An expatriate Australian journalist who’s written/edited for Mixmag, Impact (UK), and Anime Insider (among others), Andrez Bergen has been entrenched in Tokyo for the past 10 years, where he also “hacks together” electronic/techno music under the moniker Little Nobody.

Read the entire interview at Welcome to The Velvet.

Also check out Booked Podcast’s Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat review episode.

My first AWP was Denver, now two years in the rearview, and I had a memorable time, even if no photographic evidence exists to confirm this. Sure, there were dozens of panels hosted by writers I respected (including my word-hero Michael Chabon), and just as many where the informative content trumped the unknowns presenting it. But let’s be honest: it’s really an excuse to get silly for four days and nights with my extended online family of writers who workshop together, support one another’s writerly trajectories (hopefully ascending), and conspire to commit all sorts of questionable acts that will ultimately shave years off our lives. Some have never met in person before, and others cross international waters to participate. It’s also an excuse to buy more indie books than will fit on my Goodreads shelf. To pawn a few of my own fictions. To feign enjoyment at listening to authors read their work aloud. To chat up fishnetted, becorseted, raccoon-eyed authors of amputee erotica in dark corners over a glass of absinthe. Though we all know such gals are usually costumed more like thrift-store managers, and prefer wine coolers to wormwood. I love them all the same.

Last time, I burnt myself out with too many back-to-back panels, and am taking more of a relaxed approach this year: just a few per day. After all, this is my so-called “vacation.” No secret benefactor is footing my bill; I’ve no obligation to present or perform anywhere (that I know of. . .). I’ll sleep in if I please. See the sights. Indulge. Endure an hour-long line for a gourmet hot dog, goddammit!

But the real reason for this post isn’t to regale you with tales of literary conquests past, of syndicated television viewed in different time zones. It’s an invitation for you to come say hello, to let you buy me a pint, slip me a free copy of your book (paperback, please), or indulge me in droning on solipsistically about my own works-in-progress. Below is a preliminary list of the panels and events I may attend (unless something shiny or lacy distracts me) for those organizing their own stalking-and-accosting itineraries. I’ll be staying Wednesday through Saturday night (2/29 – 3/3) with my three ninja bodyguard/roommates at the Hampton Inn Majestic, right around the corner from the Palmer House (where most of the panels I care about are held, and where many attendees are staying). Gimme a shout in advance if you like.


Wednesday, 2/29
8:00 pm   Kick-Off Party @ The Empty Bottle (1035 N. Western Ave.)


Thursday, 3/1
9:00 am    R121. Atypical Points of View in Fiction Narration
12:00 pm  R170. Villains and Killers and Criminals, Oh My: Representing Evildoers in Lit Fic
4:30 pm    R233. The Renaissance of Midwestern Literature
8:30 pm    Margaret Atwood keynote

8:00 pm    The Wrong Kind of Reading @ The Galway Arms (2442 N. Clark St.)
9:00 pm    Karaoke Idol @ Beauty Bar (1444 W. Chicago)


Friday, 3/2
9:00 am   F119. Literature and the Internet in 2012
12:00 pm  F169. The Place at the Heart of Story
1:30 pm   F178. Natl Book Critics Circle Celebrates Award-Winning Authors

7:00 pm   Beautiful, Words @ Beauty Bar (1444 W. Chicago)


Saturday, 3/3
9:00 am   S104. Midwest Gothic: Dark Fiction of the Heartland
12:00 pm  S165. Mine Is Clouds: Revisiting the Life and Work of Richard Brautigan
3:00 pm   S215. Men from Venus, Women from Mars: Writing the Opposite Sex

6:00 pm   Ear Eater #13: The Impossible, The Extraordinary @ Beef & Brandy (127 S. State St.)

First up is this event at the end of the month in St. Louis, MO where I’ll be reading . . . um, something . . . alongside noir authors Caleb J Ross (I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin), Mark Tiedemann (Remains), and Kevin Lynn Helmick (Sebastian Cross). It’s at a coffee shop in the Delmar Loop near Washington University, part of a semi-regular local series hosted by Jedidiah Ayres and Scott Phillips. This is a road-trip stop for Caleb and me on our way to the AWP conference in Chicago the next day.


Noir at the Bar
Feb. 28, 2012
7:00 – 10 pm

Meshuggah Café
6269 Delmar Boulevard
St. Louis, MO 63130



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My short story “Fry Girl” (my personal favorite of those I’ve written) appears in …In Search of a City: Los Angeles in 1,000 Words, the first fiction collection from ThunderDome Press, now available in full-color paperback at ThundaDome.com/LA1K (where you can find instructions for a discount code) as well as through Amazon. Be sure to add it on Goodreads as well.

