To paraphrase Samwise Gamgee: Well, we’re back.

As you noticed, the Weird Tales website was quiet for a couple of months. That’s because our publisher, Wildside Press, was going through some reorganization that’s finally settled into its new status quo. To sum up: Wildside’s Juno Books line of paranormal and urban fantasy novels has now become an imprint of Pocket Books, where it’s poised for much larger-scale success. The Prime Books line, with its affiliated webzine Fantasy-Magazine.com, has spun off as its own separate publishing house. And our sister journal H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror has closed the doors on its print incarnation (though future web projects may well ensue).

Wildside is now leaner and meaner, and Weird Tales has some fantastic stuff lined up for the rest of 2009. The spring issue, coming your way in a few weeks, features stories by acclaimed authors Jeffrey Ford and Paul Tremblay — as well as exclusive, in-depth interviews with horror master Thomas Ligotti and comics genius Richard Corben. Meanwhile, we’ve begun taking submissions for a new line of micro-fiction: One-Minute Weird Tales! And we’re looking forward to an exciting summer/fall convention season — WorldCon in Montreal this August and Dragon*Con in Atlanta this September, for sure, plus more to be announced.

A semi-casualty of our web downtime was Steven Archer’s daily art series, “Blasphemous Horrors,” which suffered some technical glitches that we didn’t fix quickly enough. So Archer’s getting off the hook early; we’ll be posting about 20 more paintings from here on in, and then later this year the artist will be back with an all-new series of weird fantasy art for your viewing pleasure.

Thanks for bearing with us. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming…