January 2018 (O the mind, mind has mountains)

It's easy to fall into the trap of believing your answer to the question What did I do this month? is required in order to justify your consumption of oxygen (or perhaps your carbon footprint) over the previous thirty days. It's not.

That being said, here's what I did in January 2018.

1. Revamped my Introduction to Literature course at UC Davis to emphasize analysis over argument. Graded the first set of papers for said course.
2. Completed a draft of my paper for INCS 2018, "Plotting the Brain: Arthur Machen's 'Unbroken Material Succession." Submitted an abstract for RSVP 2018.
3. Completed and submitted "A Nearly Beautiful Thing" (previously titled "Ninshubar")
4. Completed drafts of "The Oracle and the Sea," "It Is Not So, It Was Not So," and "Frankincense and Myrrh" 
5. Completed outlines of "Swallow (The Captured City)" and "Hunger Lake" [working title]
6. Read an excerpt of "It Is Not So, It Was Not So" with Fig + Axle at the Avid Reader
7. Reformatted www.meganarkenberg.com to fix broken links and put fewer mouse clicks between you and my short stories
8. Sent out seven reprint submissions and queried two publishers about forthcoming publications
9. Reopened Mirror Dance to poetry submissions

I'm spending less time on Facebook and Twitter these days. I can't say I regret how much effort I poured into social media throughout 2017; the sense of community support, or at least mutual outrage, kept me going when nothing else could. But eventually your feet hit the seafloor again and you can loosen your grip on the life preserver. I hope that's where I am.

Also, since the last year and change has been a raging pit of despair a bit difficult, I failed to report on a new publication: "But Thou, Prosperpina, Sleep," a story about Swinburne and Nyarlathotep, in A Breath from the Sky: Unusual Stories of Possession. If you've liked anything I've written before - because it's queer, because it has strong liquor preferences, because it's a little too obsessed with poetry or Great Lakes geography - you'll like this one.

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Wednesday, January 31, 2018

academia, the writer in its natural habitat, website

This isn't a blog post

...because I should be finishing revisions on a book chapter right now. So. In one hundred words or less:

It's November!

Jose Cruz has written a wonderful spotlight on "Final Exam" over at The Haunted Omnibus. Also check out the interview, in which I discuss genre, Lovecraft, humor, and futility.

And I have a new short story, "What Hands Like Ours Can Do," in the November issue of The Dark:

She’s washing the dishes after a simple breakfast of fried eggs and tomatoes, looking out the window towards the river winding low and shaded beneath the willow trees, when she sees a man coming up the road from the south. He’s dressed nicely, gray suit and waistcoat, well fitted; his shirt looks new, with one of those low Mandarin collars that take a pin instead of a tie. No hat, and his dark, longish hair blows across his eyes like a veil. She thinks to herself that there’s rain coming, with that kind of wind.

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Thursday, November 05, 2015

academia, horror, interview, short fiction