Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

New collection: A Songbooks of Sparks!

Years ago, I formed the idea of making novella-sized short story collections organized around particular subgenres. Sorting through the stories I had at that point, I determined that there should be six of these (or, well, seven, but one of those I set aside for a slightly different plan; it turned into Driftwood).

Today, the last of those six is finally published at Book View Cafe!

cover art for A SONGBOOK OF SPARKS, showing a twist of golden sparks against a black background

I was able to publish Maps to Nowhere and Ars Historica almost immediately; it took a little longer to do Down a Street That Wasn’t There and to decide that, really, I wasn’t going to write any more short stories set in The Nine Lands, so I could go ahead and publish that one. Because I became determined to balance out the regions featured in A Breviary of Fire, the fifth of the set came out only last year. And then secondary world fantasy lapped the pack with The Atlas of Anywhere a few months ago.

But it took a while to complete the sixth of the original set, A Songbook of Sparks, because its requirements were very particular. As the cover and title suggest, this is a follow-up of sorts to A Breviary of Fire (as Atlas is to Maps), likewise consisting of stories drawn from traditional folklore — but in this case, it’s specifically folksongs. Ballads and the like. And after a spate of writing those while I was in graduate school, I just kinda . . . stopped. Without having quite enough material to cross my minimum threshold for making one of these books. So it’s only quite recently that I wrote and published the last story needed to complete this set!

But now it is done, and out in the world: you may buy it in ebook or print, as you prefer. Within you’ll find nine stories, one unpublished poem that mashes up sources half a world apart, and — a bonus specific to this collection — the lyrics of the traditional songs that inspired the stories. Enjoy!

New collection: The Atlas of Anywhere!

cover art for THE ATLAS OF ANYWHERE, showing a cool, misty river valley with waterfalls pouring down its slopes

Well over a decade ago, I first had the idea of reprinting my short fiction in little collections themed around subgenres. When I sat down to sort through my existing stories, I found they fell fairly neatly into six buckets, each at or approaching roughly the cumulative size of a novella: secondary-world fantasy, historical fantasy, contemporary fantasy, stories based on folktales and myths, stories based on folksongs, and stories set in the Nine Lands.

Five of those six collections have been published so far: Maps to Nowhere, Ars Historica, Down a Street That Wasn’t There, A Breviary of Fire, and The Nine Lands. The sixth is coming out in September, but it’s not surprising, given the balance of what I write, that secondary-world fantasy has lapped the rest of the pack — more than once, actually, since The Nine Lands is also of that type (just all in a single world), and also my Driftwood stories hived off to become their own book.

So yes: as the title and the cover design suggest, The Atlas of Anywhere is a follow-on to Maps to Nowhere! Being short fiction collections, they need not be read in publication order; although a few settings repeat (both of them have a Lady Trent story inside, for example), none of the stories are direct sequels that require you to have read what came before. At the moment it’s only out in ebook; that is for the completely shameless reason that replacing the cover for the print edition later on would cost me money, and I have my fingers crossed that in about two months it will say “Hugo Award-winning poem” rather than just “Hugo Award-nominated.” (“A War of Words” is reprinted in here: my first instance of putting poetry into one of these collections!) But you can get it from the publisher, Book View Cafe; from Apple Books; from Barnes & Noble; from Google Play; from Kobo; from Indigo; or, if you must, from Amazon in the UK or in the US (that last is an affiliate link, but I value sending readers to other retailers more than I do the tiny commission I get).

Now, to write more stories, so I can put out another collection later!

“The Poison Gardener”

New story out today, in The Sunday Morning Transport! This one is for subscribers only, but subscribing gets you a story in your inbox every Sunday morning. My contribution this week is “The Poison Gardener”, a vicious little science fantasy piece entirely born out of me thinking poison gardens are cool . . .

oops I lied

I thought I was done with publications for the year, but one more has slipped in under the wire! My flash story “Ten Minutes” is free to read online at The Cosmic Background. It’s born of my brain’s invincible impulse to narrate everything, including my own attempts at meditation — which led to me writing a story about meditation! And about something else, but you’ll have to read to find out what . . .

I’m particularly honored by this timing because The Cosmic Background is running a Kickstarter right now, and so the editor chose my piece as one to showcase what the magazine is doing. I’ll note that, very unusually for our field, TCB pays its slush readers — most markets rely on volunteers for that — so this is part of what your money will support if you pledge! Rewards include your very own eldritch horror in the mail, so check out the Kickstarter page and consider kicking a few bucks their way!

The 2024 Roundup

This looks like a slow year only because the couple of years before it were bonkers. Asterisks mark the things in each category that I’m the most proud of (unless there’s only one thing in the category, in which case, well, it wins by default).

    Collection

  • A Breviary of Fire (gathers up most of my folklore and mythology-based stories)

I need to write more short fiction again if I want to have much coming out in 2025 or 2026 . . .

