I have had five original short stories published this year!
"Sailing to Byzantium" is in Fusion Fragment #4.
"How Do You Grow?" is in Hexagon 4
"All This Darkness" is in Apex 123
"The Mountain's Wife" is in The Future Fire
"I Am Tasting the Stars" is in Translunar Travelers Lounge
As October draws to a close, I know there's one thing on everybody's minds: the next installment of Run With the Hunted!
Run With the Hunted 4: VIP is available for ebook preorder now, on the platform of your choosing! The paperback will swiftly follow.
'Funny, twisty, and full of surprises, 'V.I.P' is a boot-scootin' good time as well as a cleverly unexpected addition to this series of heist books!' - Premee Mohamed
In the fast paced, tech heavy future, even cowboys get the blues. Bristol is unwinding at a non-work party when she's approached by a bullrider with trust issues; he's had enough injuries that he can't do the rodeo circuit anymore, and he's got a deadline to get married and claim his family fortune if he wants a ready-made alternate career path. With Bits and Dolly posing as her bodyguards, Bristol is plunged into the social lives of the ostrich ranching elite. It's rife with rivalries and there are parties for days, but when people from Bristol and the team's past catch up to them, the race to the altar takes a left turn.
My dear friend J.Z. Kelly has a blog post detailing the reasons why you should preorder RWTH: VIP
New story day!
My latest, "I Am Tasting the Stars" is out now in Translunar Travelers' Lounge!
This has been an interesting market to try and crack (as we in the business say), as part of their stipulation is that they want fun stories. And in many ways, fun is subjective and arguable, and in other ways, it really very much is not. If you're familiar with my stories, 'fun' isn't really one of the main themes you might consider me to typically cover.
It is both a climate change story, and a 'the bombs dropped' story, told by a narrator who was nine years old when the word that was ended. And back then, when the world ended, she made a list of the things that should be gathered and saved and experienced, so that people would remember. The last item on the list is the one this story concerns itself with, a bottle of champagne.
Please go read it, and I hope you enjoy! Maybe fun isn't what I normally write, but even so, it is a very 'me' story!
A few years ago, I read a couple of longform articles on Mt. Everest and the way that sometimes bodies became like landmarks to other climbers, and the subsequent recovery efforts that were made to get those deceased climbers down off the mountain. In the way of things, it left an impression, but kind of just got loaded into my subconscious.
And that's where "The Mountains Wife" came from. It's a fantasy story, maybe a little bit of a horror story. There are dogs but (spoilers) the dogs are okay. The narrator (and indeed, almost everybody in the story) is unnamed, another of my hallmarks.
The Future Fire does a great job when it comes to publishing (This is my second story with them; last year, they published "Know They Will Die, Under the Salt of It.") Their editing is smooth and reasonable, and stories have illustrations! What a luxury, as an author, to have an illustrated story.
Additionally, this is my 29th short story publication! This does count prints and reprints, but it is 29 times that somebody read my story, said "Yes, we want to publish this" and did!
Stay tuned next month for number 30...
My latest short story is now available in issue 123 of Apex Magazine! It will be free to read on June 1, but the full issue is only $4.99 if you can't bear to wait. It's called "All This Darkness," from the Bruce Springsteen song "Land of Hope and Dreams."
It isn't about Bruce Springsteen, though, and it isn't a New Jersey story. It's inspired by Shamokin, Pennsylvania, where my grandparents come from. It was a coal mining town, until the mines closed, and so my story is about the generation of kids that thought they would graduate high school (or not) and go to work in the mines, like their parents before them. Until the mines closed. And then they went into the mountain anyway.
I do hope you'll give it a read, and enjoy! They also interviewed me, which was really fun and interesting.
Edited to add: Here is the direct link to my story: https://apex-magazine.com/all-this-darkness/
My latest short story is available to read in issue 4 of Hexagon magazine!
It is called "How Do You Grow?" and is about symbiotic teeth, and growing up, and the things that adults tell children sometimes as they're growing up. The title is from the Anne Sexton poem "Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman"
In his Quick Sip Review, Charles Payseur calls it "an unsettling but effective read," and I do tend to trust Charles' judgement.
One of the stories nearest and dearest to my heart, "Sailing to Byzantium," is now available in Fusion Fragment magazine's 4th issue!
It is a pay what you want PDF, or you can get a physical issue or $23.99 Canadian. They sent me a contributor's copy, and it is a very high production print work!
If you liked some of my other short stories, "Daddy's Girl" and "For Whatever We Lose" specifically, then this story is an examination of similar themes.
It's a story that was rejected by some as too literary, and by others as too genre, and I'm still not really sure what to call it necessarily. But it's found its home, and I hope that it is read widely! Tell your friends!