Meet the Creature from My Bloody Blog!!

Welcome to my writer's blog. I'm not new to the internet: as a publisher of quality fantasy fiction, such as the limited-edition hardcover anthology Bound for Evil: Curious Tales of Books Gone Bad, or the brilliant portmanteau novel, Engelbrecht Again! by absurdist Welsh writer Rhys Hughes, I maintain an active web presence at my Dead Letter Press site. Lately, however, my own fiction has been receiving some nice recognition. My ghost story "Lightning Rod" (which originally appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of All Hallows ) has been selected to appear in Horror: The Best of The Year, 2008 (edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz for Prime Books, and due July 2008). "A Handful of Dust" will appear in an upcoming issue of All Hallows and "Dry Places" will appear in The Age of Blood and Snow, an anthology of fantastic stories set in the Heroic Ages (edited by Skadi meic Beorh for Morrigan Books, and due December 2008). So, a blog empasizing my role as a writer seemed like a good idea. (Yes, another bloody blog to clog the Information Superhighway we fondly call the 'net!) And what better title for it than "The Literary Alchemist"! After all, by day I am a chemist---trying hard, by night, to transmute words and ideas into literary gold. cough... well, entertaining fiction, at any rate.

I hope you'll drop by again to see what's new. I promise I'll try and make it worthwhile. I realize many of us have literary aspirations, so to help feed our dreams I'll be posting a "Writer's Quote for the Day." I'll also post encouraging anecdotes about writing. I'll sprinkle in background pieces on how the ideas for some of my stories developed, and keep you posted on upcoming projects, both by me and some of my writer-friends. For the more general reader I'll post "Wise Words," about twice a week. And what blog would be complete without photos of friends, family, special events, my dog, my neighbor's cat, my...you get the picture (pun intended)!

Best Regards,
Tom