Stories and a sale!

Two stories of mine have come out recently, one while I was out of town, the other not long after I got back:

“In the Paradise of the Pure Land” is a little piece of folkloric flash, inspired by my yōkai research for L5R novels. But you won’t find well-known things like kitsune or tanuki here; instead it’s a tale about a very special karyōbinga . . .

And then at the opposite end of the short story length spectrum, we have the not-quite-novelette “Any Rose My Mother Raised, Any Lane My Father Knows.” I won’t say what exactly it’s based on, but I suspect some of you will tumble to it pretty darn fast.

As for the sale, I am delighted to say that I have sold a poem to Strange Horizons! It took many fewer attempts than with short fiction, even accounting for the fact that SH lets you submit up to six poems at a time. “A War of Words” is likely to be out fairly soon, September or maybe October; I can’t wait.

coming soon: a new short story collection!

It’s been several years since I put out one of my mini-short story collections, but a new one is en route! A Breviary of Fire honestly could have been ready a bit sooner, but I fell into a slightly OCD determination to balance out the regional groupings within the collection so they had equal numbers of stories. Because of this, the publication dates of the stories range from 2005 to 2023. They’re all based on folklore and mythology in some fashion, but not European fairy tales (those have gone into Monstrous Beauty and Never After), nor on folksongs (those will be getting their own collection, probably next year).

A Breviary of Fire will be out on the twenty-first of this month. You can preorder it via the links here or wait for it to come out so you can buy it direct from the publisher, Book View Cafe; there will also be a print edition, but I’ve been juggling too many things to have that quiiiite ready in time for simultaneous publication with the ebook. I will definitely post here when the ebook and print pub dates happen, though!

“Embers Burning in the Night”

Back in 2006, I had an idea for a short story.

Back in 2006 + 15 minutes, I had an idea for a novel trilogy, and the short story concept was lost for good.

But I didn’t sell that trilogy right then. It went onto a back burner . . . and then, year by year, it got shoved further back until it had basically fallen behind the stove. Every so often I’d peer down at it and contemplate putting in the work to fish it out, but it seemed increasingly not worth it.

Except. There were things about the idea I really really liked, things that still excited me even more than a decade later, and I was reluctant to give up on those entirely. Unfortunately, they were too central to the whole project for me to cannibalize them for some other tale; it was really all or nothing, and “all” didn’t feel like where I was as a writer or where I was going.

. . . then I read some Borges for the first time, and had the bright idea of copying that thing he often does: find some angle that lets you write the Cliff Notes version of a much larger tale.

The result is “Embers Burning in the Night,” free to read online now at Sunday Morning Transport! As indeed are all of their January stories, so you can also check out Nibedita Sen’s “Agni”, a story of religion and control, and Yoon Ha Lee’s “Cuneiform,” a dystopian look at where generative AI and writing could go, along with a story from Benjamin C. Kinney next week. And if you like what SMT’s putting out, do consider subscribing; they are a really high-quality market, but things like that need supporters to thrive. You can sign up for free to receive the one public story each month, or pay monthly or annually to get the whole shebang.

Last story of the year + my 2023 publications!

I think “A Tale of Two Tarōs” — out now in issue #14 of DreamForge Anvil — is going to be the last of my publications in 2023. So 1) it’s out now! Go take a look! Yes, it’s based on a very famous Japanese folktale!, and 2) this seems like a good time to look back at my publications in 2023.

Friends, there was a LOT.

For a whole slew of reasons. I actually wrote very little short fiction this year, but since I produced a ton of it in 2021 and 2022, this is the tail end of that flood. And then on the novel front, one of my them was originally drafted many years ago — having three books out this year doesn’t mean there was a year where I wrote three books. But still and all, it adds up to a very satisfying pile!

All links go to places where you can either read it online or purchase it (those latter are marked).

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to all of the above, I also republished all four novels of the Onyx Court series (Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and With Fate Conspire), and put out the sixth collection of the New Worlds Patreon. And ran a successful Kickstarter for the Rook and Rose pattern deck.

. . . yeah. On the one hand, I feel very pleased with all I accomplished this year, and on the other hand, no wonder I feel burned out. I hope 2024 is a good year for my writing, but I’ll kinda be okay if it isn’t quite this packed.

Another story sold to SMT!

I have sold another story to Sunday Morning Transport! This will be my third, coming out some time next year.

The thing that pleases me the most here is, this short story was originally supposed to be a novel trilogy. One for which I came up with the concept over fifteen years ago — but I didn’t sell it then, and now both the genre and I have moved on enough that I recently faced up to the fact that I’m unlikely to ever write it. For an assortment of good reasons . . . but it made me a little sad, because there were key beats in the concept I really liked, which can’t be transplanted to a different story without basically re-creating the thing I had good reasons for not writing.

