CAN YOU READ MORE THINGS YET? No.

WILL YOU BE ABLE TO READ MORE THINGS SOON? Yes.

UNBURIED: A Collection of Queer Dark Fiction is available for pre-order NOW NOW NOW and Officially Launches June 1 2021, with some of that sweet money going towards Rainbow Railroad. The reviews coming in are pretty positive (an especially flattering one for my story at Beauty in Ruins). I’ve crowed before in a previous post about how happy I was to see my story “Open Up and Let Me In” finally find a home, but here’s a fun bit of lore: the marriage in the story had originally been written as hetero. As the years went on and rejections kept coming, I sometimes toyed with the idea of making the main characters lesbians instead, simply because it might make it stand out a bit more in the slush piles, but I never went through with it because, well… that would mean killing a lesbian. With all the violence against queer people in the world, did I really want to kill a lesbian?

So I submitted the hetero “Open Up” to another of AM Ink’s calls and it got rejected. But! A little while later, the editor (Rebecca Rowland) emailed me to ask if the story was still available, because if the main character could change to a woman, it would be a perfect fit for an upcoming anthology specifically geared towards queer horror.

Moral of the story, make all your characters gay.

Speaking of how happy I am to see a story finally find a home, one of my beloved Weird Westerns has finally found a home! “Open Up” had been the previous champion, coming in at 30 submissions, but “The Last Limerick Out Of Dirt Rut” rises to the challenge with 32 submissions! Not only that, but “Limerick” racked those up in only 3 years! Good job, Limerick! You have been putting in the work! “Limerick” was accepted by The Colored Lens, making it my second sale to them. The first was in 2012 (though “Leavings and Remains” was published in the 2013 Winter edition, which still exists and you can find it through my Free To Read! page). Out of the three stories I’ve sent The Colored Lens, two have been accepted, which means 1) 2 out of 3 is a pretty good acceptance rate 2) I should submit there more often.

Last bit of news: A Quiet Afternoon 2‘s production is ticking along nicely and because my brain is a sieve I don’t remember when its release date is BUT it is in fact ticking away nicely! The first AQA had, what, 13 stories? AQA2 has twenty-seven. That is so many stories. That is an aspirational number of stories. We absolutely should not have that many again. Enjoy it while it lasts. EDIT: hahahah so right after I published this post, Victoria goes and puts up the pre-order link for AQA2, here it is, please appreciate the pretty cover she worked so hard on, Official Release day July 1 2021.