I dunno hwhat is going on with my work these days. It’s been well over a month since I’ve had massage bookings, but here I am announcing yet another story sale, this time to Agita Publishing‘s “Side Hustle: Horror Stories for Late Capitalism” (slated for publication March 2027). The irony of me selling a story to an anthology about side hustles where it feels like all of my jobs are side hustles is not lost on me.

Also! I’m going to be in Penumbric‘s Best Of vol ix (unsure when it’s being released), with my prose poem “You Must Be This Tall” (surely you remember it…). So that is pretty nifty.

Since I am on-call weekend mornings at the clinic, it’s a weird, unpleasant sensation of needing to be ready to go!! at any moment!! while also knowing haha lol who tf is going to call in for an emergency relaxation massage, it’s summer, you’re either already relaxing on a beach or on vacation (or staying indoors while wildfires pump the air full of smoke. Please donate to Anishinabek Nation 7th Generation Charity to help those who have lost their entire communities because our government thinks spending money on pipelines and genocide is more valuable than keeping the funding for wildfire prevention). So I try to get out for a Stupid Mental Health Walk in the early morning before I have to Get Ready To Get Ready For Work!! and sometimes I see cool stuff, like a very chill toad, or a ton of wee babby froglets, or I help a baby racoon escape a big ol’ city green bin. And while I am still worrying about Oh No, Do I Need To Run Home In Case Someone Has Booked Me In An Hour in that time, at least I have done something worthwhile with my time.

Trick question IT IS BOTH and I also am coming in HOT with having signed a contract for my short story “Nor Suffer a Sea Change.” No, it is not yet available (nor shall be, for almost a year) but I wanted to toot my own horn because this story, this poor story, has been waiting eleven-ass years to get published, and holds the distinction of having the second-most number of submissions, coming in at a big round 40. It’s one of the few stories that I made significant changes to partway through the submissions process (the ending had been even more nihilistic) and possibly the only one that also had a title change. (Originally it had been called “What Changes With Love,” but I decided that sounded too generic.)

(“omg can’t beLIEVE the title changed to a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and he think it sounds less generic now, smh” hey shut up though)

Anyway that’s something to look forward to and goodness knows something to look forward to is always a nice thing, even if it does end in a certain amount of nihilism.

(I swear to gosh my recent stories are much less nihilistic*, they just need to sell.)

*except for the one with skull-fucking.

It is honestly difficult to not inject some amount of humour into my stories, no matter how serious or grotesque, so letting myself write something intentionally goofy scratches an itch. And like an itch, scratching it is not necessarily productive (which is to say, it’s difficult to sell humour. Or at least it’s difficult to sell humour to genre magazines, which tend to take themselves Seriously to Prove that they are Serious Business and deserving of Serious Attention).

(“But Laura! Shouldn’t you be writing for the love of writing? Must everything you write sell?“

lol, yes? Preferably? I would like that thank you.)

If I’m remembering right, the inception for this story came from the schoolyard rhyme featured partway through. I have a dim recollection of walking down a residential neighbourhood and this popping into my head, whereupon I texted it to myself to keep it in mind. (My phone is oldschool and doesn’t have apps. Or if it does I don’t know about it.) I think I texted it to a friend too, saying “This needs to become something.” Turning it into a B-movie seemed logical. And I’ve long been a fan of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, so throwing in references to interocitors also seemed logical. (Fun Easter egg, the Bill in the story is based on Bill from “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.”)

For anyone wondering who exactly Mabel’s ‘friend’ is and what their living arrangements are, that’s entirely Mabel’s beeswax and she’ll thank you to mind your own.

Final note: I did not realise how many varietals of potato there are and yes I did look it up.

SCIENCE!

Anyway please enjoy Through the Eyes of My Creator, published by the good folks at Daikaijuzine who appreciate the goofier things in life (and genre fiction).

Regardless of category, You Must Be This Tall from Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag is about a haunted playground, so if you don’t want to read about dead kids, you should probably give this one a pass! But I hope you do read it, because it’s gleeful and bouncy and just wants to plaaaay.

