Category: publication news

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Rejoice, ye turkey-addled American masses and folk of various other climes! Ruined Cities is now released!

Ruined Cities Cover
Ruined Cities, including my story “In the City of No God”

Available at Amazon, B&N, and Kobo.

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So here’s my big announcement: my fantasy novel The Wedding of Earth and Sky has been sold to Red Adept Publishing, and will appear sometime in 2014.

I’m really excited about this. Red Adept is a small press with a focus on ebooks and audiobooks, and I’ve been very impressed by the quality of their product and the professionalism of their editorial staff. Here’s hoping for big things.

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I held off announcing this a little because of some weirdness, but I’m happy to say that that has resolved itself, and now I can happily report that my story The Other City is currently up at Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.

The man stumbled through the gates of Salem with a bundle in his arms. “Let’s eat him,” the boys said and scampered down the grassy hill to the wall, hooting and hollering and grabbing sharp sticks and stones as they went.

Read the whole thing here.

Fun facts about this story:

This was the first short story that I wrote after I decided to get serious about my writing a few years ago. It took a while to find a home.

My idea for the story involved the ending (which I won’t spoil), and the starting point of a man being expelled from Salem. So I wrote the first line above (“The man stumbled through the gates of Salem”), then thought for a moment. The next line (“‘Let’s eat him,’ the boys said”) was a moment of inspiration, and this wound up driving the rest of the story. My advice is that when your subconscious gives you cannibalism, you run with it.

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So here’s the first of two publication announcements: my story The Lion and the Thorn Tree will soon be appearing in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. The story should appear in the spring edition, coming out at the beginning of April.

This sale is a lesson in not auto-rejecting yourself. I wasn’t sure that this story was really a good fit for Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, given that it features an early industrial tech level and a pregnant female protagonist. It seemed pretty dissimilar from the sword-and-sorcery that’s the usual fare at HFQ. But, I reasoned with myself, they do publish a wide gamut of stories within the guidelines of their genre, and I shouldn’t assume that the editors are unwilling to take something a little less usual. So I sent it in.

And of course they accepted it.

Look for the story in April!

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Having just sent in the contracts, I’m happy to report that my cyberpunk short story The Suffragette’s Election has sold to Crossed Genres, and will be appearing in their February 2013 issue.

This story has a long and tortuous history. Its first draft was written over four years ago, but I never sent it out because of obvious problems with the ending. Essentially, I knew how I wanted the story to end, but my first attempt at writing this ending was devoid of tension and drama, and the story sputtered out in a lame and unconvincing finish.

I put the story away for several months. Then I took it out again and rewrote the ending to see if I could make it work. It didn’t. So I repeated this process four more times.

Earlier this year I took the story out again and tried one more time—and finally got something good. (The key difference turned out to be not the ending itself, but the ordering of a few scenes before the ending.) However, by this time the beginning of the story had gotten shabby from so many partial rewrites, so I had to rewrite that, too. And then, finally, I had something that I was happy with from beginning to end, and just in time to submit to Crossed Genre’s “Cloak and Dagger” themed issue.

Evidently the muses smiled on me after all that effort, because the story was accepted on its first submission. Woo!