Awards Eligibility 2022, Jennifer R. Donohue

I have had seven original short stories published in 2022 

"Every Quivering Fold of Flesh" was published by The Future Fire

"One to Sit in Judgement" was published by Air and Nothingness Press in The Spirit Machine

"Boys of Summer" was published by Corvid Queen

"Mistempered Weapons" was published by Kaleidotrope 

"A Country of Eternal Light" was published by Apex Magazine

"On What Wings" was published by Fusion Fragment

"Into the Dark" is in Issue 86 of Fantasy Magazine

Additionally, my novella The Drowned Heir is eligible in that category, and is available on most digital platforms, and wherever you buy your hardcover books. 

Out now! "I Am Tasting the Stars" in Translunar Travelers' Lounge

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!

2020 Awards Eligibility Post, Jennifer R. Donohue

 I had five original stories published this year!

"For Thine is the Kingdom" appeared in Truancy magazine in January

"Black Market Cheerios" appeared in Lamplight volume 8, issue 2. 

"Nothing Left But Mud" was published as a standalone by Sword & Kettle Press in July.

"Defend Us in Battle" appears in the Hear Me Roar anthology, released in September

"Know They Will Die, Under the Salt of It" appeared in The Future Fire in October.

Additionally,  I released the third Run With the Hunted novella, Run With the Hunted 3 Standard Operating Procedure, in October

Now Available! "Know They Will Die, Under the Salt of It" in The Future Fire

 My science fiction short story "Know They Will Die, Under the Salt of It" is now available to read in The Future Fire!

I wrote this story in 2018, after I happened across an article in Outside about freediving. So then I read three more. I didn't really know what I was going to do with it yet, but that's just part of my process; I just put as much into my brain as I care to, and stories come out, some sooner, some later. 

The title come from the Carl Sandburg poem "Young Sea" and it is a title that I'm happy with. I feel like it both catches the freediver spirit, and the reality of those who live by the ocean and work closely with it,  and also the reality of what is happening in the story itself. 

This is one of two stories that I've written about not-really-successful space colonies; the other is "Black Market Cheerios," and appeared earlier this year in Lamplight Volume 8, Issue 2. They are not related stories in any further sense; they don't share characters or anything. But they are both stories that I am very pleased with, and I am happy that they have found homes!

REPRINT Publication! "For Whatever We Lose," in Escape Pod

This month, Escape Pod is doing a run of space-themed stories. First up? My short story "For Whatever We Lose," first published last year in Luna Station Quarterly.

It's always interesting listening to one of my stories be podcast; I'm the only one who reads my stories the way I read my stories, if that makes sense. So hearing my words in not-my-voice is a fascinating experience! Phoebe Barton's comments at the end were also excellent.

So, if you missed it last year, or if you just want to revisit, do please go to Escape Pod and give the story a listen! Plus, tell your friends!

image of Phobos from NASA

Publication! "Fundamentals of Search and Rescue" available in DreamForge issue 03!

I've finally had a Doberman story published! It is in issue 3 of DreamForge!

"Fundamentals of Search and Rescue" is a story about a space elevator disaster, and canine search and rescue, and also Doberman ownership, which is the only kind of dog ownership I actually truly know. I've known other dogs, sure, but they haven't been <i>my</i> dogs.

and LOOK, Dreamforge does art for every story!

I named the Doberman Riddle, in homage to Susannah Charleson's dog Puzzle. Susannah Charleson's Scent of the Missing is why I got interested in reading about Search and Rescue to begin with; her book is amazing, and when I was done, I looked further on the topic. A few years later, in my writing group, we sat down and I set the timer to write, and the first sentence came out:

"The space elevator breaks with a noise like thunder rolling cross country." 

You can subscribe to Dreamforge here!

Awards eligibility post 2018

Well, it's here. Awards season is upon us, or at least nominations season for the upcoming awards season.

As always, publishing as Jennifer R. Donohue. I am also now eligible for the John W. Campbell award.


My short stories:

"A Thing With Feathers" was published in Mythic Delirium

"Surveillance Fatigue" was published in Escape Pod

"Bread and Milk" was published in Under the Full Moon's Light

"The Glint of Light on Broken Glass" is in Truancy 5




My novella "Run With the Hunted" is available in paperback and on many digital platforms.

PUBLICATION DAY! "Surveillance Fatigue", on Escape Pod

Publication day is finally here!

"Surveillance Fatigue" is Episode 623 on Escape Pod!  You can listen to it (which I am doing for the first time) or just read it if that's your preference.

Of related interest, Escape Pod is the first podcast to be nominated for a Hugo award! This publication will also be the sale which allows me to apply for an SFWA membership.

So please read, or listen, and share it far and wide! I do hope you enjoy. It's fairly timely, given the meme of "I hope the FBI agent assigned to my Facebook is well/thinks I'm funny/understands", etc. I did, however, write it 2016.

June 2017 Goals roundup

So June was pretty great!

My short story "Daddy's Girl" was published in Syntax & Salt and a lot of people have shared it across Twitter and said very nice things about it, which I really appreciate and which thrills me to no end. I try to share short stories when I've really liked them, and follow the authors on Twitter, and in this instance that story is mine and that author is me and it's a lovely feeling. Additionally, the Syntax & Salt folks were very nice and easy to work with, and I'd like the stories they'd run previously, which is why I submitted mine.

Oh, so have you tried out Inspirobot? You should. It's an AI built to generate inspirational phrases, and slaps them onto images. It's....interesting. Sometimes perfect, sometimes hilarious. Sometimes both! I may inflict some of them on my writing group as writing prompts. We'll see.

Interestingly, so far, every story I have had accepted was either 1. accepted its first time submitted or 2. the first time I'd submitted a piece to that particular market. Obviously, this trend has to break at some point, as I have more stories and am constantly sending them out. Though I guess I need to take a break on that pretty soon, if I'm going to be doing October Madness again this year. Though the point of October Madness is to get myself submitting stories, without having lapses, and clearly that is no longer a problem for me. So we'll see.

There are any number of short stories I have (still, forever and always) that I have started and that need to be finished. Some which have been rejected enough that they've received large overhauls and rewrites, some slated to receive such a treatment. I've got one story that was not originally speculative but is now and (I think) works pretty well that way. We'll see what the rejection letters (or acceptance letters?) have to say about that.

In June I indeed wrote a new short story, a cyberpunk-ish sort of thing concerning biotech and limb/body part replacement and personal security. It was also a romance, very technically, and written to a prompt from my friend Tori (the author of Eelgrass), who was trying to prevent me from jumping the gun and submitting May's short story too early. Because I don't really write romance, it was an interesting challenge, and she gave me these stipulations: "1 kiss, one loving description of a butt, flowers exchanged, and a meet cure. I also want one witty banter, a shooting range, and an assassination attempt."  It is to my credit that I did not in fact just cheat and write a Shadowrun story using one of my characters. I did also write a couple of Shadowrun stories, a pair of which were very fun indeed because they were the same scene/situation from two perspectives.

I have decided for July's Camp NaNoWriMo that I'll be rewriting/revising The Last Song. I've made a new and improved playlist, I have the most current draft printed out, I've been circling the characters in my head and looking at Detroit things again. I've also had the thought that maybe I shouldn't write it from the perspective of my rock star Orpheus, but I think writing it from my modern day Eurydice's point of view isn't actually the best plan. It's possible, certainly, and though she needs to be represented far more strongly than my current text does, I don't think that's the correct frame. So we'll see what happens.

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!

Strange Horizons annual fundraiser!

Strange Horizons is a very, very good online magazine that publishes scifi/fantasy/whatever short stories, poems, columns, and reviews. I've been reading them for years, and been submitting stories to them for years as well. No "yes" from them yet, but I have gotten some very good personal rejections from them as well, not just forms.

