We’re in the middle of yet another heat wave and things are heating up at Weird Tales as well. Our latest issue #358 (which I fondly call the Weird Tales Goes to Hell issue and therefore appropriate for this weather) is finally out in the world and subscribers are receiving their copies. Contributors will receive theirs soon as I expect a shipment to arrive this coming week. I’ll mail them out as soon as possible.

It’s been a very busy summer here in Weird-land. I just got back from a short mini-tour plus a week of teaching at Shared Worlds (the teen writing camp). The students are all fans of Weird Tales (naturally) and just might be the next generation of weird writers! Jeff and I also had a few book events to celebrate The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. Putting the final touches on The Weird anthology (more news on that later), which will be released in October. And on Sunday, August 21 we’re planning a big Cabinet/Steampunk/Weird extravaganza here in Tallahassee with guest artist Carrie Ann Baade. So if you live in or near Tallahassee, please come join in the festivities! (Ray’s Steel City downstairs from 4-7pm).

No one should be surprised that we’re behind in our reading. So very sorry about that. This is one of the reasons we allow simultaneous submissions. We want to make sure that each story is given the attention it deserves and be fair to the writers. Sometimes this means you might wait longer than 8 weeks…we just had no idea the number of stories submitted would be so high. Thanks so much for your continued patience.

And speaking of submissions, we’re closing on September 1, 2011 to avoid an overstock situation (but will re-open January 1). So please get your submissions in before then. The portal will close on that day.

Thanks for keeping it Weird!

My latest editing project with my husband, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, started out as a “shared worlds” project centered around the life of Dr. Lambshead and his collection of artifacts. However, by the time we’d put it all together, the anthology had naturally morphed into something more. There is a framing story involving Lambshead, and the good doctor is mentioned in several stories, but in its mix of major established creators and up-and-comers, the Cabinet serves as a modern treasury of fantastical and weird fiction and images.

The “weird” part, which is probably of most interest to Weird Tales readers, starts with the art. Genius animator Jan Svanmajer contributed a three-part crypto-zoology print that as playful and yet creepy as any of his films. If you’ve seen his version of Alice in Wonderland, you know what I mean. Another great artist, Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, gave us four originals and asked us to approach specific writers to create stories based on them. Mignola’s mind tends toward both the dark and the darkly humorous, so it’s no surprise that in one case his art led to both Cherie Priest’s “The Clockroach” (art and excerpt here) and China Mieville’s somber and effecting “The Pulvadimonitor: The Dust’s Warning,” with its investment in the macabre: “Even by indirect light the extraordinary texture of the head was clear. It moved in small spasm, creasing its dun self in unnatural directions. ‘Not like a head,’ one witness said. Its teeth, gleaming from behind dirt-coloured lips, ceramic-white and vivid, look in the photographs overlaid on the picture like a crude collage, part of a wholly different image with a quite different palate. At seconds when the dials on the little motor twitched, the face might slightly crease its eyes or wince as if in pain, in response or cause, it was impossible to say.”

Always a double or triple threat, Mieville also contributed art to the Cabinet, specifically “The Very Shoe” and “The Gallows-horse”. Helen Oyeyemi wrote a story around the shoe and Reza Negarestani wrote a kind of meta-horror story around the horse. Negarestani’s work has appeared in Starry Wisdom, and his philosophical novel Cyclonopedia is a masterpiece of horror that includes supernatural weapons, sentient oil, and Lovecraft influences in a potent and unique mix. “The Gallows-horse,” which is excerpted here along with a statement from the writer, has an almost existential strangeness to it that speaks to the weird’s uncanny genius for making you uneasy, uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, Aeron Alfrey, who has done amazing macabre work for the likes of Thomas Ligotti, contributed art for two of the darkest stories: Caitlin R. Kiernan’s epistolary “A Key to the Castleblakeney Key” and Michael Cisco’s strange, funny, and oddly moving “The Thing in the Jar”. In both cases, Alfrey’s artwork sparked the stories in question rather than the other way around, and the style and mood of the text perfectly captures the atmosphere of his images. There are other examples from the Cabinet antho that will satisfy even the most jaded reader of weird fiction, but for now I thought I’d give you just a taste of Alfrey’s artwork and short excerpts from the stories (after the break)…

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OK, now that the Rapture is over and the only ones left are us, I thought this would be a good time to tell you a bit about how things are going at Weird Tales.  Our new submissions portal has been up and running for about 4 months now (thanks to Neil Clarke and Matt Kressel).  It’s very popular – we received almost 100 submissions on the first day!

