Colleen Chen

Colleen Chen is a speculative fiction writer living in the Twin Cities.

24/01/2021

In my gmail account that I've been trying to purge lately, I have a folder filled with prose poetry that I intended, years ago, to read later. Libraries filled with unread books is the energy of Ahriman, who in Anthroposophical terms is more dangerous than Lucifer. So, I am beginning to read it. (I like this sentence: Aloysius Bertrand's "for your shroud you shall have speckled bands of golden snake-skin, in which I'll wrap you up as snug as any mummy.")

On the advice of a friend to "create something but do it badly" in order to break out of creative paralysis, here is my prose poetry for the evening:

1.
Eyes open to fresh dawn, the magic carpet beckons as I say, I will do it.
I stand on the magic carpet, but I forget to breathe. As velvet billows and catches the wind, my face turns as purple as the cloth.
Still not bereft of hope, I aspire to become the first zombie ever to fly on a magic carpet.
Yet my dead eyes look upon a sky-sea of other zombies.
Fortunately, zombies don’t care about anything.

2.
I look’d down and saw that I wore two different shoes.
Then I saw that I had written look’d, a foreign phrase.
Nascent other-phrases from a methuselah fog—such as “I do not eat fish”—
Swim amongst the rusty flotsam of overused, trite, hackneyed, banal
I make a raft, ten words at a time.
The destination matters not.

24/10/2017

https://threestudents.com/2017/10/24/review-of-kalis-odiyya-by-amarananda-bhairavan/

Review of Kali’s Odiyya by Amarananda Bhairavan I’ve been wanting to write up my thoughts about this book for a while, as it’s so information-dense that I’ll easily forget it without a summary in my own words. It’s not re…

02/03/2017

http://www.tangentonline.com/print--bi-monthly-reviewsmenu-260/296-analog-sf/3413-analog-marchapril-2017

Analog, March/April 2017 Tangent: the genre's premiere review magazine for short SF & Fantasy since 1993 -- One World Fantasy and six Hugo Award nominations

03/09/2016

My book and most other ebooks from Montag Press are free over Labor Day weekend. Happy downloading, and reviews encouraged! https://www.amazon.com/Dysmorphic-Kingdom-fairy-Colleen-Chen-ebook/dp/B012GSAITG/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Dysmorphic Kingdom: a fairy tale Vesper is a scientific-minded young woman living in the kingdom of Malland. When she finds a detached talking p***s in the woods, her sheltered life with its wistful fantasies of change explodes into chaos as the p***s chases her home, wrecks her sister’s engagement party, and causes a sca...

24/05/2016

Free e-books from Montag Press this Memorial Day weekend--my book Dysmorphic Kingdom among them.

24/05/2016

My editor Mara Hodges at book festival in Oakland. Dysmorphic Kingdom, second from left on the top. :)

30/04/2016

https://colleenchen.com/2016/04/30/qa-with-colleen-what-i-do/

Q&A with Colleen: What I do Around fourteen years ago I received a diagnosis of a precancerous condition, a severe cervical dysplasia, right before I was leaving for a summer in Brussels, Belgium. The typical treatment at tha…

30/04/2016

I reposted this to my new website: https://colleenchen.com/2016/04/30/interview-with-valentine-lahey-winner-of-the-draw-minimus-contest/

Interview with Valentine Lahey, winner of the “Draw Minimus” Contest Here it is, from Valentine Lahey, the winner of Montag Press’ “Draw Minimus” Contest! In Dysmorphic Kingdom, Minimus is Prince Magnus’ princely p***s, who because of some st…

17/02/2016

After not feeling like blogging for about two years, and after realizing that the way I've been doing it does nothing to build my "platform," and really just provides a way for anonymous voyeurs of my personal life to get off while they continue to not be interested in my actual writing, I decided to stop for the time being. I switched my blogspot blog to wordpress, which is much nicer as a more static site. I haven't decided if I'll move any of the old posts over or not. www.colleenchen.com

Colleen Chen

18/01/2016

http://www.colleenchen.com/2016/01/interview-with-valentine-lahey-winner.html

Colleen's Write Brain: Interview with Valentine Lahey, winner of the "Draw Minimus" Contest

13/01/2016

I loved all the entries. The winner of the Draw Minimus Contest is...*drum roll*...this one, by Eye Aye Oh!

12/01/2016

Review of fellow Montag Press author James Bodden's The Red Light Princess: http://www.colleenchen.com/2016/01/review-of-red-light-princess.html

Colleen's Write Brain: Review of The Red Light Princess

Colleen's Write Brain: IWSG and Review of 2015

12/01/2016

Somewhat unprepossessing monthly IWSG blog post (but as it's about being an insecure writer, it should be unprepossessing, shouldn't it?) http://www.colleenchen.com/2016/01/iwsg-and-review-of-2015.html

Colleen's Write Brain: IWSG and Review of 2015

20/12/2015

One more :)

New book! The Circlet Treasure Chest: Erotic Microfictions for Every Occasion | Circlet Press

08/12/2015

I wrote a story a couple years ago for Circlet Press' "microfiction" section. It's been taken off the website and has been republished in an anthology released last June. http://www.circlet.com/?p=1575. I'm now eligible to be nominated for the Ravishing Reads awards: http://eroticauthorsguild.org/ravishing-reads/ . I don't know if my self-pubbed works are eligible as well because I like some of the scenes in those much better than in the story I wrote for Circlet. I will find out--stay tuned.

New book! The Circlet Treasure Chest: Erotic Microfictions for Every Occasion | Circlet Press Announcements New book! The Circlet Treasure Chest: Erotic Microfictions for Every Occasion June 9, 2015 Nikola Klaus Leave a comment The Circlet Treasure Chest: Erotic Microfictions for Every Occasion. $5.99 ISBN 978-1-61390-122-9 Formats: : The ebook edition is also available at: Amazon.com, Barne…

05/12/2015

Two more. I'm self-conscious about how overwhelmingly phallus-centered my page is getting, but I think these are pretty awesome. :)

02/12/2015

Every month I do a post on something related to insecurity and writing on my blog. Honestly I feel this topic is a bit too limited to stimulate the creativity that comes from giving ourselves limitations, and tends to produce just whining and rationalizing about why I'm not writing the way I want to be, but the good thing is it does make me keep blogging when I've not really been in the blogging mood for, say, a couple years. This particular post is slightly incoherent due to my being sick and mentally foggy...I feel like I skipped a couple of explanatory sentences in making my analogy, but here you go anyway.

http://www.colleenchen.com/2015/12/nonviolent-self-communication-as-i.html

Colleen's Write Brain: Nonviolent self-communication as I insecurely write 20,000 words is GOOD, though! I think maybe it's about realizing that success is in our minds and, yes, setting smaller goals for ourselves. 50,000-100,000 in one month is a huge undertaking...it's understandable if you can do it, but the real accomplishment is in putting more words on the page than…