They've got 8 days and change left in the fundraiser, and are at about $7500 out of their baseline $15,000 goal. It would be really great to see them reach it! They've got some great things they want to do, like publish stories in translation, do interactive stories, that kind of thing.

If you haven't checked them out, go. Do so. Here are some things I've really liked recently that they've published:

Million-Year Elegies: Oviraptor, by Ada Hoffman

The Beef, by J.D. Moyer

Noise Pollution, by Alison Wilgus

little stomach, by Charlotte Geater


You can donate to them via Network for Good, PayPal, subscribe to them via Patreon, or even send in a physical payment.  Strange Horizons is a 501 (c) (3) not for profit organization and so in the United States, donations are tax deductible.

Places I've been "published"

Well, okay, not really published. But put up publicly where total strangers can take in my work.

I already told you about Housekeeping, my science fiction short story that my good buddy Jacob narrated and put up on Soundcloud. If you like what you hear, you should follow him on Facebook. He'd probably like that.

Now I've got another "credit", wherein my buddy Dave, who we game with weekly if not more frequently, has shared my piece on his blog. He's been doing a character journal of our Dungeons and Dragons game, which is the adventure path titled "Age of Worms", published in Dungeon magazine from 2005-2006, and he's graciously opened his blog space up for other players to contribute. My character, Larkin, is the party's fighter.

Mining on the Moon

I thought this was a great article, and Very Pertinent to the Moon/Space fiction that I'm in the early planning stages of writing (hear that? I'm planning!) Mining the Moon: Plans Taking Off but Rules Lacking. The pertinent rule or "rules" here is from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, wherein the signers agreed that the moon belonged to no nation (I'm sure this is a drastic oversimplification, but there you go). This is also the treaty that bars nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction from orbit, or installation on bodies such as the moon or a space station.

Picture of the moon from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory web site

Spacing Out

I discussed my latest science fiction inspiration last week. Untitled as yet, though I do have a main character in mind. I haven't started writing yet, not really. I've got a file of collected sentence fragments; world building, I suppose. Of course, this is research for two space/scifi/moon novels at once. There's a lot of moons, did you know that? Ours, obviously. But

Much like how I intend all of my urban fantasy books to take place "in the same world", whether they're cognizant of if or not, I also intend for my space scifi to take place in its own world. I'm not entirely sure I want these two worlds to be the same. Werewolves in space may not be my thing, savvy? Or, it might be just what we need. Hrm. But I digress. I have to build the culture, and the history, of how my humanity has become spacefaring. I need to decide what's run of the mill for them, and what's out of the ordinary. So I need to build a timeline, and to build a timeline, I need to know what the "real" one is, from V2 rockets on up.

 

(the Apollo 17 Lunar Roving Vehicle)

What I'm talking about when I talk about Science Fiction

Science Fiction is a continually compelling genre. For me, anyway. Judging from the number of space and clone and and and things coming out, it is for a lot of people.

So, what's my first mental impression when I think "Oh, SciFi"?

Space. Really and primarily, space. Space travel, space ships, worlds that are not Earth. Worlds that may once have been Earth. I sometimes think about things like my brain in a robot body (or a cloned body! Thanks Richard K. Morgan, for Altered Carbon and the subsequent two books. I'd love for there to be more).

If there's a science for it, there's a fiction for it, so Science Fiction possibilities, in my mind, are fairly infinite. But when it comes down to it, when I write (or make gestures at writing) what I think of as "Science Fiction", I'm reaching back to that Golden Age of Space Travel and Possibilities, where Man willingly travels at the behest of his (or her; I'm using "Man" as the gender neutral noun here) government to Explore and Discover and what have you. I want that mood of the indomitable spirit, the inquisitive attitude, the endless question of "What will we find and how will we survive it?"

I've already got an idea somewhat laid out for a near-future Moon novel. I now, I think, have the most nascent dream of a novel somewhere along that timeline, after the events of Untitled Moon Novel are said and done, and we (meaning Earth People) have moved even further.

What do you think of when you think of SciFi, be it books or movies? 

