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. 

Available Now! Run With the Hunted 5: Insert Coin to Play

 The latest installation of Run With the Hunted came out on October 31, and thus Run With the Hunted 5: Insert Coin to Play is now available to purchase in paperback and ebook!

In the fast-paced, tech heavy future, all work and no play makes a dull team. Bits scores an invite for the game: a real-world, multi-day puzzle and travel challenge with big prizes for the winners. Dolly and Bristol join the road trip, solve puzzles, take in the scenery, and bicker about snacks. But when Bits does what she does best and takes a look behind the code, all is not what it seems, and now the trio is playing against a different and deadlier clock.

Awards Eligibility 2021, Jennifer R. Donohue

 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

Preorders open! Run With the Hunted 4: VIP

 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

Get the latest! "How Do You Grow?"

 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. 

2019 Awards Eligibility!

2019 has been my best publishing year yet! I can only hope 2020  keeps the ball rolling.

I am eligible for the Campbell Award, and I am listed on the site as an eligible author.  It was also just renamed the Astounding Award, though the site doesn't reflect that yet.

My scifi short story, "For Whatever We Lose", was published in Luna Station Quarterly

My fantasy short story "The Pearls That Were His Eyes" was published in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine issue #75

My steampunk short story, "One Hundred Years", was published in the Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline anthology

My scifi short story "Fundamentals of Search and Rescue" was published in Dreamforge, issue #3.



The other short stories I had out were reprints (3! reprints!) or on my Patreon. The Patreon ones are eligible, and  if you are reading to nominate, I can make them available to you directly!

In total, I had 9 acceptances! One was in a dream market, Apex, that has sadly shuttered, or perhaps gone on hiatus. That story is traveling through slush piles again. I also had an anthology acceptance that will no longer be published, as that publisher has also shuttered. So hopefully 2020 is kinder to remaining and future markets!

Now Available! Run With the Hunted 2: Ctrl Alt Delete

Happy Monday!  The long-awaited sequel of Run With the Hunted is now available in ebook or paperback form!

In the fast-paced, tech-heavy future, even hackers need to take a break. Bits isn’t working right now, and instead spends her days in VR, making necessary additions to the immersion’s neglected night sky. When Dolly shows up with a problem that needs solving, Bits can’t just boot her. Especially not when she finds out Bristol’s been arrested and they have a narrow window of opportunity to bust her out. There’s something wrong, more than jail, more than the effects of all that time in VR, but she can’t remember. She and Dolly have to hit the road first and figure out the details later, because if they lose track of Bristol now, they might never get a second chance.

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!

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.

It's December and we have no snow

Despite my comments to the contrary, I ended up doing NaNoWriMo.

I started my novel on November 18, and in fact made the 50,000 mark. On the 30th, in fact, writing 8600 words that day.

It's a draft I'm so far happy with. Space science fiction,  near-ish future. Per my usual NaNoWriMo habits, it's currently "trunked", pending finishing at a later date. It doesn't have a title. It has a lot of plot kinks to work out. But the bones are there, and that's pretty cool.

 

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? 

"Put this in your earholes!"

Cribbed from my voice actor friend, Jacob Burgess, "Put this in your ears" is exactly the sentiment I want to put across to you.

See, Jacob is doing a project where he reads a new story every week. This week, he did a fun (and funny) Scifi short story of mine entitled "Housekeeping".

You can find Jacob here on Twitter, here on Facebook, and he even actually has his own website, Make Words Happen. Give it a listen, and check out other great things he's done. Like his page, share stuff far and wide, etc. etc.

I hope you enjoy!

Post by Jacob Burgess.

(You can also just listen to it here on Sound Cloud, but Sound Cloud doesn't appear to link to anything else, profile wise or anything, and that's frustrating to me. If I find somebody I like, where are the breadcrumbs to lead me to them? Maybe I'm just missing it.)

Someday never comes

Sometimes I read a lot. Sometimes it takes me a long time to get through a book.

Sometimes I don't write for months. Others, I have a project going that I really focus on and really make headway with. Sometimes it's multiple projects.

Right now in the rubrick, I'm in the "not really reading, writing a lot" portion. I started a werewolf novel in April that's coming to its climax. I started a new writing project involving horror short stories. With June coming up, I'm trying to get myself to actually outline my CampNaNoWriMo novel.

I know I'm doing a space scifi thing. I know that the main characters are two sisters, and that there's at least one dude (no, this is not going to be a love triangle). I know some aesthetics of the space world that I'm operating with, and even though it's in space, it'll be on a smaller, character driven scale. But story? Eh, I've got an idea of the conflict. I think.

So, I need an outline, or else I'll be dead in the water at 10k words.

In NaNo lingo, I'm typically what's known as a "pantser", i.e. I write by the seat of my pants. I also typically have a story arc in mind, though, a culminating event, how I want things to shake out, that kind of thing. I wish I knew that already, this time. I'd really like for this to work out, and I'm always up for a NaNo!