Publication! "For Whatever We Lose" in Luna Station Quarterly

Hello friends and readers, my second publication for the year has come out! (if you missed it, my first one was a podcast reprint of "Sugar and Spice")

"For Whatever We Lose" is a scifi short story that you can read now in Luna Station Quarterly. They also have a print edition, which is very nice. There will be an interview about it on their blog later this month so I don't want to retread too much of that ground accidentally, but I do want to say that the title comes from the ee cummings poem "maggie and milly and molly and may" and I'm honestly not sure if I should recommend reading the poem before or after reading my story, but that one informs the other just a little bit. It's one of the few times I haven't had a hard time coming up with a title.

If you liked my story "Daddy's Girl", it's a little bit along those lines.

Also, in upcoming publication news, my short story "The Wave" will be in issue 04 of Wizards in Space Magazine. You can preorder a print copy of it here, and I think it's coming out on March 22. "The Wave" previously appeared on my Patreon, so I was very happy to find it a home with a wider audience here!

Yes hello it is February (2019)

I guess I should have blogged last month but I didn't and here we are.

January was kind of a frigid blur and I didn't have anything come out anyway (other than Patreon stories. Hey, subscribe to my Patreon! $1 a month gets you at least one short story)

I DID have something else come out in December, though. I edited an anthology for my writing group, which you can get in paperback or in ebook on Amazon.

I've continued to work on Run With the Hunted 2: Electric Boogaloo (Run With the Hunted available on Amazon and Elsewhere, tell your friends! Rate on Amazon and Goodreads! I'm not one of those authors who reads my reviews and responds to them. I just read them. I need them.)

So far, for 2019, I have had four acceptances! That is already exactly as many as I had for 2018 so let's hope we're just going upwards from here!

Three of them haven't been announced yet, but I can tell you that my scifi short story "For Whatever We Lose" will be in Luna Station Quarterly on March 1! Mark your calendar, tell your friends, set up your Google alert. It's of the same, shall we say "tone", as "Daddy's Girl" (which was in the Summer 2017 issue of Syntax & Salt if you missed it).

 I may have more announcements for you later this month! Keep reading, stay warm.

Run With the Hunted preorder

Happy October, everybody, I have a surprise for you!

My cyberpunk novella "Run With the Hunted" is available for Kindle preorder! The release date is October 31, 2018.

"In the fast-paced, tech-heavy future, diamonds are still a girl’s best friend. Bristol is more than happy to get dressed up and crash a private diamond sale that her hacker associate, Bits, has caught wind of on the deep web. The job is unbelievably simple and the getaway is a breeze; Dolly barely even gets to fire a shot during the holdup. But in the days that follow, things start to go wrong. Bristol’s dinner party is raided, their buyer backs out, and they find themselves on the run in a heavily surveilled city. Now that it’s become clear these diamonds are more than meets the eye, the trio has to find out who wants them enough to kill for it."


I said this on Twitter, and I'll likely post about it at greater length at some later date, but "Run With the Hunted", in my head, takes place in the same near-future as "Daddy's Girl" and "Surveillance Fatigue". This isn't to say that the characters in those previous stories are involved; they aren't. Another notable difference is that the characters in "Run With the Hunted" all have names! But, it was a lot of fun to write, and I really enjoy the characters of Bristol, Bits, and Dolly, so hopefully I'll make a habit (series) of this.

July 2018 writing goals roundup

Happy July, friends! Are my American readers having the same heatwave that we've just been hit by? I both love it and don't...if I was at the beach, I'd truly love it. These are beach days, to be sure.

I encourage you to check out my Patreon. This month's story, "The Wave", is a somewhat beachy wave. You can read the author notes there without any cash on the barrelhead, but I'll say, the story was inspired by my recent reading about Big Wave Surfing, and by Coca cola's "have a coke with" campaign (the bottles have peoples' names on them). I just moved up the timeline to be a near future, perhaps a few decades beyond where "Daddy's Girl" would be.

In general writing news, I wrote three first drafts last month (!). One of them came out much longer than my stories normally go (almost 14,000 words) and seeing as how  Fireside is having a novella call next month...I figured I'd try to lengthen it for that submission window. It's an interesting exercise, just casually saying "well I need to add 6k to this story", when so many of my stories are around 2000 words in total. I can definitely write 6000 words by then, but whether they are meaningful words which fit the story and improve it remain to be seen.

This month is also a Camp NaNoWriMo and for once, I'm not really certain what to consider my "main" project. I should work on rewriting the middle book of the werewolf trilogy. I should work on this novella for Fireside. I could do both, and that might just be what ends up happening.

The (Writing) year in Review

It's New Year's Eve, I should probably do this right?

I once again met, and exceeded, my goal of completing a piece of writing each month, which makes me think maybe I should add to my writing resolutions in some way. Maybe go for two? (and give myself a pass on that in NaNoWriMo months?)

