Everything is live and ready for your consumption: A Quiet Afternoon 2 is live on Payhip, Unburied is available at a variety of places, and now Issue 40 of The Colored Lens is ready for consumption here. (And bonus: Looks like my story ((starring an enby protagonist who uses limericks as magic spells)) is first on the docket, so you can even read it for free as the sample chapter!)

…

That is all the news I have, I am tapped dry. Besides still living in a pandemic, it’s just been a rough few months (I am personally okay, but the state of the world/my particular city is pretty shit) so it’s been difficult to get motivated to work on new projects. That being said, I’m currently picking away at another Sterling Acton (werewolf cowboy/reluctant hero) story involving a carnival, so. There’s that.

…WOW WHAT A DOWNER THIS UPDATE IS 😀

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.

My flash horror fic ANY DIRECT FLIGHT is now up at Theme of Absence! This story is based on real events that apparently happen remarkably often on flights and wow was that ever a thing I did not want to know!

At some point (last year? Two years ago?) my friend Victoria Feistner suggested writing snowballs together – exchanging emails where one of us would start a story, write a paragraph or so, and send to the other person to add another paragraph or so. It was a low-stakes way to keep us writing and keep us interested in writing. (My major flaw as a writer is that once I know what my story’s ending is going to be, I get bored and stop writing. After all, I already know how it ends. The surprise is gone.)

Victoria and I do not write the same way at all. She/they loves worldbuilding and just sitting that stool down and milking the worldbuilding cow for all it is worth. I, however, just want my characters to talk-talk-talk the whole way through. She/they loves science fiction and time-travel and digging into ancient civilizations; I… do not.

AND YET.

And yet we snowballed a story and she/they polished it up and sent it out and through the magic of ‘huh’ sold SIDE HUSTLE to Typehouse Literary Magazine and it contains every instance of the word ‘poot’ and all of its verbings.

When Victoria showed me the finished story, I could not remember who had written what. (I am assured that every pooting was mine, or at least I was the originator of the primal poot.) Which, considering how different our writing styles are, is pretty darn cool.

…I feel like I should be espousing a moral at this point but all I’ve got is ‘write however you want to write and let the editor sort it out but if you disagree with the editor that is totally fine and also see if you can sneak a poot in there, because it may go unchallenged and that will be very satisfying.’

poot.

Just signed a contract for my story, “We Was Here,” with Welkin, a new magazine of fantastic literature. I hope that cover art is indeed going to be that spyglass dude on a mountain, because I do love me some classy black and white art. “We Was Here” is similar to “Love Finds a Way” in that they’re both kind of sexual but not in any way that encourages sex.

(The joke Derrick tells is one I heard from a Romanian friend many, many years ago and when I repeated it back to her recently she was HORRIFIED.)

“We Was Here” took 23 rejections (plus a withdrawal due to non-updates), so it does feel a very fitting title. We was here, and now we been seen.

OH ALSO Grace&Victory are open once again to quiet, cosy, NON-MURDERY speculative fiction submissions until December 31 2020. Full details in the link, but the pertinent details are: 500-5000 words, $0.01CAD/word (capped at $30 or 3000 words, so keep that in mind when you’re spinning your yarn), and DON’T DO A MURDER IN YOUR STORIES, GEEZ. Also don’t bring babies or the joy of motherhood into it, I simply do not give a shit (and as I am one of the slush goblins, my shits are worth something). We are looking for low stakes, reasonable resolutions, talking as a way of solving problems, and a sense of quiet satisfaction at the end of the story. It can be sad and give you feels, but seriously. Don’t do a murder. (Or be racist, sexist, ableist, sizeist, etc.) We would LOVE more science fiction.

We look forward to hearing from you!

With the contract signed, I can now say that LOVE FINDS A WAY has found its home with Perpetual Motion Machine’s Dark Moon Digest, huzzah! It’s a tale of carnival workers and genetic manipulation with vaguely giallo undertones. It’s also got very fun dialogue and is overall a jolly good romp. Consider LOVE FINDS A WAY, won’t you? Thank you.

(true), my latest witches’n’robots story, has landed at Andromeda Spaceways! Get your copy here https://andromedaspaceways.com/product/asm-80/ and enjoy someone getting their just comeuppance!

I also got another story acceptance (whaaat) but I’m still waiting for that pesky ol’ contract to come through because I have trust issues!

Which is remarkable considering the death by a thousand cuts the rest of my life is going through, but at least in writerly news good things keep happening! https://andromedaspaceways.com (who also published “Long Hot Wait” way back in issue 59) is going to be publishing “(true),” another robowitch story with sassy robots, entitled white women, and side characters who do not care for your shit. Should be dropping at the end of September 2020, however long the rest of this oh-my-god-make-it-stop month is.

(Like seriously, I have some kind of cyst in my literal mouth that I’m waiting to get seen about, we had mouse issues in the apartment, and our fridge just broke down; one of the washing machines didn’t drain properly and our water’s been shut off for an indeterminate amount of time today. I don’t know who I pissed off. Oh and it’s a long weekend here, so anything that CAN be fixed is unlikely to actually GET fixed until next week at the earliest. My cyst (which resembles something like a tusk and something like a frog,) has, despite being a cyst in my literal actual mouth, somehow never cracked Top Priority status. It’s been there for three weeks and shit kept happening. MORE than mice and fridges shit.)

Anyway I think a lot about the ‘scream inside your heart’ meme these days.

The UK horror anthology SCARE ME from Esskaye Books is now live! 3.49 UK dollars gets you 12 tales of terror, including my story of a very sinister hobby horse. Get your internet copy at this here kobo link.

I hardly need to remind you that the COVID-19 pandemic is still well underway and I’m mildly surprised that it’s taken this long for my brain to fizzle out. As promised, this website is poorly maintained and sporadically updated at the best of times, and as these are Not Best Times, the simple keeping up with announcements is kinda shoddy.

That was not a well-parsed sentence, but we’re all doing the best we can right now.

In any case I think I’m able to announce by now that I’m going to be in AM Ink Publishing’s Unburied anthology, slated to come out in summer 2021. This is a very exciting one for me, as this story (“Open Up and Let Me In”) has been kicking around since 2014, racking up 30 submissions over 6 years, resulting in 28 rejections, two withdrawals, three short-listings resulting in rejections, two acceptances (one that amounted to nothing as the pub closed down before publication) and some VERY mixed reviews!

So it’s pretty darn great that it’s found a landing pad at last, especially since AM Ink is so… oh my gosh, so professional, they’re been a goddamn delight so far, laying out expectations and timelines and requirements, heck dang.

One of which being they need a bio written up by next week and I am terrible at writing lengthy bios so I’ve been putting it off and in fact am in the midst of doing it right now, as I’m writing up this post instead, so I am blaming this flibbertigibbet rambling on the pandemic instead of my deep distaste for writing bios that have any personal information about me whatsoever.

lol no actually I just hate writing informative bios.

Anyhoo buy yourself a copy of A Quiet Afternoon available via Grace&Victory, it’s really good and it’s been out for a month and a half already, oopsie.

And it looks like I need (“need”) to go do a grocery run with the bf so that bio’s gonna wait juuust a li’l longer.