Anyone know of any contests/opportunities for young, aspiring manga artists? I just got this email from someone who came across my Teen Writers site:

Hi Dave,

I have a 13-year-old daughter who has always been a talented artist. She goes through phases of interest and works on perfecting different styles of art.

This year she has been working on something called Manga (sp?). Her pictures are very sci-fi looking combined with the manga style of characters. This weekend she brought me a script she has been writing for her comic she is developing and it blew me away. I have never been interested in this kind of writing or art, but I loved the story! I didn’t even know she could write like that!

Can you tell me if there is any kind of art/writing contest for this style of work? I have always been supportive, but more hands off than anything when it comes to her art and other interests, but this needs to be shared with others who love this kind of stuff. I have no idea which way to point her.

Thanks for any advice you can give!

Speaking of The Twilight Zone, I just noticed that my favorite episode of The Outer Limits from the '90s is now online. (With ads, unfortunately.) It's called "Quality of Mercy," and stars Robert Patrick (Terminator 2, The X-Files) as a captured star pilot who shares a cell with a female cadet who's being subjected to genetic experiments that are slowly transforming her into one of the hideous aliens that Earth is at war with.

Anyone seen The Box? It's the new film from Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko). I'm trying to decide whether to go see it, and the reviews are pretty mixed.

A loyal reader informs me that the terrifying short story I described in my last post was "The Patchwork Monkey" by Beverly Butler, which appeared in the picture book horror anthology Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures, illustrated by Rod Ruth (introduction by Andre Norton!).

Harry Markov over at Temple Library Reviews asks a bunch of writers about what monsters scared us as kids. Here's my answer:

When I was a kid I read a picture book of scary stories. I wish I remembered what it was called. The first story was about a boy who gets a stuffed monkey toy, a sort of ragged old hand-me-down, and someone has sewn needles into its paws to make claws, which cut the kid before he notices them. He starts having nightmares about the monkey, and by the end of the story the nightmares have become reality and he’s trapped, and the monkey has become gigantic and is looming over him -- this was one of the illustrations. That story scared the crap out of me. So much so that I returned the book to the library without reading any of the other stories. So much so that I basically didn’t go near the horror genre for years afterward. I was too scared to read Stephen King, too scared to watch Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street, so I missed a lot of the standard stuff that kids of my generation would probably name. I used to have to cover my eyes during the librarian ghost scene in Ghostbusters, and for a long time James Cameron’s Aliens was probably the scariest movie I’d watched. Then one night I was sitting in front of the TV, and somehow started watching this movie called Killer Clowns from Outer Space, about alien clowns who land in a UFO/circus tent, and start abducting people and cocooning them in cotton candy, and then the clowns use curly straws to suck out their victims’ blood. The only way to kill them is to shoot them in their big red noses. It sounds like a comedy, and if I watched it today I’d probably see it as a comedy, but I don’t think any movie has ever unnerved me as much as that one did. There’s just something really freaky about clowns. Clowns, dolls, puppets, anything like that. (There was a great episode of the Tales from the Crypt TV show that featured a puppet who avenges himself on his owner’s scheming wife.) A piece of fiction that really did it for me was George R. R. Martin’s “Sandkings.” I read that in an airport while waiting for a delayed flight to board, and the story transported me completely, and by the time I finished it my adrenaline was racing and I looked around, startled to be back in the airport. You know something is good when it can scare you even in a crowded airport at noon.

I'll be reading my fiction on Saturday as part of the Halloween Party at the McNally Jackson Bookstore in SoHo.

I recorded an audio version of my short story "Red Road," which appeared last year in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show.

"Red Road" MP3 [34:48]

Here's an illustration I did for my short story "Family Tree."

I'll be appearing as a panelist at this:

Last night I went to this fun Post-Apocalyptic Teen Fiction Panel, featuring Scott Westerfeld, Carrie Ryan, James Dashner, and Michael Grant. The venue, Barnes & Noble at 86th & Lexington, was perfectly appropriate, as it's laid out like a bomb shelter -- seriously, you walk through the front door and immediately descend an escalator into a multi-level underground complex. They showed two really good book trailers (especially compared to most book trailers, which are usually pretty lame). The one for James Dashner's The Maze Runner doesn't seem to be online, but here's the one for Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth, about a girl born generations after a zombie apocalypse:

John Joseph Adams is announcing that he'll be editing a new online science fiction magazine called Lightspeed.

The zombie panel last weekend was a smashing success. Here's a photo:

The short story "After the Age of Giant Sundials" by recent Alpha grad Haris is today's #1 Sci-Fi/Fantasy article over on Teen Ink. Congrats!

Here's the cover of the Spanish edition of the zombie anthology The Living Dead (which contains my story "The Skull-Faced Boy").

Just a reminder that I'll be appearing in New Jersey tomorrow night to discuss zombies. Here's the poster:

The Dell Magazines Award has a slick new website. Check it out.

Here are two good history podcasts: The History of Rome and 12 Byzantine Rulers.

I'll be appearing at: The Science Fiction Society of Northern New Jersey presents Face the Fiction: Zombie Encounter & Film Festival, featuring the premiere of Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated, a re-creation of George Romero's 1968 classic, now with each scene rendered by a different animator in their own unique visual style. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with me, Kim Paffenroth, Jonathan Maberry, Peter Gutierrez, and John Joseph Adams.

Locus is reporting the thrilling news that the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean flick will officially be an adaptation of the Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides.