Thanks to our friends at In Reference to Murder, we found out that Macmillan is relaunching Criminal Element as a website. Sure, it’s a way of promoting Macmillan’s authors (no bad thing when you see who they are), but it’s also got a social networking component, blogs and community elements along with the soft-sell. Check [...]

There’s a call for submissions for an anthology of original fairy tales that use all the expected elements–children, witches, wolves, woods–in unexpected ways.
Stories can be 500-10,000 words long. The only real “rule” for the tales is that they should be dark and in keeping with classic fairy tales. For more information, check the Feministas [...]

The Mystery Writers of America (MWA) has announced the 2011 winners of the Edgar Award (named, of course, for writer Edgar Allan Poe).  Here’s the complete list of winners.

The schedule for the May edition of Six Questions For is up:
5/02—Six Questions for Dawn Raffel, Editor, The Literarian
5/04—Six Questions for David Cotrone, Editor, Used Furniture Review
5/06—Six Questions for Jeffrey S. Callico, Editor, Negative Suck
5/09—Six Questions for Lori Titus, Editor, Flashes in the Dark
5/11—Six Questions for Bruce Priddy, Editor, Eschatology
5/13—Six Questions [...]

Still Life with Herbs and Flowers
by Mark Satchwill
The portrait was almost finished. A few highlights to the hair and it would be done. Then work of a different kind would have to begin. I’d need a drink for that! No, more than a drink, I’d need to get drunk. No drinking when painting though. No, [...]

Award-winning writer Elizabeth Zelvin (whose short story “The Silkie” was in the first issue of Dark Valentine Magazine) dances with herself on Nigel Bird’s Sea Minor blog today. Read the interview here.
After that, check out her amazon.com author page for details on Death Will Get You Sober,   Death Will Help You Leave Him, and [...]

When “The Smallest of the Summoner’s Bells” posted earlier this year, a number of readers asked for more stories set in the urban fantasized Los Angeles world. Fairy Story is a stand-alone tale from the same universe and it’s now available in a variety of formats.
I am very interested in getting feedback for this story, [...]

Vera Nazarian, author and publisher at Norilana Books, is losing her home to foreclosure after a protracted battle with her bank. She’s pulling up stakes and moving to Vermont, and hopes that lovers of genre fiction might be tempted to purchase a few items from her catalog to help her with this dramatic transition. You [...]

At Dark Valentine, we’re big fans of one-of-a-kind jewelry and re-purposed words and images. Imagine our delight when we stumbled across the Etsy store of Glamourkin. Using eco-friendly materials (bamboo tiles), classic fairy tale illustrations and words, the artist crafts unique “circles” of altered art to wear as a pendants. The jewelry is priced to [...]

Virginia artist George Mason has created a mermaid pin to raise money for cancer awareness.  Details here.