Tomorrow, December 9, the incredible team behind Cornerstone Press will hold a release party for my seventh book, Meditations of a Beast. This week has seen a series of activities related to the book launching event.

If you want to buy a copy of Meditations of a Beast, please go here.

John Reppion's Spirits of Place was released a few days ago. This book features essays by me, Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir, Vajra Chandrasekera, Maria J. Pérez Cuervo, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Dr. Joanne Parker, Mark Pesce, Iain Sinclair, Gazelle Amber Valentine, and Damien Williams. 

Two Unnamed Press titles were included in Chicago Review of Books' list of the best fiction books of 2016--my book, Age of Blight, and Dan Lopez's The Show House. Also included were Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer, Of This New World by Allegra Hyde, and A Tree or a Person or a Wall by Matt Bell.

​'Tis the season...

I have two forthcoming books. Both are full-length poetry collections from university presses. There's Black Arcadia, a perverted little sister to Lifeboat (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015), and it will soon be released by the University of the Philippines Press. This note explains how I envisioned Lifeboat and Black Arcadia together.

Then there's Meditations of a Beast from Cornerstone Press, a student-run publishing house in the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Expected release schedule is December 9, 2016. Meditations of a Beast explores the nature of reality, the psychological terrain of the uncanny valley, morality/ethics as prerequisite for sentience, and a fabulist carnival featuring, among other some such homely creatures, a spontaneous combustion victim, the loneliest kettle in the world, and the wretched god of broken things.

Here's Jenny Peterson's interview with SPTV - UWSP Television, where she talks about Cornerstone Press and Meditations of a Beast. There's also a press release at The Pointer.​
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LONTAR is still going strong in its relatively long haul and is set to release its eighth issue!​ We'll soon be publishing poems from promising Filipino writers like ​Tilde Acuña and Lakan Umali.

Lightspeed Magazine's People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction, whose original fiction section I co-edited with Nalo Hopkinson, is brimming with full color and great writing by POC creatives.

DF Lewis reviewed my short story collection, Butterfly Dream, as well as the anthology Marked to Die: A Tribute to Mark Samuels (edited by Justin Isis) in which my story, "The Early Signs of Blight," appeared. 

While passing time during the sixth extinction, I wrote several stories and poems that found home in these publications. 

A story called "The Island" (which was the beginning of a book-length manuscript I've been working on) was published in Maximum Volume: Best New Philippine Fiction 2 (edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Angelo R. Lacuesta). You can buy the book from the publisher. Alternatively, a Kindle edition is available. 

A poem called "Impossible Forms," which was collected in Meditations of a Beast, appeared in the third issue of Wolves Magazine. 

Two Black Arcadia poems, "The Waiting Room" and "Minotaur," were published in Meniscus, a literary journal backed by ​the Australian Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Two more poems from Black Arcadia--"The Fugitive" and "Scarecrow"--were included in Flapperhouse's annual anthology, which is available here.

"The Burn Unit" is another poem collected in Black Arcadia. It is included in the 77th issue of Hiram Poetry Review.

Three oldish poems, reprinted from an earlier issue of Big Pulp, were included in this handsome volume. You can pick up a copy of M: Murder & the Macabre here.

I also have had stories featured in some fine places. "Day of the Builders" and "Beautiful Curse"--both from my short story collection Age of Blight--were reprinted in Weird Fiction Review. An interview by Jeff VanderMeer accompanied the two stories. Arcturus published my story, "B is for Body," while The Collagist featured "Genesis," whose accompanying author interview by William Hoffacker can be found here. 

Future publications include the story, "Boltzmann Brain," in the anthology Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk & Eco-Speculation (edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Wieland and to be released by Upper Rubber Boot Books in 2017), as well as a long essay in an anthology edited by John Reppion. 

​I met this little creature on November 1 and took him off the streets. He was thin then, malnourished, fur matted with dirt and dried-up pus, lots of ear mites, pus behind the right ear from infected superficial wounds, pus and encrustations covering almost half his head. I already fattened him up from 7.5 to 8.9 kgs. The vet estimated his age to be slightly less than a year old. He has sarcoptic mange, which is readily treatable. His name is Moymoy. He's going to be fine and has a long happy life ahead of him.    

Onward to 2017.​... and to a couple more years before everything goes downhill.