There was last week’s round table mini, as well as one for the upcoming book Scribes of Speculative Fiction 2, and now this perambulating beast conducted by Lee Thompson, at his author site.

Subjects and revelations include how a writer’s voice turns to marble, time/project management, and why punching and kicking things can make you a better creator.

And, just like in Sophie’s Choice, Lee forced me to pick favorites. It was horrible.

So what goes into a year’s best anthology? First, start with a bunch of diverse, and diversely talented, people…

In recognition of Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 4, Erin Underwood at Underwords had a fine idea: strap several of the contributors into the hot seat and put the same three questions to each of us.

Interesting insights and background perspectives from one and all.

Plus some well-deserved accolades for Ellen herself.

And if you’re not in a shopping mood, you can bypass all that and win a copy for yourself, if the stars align and the Fates are with you.

What happens when you take Las Vegas’ current trajectory as an unsustainable city and push it to a logical extreme … and then keep pushing? Without Purpose, Without Pity is what happens. Kind of dystopian, kind of Lovecraftian, and told through the world of pro fighters.

With a really, really, really weird Thai rope fight.

E-book formats are ready now, with the print edition coming later.

You can check it out at Delirium Books’ DarkFuse outlet. This one page gathers everything you might need: the quick cover description, a lengthy excerpt, and links for Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, Sony Reader, and Kobo.

If you’re holding out for the hardcover, you have a couple of months’ worth of patience to burn through. That’s slated for a June 12 release, and is well on-track — I’ve just signed the signature sheets weeks ahead of deadline.

Kind of lost in the shuffle lately is that Wild Horses, my first crime novel, has made the leap from stodgy old paper pages to around-the-world-in-80-nanoseconds digital formats.

This is the little crime novel that could, which went to market and ended up the object of desire in an auction between four publishing houses. Fun times.

For the cover, we’ve replicated the original but ultimately unused dust jacket design for the William Morrow hardcover. The Ballantine paperback looked great too, but I have two other books coming with road-themed covers, and a third would just be too too much.

It’s available direct from the publisher, or the two major e-reader outlets, with Apple iBooks and others to catch up eventually.

Cemetery Dance (bundled ePub + Mobi files)

Amazon Kindle

Barnes & Noble Nook

I’ve been sitting on this one awhile, but now that the contracts have been signed, I’m free to divulge. I’ve contributed a couple of chunks to Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback, the sequel to, appropriately enough, Zombie Apocalypse! Both are what editor/creator Stephen Jones calls mosaic novels.

If the zombie apocalypse looked like this, would it really be so bad? Hah! That's what THEY want you to think!

What’s a mosaic novel again? Imagine a unified storyline that unfolds from a plurality of perspectives, through such mediums as journal entries, e-mail, video transcriptions, Twitter feeds, and the like. All done by writers handpicked for their chapters, because Steve thought each would do the greatest justice to that segment’s core idea.

My main contribution? Think the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), but with zombies. I also did a shorter origin piece, something Steve decided to work in after I sent him an article about a relevant archaeological dig going on at a medieval London plague pit.

Should be out this fall, and check out the full lineup:

Guy Adams • Peter Atkins • Anne Billson • Pat Cadigan • Peter Crowther • Les Edwards • Paul Finch • Jo Fletcher • Amanda Foubister • Christopher Fowler • Neil Gaiman • Brian Hodge • Nancy Holder • Paul McAuley • Lisa Morton • Reggie Oliver • Sarah Pinborough • John Llewellyn Probert • Robert Shearman • Michael Marshall Smith • Simon Strantzas

[Photo by Nivaldo Arruda]

What’s the best thing you can hear after dragging in from an hour of circuit training and heavy bag work? My vote goes for this: “Hi honey, can I scrub you down and shower you off? Oh, and we won $10,000,000, too!”

I would totally live in here if I were short enough.

Sadly, that didn’t happen today either. But the runner-up was pretty sweet: a batch of congratulations on making the final ballot for the Horror Writers Association’s 2011 Bram Stoker Award.

Yep, my novelette “Roots and All,” from Stephen Jones’ epically awesome A Book Of Horrors, follows up its selection for Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Four, with a shot at Superior Achievement In Long Fiction.

