For some time now, as I assemble sufficient quantities around relatively focused themes, I’ve been collecting my short fiction into ebooks: Maps to Nowhere for secondary world fantasy and Ars Historica for historical fiction, and then the much smaller Never After and Monstrous Beauty for two different twisted approaches to fairy tales, the latter taking a darker tone than the former.

Now I can add The Nine Lands to that list! This is also secondary world fantasy, but unlike Maps to Nowhere, all of the stories take place within the same world: the eponymous Nine Lands, the first properly fleshed-out setting I ever created. Many of the pieces in this collection are “firsts” of one kind or another for me: first good short story I ever wrote (that form did not come naturally to me), first story to earn me money, first story I ever sold. Because of that, I decided to commission my friend Avery Liell-Kok to take my ugly scribble map and turn it into the beautiful thing you see here:

The book will come out on November 19th, but you can pre-order it now at Barnes and Noble, Google Play, iTunes, Kobo, or Amazon US or UK — or wait until the 19th and buy it directly from the publisher, Book View Cafe.

Man, it’s ten years almost to the day.

In October of 2009 my husband and I took a trip to India. While I was there, I read William Buck’s heavily abridged rendition of the Mahabharata, one of the great Indian epics, and a side character in it really caught my imagination. Enough so that I thought, I’d like to write a short story about this.

Well, it took me ten years and reading four different English-language versions of the Mahabharata (plus spot-checking details in a fifth), but I finally got that short story to happen! And now, in October of 2019, that story is live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, in both print and podcast forms.

Also out now: a reprint of my short story “The Snow-White Heart” in Flash Fiction Online‘s October issue. It’s been a remarkably busy short story scene here at Swan Tower lately . . . I like it. 🙂

As of yesterday, I have two new stories out: my anthropological novelette “La Molejera” (as in, it’s literally about an anthropologist) and my folkloric short story “This is How.”

I need to talk about that second one a bit, because it’s a huge milestone for me. You see, I sent my first story to Strange Horizons in <checks records> May of 2002. That isn’t a typo; I didn’t mean 2012. 2002. Seventeen years ago. In that time, I have sent them forty-five other stories — but the truth is that the overlap in the Venn diagram of “the kind of thing I write” and “the kind of thing SH publishes” is pretty narrow. I kept trying, because I really admire them and wanted to see my name listed among the people they’ve published, and a few of my submissions came close, but this one was a white whale for me. It was entirely possible that I would never actually crack it.

Until a couple of months ago, when we had half a dozen friends over for a movie marathon and I suddenly hit the pause button to say, in a voice entirely too calm for what was going on inside my head, “I just sold a story to Strange Horizons.”

It’s very brief — less than two thousand words. It’s much more elliptical and poetic than most of what I write, which I’m sure is part of why they bought it and not the previous forty-five attempts. It has metaphorical depth I didn’t notice until a couple of weeks ago. (It also has content warnings, which you should click on if you’re concerned.) And you can read it online for free, or listen to the audio version by Anaea Lay.

Also? It has art.

Last year I set myself a goal of writing six non-L5R short stories — not counting the L5R ones because, those being work-for-hire, I can’t submit them to short story markets or collect them into ebooks or anything like that. For several years I’d been in a trough where I either wrote no short stories at all (2016) or none that weren’t solicited for anthologies (2017), so I was getting no fresh material into the pipeline, and I wanted to fix that.

Well, I didn’t quite make it last year; I only managed five. (Despite a heroic effort to finish one more on the flight home the day before New Year’s. It stalled out partway through, and still hasn’t come unstuck.) This year there was the temptation to try to make up for that, but I know that’s a foolish approach; I set my goal at six again.

But six is . . . a much fuzzier number than you might think.

In March I wrote a piece of flash fiction, my first in more than a decade. Does that count as one of the six? The honest answer to that is “if I don’t write more than five other things this year, yes, sort of; if I do, then no.” It absolutely counts as A Thing I Can Send Out, but it’s so brief — less than 500 words — that it’s hard to feel like I’ve accomplished much in writing it. Then in July I finished a novelette — which would definitely count, being longer than a short story, except that it’s part of a larger project and not something I’m going to be able to submit on its own to various markets. So while it’s A Thing I’ve Written, it doesn’t actually address the lack I was aiming for. And later that month I wrote another piece of flash fiction. Where did the count stand? And is any of this making up for last year’s shortfall?

The sensible answer is that last year is last year and the count for this year stands at whatever I’ve written, nature of the pieces included. Which as of completing another piece last night is five short stories, two flash stories, and the novelette. Does that hit the magic number of six? Yes and no. I don’t know. It’s complicated.

Really, though, that’s not the question. The question is, “can I write another short story before the end of the year?” And I think the answer to that is “yes.” I seem to have rediscovered the short fiction gear in my brain, after misplacing it for quite a while. I’ve got several ideas that might be about ready to go, and I have more than three months in which to prod one of them to the finish line.

And if I manage that well before the end of the year . . . then I might just write seven. Or eight. Who knows where the madness will end.

