Publication!: The Wave, reprinted in Wizards in Space

I mentioned last month that my short story "The Wave" would appear in Wizards in Space magazine, and it has!  You can purchase issue 04 on their website, and it is a wonderfully produced little physical volume. Look at that cover! I'm very happy with it, and that they sent me a contributor's copy. There's something extra special when your words appear in print, as opposed to more words on the screen. Though, there's always something special about people loving your words enough to buy them, be that print or screen or whispering them into a conch shell that they hope a stranger passing by will pick up and put to their ear (note: this is probably not a viable lit mag model).

Here is my hard-won author dog photo of the issue with Ulrike. She wanted very much to nibble on the corners of this thing that I was propping against her.

If you both want the physical copy but also want to read it NOW, "The Wave" does appear on my Patreon, where currently a dollar a month gets you at least one new short story per month.

Also, if you would like more news and pictures like this, but in your inbox instead of via blogspot, you can now sign up for my TinyLetter! Probably also much more effective than a conch shell, and how often do you walk past a conch shell anyway? Hardly ever, I'd bet.

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!

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.

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.