Editor Michael Gonzalez challenged each of the 26 contributors to write a 1,000-word story (no more, no less) with a California theme, based on their selection of a photo from a gallery of Hipstamatic shots he took with his iPhone around the Los Angeles area. The result is quintessential L.A.: dreams, drugs, hallucinations, romance, life and death, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and redemption. This one below was mine, the billboard, which inspired a story about a middle-aged former child model reflecting on her rivalry with her best friend.

Full contributor list:

Ryan Wilson – “American Trash”
Stuart Gibbel – “Break on Through”
Craig Clevenger – “Obsolescence”
Nik Korpon – “South of Thirteen”
Dennis Cruz – “Smile Now, Cry Later”
Pela Via – “Bathhouse”
Stephen Conley – “Don’t Feed the Animals”
Grigori Black – “This Was Heaven”
Doc O’Donnell – “Your Personal Apocalypse”
Nikki Guerlain – “Sick Ticket”
Patrick Verhagen – “Swim”
Craig Wallwork – “El Bordello Alexandra”
Nicholas Merlin Karpuk – “Ahm’s Bay”
Nik Houser – “Subtitles for a Silent Film”
H.R. Tardiff – “Walls in the Sand”
Richard Thomas – “The Jenny Store”
Bob Pastorella – “Alexandra”
Simon West-Bulford – “Project Asmodeus”
Jay Slayton-Joslin – “The Fantasy of California vs. The Reality of London”
Amanda Gowin – “Gilded Bones”
Chris Deal – “Padre Nuestro”
Boden Steiner – “Here”
Gordon Highland – “Fry Girl”
edward j rathke – “All the Dreams You Dreamt Retold”
Michael Paul Gonzalez – “Tidal”
Victor Bengtsson – “Venice, Forever”

A great deal of care was put into these e-book editions, and you’ll find a wealth of bonus content, including:

• Afterword by Jesse Lawrence
• Final Thoughts by Livius Nedin and Robb Olson
• Warmed and Bound: Up Close by Phil Jourdan
• Interview with Pela Via by Phil Jourdan
• The Multiple Voices Inside Your Book by Jay Slayton-Joslin
• Booked Podcast: Warmed and Bound Sessions
• Transcripts of Booked Interviews with: Craig Clevenger, Brian Evenson, Stephen Graham Jones, and Pela Via
• Photography by Charles King
• The Fuse

With 38 stories (from authors united by their love of dark fiction), plus all the new stuff above, this thing is a beast. But navigation is easy thanks to all the linked cross-references, both within the collection, as well as to external ones for more information. We want you to learn more about these emerging and established authors.

If you like what you read, please help us get the word out, and we’d love for you to post a review at the usual places like Amazon or Goodreads, even if it’s a short one.

Visit the official site for updated news:  http://warmedandbound.com

ISBN: 1613641621

ASIN: B005J3UAK8

To coincide with today’s release of Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology, I created this promo. It’s composed of imagery inspired by stories in the collection, including original music from me. The intent is to evoke a feeling, a mood—ominous, violent, and redemptive—rather than paint specific settings or characterizations. Multi-plane animation (a.k.a. “2.5-D”) was used to breathe life into what are predominately still photos. I’m so proud to have a story included alongside so many talented and respected authors in what has to be one of the year’s best.

The paperback is available through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com (both at $9.09 for a limited time), and Powell’s.com, with e-books coming very soon.

UPDATE: On its release day, the paperback was BN.com’s #4 best seller, trending #1 in hottest movers! (Click to embiggen.)

This project has been a labor of love, born out of a reading/writing community called The Velvet (where I’m a moderator), who are united by their love of dark, visceral fiction exemplified in the works of authors Will Christopher Baer, Craig Clevenger, and Stephen Graham Jones. Many other published authors and emerging writers make up the talent pool as well, and when the time finally came to assemble a collection of their work, our editor Pela Via and admin Logan Rapp led the charge. With participation from Clevenger, Jones, and the regulars, we reached outside our community to a number of authors with similar sensibilities we respect like Brian Evenson, Craig Davidson, Matt Bell, Blake Butler, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Paul Tremblay, Vincent Louis Carrella, and others, and were delighted with their response. There’s even a short foreword by Steve Erickson, whose work is praised within our walls nearly as often as that of our founders.

Here’s a peek at the cover. Click for larger versions and to see the full list of contributors.

