Liked what you read? Please leave a review at Amazon & Goodreads! Or share on your social network. The hashtag for the book is #CFSBOOK. You can find me and Pelekinesis on Twitter and Instagram at: @BasBleuZombie & @Pelekinetic.
We’re in the final countdown! In a month, my debut collection CALLS FOR SUBMISSION will be out in the world doing whatever debut collections do (hopefully be read?). And I am doing all the things writers do to try to make that happen (witchy moon spells?).
Seriously, though, so far, it has been going pretty good, and I am very excited about the upcoming date. I am humbled to have received wonderful blurbs from among my favorite writers working today. I am “over moon” to have the above from Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., editor of The Madness of Dr. Caligari and the World Fantasy Nominated Cassilda’s Song. He is also author of A House of Hollow Wounds (which includes some madness of its own in the way of Mallarmé that is sooo good!) among many more great works. You can find more out about Joe here!
Other blurbers include Kat Howard, Livia Llewellyn, Richard Gavin, Ann VanderMeer, Paul Tremblay, Nick Mamatas, and Orrin Grey! As you can see above, my publisher at Pelekinesis, Mark Givens, has made these beautiful blurbs into nifty memes, and I will start unveiling them over the next few weeks. I am also working on some Guest Bloggage and a few local events in Florida, so please stay tuned for developing news and the official book launch May 15th!
If you’d like to get your orders in early, the paperback is now available for pre-order at the Pelekinesis website, and I understand an e-book option will soon follow. And I don’t really know what else to say at the moment, other than a HUGE thank you to everyone who has taken the time to support and encourage this project!
I have been writing professionally for about twelve years now. You name the type of writing, and I’ve probably done it. Journalism? Yes. Fashion copywriting? Oh, yeah. Travel writing? Check. Editing? Check. Eulogy writing? Oddly, yes. Prize-winning fiction? Eh…well, some of my fiction has been nominated for things…”Of Parallel and Parcel” was nominated for a Pushcart, and just a few weeks ago my latest story, “The Neurastheniac” was named a World Fantasy Award finalist.
My non-fiction has garnered some laurels as well. My travelogue Wandering Spirits: Traveling Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was nominated for a Best of the Net award by the editors of the Non-Binary Review, where the series appeared, for the first time as a whole, in their Frankenstein issue. You can download that issue for free here. My first book, The Steampunk Bible, was co-written with Jeff Vandermeer and was nominated for a Hugo and World Fantasy award, and won the Steampunk Chronicle’s 2012 Reader’s Choice Award.
Now, you may be scratching your head and asking: “I thought some guy named S. J. Chambers was attached to that.” It’s true, but that guy was me. Up until Spring 2015, I was publishing as S. J. Chambers, but decided to drop my initials for reasons I wrote about here.
While I love exploring other forms of writing, fiction has been and always will be my true passion. I prefer to write about the “asterisks” of history, as Mina Loy wrote in her “Library of the Sphinx” essay. I am very interested in the women that have been resigned to be footnotes in history, and I have slowly been working on a mythos of sorts that involves a secret society of these forgotten maidens, The Bas Bleu. They appear in some shape or form in several of my stories, including “The Neurastheniac,” and occupy most of my current fictional endeavors. Other stories they appear in include “Remnants of Lost Empires” (TheStarry Wisdom Library) and “The Veils of Sanctuary” (Sisterhood, forthcoming).
“The Neurastheniac” appears in Cassilda’s Song, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., and published by Chaosium Inc.
Most of my stories appear in anthologies, but there are a few stories out on the internet available for free:
“The Şehrazatın Diyoraması Tour” is an anti-Orientalist, steampunk tale set in Constantinople, and is available at the new literary magazine WORDS over at Hex Publishing.
Information about my other previous work can be found in my somewhat updated bibliography here.
“The Last Session: or, the facts in the case of Clarissa Collyer“ is a limited edition chapbook from Dunhams Manor Press. The copy reads: “Clarissa Collyer is having problems growing up. Among the usual teenage problems of identity and independence, she also has to care for her mother, whose soul is stuck in her cancer-ridden body. A modern riffing on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” this weird bildungsroman tale from Selena Chambers frays the threads between cutting the mortal coil and the umbilical cord.”
Mechanical Animals is a crossed-genre anthology looking at the history, trend, and relevance of biomimicry. I am co-editing it with the awesome, Hugo-award winning Jason Heller, and it will be published through Hex Publishing.
If all of that isn’t exciting enough, next May will see the release of my debut collection, Calls for Submission, through Pelekinesis.
My greatest collaborator, Baby Johnson.
Other than all that, I am a Lit-Nerd, Francophile, Bibliophile, and dromomaniac. In addition to writing, I love listening to music, analyzing art, dancing the charleston and shimmy, mixing cocktails (possibly related to the first thing), playing my telecaster, playing Fallout, sauntering in the woods, swimming in the ocean, cloud gazing, and traveling to various literary shrines to pay pilgrimage to my betters. When I’m not doing any of that, I’m hanging out with my Boy and my cat.
Phew. Well, that’ll do it for starters. If you’d like to introduce yourself in the comments, please say hi, and if you’d rather lurk around, I invite you to sign up for this page for updates and news of those vaguebook things I alluded to earlier. You can also keep up with me at Facebook or at Twitter: @basbleuzombie.
Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope some of this was informative and you’ll come back soon!
