(Re)Viewed by James K. Moran: September 2016

Friday, September 16, 2016

SASE Blues: A Comment

Sending off a Self-Addressed, Stamped Envelope (SASE for those in the writin' business, pronounced "Sayse") feels so strange. I have seen my own name that I have written in my own penship on business envelopes come back so many times with bad news that I have trouble trusting my own handwriting, postage paid or not.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

CanCon this Weekend

I’m excited to be part of this weekend's Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Arts andLiterature, featuring guest of honour, Tanya Huff.

At 4pm this Saturday, I will be weighing in on, Want to Dominate the World, but Don't Have a Writers' Group? My partners in crime are Maaja Wentz, Mike Rimar, Su Sokol, and Ryan McFadden (moderator).

On Sunday at 10am, I will be on the Horror and Weird Fiction: A Reader’s Panel. Our panelists discuss the most disturbing, lyrical, and scary horror out there. If you want to not sleep for weeks, make yourself a reading list at this panel! My co-panellists are Brett Savory, Sean Moreland, JRebecca Simkin, and Sandra Kasturi.

This will be a speculative blast. More about CanCon here.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Support Lethe Press

My fine pubilsher, Lethe Press, also needs your help. Publisher Steve Berman was brave enough to take a chance on my novel Town & Train, so I'm very proud to be part of their speculative fiction that "is imaginative and strange and wondrous."

In their own words:

Lethe Press began in 2001 as a home for queer and speculative fiction. Since then we have won numerous awards and acclaim for our books. Many readers feel like outsiders because of the sexual identity--our books are welcome reliefs to this problem; the gay and lesbian protagonists in our books have adventures, chase danger, fall in love, lead rich lives, and overcome the taint of homophobia. Our speculative fiction is imaginative and strange and wondrous.

As 'Nathan Burgoine says, this is more of a a fundraising process that is more of a subscription and monthly investment. Lethe gets voices out there that readers might never otherwise discover, including Lee Thomas and Dayna Ingram and many others that I am very grateful to have discovered.

Lethe's Patreon is here.

About Fear Itself

Canadian author James K. Moran's debut collection of dark fiction offers fantasy, sci-fi, and horror shot through with hope and friendship. Inside, readers will discover sea serpents among the roiling waters of the St. Lawrence River under a dilapidated international bridge; a misguided bi mage negotiating with a demon he accidentally summoned into his dorm; a baby monitor issuing the voice of an inter-dimensional dark god; a couple in Picton County fleeing an ancient entity they cannot see directly that demands a blood sacrifice; queer ghosts haunting a British nightclub; two salty old ranch hands outside Lethbridge, Alberta, betting on who is a better shot in what may be the apocalypse; a shape-changing huckster seducing apathetic suburbanites; a gay rare-collectibles hunter hunted by a being moving between the Internet, film, and fact; a cat-fished giant marauding the backroads of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry counties; a gay wine shop manager discovering more than a dusty Moscato lurking in the musty basement; and a pterodactyl loose downtown.

About Town & Train

In a small Ontario town, seventeen-year-old John Daniel wakes by the railroad tracks with no recollection of how he got there. Something called him from his bed. Officer David Forester, a recent transfer from Toronto, struggles to fit into the local police force, despite resistance from established circles. Both soon suspect a more pervasive and menacing collusion occurring in town when an antique steam train arrives late in the night. At the phantasmal engine, a conductor promises the desperate locals escape from their town dying with so many closed stores and shattered dreams--but there is no denying what the stranger really brings is the stuff of nightmares.

"Though they traffic gleefully—sometimes ruthlessly—in the terrors that haunt his fraught characters’ dreams (and, all too often, realities)—James [K.] Moran’s stories inhabit a shadowland filled with sights and experiences worth having or remembering: the first, sleep-famished months of parenthood; the memory of lost friends; Canadian woods and waterscapes; the hunt for impossibly rare films, which is almost always more fun, and—in the case of these stories—definitely safer, than completing one of those hunts. These are characters not just clinging to but immersing in their lives. Not that that’s going to save them, of course..." —Glen Hirshberg, author of Infinity Dreams and the Motherless Children trilogy