De la musique avant toute chose: Mistwirler – Law Yet Unbroken

Moody and beautifully haunting. The artists are from Moscow: Bansheerie (music, lyrics, guitar, vocals) and Vivita (music, banjo, vocals and cover art) Also found on Death Roots Syndicate Volume VI. (Death Roots Syndicate is a free digital download label specializing in the promotion of dark music including but not limited to country, folk, blues, rock, […]

Summer’s End

School is starting tomorrow and summer is going out with a bang (heat advisory). I don’t know how to feel about it. All year, all winter long I dream up such high expectations of summer and then somehow it just ends and looking back at it, there were so many missed opportunities, so much good […]

Send Us Your Best Work

Demoralizing, exasperating, demotivating, patronizing, simply soul crushing calls for submissions: Please send us your best work. Do not sent us stories that have been rejected by other publications. Edit thoroughly and send us only your cleanest work. Format according to these particular requirements: (a list of ten seemingly arbitrary rules follows). Write a good, clean […]

Style Inspiration: Julianne Moore

I could look at pictures of Julianne Moore all day for style inspiration. There is something about the clothes and the way she wears them, like they are hers and she is herself in them, that is very powerful and attractive. But the clothes themselves! When she wears loose and somewhat edgy outfits, which she […]

Punctuated by horror movies

Dracula, 1958, with Christopher Lee. I hail from Romania. so o, course. I remember watching this particular Dracula with my little sister, my cousin O (lifelong partner in horror-appreciation), and my aunt, O’s mother, at home. My parents were away for a wedding, probably. We all got so frightened during that movie that my aunt […]

Feminizing the canon, are we?

The Paris Review has started this new column they call “Feminize Your Canon,” which looks like the best idea I’ve seen lately in support of women’s writing. There is a but, though. It depressed me like nothing else. If you are an unsuccessful women writer, it will depress you too. I honestly didn’t need help […]

The smallness

  It’s something that the human brain cannot really process: our own smallness. I have been having to deal with a lot of rejection coming my way lately. Since January I haven’t had any story accepted for publication, although I have been submitting regularly, up to ten stories per month. Every time I open a […]

Since late last year I fell victim to the bullet journal craze. I am easily swayed by trends, as we all know, but this time I was actively looking for a system that would bring back pens and notebooks into daily use. Before the bullet journal I used to have a scattered system all centered […]

Checking in: snow day

Another snow day. I heard yesterday on the radio that historically in our area we get the most snow of the winter in the first two weeks of February. Right. So, it’s not over. This winter has been relentless. But a snow day is not a bad time to write a blog post over here […]

A dreadpunk, gaslamp, and dark steampunk anthology: DeadSteam

One of my short stories, “A Visitor at Sultana’s Castle,” is set to appear in the upcoming DeadSteam anthology, edited by Bryce Raffle, to be published by Grimmer & Grimmer Books in October 2018. The dreadpunk, gaslamp, and dark steampunk anthology will include seventeen chilling stories of the monsters lurking around every corner, the ghosts […]

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