Visit the official Warmed and Bound site for more info and updates, be sure to “like” its Facebook page, add it to your Goodreads shelf, and I’ll be posting some related media here in the upcoming weeks.

When I was younger, I took comfort in open-ended answers from my teachers and professors. I’d ask about the serial comma rule or how to handle semi-colons and answers would vary from the dismissive (“Nobody really knows when to use the serial comma”) to the Socratic (“How do you feel you should use semi-colon?”). This level of freedom with language was something I had never experienced before. It felt good to realize just how little in this world could be definitely right or wrong.

But it got old. After graduating college I suddenly found myself having to provide actual answers. When in school, the future is a vague, ever-distant destination. Post school, the destination suddenly becomes the present. Answers are important; philosophizing about them is not. The desire for absolutes extended beyond the grammatical and into the professional. So today, for fiction writers suffering the same confusion as I have (and still do, in many respects), below is a list of absolutes. Take comfort.

1.   Use the word “that” 97% less than you do right now. “That” is a buffer word and usually serves to clog the flow of a sentence. Find a way around it.

2.   Replace almost every instance of a “to be” verb with something else. The difference between the right verb and the almost right verb is the difference between a right sentence and a wrong sentence. Go for active verbs and you will get engaged readers.

3.   Avoid “(blank) of the (blank)” phrase constructions (e.g. “chicken of the sea”). These phrases usually indicate weak metaphors. Much of the time, the phrasing can be changed for better impact (e.g. “sea chicken”). Always use as few words as possible to tell a story.

4.   Read only one publishing how-to book, if you must read any. No more than one. Be wary of publishers who make their money by selling tools to writers. If you’ve read a handful of Writer’s Digest how-to write, how-to query an agent, how-to submit a manuscript books, you’ve read them all (Christina Katz’s Get Known Before the Book Deal is a definite exception).

5.   Follow these Twitter accounts:

• @JaneFriedman
• @GalleyCat
• @PublishersWkly
• @AuthorScoop

6.   Subscribe to these blogs:

• ArtsJournal: Daily Arts News – Publishing
• Author Scoop
• Book trade news from Book2book
• How To Write Badly Well
• How Publishing Really Works
• mediabistro.com: GalleyCat
• Nathan Bransford – Literary Agent
• Publisher’s Weekly Latest News
• The Shatzkin Files
• There Are No Rules
• Springwise
• The Self-Publishing Review
• VentureBeat
• We Who Are About To Die

7.   Listen to these industry and career-wise author podcasts:

• New York Times Book Review
• Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing
• NPR Books
• The Velvet Podcast
• Writing Excuses
• Beyond the Book

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajdagregorcic

That William never wanted to bring a child into this awful world to begin with—even in his fiancée’s last trimester—will make most readers squirm. The point is repeatedly driven home as Will derives much of his outlook from his experiences as a crime-scene cleaner, but these are also what lends the novel its unique quality: the more flawed the character, the greater the possible arc for redemption. We are so repulsed by his refusal to praise the miracle of Life, until we meet other kindred spirits who put his own beliefs in perspective and challenge him to embrace greater ideals. At this point Will becomes more identifiable and sympathetic as he befriends a child at the park who sparks the conflict within him.

While the themes and literary devices employed in the book are reminiscent of Chuck Palahniuk’s early work (it’s also the May selection for discussion at Chuck’s site’s book club), the prose stylings are pure Ross. Dark, disturbing imagery combined with great sensory detail and a grotesque wink now and then. We smell the toxic chemicals of his trade that infuse Will’s entire existence, from wardrobe to vehicle to house. His infected dog bite that festers throughout the story has us scratching at our own arm. He does a masterful job of putting the reader in Will’s head, especially given that the story is written in third-person (a fact I had to verify just now, so close is the point of view to the protag). This is not a beach read; bring it to the doctor’s office or stash it wherever you hide your smokes from your old lady. Discuss it with your friends via carrier pigeon.

As for criticisms, Otherworld Publications is a young press, evident in some editorial errors like typos and such, and hopefully they’ll correct these in future editions. Also, sometimes the cult ideologies that pervade the narrative seem to be in direct opposition to one another, though I think this is probably true to the spirit of those who subscribe to such belief systems, and having that debate play out actually helps us see the conflicts more clearly.

Caleb will be writing a guest post here next month as part of his Tour for Strange blog tour. In the meantime, pick up Stranger Will for yourself, as well as an e-book of last year’s fantastic story collection, Charactered Pieces. Next up for him is another novel, I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin (Black Coffee Press), and a novella, As a Machine and Parts (Aqueous Books), both of which I’ve had the pleasure of reading and pimping thusly.