Although Frankenstein was published in 1818, fans are getting a head start on celebrating the novel’s bicentennial starting this week. On June 16-18, 1816, in Geneva, Switzerland, three days of terrible thunder storms caused a crew of young poets and libertines–Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dr. John Polidori, Claire Claremont, and Mary Shelley–to seek shelter in the Villa Diodati. To while away the time, they drank and read each other ghost stories. Eventually, Lord Byron challenged his friends to write their own fantastic tales, and it was through this writing prompt that Frankenstein was conceived. (This is of course, the bare bones version.)
I have, since a pre-teen, been in love with this anecdote, as well as the young girl it concerned, Mary Shelley. This infactuation with her and her circle stuck with me through adulthood, and at 28, compelled me to visit her old haunts as well as those found within her most famous novel. I wrote about these travels in a web series called “Wandering Spirits” on WeirdFictionReview.com, and they were collected as a whole and published alongside the Frankenstein source text for Non-Binary Review’s Issue 2: Frankenstein, to which the travelogue was nominated by editors Lise Quintana and Allie Marini for Best of the Net.
Wandering Spirits has been one of the more intense and gratifying things I’ve done as a writer and a traveler, and doing so gave me a greater appreciation, love, and respect for Mary Shelley and her work. I am thrilled that the work is being reanimated by Tallhat Press, who has collected, annotated, and illustrated this series into a new special limited edition chapbook in honor of the Villa Diodati bicentennial.
Only 200 copies are available, and will only be on sale for the next nine months (to commemorate how long it took Mary to draft Frankenstein).
If you would like to help me celebrate, you can buy the chapbook at Amazon, or you can just share the below press release on whatever social media platform you feel most comfortable doing. Either way, I am grateful for your interest in my work as well as Shelley’s.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE–Tallhat Press Presents: Wandering Spirits: Traveling Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN by Selena Chambers
“…although Mary and these poets experienced a lifetime before they were thirty, here I was at 28, having never left my homeland. I needed to flee—go forth and find sublimity. What better guide than Frankenstein.”
—From Wandering Spirits: Traveling Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Six years ago, Selena Chambers turned her first major trip abroad into a literary scavenger hunt of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Visiting Geneva, Switzerland, Ingolstadt, Germany, and Chamonix, France over a series of several days, she found within the nooks and crannies of these modern European towns the residual Romanticism that inspired the teenage Mary Shelley and shaped her most famous novel.
This annotated, illustrated, and special limited bicentennial edition chapbook collects this Best of the Net nominated travelogue to commemorate Frankenstein’s conception during the week of June 16, 1816. Written in the epistolary vein as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, these letters portray Chambers’ visits to three of the most important sites within Frankenstein and takes us all on a journey through the sublime.
It is available for purchase on Amazon at the following links:
Selena Chambers’ fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a variety of venues including MungBeing magazine, Clarkesworld, The Non-Binary Review, Tor.com, Bookslut, Cassilda’s Song (Chaosium, 2015), and The Last Session (Dunhams Manor Press, 2016). Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, Best of the Net, and the Hugo and World Fantasy award. You can reach her at www.selenachambers.com.
About the publisher:
Tallhat Press is a small press interested in publishing evocative and energizing Genre-based non-fiction in well-designed print editions. For more information, please visit: http://www.tallhatpress.com
For publicity or review inquiries, please contact the author at:
So Molly Tanzer has written this AMAZING weird-western called VERMILION (Word Horde Press). It was released last April and has been blazing trails of both the critical and selling-like-hotcakes paths. If you don’t believe me, check out NPR’s review here.
Anyway, it just so happens Molly Tanzer will be in Tallahassee (if you didn’t know, she’s got roots here, y’all!) this week and is having a book-release bash at Fermentation Lounge, May 12, at 7 pm. She’ll be reading from the book, while giving Jesse Bullington and I a tiny-bit of limelight with short readings of our own.
If you happen to be in the area, we’d love for you to come by, experience some weird lit, drink some brews, and help us toast Molly and Lou Merriwether into the glory hours. Details and updates can be found at our Facebook event page here.
Fermentation Lounge is located at 415 All Saints Street #113., Tallahassee, FL 32301
I am crawling out of my hermit crab-shell this weekend, and will be rolling into Hawtlanta to tangentially participate in the World Horror Convention. And by tangentially I mean via pool and/or bar-conning as well as a special group reading with friends: Jesse Bullington, J. T. Glover, Orrin Grey, and Molly Tanzer. While I haven’t quite pinned down what I am reading, I am leaning towards “Descartar,” which is part of Jason V. Brock’s THE DARKE PHANTASTIQUE anthology, nominated for Stoker Superior Achievement in an Anthology, so that seems pretty approps. The location is TBA, at the moment, so if you are at #WHC, or just in the Atlanta area, and want to check us out, follow the Facebook event here.
Readings by Jesse Bullington, Selena Chambers, J. T. Glover, Orrin Grey, and Molly Tanzer.
Although Frankenstein was published in 1818, fans are getting a head start on celebrating the novel’s bicentennial starting this week. On June 16-18, 1816, in Geneva, Switzerland, three days of terrible thunder storms caused a crew of young poets and libertines–Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dr. John Polidori, Claire Claremont, and Mary Shelley–to seek shelter in the Villa Diodati. To while away the time, they drank and read each other ghost stories. Eventually, Lord Byron challenged his friends to write their own fantastic tales, and it was through this writing prompt that Frankenstein was conceived. (This is of course, the bare bones version.)
Six years ago, Selena Chambers turned her first major trip abroad into a literary scavenger hunt of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Visiting Geneva, Switzerland, Ingolstadt, Germany, and Chamonix, France over a series of several days, she found within the nooks and crannies of these modern European towns the residual Romanticism that inspired the teenage Mary Shelley and shaped her most famous novel.
Selena Chambers 
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