Adding further fuel to the tempestuous insanity that has been this week, I've had two somewhat interconnected papers accepted to two more conferences coming up this spring! First is the 2009 American Comparative Literature Association Conference, which takes place at Harvard March 26-29. This overlaps a bit with the tail end of the 2009 Game Developers Conference, so I'll take off from that a little early to make it back for ACLA.

Second is the Fairy Tale After Angela Carter conference at the University of East Anglia in England, which is going on April 22-25. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this also has an overlap, with MIT6 (April 24-26), so I'm planning on taking off from the Fairy Tale conference early so I can catch the latter half of MIT6. Good grief – literally!

What's fun about these is that the first paper, for ACLA, is titled "From Horrorism to Terrorism: the New Weird, the New Horror and the War on Terror", and the second one is titled "Fairy Tales in the New Weird, the New Horror and the War on Terror". If anyone out there is concerned about self-plagiarism, don't be – they're two separate papers with a shared core body of reference research, where the first one will describe how the New Weird and the New Horror have emerged out of a post-9/11 cultural mentality, and the second will sketch out the basics from the first paper and then drill down into how new fairy tales like Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth fit specifically into that framework. Now I'm wondering what I could do to shift the titles around a bit before final publication to show that they're linked, but separate. Hmmm...