Remember playing? Sometimes I’ll go to the park and watch people throwing balls and frisbees for their dogs and be envious of how uncomplicated a dog’s hobbies are. Chase! Fetch! Flop onto your back and wriggle in the dirt! Then again I like sitting in parks and watching dogs be goobers, so who’s got the uncomplicated hobby now, dawg.

(A coworker and I share a birthday week, and it’s our hobby to trade chocolates. This year I also made a tiny adorable gift bag from scraps left over from a larger project. I like making extremely niche-purpose bags. I recently got a steam cleaner and am looking forward to making a bag to hold all the attachments, though I am more looking forward to getting the big stupid box it came in out of my apartment.)

I just got my taxes did (shoutouts to MY GIRL ZORKA) and need to clean the oven today, but it’s sunny and nippy so maybe some of the day will be spent in a park, creeping on dogs and listening to birds yell about how SEXXXXXAYYYYYY they are.

We just celebrated Punch George Vernon Hudson In His Stupid Ghost-Dick (or Daylight Savings Time) yesterday and I am still wiped out from the time change, so alas I do not have the capacity to give much more of an introduction to my latest short story, “NEW REVISED DAWN, ATROC. 3.1-13,” published with the excellent and sadly departing Inner Worlds magazine (spearheaded and everything else-ed by Sarah Jackson). Spring is spranging (in the Northern hemisphere, at least) and so too in NRD:A, something is certainly sprungling.

(Maybe if Georgie had lobbied for a shorter workday instead of arbitrarily fucking over everyone’s internal clock so he could look for FUCKING BUGS we would not need a New Revised Dawn, but here we are.)

As I mention pretty much every time I post an update, I am bad at 1) posting updates and 2) maintaining the integrity of this website. I was recently reminded that hey, maybe you should make sure all the links to your stuff still work and sure enough there was a fair amount of tidying up to do in both the For Free! and For Monies? sections.

The bad news, of course, is that some of my favourite stories are no longer able to be found for love nor money. (Time to start submitting reprints, though!) I also found out that Inner Worlds is soon to go on indefinite hiatus, which is sad to hear, so flip through their back issues and show some love.

The good news being, some of the stories which used to be For Monies? have now been shunted over to the For Free! section (along with a co-written story with Victoria Feistner which I simply forgot to include last year. 2024? Whenever that was). And so, while I have all the links handy, here’s the list of things that are now past their best-buy date (but still perfectly edible):

Side Hustle (as V.L. Seltsam): The most important thing to know about this story is that it contains multiple uses of the word ‘poot’ and we still managed to sell it to a literary magazine. This is genuinely one of my greatest achievements. (You will need to scroll down the page to Volume 8, No. 1, Issue 21, #BlackLivesMatter to access the magazine; I leave you the choice of whether you wish to purchase a hardcopy or simply download a .pdf. I ain’t the cops.)

Lifted Spirits (as V.L. Seltsam): There’s a guy in this who touches a hors d’oeuvres and then doesn’t take it and I am so jealous that Victoria was the one who thought of that particular bit of character building, that guy sucks.

Roots and Shoots: I think this remains my most ‘experimental’ story? It is one of my favourites, so I’m glad it hasn’t disappeared like some others. It stars a robot and involves robot magic. This also had one of the nicest (and most incisive and helpful) editors I’ve ever worked with, and I learned a LOT from them. I don’t think they do editing any more, which is a loss for the literary world and a boon to whatever other world they’re gracing.

The Last Limerick Out Of Dirt Rut: Another favourite of mine (and uh maybe still extremely fucking relevant to the state of the world). The writing is clunkier than Roots (and the website’s formatting is not exactly a blessing) but I think it still packs an emotional punch. Also it contains a song I wrote for a D&D bard I played back in highschool, so I feel I get some kind of check mark for that.

And after all, it seems to be a completely random tradition that Novembers bring more publishing news for me, and indeed the issue was released in November, but here we are. I have just returned from the clinic and am scarfing down some lunch before setting off on a walk across the city to meet another longtime client but I should really post now before I get distracted by all that December entails.

