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!

As of today, you can read my flash story “Guidelines for Using the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library” for free at Lightspeed Magazine! (And if you like what you find, you can buy issues or subscribe to the magazine.) There’s even an author spotlight to go with it, if you want a bit of a glimpse behind the scenes!

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 . . .

I’m not going to attempt to recap 2020 generally — we all know what it’s looked like, and mostly the answer is “on fire, literally and figuratively.” But last year I made a post about my writing resolution for the upcoming twelve months, and it’s got me thinking about the last several years.

In 2017 I wrote three short stories that weren’t for L5R, all three of them solicited for anthologies (though one of the three anthos folded after my story was drafted). That was . . . not super productive. So in 2018 I set myself the goal of writing six, one every two months — again, not counting L5R work, since the goal here was to start actually submitting short fiction again. I managed five, which was at least an increase over the previous year, though two of those five were for anthologies (one of which again folded). In 2019 I decided to aim for the same target again, and thanks to some unforeseen angst over whether I could let myself count flash — a thing I hadn’t written in ages, but apparently my brain found that gear again — I wound up with nine stories, six of them full-length, three of them flash.

But for 2020, I changed my goals. See, I had a feeling that politics was going to trash my ability to concentrate, so between that and the novel work I was contracted for, I felt it was better to scale my expectations down. Three short stories only, and hopefully three specific ones that would help me finish off some collections.

. . . I wrote twelve.

Nine full-length stories and three flash fell out of my head this year. Not because the world was in better shape than I expected, but because there appears to have been a huge split in how people responded to 2020: either it destroyed their ability to get anything creative done, or that became their refuge from the stress. (This also seems to have been true of reading.) I apparently fell into the latter camp, with the result that this has been my most productive short fiction year since . . . <checks records> . . . 2004. That year I wrote a whopping twenty-four pieces — but eighteen of those were flash; the total wordcount was nearly 8K less than this year’s.

(Oh, and also two novels. Admittedly Alyc and I wrote a quarter of the second Rook and Rose book last year — but even if I count only half of the part we wrote this year, that’s still 75K. Which is not all that much shorter than Night Parade in its entirety.)

(And also my Patreon, which is like 60K+ every single year.)

Weirdly, my productivity has actually become kind of a problem. I am literally writing short fiction faster than anybody’s buying it, and at this point the submissions pipeline is saturated. I’ve got three drafts I haven’t even tried to revise, because there’s nowhere for me to send them. Even if I thought I could top this year’s achievement, what would be the point?

So my goals for 2021 are winding up about the same as last year’s, only for totally different reasons. I owe a long short story or (more likely) a novelette to an anthology; I have those three drafts that need revision. There are two stories it would be nice to write, one of which is left over from my 2020 hit list (the other two got written), but I’m not going to push.

Of course, I didn’t mean to push this year, either. So who knows what will happen.

Hard on the heels of announcing the (extremely belated) pre-order window, I now announce the publication of Down a Street That Wasn’t There! Another novella-sized collection of my short fiction (joining the ranks of Ars Historica, Maps to Nowhere, and The Nine Lands), this one collects my urban fantasy to date. You can buy it from Book View Cafe (the publisher), Barnes and Noble, Google Play, iTunes, Kobo, or Amazon US or UK.

But I want to reiterate what I said before: if you have not yet donated to some organization fighting for racial justice and an end to the rampant police brutality in the United States (or elsewhere), then please take the money you would have spent on this book — or more! — and do that first. I don’t want to think anybody bought my collection instead of doing that. Both is fine! Both is excellent! But if your finances are tight enough that it’s a choice between one or the other, pick that one. It matters far more.

I’ve set this up very much at the last minute — as in, it’s coming out Tuesday. But I’m putting out a new short story collection! Down a Street That Wasn’t There pulls together my urban fantasy to date — seven stories set in the real world or something very close to it.

Here’s the thing, though. I scheduled this before the most recent round of inexcusable police brutality took over the news (where it well deserves to be), and . . . I feel weird saying “hey, buy a thing from me!” when there are much more urgent needs out there. So let me say this: if you have already donated to a bail fund or Black Lives Matter or the ACLU or some other organization fighting for badly-needed justice, or if you’ve made purchases to support some local Black-owned businesses, and you want to pick up this collection, then thank you. But if you haven’t, I ask you to instead spend that money where it will do more good. I could say “all proceeds for now will go to X charity,” and there’s a sense in which that will be true, because my household’s been making a lot of donations lately and isn’t done yet. There are two reasons I’m not framing it in those terms, though. The first is that I don’t want to feel like I’m using a good cause to promote my book — it should be the other way around. And the second is that I think it’s more valuable to encourage lots of people to interface with these organizations, to take action directly rather than indirectly (i.e. through me).

So: please put the needs of the vulnerable ahead of this book. I’m still putting it out because I don’t want to leave Book View Cafe with a hole in its publishing schedule and because even when the world is on fire, we still need stories and diversions and entertainment; in some ways we need them even more badly in such times. But I really mean it. Donate if you can.

And if you’ve already done that, well, I have a new short story collection for you!

DOWN A STREET THAT WASN’T THERE

Step beyond the ordinary . . .

Beneath the surface of our reality lies a world of magic and danger — a world where buildings have guardian spirits, shapeshifting coyotes prey on the hopeful and the desperate, and ancient traditions prepare for an apocalyptic future. These seven urban fantasy tales from award-winning author Marie Brennan paint the everyday with a layer of wonder, inviting you to imagine what could lie just around the corner.