And then, while I was being sad, I read some of Borges’ short fiction for the first time.

Which is how I wound up condensing that trilogy down into 2500 words of testimony from the interrogation of a character who was there for all the events of the novels I’m not writing! Not only did this let me keep those key beats, but it also let me skip the hard work of coming up with all the details of the clever, long-term plans laid by the characters; I can dispose of that in a sentence or two of “we spent years setting that up.” Win-win! <lol>

WSFA Award finalist!

I got this news on Friday, but had to keep it under wraps until today: my Onyx Court short story “This Living Hand” is a finalist for the WSFA Small Press Award! This is particularly exciting for me since I don’t often achieve this kind of thing with my short fiction; the last was an honorable mention in 2004. “This Living Hand” was published in Sunday Morning Transport in February of 2022, and you can read the beginning of it here, but the story as a whole requires a subscription. SMT’s been publishing some really fantastic stories since its launch, though, and it’s highly worth following!

Only brief rest for the wicked

The problem with vacation is how much you have to hustle beforehand to get matters squared away, and then when you come back there’s a new pile of things you have to dig out from under.

But hey, at least the pile of things in this case includes author copies of several things! On Spec #124 is out now (and will be available at NASfic, for those of you who are going), with my Greek mythological story “Your Body, My Prison, My Forge.” ZNB Presents: Year One has been out for a little bit, but now I have my copy; you can find various buy links for that on the story page for “Crafting Chimera.” And the Department of No Really Your Book Is Real sent me my copies of Labyrinth’s Heart! So those at least are some bright spots in a sea of emails to be answered and revisions to be completed.

Twenty-two years of persistence pays off!

There is a very particular pleasure that comes from selling a story to a market I’ve been trying to crack for a dog’s age. In this case, I am delighted to announce that after twenty-two years of trying, I’ve sold my first story to Interzone: “999 Swords,” a tale that could almost go equally well in my historical category as my folklore, as it weaves a path between the factual reality of Minamoto no Yoshitsune and Saitō Musashibō Benkei and the wild tales about them, shamelessly pillaging from a sixteenth-century source as it goes.

Not sure when this one will be out, but I’m looking forward to it!

New flash, and an upcoming novelette!

I was so busy this past weekend that I failed to post on the day of, but Flash Point SF honored me by choosing my story “The Merchant With No Coin” to run on the 24th, which was National Flash Fiction Day! It’s a little snippet of folklore from the Rook and Rose setting, very quick to read.

I’m also pleased to say I’ve sold another story in that world to Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies! This one is a novelette set some years before the novels, a fun little heist that also ties in with some side details in the main narrative. It will be out in August, in time to whet your appetites for Labyrinth’s Heart on the fifteenth!

I’ll have some more stuff out soon, too, I think — not Rook and Rose-related, but other short fiction (and even my Very First Poem, whee!). It’s busy times around here . . .

Two recent stories

Where do the days go? I make a note to do something, and then it’s like a week later and somehow it got squished to the side by everything else.

But hey, two birds with one stone! By which I mean I have had two stories published recently, and I can now link to them in one post. The first, “At the Heart of Each Pearl Lies a Grain of Sand,” requires a subscription to Sunday Morning Transport, but since this is a magazine putting out a weekly story from a broad array* of splendid authors, it’s well worth subscribing to. My own recent contribution — my second in SMT thus far — is a riff on a minor character from one of the stories in One Thousand and One Nights: what happened to her before those events, and what happens to her after.

(*To quote from their own About page: “Max Gladstone, Karen Lord, Elwin Cotman, Kij Johnson, Kat Howard, Elsa Sjunnesson, Kathleen Jennings, Sarah Monette, Juan Martinez, E.C. Myers, Maureen McHugh, Tessa Gratton, Sarah Pinsker, Yoon Ha Lee, Michael Swanwick, Brian Slattery, Malka Older, and many more.”)

The second piece, “Oh, My Cursed Daughter,” is free to read at Dream of Shadows (which, sadly, will end publication next month). This is based on a folksong, and it has a bit of history, being the only instance I can think of where I wrote a story, shopped it around, trunked it, and then wrote a completely new piece off the same starting concept. I am so glad this and not the first one is the version that got published!

all the news that’s fit to announce

I have several things for y’all today!

The big one is that Stage Two of my Onyx Court re-publication quest is complete, with a print edition of In Ashes Lie now available. (Stage One was, of course, Midnight Never Come; several more retailers links have been added to that page since its release, if you haven’t yet acquired it.) Stage Three (A Star Shall Fall) and Stage Four (With Fate Conspire) will follow in March and May, respectively, with a break in the middle there for New Worlds, Year Six, and then I’ll finally stop having eighteen balls in the air at once.

cover art for In Ashes Lie, showing a ring of fire with an inset painting of Newgate in London burning in the Great Fire

I’m also very happy to announce that my creepy folkloric story “Silver Necklace, Golden Ring” is now available to read for free on the Uncanny Magazine website. This is the piece that started off as a retelling of a particular folktale and wound up being a mishmash of five different influences headed in a direction I didn’t foresee until it happened.

