror will flourish again. The problem is that there is so little of it except for the work of the biggest names such as King, Saul, Koontz, and others who play ball in their league.

The most hopeful sign I have seen in years is the awarding of the Stoker to Jonathan Maberry for Ghost Road Blues. It's easy to fall in love with his characters, which in turn raises the level of suspense and threat above and beyond that of the rest of the genre.

Former agent, now an editor, Jane Letty is looking over the contract I put together for the anthology to make sure that all bases are covered. As soon as she gets back to me, I'll be sending them out.

When you get them, and you know who you are, but I'll put up a list, I will need for you to print out two copies and sign them. Send both of them to me and I'll counter sign them and send one copy back to you. When I get the contract back, I'll mail your checks out.

So far, we have stories by:
Lyn McConchie
Sharman Horwood
Nicholas Mounts
Kaolin Fire
Susie Hawes
Tracy Keegan
Lena Sawyer
Natalie Daniels
Luna Black
Deann Allen

And several authors have promised to sub something before the deadline of June 1st.

Now that everything has begun to come together in my life, there will not be another extension on the deadline. June 1st is it, folks.