Hello, readers! I haven’t been updating this blog, so consider this post a belated announcement of my 2019 publications.
I’m going to list them in reverse chronological order (most recent first!) but if you’re reading for awards season, I’m particularly pleased with “Three Tales the River Told” (bleak eco-SF) and “How to Break Causality and Write the Perfect Time Travel Story” (zany time travel), both of which are flash fiction.
“Music, Love, and Other Things that Damned Cat has Peed on”
Kimiko just wants to find love and make music, but her cat has other ideas. And then there’s that old book she unearths, the one with all the weird runes and descriptions of human sacrifice. It’s creepy, but pretty fucking punk.
Inspired by the true story of my cat, who went through a phase of peeing on damn near everything. (Reader, he did not like his litter box, apparently.) Contains broken bones, pseudo-Lovecraftiana, queer characters, and, well, what it says on the cover, really. Sorry-not-sorry.
Published in October 2019, in Zenon Publishing’s A Punk Rock Future, which has punk stories that range from fun to serious from a lot of brilliant authors. Erica Satifka! Sarah Pinsker! Maria Haskins! Spencer Ellsworth! Available on Indiebound, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.
“Three Tales the River Told”
Siu Fan wants to be a star. But when she takes a contract that will get her new fans–and her sent to the environmentally hostile surface world to hike a dry riverbed–the experience will change far more than her follower count.
Published in August 2019, in Nature. Read it for free online, and follow it up with my guest post on the Future Conditional blog.
The title came first with this one. For that, I’m indebted to Vylar Kaftan, who runs an annual Title Rummage Sale contest on Codex Writers Group where you write a story from someone else’s title, and to Aimee Ogden, who provided the title itself.
“The Colours of Europa, the Colours of Home”
(CW: death of a child; parental grief)
When Yihan’s youngest daughter dies of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, she buries herself in her research, taking a position on Ling-Xian Station searching the Europan sea for exotic microbes that could be used in new kinds of antibiotic. But will her search for forgiveness–and her guilt at not being there–keep her away from her living daughter, left at home in her grandmother’s care?
Published in August 2019, in Little Blue Marble. Read it for free online or you can wait a bit and purchase the 2019 anthology.
“How to Break Causality and Write the Perfect Time Travel Story”
Jaunts through the Mesozoic, plots to assassinate H.G. Wells, questionable writing advice, splitting headaches, and the importance of a balanced breakfast. All this and more, just because you stole your future self’s time machine… A cautionary tale of what happens when you sacrifice everything for your art and/or when you take advice too literally. (Or something.)
Published in August 2019, in the inaugural issue of Translunar Travelers Lounge. Read it for free online or purchase a copy on Amazon and support this great new market!
Author and tireless reviewer Charles Payseur had some very kind things to say about this one:
I do appreciate that the story mixes these things that are rather ridiculous, almost joking, and mixes in some much more real moments. Angst and fear and uncertainty where the second person “you” of the story just wants so badly to be a writer, to be an Author……… It’s a surprisingly deep and complicated piece, given that it might be easy to read it solely as a joke.
“Things that are rather ridiculous” being mixed with “real moments” is very much on brand for at least half of my flash fiction, so give this one a read!
“Communications from the Honeymoon Suite”
Dr. Laurie Vernederen will do just about anything to prove her theories and get tenure–including a jaunt back through time from Hotel Stormcove’s most luxurious suite. But of course, with time travel being time travel, there’s never a guarantee of being first…
The anthology this was published in, Five Minutes at Hotel Stormcove, required each story to take place over five minutes. Each of the five minutes in my story is represented by snippets of some kind of communication from a different century–starting in the 2160s and going all the way back to the 1700s. (Because time travel, of course.)
One of the neatest things about this one, to me, is that the publisher printed each of the story’s five sections in a different, era-appropriate font. So the 2005 instant messaging communication is in AOL-style Times New Roman, the newspaper clipping from the 1800s is presented in a newspaper-like font, and so on.
Published in Five Minutes at Hotel Stormcove by Atthis Arts publishing. The anthology is a lot of fun, so go pick up a copy at the Atthis Arts web store!
Untitled Nopperabou Game
Bonus! In late October, I wrote a piece of interactive fiction (IF) for Ectocomp, an annual IF competition with a spooky theme.
Because I’d been playing the marvelous Untitled Goose Game at the time, I wrote a parody of it set in 1800s Japan. So if that sounds like your jam, check out Untitled Nopperabou Game on itch.io for free.
(Also, because I realized I didn’t have one before, I added a page on this site which lists all my interactive fiction.)