And then finally, I also have a story out in Lightspeed! You can buy the issue (or subscribe to the magazine) to read “Guidelines for Using the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library,”, which I believe is my first ever listicle-style flash story, and is definitely a nerdy love letter to the quirks and weirdnesses that library used to have.

2022 in review

Publications-wise, that is. I never really know what to say about my personal life; it’s mostly a combination of uninteresting things, and stuff I don’t especially want to make public.

This was a weird year. For the first time since (I think) 2007 — which was the year after my first two books were published — I didn’t have a novel out. But since I had three in 2021 (The Mask of Mirrors, The Night Parade of 100 Demons, and The Liar’s Knot), and since I’ll have three again next year (The Game of 100 Candles, Labyrinth’s Heart, and The Waking of Angantyr), it’s not like I have much grounds to complain!

Meanwhile, on the short fiction front . . . this was a banner year, with no fewer than ten short stories published (beating out 2019, which had nine, but that was counting my fiction for Legend of the Five Rings, too). Speaking of L5R, this year also saw the publication of my first really significant game work: I’ve written micro-settings for Tiny d6, little branching adventures in 50-word chunks for Sea of Legends, RPG fluff and a few bits of mechanics for an earlier edition of L5R, but now I can lay claim to a full-bore adventure. And I’m really proud of how Imperfect Land turned out, in terms of its structure, its content, and the impact players can have on the larger world of their campaign. If any of you out there are reading for game awards and would like a review copy, just let me know!

And speaking of award nominations, if that’s your reason for looking at posts of this type, the piece I’d most like to bring to your attention is “Fate, Hope, Friendship, Foe” (3800 words, Uncanny Magazine; also available in their podcast). This is my “Atropos on a road trip through the Midwest” story, aka “the story it took me sixteen and a half years to write,” and I couldn’t be more delighted with how it turned out . . . even if for a long time there, I assumed it would never get written.

But as mentioned above, I have many other stories racked up from this year! Not all are available to read online, but:

* “Chrysalis” (5700 words, Beneath Ceaseless Skies) — a setting based on Mesoamerican folklore, where the main character is arguably a rock.

* “This Living Hand” (2900 words; Sunday Morning Transport but paywalled to subscribers) — dead Romantic poets and a willow tree that is up to no good.

* “Never to Behold Again” (440 words, Daily Science Fiction) — flash set in a world where beauty is eroded by people perceiving it.

* “The Me of Perfect Sight” (670 words, NewMyths) — Sumerian mythology about Inanna’s theft of the holy me.

* “And Ask No Leave of Thee” (7500 words, Neither Beginnings Nor Endings) — a modern retelling of “Tam Lin” that started with me figuring out how to do a non-magical version of the transformation sequence, then wound up as fantasy anyway.

* “Then Bide You There” (490 words, Dream of Shadows) — flash fiction born of me reaaaaally hating the folksong “The Two Magicians.”

* “Two for the Path” (1200 words, Shattering the Glass Slipper) — what if Snow White’s stepmother was actually trying to save her?

* “The Faces and the Masks” (340 words, Daily Science Fiction) — a meditative bit of fantasy-religious flash in the setting of the Rook and Rose series.

* “Crafting Chimera” (6700 words, ZNB Presents but paywalled to subscribers) — a psychologist tries to help a shapeshifter with identity issues.

Whoof, that’s a lot. But you know what? I already have seven stories racked up in the sold-but-not-published queue, all of which I’ve been at least tentatively told will be out in 2023. And I have two more for which I don’t have a date, but it might be in 2023. So with a few more sales — provided they’re to markets that aren’t already booked out so far, new acquisitions will be going into the 2024 schedule — I could theoretically surpass this record . . .

“Crafting Chimera”

I’m sneaking a couple more short fiction publications in before the end of the year, and the first of those is “Crafting Chimera”! It came out today in the online magazine ZNB Presents; as you’ll see if you follow that link, they’re running on Patreon, so the story is available only to ZNBP patrons. Joshua Palmatier and his company have a long track record of putting out great themed anthologies, though, so the magazine is definitely worth checking out!

As it happens, this story also comes with a funky bit of background. To learn how it made my protagonist immortal, head on over to my site . . .

Another Uncanny sale!

Something I did not expect on a Sunday afternoon, but was delighted to receive: an email letting me know that Uncanny Magazine is buying another story from me! A piece called “Silver Necklace, Golden Ring,” which is a chilly fairytale-style piece resulting from about five different inspirations smashing into one another; you can read the full background on my site.