I completed 22 things this year. Two of them were book two and three in the trilogy that Learn to Howl begins, so now I just need to go through Learn to Howl (at least) once more with feeling™, and then make it publication ready. I've made a significant change in the setting, from Somewhere in North Carolina to, instead, Somewhere in the Pine Barrens. Story wise, it still fits/works/makes sense, and from an author standpoint it makes sense because, y'know, I'm from New Jersey. I'm not from the Pine Barrens, but *spoilers* there's only so long the characters stay there. So I'm looking forward to that.

Some of the stories I've counted as completed this year are pretty comprehensive rewrites of stories I wrote prior to this year, and it's given them good new life, so I've got high hopes for their submissions success in the coming days.

Some people on Twitter are talking about like, their total wordcounts and stuff, but I don't typically worry about that unless it comes to submissions (whether a story is too short or too long) or novels (where there is a generally accepted length for a genre). So I'm not going to go open all 22 of those files and tally it up because, well, I don't want to. It's a lot. It's at least 150k because of three months of NaNoWriMo, and then the other additional stories.

Which brings us to my submissions (and rejections) and publications!

I had three stories accepted this year. First was Daddy's Girl in Syntax & Salt, which is also on the Nebula Reading List (the actual Nebula Ballot will be released I'm not sure when, and the actual voting is from March 1-March 30). The second story was "Aground, Upon the Sand", also in Syntax & Salt, winning their Fall Flash Fiction contest!

And hey you should go read Syntax & Salt, who in the coming years have a plan to do things like improve the rates they pay their authors, have an editor dedicated to making sure their authors stories are nominated for awards, that kind of awesome thing.

My third story acceptance is "A Thing With Feathers", coming out literally tomorrow (January 1!) in issue 4.3 of Mythic Delirium. The whole issue is available for Kindle here for $2.99, but if you don't want to do that, my particular story will be on their website in February.

In total, I submitted 173 pieces in 2017. Of those, there are still 19 submissions I'm still waiting on (even though 1 of them will probably not reply, if other writers' experiences are anything to go on). I received 106 form rejections and 53 personal rejections, which is almost three times the amount of personals I've received in prior years.

So next year, I hope to get more acceptances, publish my werewolf trilogy, and write at least as much as I did this year! I might also get that Patreon started (though I guess with the recent Patreon drama I'm glad I held off on that a bit?) If you'd be interested in being one of my patrons and maybe have any kind of specific "gee I'd really love it if Jen did X and I'd totally pay a dollar or whatever a month for it" let me know!

Awards Eligibility 2017

I had two stories published this year, both at the lovely Syntax & Salt. They're great people to work with, and I've been so thrilled with the response both of these stories have gotten. It makes me happy when my stories make people....well, not happy, I guess, they aren't happy stories, but they reach people, anyway.

First up was Daddy's Girl, which was published in June 21 2017. Maria Haskins reviewed it on her blog back in June (thank you, Maria!)  and it is on the SFWA Nebula Reading List 


The other story was published on October 31 2017, "Aground, Upon the Sand", and was their Fall Flash Fiction contest winner.

My story came in first place at Syntax & Salt!

My latest short story "Aground, Upon the Sand" took first place in Syntax & Salt's Fall Flash Fiction contest. 

It's a story that, once it formed in my mind, didn't take very long to write. I didn't have a false start, but I did have a false ending, that I went back and rewrote. Originally, it didn't quite strike the right tone for me. Now it does. and it strikes that tone for others as well; as some of my twitter buddies have said, in the way of the internet, that it has given them Feels. So I hope you enjoy it as well.

Syntax & Salt has been very good to me indeed. My previous story with them, "Daddy's Girl", is on the Nebula Reading List. Nominations for the Nebulas start November 15 and run through February 15, so if you know any SFWA members, tell them to vote for me!

September happened, I know it did

September went both very quickly and very slowly. Which is just how time works, I suppose. It's always just a matter of perspective.

Are you ready for my Super! Special! September! News?

It's not another story acceptance, and I haven't finished my third werewolf book yet (though I did make it my official project for NaNoWriMo this afternoon. My handle over there is GingerGunlock  if you want to buddy up). I haven't even done the rewrites on books 1 and 2 yet.

PUBLICATION DAY: "Daddy's Girl" is LIVE at Syntax & Salt

Greetings readers!

My latest published short story, "Daddy's Girl" has gone live at Syntax & Salt.

It is near(ish) future science fiction, and the tag line (lead line? Or is it lede? I'm all publication0-joy-frenzy over here, excuse me) is "Nobody needs to read drone instructions anyway: they always worked right out of the box."

It's a story I worked on carefully; the title has gone through several iterations, though the story itself has remained largely the same as the first draftings.

Go! Read and enjoy!