Vampires and Jazz — Vampire Week Day Seven; Mystic Nebula Interview Monday
On day seven of our ten-day Vampire Week we go to a blog train celebrating the fifth anniversary of Rhonda Parrish’s e-magazine NITEBLADE. Any publication lasting as much as five years these days is worth a nod, yes? And as it happens I’d sold Rhonda poetry going back to its very beginnings so why not my entry, following Rhonda’s initial introduction the day before, to start things off? So, some (though not all) of my poetry she’d published being about vampires, especially two that had to do with vamps dancing to jazz, I had a natural for a topic too: the relation of vampires to that particular music. Not only that, but there’s a link in the entry to an interview I’d done for NITEBLADE the previous year — including information about VAMPS (A RETROSPECTIVE) which had just come out at that time; instructions for finding an essay on poetry (under PAGES, elsewhere on this blog) on “Edgar Allan, Allen Ginsberg, & All That Jazz”; and, as a lagniappe, the text of the poem “High-Flying” that was one of two that appeared in NIGHTBLADE’s premier issue. For all this and more, take the Wayback Machine back to August 9 2012 by using the key phrase “Jazzy Vampires.”
Then speaking of interviews, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? Or is that times change (for instance, a novel I’ve been working on seems less likely to see print now than it did back then) and, anyway, the questions asked are bound to be different. Sunday’s email included a note from Editor Chris Vera that an interview I’d done for him for THE MYSTIC NEBULA is scheduled to be up today, so here’s a chance to find out for yourself by clicking right here. And then, while you’re there, you might take some time to find out more about this brand new ezine of just a few months that (to quote from the “About” section) “represents and celebrates the creativity in us all, the natural, the unnatural and the supernatural things that inspire us to do great works. It is a place of light and darkness, joy and pain. It is a place to imagine the future and worlds that have never existed.” Also check the home page and some of the poems and stories and, for the writing folk among us, there’s also a section containing guidelines.
And yes, to answer the question above — about whether times change — I’d noted that VAMPS had been my latest project, dwelt on in some detail in the NITEBLADE interview. For MYSTIC NEBULA the latest news is my upcoming third prose collection, THE TEARS OF ISIS, scheduled to be out from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing (cf. January 2, December 13 2012, et al.) in only a few months. So now you can read a bit more about it (at least two stories in which, by the way, have to do with vampires).
February 12, 2013 at 8:47 pm
NITEBLADE is top of my list for online publications (small press) that feature dark & speculative–often daring– fiction and poetry!
February 13, 2013 at 12:23 pm
Agreed, but don’t forget the other half either, the new MYSTIC NEBULA with its interview (we have yet to see whether I can place poetry with them
) in which we learn, among other things, the tale of how I met The Woman Who Was to Become My Ex-Wife.