This missed posting for some reason, and I only just now noticed. But there is still time to pre-order!

*

About a year ago, I discovered that February 26th is National Tell a Fairy Tale Day.

Now, like many authors with an interest in folklore, I’ve tackled fairy tales before. I have a whole collection of them, Monstrous Beauty. But that represents only one part of my fairy tale ouevre — the part that’s the most horror-tinged. I have others.

And I thought, why not do something with those?

This happened about a year ago, so it was far too late to do anything for that year’s National Tell a Fairy Tale Day. But I looked ahead to 2019, and discovered that this year, February 26th would be a Tuesday — which is, traditionally, the day of the week when new books get released.

Ladies, gentlemen, and other civilized people, I give you Never After: Thirteen Twists on Familiar Tales. Available for pre-order now; due to be released — of course — two weeks days from now. It’s a tiny little thing; every one of those thirteen stories is flash-length, under 500 words, and two of them are about 100 words apiece, which is why the collection is priced at a mere $0.99 (or whatever that turns into in your local currency). You can pick up both that and Monstrous Beauty for two bucks, and have twenty fairy tales of variously warped sorts — the ones in Never After are not as dark as the ones in Monstrous Beauty, but I wouldn’t call them sweet and innocent, either . . .

Forget perfect princesses, handsome princes, and “happily ever after.” In this collection of thirteen flash-length fairy tale retellings, award-winning author Marie Brennan introduces you to a world of manipulative mirrors, treacherous pigs, and candy houses that will eat you right up. Each one is a subversive little gem, guaranteed to shock the Brothers Grimm.

Pre-order now!

My fellow Book View Cafe author Sherwood Smith has organized a new anthology:

The pleasure of your company is requested.

Graceful feet tracing courtly steps.
Eyes in jeweled masks meeting across a room of twirling dancers.
Gloved hands touching fleetingly–or gripping swords . . .

Anything can happen at a ball.

You are invited to enjoy stories of fancy and fantasy from thirteen authors, framed in the splendor and elegance of a ballroom. Be it at a house party for diplomats and thieves, or Almacks in a side-universe in which the Patronesses have magic, or a medieval festival just after the plague years . . .

Prepare to be swept into the enchantment of the dance!

Featuring stories from myself, Marissa Doyle, Sara Stamey, Charlotte Gumanaam, Irene Radford, Gillian Polack, Deborah J. Ross, Francesca Forrest, Lynne April Brown, P.G. Nagle, Brenda Clough, Layla Lawlor, and Sherwood Smith herself. My contribution is a reprint of “The Şiret Mask.” You can pick up the ebook now from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, or Apple Books, or get it in trade paperback instead!

People sometimes say a writer is supposed to love all their literary children equally, but the truth is that we’re inevitably more proud of some stories than others. Among the fifty or so short stories I’ve sold, one of my favorites is “Daughter of Necessity,” which (as you can see at that link) got utterly gorgeous artwork from the folks at Tor.com — gorgeous enough that a print hangs at the top of the staircase down to our den.

It’s been reprinted twice, once in the 2014 Tor.com anthology, and once in the Book View Cafe collection Nevertheless, She Persisted (for which we’ll be doing an event at Borderlands Books on February 10th — look for more details on that soon!) And now it’s going to be reprinted again, in another Tor.com title, Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction. I’m more pleased than I can say that with ten years of short fiction to choose from — including award winners — “Daughter of Necessity” made the cut as one of the forty tales they’ll be including in this lovely hardcover volume. Check out that link for the full Table of Contents and options for pre-ordering! It will be out in September of this year, for the tenth anniversary of the site.

I’m delighted to have another short story in Beneath Ceaseless Skies this week, and honored that Scott Andrews chose mine to be the 500th story published in the magazine. Go forth and read “The Şiret Mask,” aka Ten Pounds of Caper in a Five-Pound Sack! Or listen instead, if that’s your preference. And I hope you enjoy it half as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Last week I solicited title suggestions and promised to give away a signed copy of Cold-Forged Flame to one person.

In the usual way of my brain, it did not settle on any of the proposed titles — but receiving all those possibilities finally provoked it into getting off its posterior and coming up with something that it liked. (This really is how my brain works. When I was in junior high and got the Elfquest roleplaying game book, which I used to make up characters to tell stories with instead of for use in the game, the entire section on generating your character’s appearance never got used the intended way. I would roll the dice, decide I didn’t like the suggested result, roll again, reject the second result, rinse and repeat until I made up my mind what I wanted to pick off the list.)

But I promised a giveaway, and a giveaway you shall have! Our lucky winner is Joshua of The Rabbit Hole. Drop me a line and claim your prize!

. . . what’s that you ask? You want to know what the title I settled on is?

You’ll find out next spring, when I intend to release the collection in question. 🙂 Until then, you must live in suspense!

(But I’ll give you this hint. I wound up deciding that I liked it because of an unexpected echo of something in Diana Wynne Jones’ novel Fire and Hemlock, which is the book that made me a writer.)