And of course, once more we’re running a bit behind (currently reading stories in Mid-March) but making steady progress.  We’ve received close to 3000 stories via the portal so far and are still receiving snail mail submissions as well (about 4-5 a day).   My editorial assistants and I are happy to see so many impressive stories, but frustrated that we just don’t have the space for all of them (working on something to help rectify this – stay posted ).  So thanks to all for your patience while we work hard to get to each and every one of you.

Some news – just a small sampling of stories we’ve recently acquired that you will see later this year (please note: this is not all of them):

Stephen Graham Jones – an amazing post-apocalyptic zombie story (no, you’ve not seen one like this before). 

Annalee Newitz – monstrous weirdness in an alternate future of San Francisco

Conrad Williams – a photographer finds something strange

Tamsyn Muir – a young girl is schooled in the many ways of magic (Harry Potter this is not, trust me)

Tom Underberg – A Sin eater in search of something he must have in order to feel again

Jamieson Ridenhour – Unusual musical Deal with the Devil story in the Deep South

Leena Likitalo – Short bizarre story from this up-and-coming Finnish writer

The Weird, as opposed to horror or dark fantasy, has a slippery quality of “you know it when you read it,” with an element of terror, perhaps, but more likely unease. Weird stories don’t necessarily have pat resolutions and the creepiness or intensity of them is part of the journey.

Although weird fiction has a strong and proud tradition in the UK and North America, it’s not exclusively an Anglo phenomenon. As we discovered when reading for The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Fictions (Atlantic, November 2011), you can find weird all over the world. That anthology contains work from fourteen countries and every continent except Antarctica.

One of those countries is Finland, and the writer in question Leena Krohn, whose Tainaron is one of the finest short weird novels of the past fifty years. Works by the excellent Johanna Sinisalo, Boris Hurtta, and many other writers also exist in this visionary, hard-to-classify gray area.

I had a chance to see Finnish Weird first-hand recently during a whirlwind trip to Finland in April with my husband, Jeff.  Sponsored by a FILI travel grant and the generosity of the incredibly strong local SF/Fantasy community, we spent seven days teaching workshops, doing presentations, and lecturing at various universities and writers groups.  Our last day, in Helsinki, we attended Tähtivaeltaja Day, in honor of the great SF/F/H pop culture magazine Tähtivaeltaja, edited by Toni Jerrman.

But just the day before that, we were guests in nearby Espoo for Escon, sponsored by the local genre writers association. As part of the day’s events, we led a two-part workshop, the first section on creativity and the second on careers. The creativity part was called “If you cry, the world will explode” and described this way: “A focus on creativity, surrealism, and the imaginative spark. You will need to write, you will have fun, and you might even learn something. But, we guarantee you won’t cry.”

Using a combination of exercises that free the subconscious but also introduce the idea of constraint, this particular workshop is meant to spark ideas, make participants write in ways different from their usual methodology, and find diverse ways into narrative. While stories can eventually evolve from what’s written in this workshop, that’s not the point. In this workshop we had the additional challenge of hoping the writers would feel comfortable and relaxed—i.e., to write in Finnish if that came most naturally.  Some felt at ease writing in English, although others did write in Finnish, and then either summarize the results for us in English, or translate on the fly, which took additional guts on their part in our opinion.

Everyone who participated was wonderful—strange rabbits and Stalin’s oranges come to mind—and several attendees were successfully published writers already. But one evolving story through the exercises was definitely weird in a very particular way, a fragment called “Watcher” by Leena Likitalo. Likitalo has only published one online story in Finnish but nothing in English, although she chose to write in English for our workshop.

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I was pleased to be asked by Gillian Polack to contribute a guest post to her series this month on Women’s History especially since I got to talk about women and the weird. Check it out. Here’s an excerpt:

Just look at all the female writers that have graced the pages of Weird Tales since back in the day to now: Mary Elizabeth Counselman (who I had the honor of publishing in The Silver Web in the 1990’s), Margaret St. Clair, C. L. Moore, Allison V. Harding, Tanith Lee, Lois Tilton and Carrie Vaughn, among others. As a matter of fact, over 120 women published fiction in these pages from 1923-1954.