It probably won’t go any further than this. Awards and I have a long and almost spotless record of repelling each other … which is excellent news for everyone else!

You can see the full list of finalists here.

What we have here is the freshly minted and entirely tremendous wraparound cover for my upcoming novella from Delirium Books, courtesy of artist Daniele Serra. It’s my first cover by him, and I hope it won’t be the last.

To recap, Without Purpose, Without Pity runs nigh on 28,000 words, so yeah, it has some meat to it. It’s now the longest not-a-full-novel that I’ve done, edging out “As Above, So Below,” recently seen as Miss 1998 in The Century’s Best Horror Fiction, and weighing in at a trifling 23,400 words.

I’m proofing the galleys this week, so everything’s on track for a June release in hardcover and general e-book, and possibly an early Kindle Exclusive in March.

Click the skinnyfied version below to pop open a larger view.

How many books do you know that could legitimately be described as more than a century in the making? In gathering the most exemplary scary stuff published between the years 1901 and 2000, the terms that editor and genre historian John Pelan set himself were simple but daunting: one story per year, one story per author.

Thus, regardless of his titan status, H.P. Lovecraft gets only one slot. Ray Bradbury gets only one slot. Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Poppy Z. Brite … only one slot.

I got a slot.

The novella “As Above, So Below,” from my collection Falling Idols, holds down the year 1998. Amazing. The company here is drop-to-my-knees-and-give-thanks humbling. The 99 other bylines range from good friends and warm acquaintances, to role models admired from afar, to names that verge on mythical. I mean, H.G. Wells and Aleister freakin’ Crowley???

I’m truly honored to be here, and enormously grateful to everyone at Cemetery Dance Publications for hanging with the project throughout the logistical delays that kept it from appearing years ago.

Got a nice nod, too, in the recent Booklist review:

Volume 2 brings more contemporary authors of horror fiction to the fore. Norman Spinrad’s “Carcinoma Angels,” from 1967, will jolt you, and Brian Hodge’s “As Above, So Below,” from 1998, is a gem. Reading this entire second volume will acquaint even those new to horror fiction with the authors who have shaped the genre during the past 50 years.

Peruse this 2-volume, 1574-page beast here:

• Cemetery Dance Publications product page
• Volume 1 @ Amazon
• Volume 2 @ Amazon

I’ve been sitting on news of this one until the proverbial ducks were in a row. Without Purpose, Without Pity is a novella that I finished in mid-January, on invitation from Delirium Books. It’s slated for a June release, in both hardcover and digital formats. Depending on what we decide, it may also appear as a Kindle exclusive three months prior to the June release. Or not.

The thing clocks in at a smidge under 28,000 words, or roughly 1/3 the length of the average novel, unless your idea of the average novel is by Dostoevsky. OK, it’s just a little longer than Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea. There.

It has nothing to do with the image here, a painting by Polish surrealist Zdzislaw Beksinski, but was in part inspired by it, the same way his work also inspired a couple of soundscapes found on the Music page. Just to warn you, I’m going to continue to be inspired by Beksinski for the rest of my life.

For now, I’ll just say that Without Purpose, Without Pity is set in a Las Vegas of the near future, features boxers, has a Thai rope fight the likes of which you’ve never seen, and pushes the marketing phrase “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” to its logical extreme.

Yeah, it’s chick lit.

After an abortive attempt or three in recent years, it’s finally happening: Dark Advent, my early post-apocalyptic novel, is getting the big whomping hardcover treatment, courtesy of Cemetery Dance Publications. When? Stayed tuned on that, but late this year or early next is a good place to start.

Dark Advent — one of the rare books that could double as a Halloween mask.

Suffice to say I’ve just turned in a manuscript that amounts to a brand new draft. Not to worry — the story doesn’t change, and nobody acts in unfamiliar ways, although a couple of things get expanded a bit. It’s just a more polished version, addressing the rampant immaturities of presentation in a very early work. This version will also comprise the e-book edition.

Dark Advent was my second novel written and sold, after Oasis, but the first to appear, and came out dressed in what has to be one of the Top 5 Most Inappropriate Covers Of All Time. No such comic fodder this go-around. Cover art will be handled by Vincent Chong, who did such a smashing job on last year’s Picking The Bones.

This is going to be awesome…