I’m very excited to announce that The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is going on sale on Nov 18, including my story The Last Free Bear.
I’ve seen the proofs for this book, and let me tell you it looks gorgeous, with fantastic cover art (that you can see above), as well as a collection of stupendous stories for anyone who likes epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and heroic fantasy. It’s well worth your time.
I’m happy to announce that a fantasy short of mine The Heresy of Friar Travolo will be appearing soon at Daily Science Fiction. I don’t have a publication date yet, but I’ll be sure to update this space when I know.
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.
Long time, no blog. There are various reasons for that, some of which I may post about soon, but for now, let’s just add some awesome news: my story In the City of No God will soon be appearing in the Ruined Cities anthology from Deepwood Publishing. Read their announcement of the anthology here. The anticipated publication date is Thanksgiving Day, so be sure to pick it up as a delicious after-turkey snack.
Bibliotheca Fantastica is now available from Dagan Books, including a story by yours truly titled “The Typographer’s Folly”.
For the curious, this is the story which prompted A Florilegium of Rejection Notes. I have only had the chance to read about a third of the other stories in the anthology, and I look forward to the rest. Hope you like it—
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.
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.
Woo! My story The Lion and the Thorn Tree is currently up at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly! Here’s a teaser:
My husband’s voice came through the door of our house in the night. It was a ghost voice, muddled with the baying of wild dogs, and so I knew he was dead. I was four months pregnant.
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!
My story The Suffragette’s Election is now available at Crossed Genres.
If you’re the sort of person who likes music with their writing, I suggest the following as a suitable soundtrack, being both sonically and thematically appropriate:
Destroy everything you touch today
Destroy me this way
Anything that may delay you
Might just save you
J.S. Bangs 