All About the Goreletter
[A Tip: Never get lost again. You can always click that black "Goreletter" banner above to go to the front page of the weblog!]
“The Goreletter is the most inventive, most entertaining, and SICKEST author newsletter out there! Mike Arnzen is not well.” — Jeff Strand
What is The Goreletter?
Corrupting readers since Sept. 2002, The Goreletter is Michael A. Arnzen’s quarterly e-mail newsletter for fans of his weird writing…and all aficionados of the aberrant, readers of the repulsive, and browsers of the bizarre.
This weblog is the enhanced version of that newsletter, full of live links, pictures and even exclusive blog-only content. Despite these elements, I consider it the “draft in progress” of the e-mail version as well as a place for subscriber feedback and comments.
Departments include…
Arnzen News | Blather (Column) | Data+Errata | Dictionscary (Word Play) | Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems | Instigation (Writing Prompts) | Not Dead Yet: Print Reviews | Online Gizmos | Odd Triple Feature (Film Lists) | Pithy Morbid Quotations | Snippets of the Strange | Weblog Exclusive Content | Weird Websites
Why Subscribe?
As a horror writer, I approach my “author’s newsletter” as a creative workspace, sharing not only news about my latest publications and other projects, but also original stories, poems, musings, research, reviews and essays. It’s an irreverent, weird, and sardonically entertaining free newsletter — presently about 2000 subscribers strong. Many subscribers have won free collectible books and other prizes. The newsletter itself even won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Alternative Forms in 2004!
“The Goreletter is good enough to read all the way through….It’s very entertaining, often funny, full of interesting observations and interesting links. Highly recommended.” — Bruce Boston
How do I subscribe?
The e-mail edition is the preferred subscription option, because it contains refined versions of the work I post on the weblog, and because you’ll never miss out on updates. It also features contests and discount coupons available ONLY to readers who subscribe. And it’s free, low-traffic, delivered to your inbox only once every three or four months. Your e-mail records are kept private. Review the archives to see what it’s like. Or fill out the form at the very top of this page to sign up.
The weblog edition is also worth revisiting because here I post drafts-in-progress of the various departments for the newsletter, and because you’ll get news as soon as it breaks. To keep things exciting, I also post exclusive content, like pictures and bonus poems, on the weblog edition. You can add it to your favorites/bookmarks, or simply post a link to http://www.gorelets.com/blog/ on your own homepage (get buttons here), and return any time you’re feeling freaky. Or — if you’re one of those hipsters who are into Web 2.0 — then go right ahead and subscribe to the goreletter using RSS feeds (see next section).
Can I subscribe via RSS?
I hope you will. RSS allows readers to get the newsletter “fed” to them without having to use e-mail; it allows The Goreletter to circumvent spam filters and other “bounced” messages that occur when a subscriber’s mailbox is full and so on. One article I read by online journalism guru Steve Outing claims that up to 38% of all newsletters never make it to their subscribers because of problems with e-mail systems, spam, etc. On average, every time I send out an e-mail edition of the goreletter, I get about a 10% rejection rate — currently, that’s around 200 bounced messages. I want readers to have as many options as possible — this is why The Goreletter is available in so many disgusting flavors.
In any case, to read RSS newsfeeds, you must either download a newsreader and install it on your computer (I recommend Feeddemon) or subscribe through a website that syndicates headlines, like Bloglines. Google has a reader, and Yahoo and other web portals all now offer RSS newsreading capabilities, as well.
Once you get your newsreader set up, here are the various feeds related to my work that you can point your newsreader to (the first one is the primary feed for this weblog):
- The Goreletter Weblog (new posts — recommended option)
- The Goreletter Weblog (comments)
- Individual Goreletter Departments:
- Arnzen News
- Blather (humor column)
- Instigation (creative writing prompts)
- Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems (short creative piece)
- Weblog Exclusive (content only posted to the blog, not the e-mail)
- Not Dead Yet: Print Reviews
- Dictionscary (riff on weird words)
- Weird Sites of the Month (weird website clusters)
- Online Gizmo of the Month (links to weird online games and animations)
- Our Odd Triple Feature (weird film clusters)
- Pithy Morbid Thoughts (unspeakable quotations)
- Updates to The Goreletter E-mail Edition Archive
- Updates to the “Creations” bibliography pages
- Updates to Arnzen’s photo gallery
- Offsite & Related RSS Feeds:
- Arnzen’s MySpace Blog Posts
- Arnzen’s GoodReads Updates
- Arnzen’s Popular Uncanny Blog Posts (criticism)
- Arnzen’s Pedablogue Posts (teaching scholarship)
Bottom Line?
Do both e-mail and RSS, if you can. Given the “live” abilities of syndicated RSS, I will often post the specific departments from the newsletter as I finish them to the “blog” and I may even list breaking news items and extra material that might not appear in the newsletter itself. The e-mailed version of the newsletter will continue to be mailed on a quarterly basis and will essentially compile the best material posted at the blog from the previous month, along with added features like contests that only people on the list will qualify for.
One exciting element of the blog site will be that you can choose to filter by department, so that, for example, if you are looking for some kind of twisted inspiration for your creative writing, you can browse all the “instigation” prompts that have been posted every month all on one page, or you could spend an afternoon surfing all the Weird Web Links at once.
However, to read material from the first year’s thirteen issues of The Goreletter, you still need to review the e-mail archives at gorelets.com, because those issues from 2002-3 never appeared in weblog format.
What now?
That’s all there is to it! Sign up and come back for the madness. Please help me spread the word — the recent domain change and move of the blog knocked me out of google’s system and now I’m starting over with trying to find new readers just like you, with an interest in all this weirdness. If you want a graphical button to use on your own website, they’re available, too.
And bear with me as I work out the kinks in the new system. If you hit one, let me know and I’ll see if I can fix it!
Where Can I Comment?
To prevent junk posts in the archives, comments are only enabled for all posts from Jan 2008 forward. However (for now), the complete Instigation department is open for any creative writing that readers would like to post (please keep it PG-13; Arnzen reserves the right to delete or edit posts for obscenity; all legal ramifications regarding comments are the complete responsibility of the author).
I hope you’ll enjoy reading The Goreletter as much as I have enjoyed inflicting it on the world all these years. Please comment regularly on posts often to let me know how I’m doing, and to be a part of the unsettling excitement.
– Michael A. Arnzen, gorelets.com
Meet some of the strange and wonderful people who subscribe to The Goreletter e-mail edition…
| Ariana Adams
Chris Ambrose |
James Cain | Kerri Leigh Grady |
| Dan Keohane | Elizabeth Peake
Jo Popek |
Jason Sizemore |
Subscribe to the e-mail edition and you too can appear here!