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

A thing I run into quite frequently (read: daily) at the library is a fear of genre. It's okay to have your reading preferences; I certainly do. Myself, I don't read a whole lot of mysteries. It doesn't mean I won't, but rather they aren't the books getting my attention. We all are more than allowed to make those choices. But what really gets me is people making those decisions without having ever even put a toe outside their comfort zone, or people making those decisions even when it's an author they're familiar with.

For example, Dean Koontz has his Odd Thomas books, right? One of them came out at a graphic novel and only as a graphic novel. Patrons who reserved it by merit of it being Dean Koontz and Odd Thomas, like you do. An unmeasured percentage of them, once they saw it was a "comic book", said "Oh, I don't want that" with a particular wrinkling of the nose and returned it unopened. Didn't even leave the building with it.

John Grisham has a series based around Theodore Boone, a 13 year old lawyer. Across the libraries in my system, that might be shelved in Young Adult or might be shelved in Juvenile (what we call MG). People come in asking for the new Grisham, or for that Grisham in particular, and when they find out it's "for kids", there's that nose wrinkle again. By the way, J is where we shelve our Harry Potter and Y is where our Hunger Games are, and people will check those out, typically after they've seen the movie. Seeing that currently with the Veronica Roth Divergent books.

We actually have a display right now, of subgenres, inspired by a conversation I had with a patron who was taking out Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest, and had never heard of Steampunk. She didn't end up liking it, but I thought it was cool she was interested and willing to give it a try. There are people who come in looking for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and when they discover it's a mystery, some don't take it. There are people who come in looking for Ray Bradbury, or Ursula LeGuin, and are put off when those are in the Fantasy and Science Fiction section.

There are the people who think Fantasy and Science Fiction should be shelved separately, because they aren't the same thing. There are people who are confused (I'm in this camp) by the fact that we shelve vampires, zombies, and Neil Gaiman in the regular fiction.

We have limited space at my library, and the catalogers aren't all familiar with genre. But it genre an all or nothing prospect? I don't think so. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, say, doesn't necessarily belong in the Fantasy/SciFi section, but he could fit there. Ray Bradbury could be comfortably shelved with the "regular" (literary and commercial) fiction. The time travel romances (with or without highlanders, but really, why are there so many Scottish Highland time travel romances? When did that become a Thing?) aren't in the SciFi, nor is H.G. Wells, but we have one Lovecraft there and the other in regular fiction.

I kind of wish my library would actually just Dewey Decimilize the whole damn thing. Just assign each book its number and let people look for it by merit of that, not by the fast-and-loose genre categorizing we're currently doing. You want fiction? It's in the 800's, then look for the author's last name. Done.

Whose reality?

I don't like reality TV.

I have two improbable exceptions to this: Dog the Bounty Hunter (I know, right?) and cooking shows. I love Japanese Iron Chef, I love Hell's Kitchen, I love Masterchef.

But "regular" reality TV? The Real World, Jersey Shore, Survivor? No, thank you. I'm from the Jersey Shore, and that's not my reality. It isn't now, and it wasn't while I was there. But I loved the Bones episode about it.

Pilot

Beginnings are often awkward.

We don't know each other yet, don't know each other's habits, and perhaps don't yet know what to say. So here, I'll go first.

My name is Jennifer, though I prefer Jen. I've been making up stories for as long as I can remember, and I eventually began writing them down. I wrote a very bad fantasy novel during high school, which will not see the light of day. Since then, I've written, and started, other novels that I think are rather better. Since 2007, I've participated in National Novel Writing Month, which is a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of November.

I plan on sharing my writing process here, and also discussing books and stories in general.  I've always been a big reader, frequently getting in trouble for it as I grew up. Even now, I read between 100 and 200 books a year, my "habit" fostered by my job at a library. I love fantasy and science fiction, and also good old fashioned "literary" fiction.

I feel that a good writer needs to read.  I believe that a good writer learns about the world, and never stops learning, regardless of whether there's a classroom. Writing, authoring, is a process and a journey, and I hope you enjoy coming with me.