I have sold an essay! Even fancier than that, I was solicited for said essay by Heartline Spec’s managing editor Rebecca Bennett (who was also part of Apparition Lit’s editorial team, and we finally met in person this past summer and we decided hello yes we glomp now??) Heartlines Spec is unique among spec fic in that it only publishes stories that involve long-term relationships, and Rebecca asked if I could write something that pertained to my crematorium work.

Now, initially I was planning to write something a bit goofy and light-hearted, probably about the first time I had to perform a witnessing (when the family comes to watch the body be cremated) on my own and the vaudeville act that ensued, or the man who brought his own stepladder, or something of that ilk.

Who was to have known that an essay about relationships and crematoria could have ended up being actually very sad and personal, tis a mystery none could have forseen.

Because in early April 2025, Adam Lopez, the founder of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, passed away, and he was brought to my crematorium and I didn’t know it until after he’d been and gone.

And oh fuck, it hurt.

It still hurts. I keep meaning to post some of my favourite movies I discovered through TADFF, or even an acknowledgement here that I knew of his passing, and clearly I have not. I never met the man but his death has affected me more than anyone else’s, family members included. It fucking sucks.

So Rebecca ended up with this essay, See You After Dark (When the Roll is Called Up Yonder), which is 100% factually how that went (hell, I didn’t even include the really downer shit, just know that the day I went back had even more depressing events involving the cemetery grounds), and like you don’t have to be as sad as I was when writing this but if you could be a little sad that would be nice for me, personally, “because it’s sad, Toby.”

And while it sure would be fun to keep mining this well of sad mixed metaphor, I do need to leave in half an hour and I’d like to not be a total wreck when walking in -8 Celsius (colder in the wind) and freezing my eyeballs out.

(Big thanks to Rebecca for letting me spill my guts across the internet, sure feels like a feeling, never want to do this again, I promise my next crematorium essay will be about the stepladder guy, bless him.)

we are all of us crabs

Up now is You Are Become Crab, a Role-Playing Adventure for Ages 12+ at foofaraw! This is a very silly story that quickly got out of hand (claw) (jokes) and I’m terribly pleased that someone said “Yes, this will do” to it.

It is proving to be A Busy Time works-wise (new story drop! tax season! I’m doing a gua sha course in a couple days! I’m covering Many Weeks Of Shifts at the crematorium over the coming months! is now a good time, zeitgeistly-speaking, to re-read Moore and Gibbon’s classic graphic novel “Watchmen”? I’m doing it anyway!) and I am wracking what is left of my noodle to brainstorm ~cool words that go together pleasingly to suggest a greater thing~. (This is basically what being a writer is both like and also all about.) Go do some good in the world and read a goofy story about crabs if you’ve got time left over.

listen we’re all trying our best here (some of us anyway)

WOULD YOU LIKE SOME ANTI-COLONIALIST SPACE HORROR?! Sure, we all do! I’m not a raging sci-fi horror fan, but I likes what I likes and one thing I particularly like is the film “The Last Days on Mars.” I also like “Little Shop of Horrors” (the musical version with Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene, and the theatrical cut, not the original – I didn’t even know there was an original until I was feeling sad one day and long story short, I was NOT CHEERED UP at the end as I’d intended) and Easter eggs that suggest I have a much firmer knowledge of niche pop culture than I really do. (The Easter eggs are quail-sized and I would be astonished if anyone actually noticed them without explicit signage. Sometimes you just have to write to please yourself.)

Anyway please enjoy “It Gets Worse If You Pick At It” at Horrific Scribblings and get your shit together, I beg.

Literally exactly a year after my last post, which amuses me.

Anyway, this boy is back in town! Feels good. I have written three new stories in the past few months and they have started making the rounds. I’ve also started submitting again, which hoo-ee that’s also been awhile. And the fact that I’m writing an actual post means the most wonderful has happened: I BIN PUBLISHED AGAIN WOOOO! Coming in hot from the inaugural issue of Sarah I. Jackson’s INNER WORLDS, it is me, that guy, with the very short “First Genuine Contact“! I wish I remembered how I formatted pub names and titles in past posts, but I am very busy and uninterested in keeping my brand consistent! I will end by saying I hope you enjoy First Genuine Contact, but I totally get why you wouldn’t, it’s not a terribly chipper piece of vampire fiction! I’m great at selling!