The Mumpsimus

Since my book came out, lots of people have asked me to describe my writing. I'm not good at this. However, having now seen my writing described by reviewers and by common readers, I've got a few ideas about how other people describe it. "Not nice", "disturbing", "bewildering", etc. After a while, I found myself responding with the same two words when people asked what my writing is like. "Perverse and uncommercial," I heard myself say now and again. (I'm sure I have some rejection slips around somewhere that call my writing exactly that.) I don't know if those terms are exactly true , but they seem to set up the right expectations in readers. My friend Jeremy John Parker overheard my self-description. Being not only an excellent writer and discerning editor but also a talented designer, he decided there should be clothing, tote bags, mugs, etc. with "perverse and uncommercial" on them. And so there now are. ...

My publisher, Black Lawrence Press, has announced that for every book they sell through their website from now through the end of the year, they will donate $1 to the American Civil Liberties Union. I will match this for my own book, Blood: Stories , meaning that every copy sold through the BLP website will also send $2 to the ACLU. I'm an ACLU member, and pleased with this choice of an organization to support because so many of BLP's authors are among the groups targeted by harassment, civil rights violations, and hate crimes — all of which are on the rise and likely to continue rising.

One of my favorite sites on the internet is Largehearted Boy, which brings music and literature together. A core series at LB are the Book Notes: playlists of songs to accompany books. Huge thanks to the Largehearted Boy proprietor, David Gutowski, for inviting me to participate and create a Book Notes entry for Blood: Stories . The The, David Byrne, Cowboy Junkies, Washington Phillips, Arvo Pärt, and many more...

original image by Joseph Maclise In the Weird Fiction Review conversation I had with Eric Schaller , Eric asked me to talk a bit about designing the cover of Blood: Stories , and in my recent WROTE Podcast conversation , I mentioned an alternate version of the cover that starred Ronald Reagan (this was, in fact, the cover that my publisher originally thought we should use, until she couldn't get the image we ended up using out of her mind). I thought it might be fun to share some of the mock-ups I did that we didn't use — the covers that might have been...

The good folks at Electric Literature invited me to converse with Adrian Van Young, perhaps not knowing that Adrian and I had recently discovered we are in many ways lost brothers, and so we could go on and on and on... And we did. We talked about  Texas Chainsaw Massacre , The Sublime, writing advice, writers we like, Michael Haneke, neoliberalism,  The Witch , and all sorts of other things. It was a lot of fun and we could have gone on at twice the length, but eventually we had to return to our lives. Many thanks to Electric Lit  for being so welcoming.

I have been busy and have neglected this blog. I forgot to make a post here about some of the most exciting news of my year: I have a story in the current issue of my favorite literary magazine, Conjunctions . It's titled "Mass" and it is about, among other things, a mass shooting. Early this morning, at least 50 people were killed and 53 wounded in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The New York Times  is currently calling this the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. I'm not going to write about the gun politics of this. For that, please read the work of Patrick Blanchfield , particularly "So There's Just Been a Mass Shooting" , "God and Guns" , and "The Gun Control We Deserve" . (He's excellent on Twitter , as well, if you want his most recent thoughts.) I have sputtered on about the topic in the past , not always coherently. Patrick is better at it, and better informed, than I. Thinking through the complex, contradic...

A new interview with me — the first to come out since Blood: Stories was released — is now up at One Story 's blog, part of the publicity leading up to the One Story Literary Debutante Ball . Many thanks to Melissa Bean for conducting the interview, and for her very kind words about the book. Here's a taste: MB: On that note, what inspires your stories? MC: Daydreams and nightmares created by anxieties, fears, and desires. I don’t write fiction for the sake of therapy, per se, but I am prone to anxiety and I have an active imagination, so it’s often the case that a story starts from one of my weird anxiety fantasies. Read more at One Story...

This afternoon, I will be flying to Los Angeles for the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference . Here's my schedule of events, in case you're in the area and want to say hello... Thursday, 3/31: Black Lawrence Press reading and party at CB1 Gallery , 7pm Friday, 4/1: Signing at Black Lawrence Press booth (#1526), 1-2pm Saturday, 4/2: signing at the GLBTQ Caucus Hospitality Booth (#633), 12-12.30pm And of course I'll be wandering around the conference and spending lots of time at the book fair.

a box of Blood Though delayed, my debut collection, Blood: Stories , now exists. I know because I received copies of it straight from the printer. That means it's also going to arrive at the distributor within the next day or so, and from there ... out into the world. I'll have plenty more to say later, I'm sure. For now, I'm just going to go marvel at the thing itself...

We're almost there — my debut book, Blood: Stories , was scheduled for January release, but is going to be a couple weeks late, because things happen, it's a small press, etc. It looks like it's going to be a really beautiful object and well worth the wait. I expect copies will be making their way out in the world around the second week of February. [Update 29 February: Wrong about that. Physical copies have made their way to me, which means they're on their way to the distributor, and once the distributor has done all their distributory things to them, they'll be out in the world. Any day now...] The book's info has been submitted to the distributor ( Small Press Distribution ), and should appear in their databases early next week, which will allow bookstores and libraries to place orders. It should also be hitting all the online vendors soon. (It's been on Goodreads for a while.) That means the pre-order sale from Black Lawrence Press will end [an...

You can now order my upcoming collection Blood: Stories from the publisher, Black Lawrence Press. The book will be released in January 2016, and BLP is offering it for a bit of a discount before the publication date (it's a big book — 100,000 words — so will retail for $18.95). Should you pre-order it? I don't know. Yes, of course, I would like you to. And if you're going to order it online, this is a good way to do it, because you'll get it pretty quickly and a larger percentage of your money will go to BLP, so you'll help a small publisher stay solvent. Once the book is published, you'll also be able to buy it from bookstores, and since I support people spending as much money as possible in local bookstores, that's a great way to get it as well. Actually, you should probably both pre-order it and buy it from bookstores, because why would you want only one copy? You need to be able to give them away to friends — or, if you don't like the book, ...

sitting in my office, contemplating what to write... I've been wanting to try out TinyLetter for a little while now, having subscribed to a few newsletters that use it, and so I took some time to create a newsletter aimed at sending out information, musings, etc. about my upcoming collection, Blood: Stories , which Black Lawrence Press will release in January. Why create such a thing when I've already got this here blog? Because I think of this blog as a more general thing, not really a newsletter. I will put all important information about Blood  here (as well as on Twitter , and I'll make a Facebook author page one of these days), but the newsletter will have more in-depth material, such as details of the publishing process, background on the stories, etc. There will be some exclusive content and probably even some give-aways, etc. I probably should have titled it Etc., in fact... And it's not all limited to Blood  — if you take a look at the first letter , yo...