Hello Monday morning! I have a new flash fiction up over at Goldfish Grimm’s Spicy Fiction Sushi: 7 Noises Heard While House-Sitting Alone, In the Dark, That Would Be Alarming If I Didn’t Know What They Were, a slightly Mythos-flavoured glimpse of country life WITH KITTENS. And certainly you should go and read the grisly longer story it’s paired up with, Twenty Aspects of Exhumation by Cameron Huntley, because it’s great.
I have a piece of flash fiction in Issue 2 of Lakeside Circus! Woke up this morning to find it’s gone up here: Aqua Vitalis, a poisonous little story in which, I’m afraid, the dog dies. It’s from the St. Ann collection, though, so you should expect that.
There are some really lovely stories in this issue. I like dan campbell’s siren, Sonya Taaffe’s Skerry-Bride and Alexandra Grunberg’s The Seam of Creation particularly.
So the Parsec Ink anthology Triangulation: Parch is a thing, and I have a story in it called ‘Bitter Water’, which I’m very pleased about, because it involves some of my favourite characters in one of my favourite imaginary places. And also because I should be getting a paper copy in the post in the near future, which will be lovely. This is not dark fantasy! It’s closer to sword & sworcery, I think, or perhaps just secondary world adventure fantasy. Expect sand, bandits, extremely aggrieved merchants, alarming spirit-haunted mountains and some rather unkind practical jokers. And certainly expect a lot more great stories by great authors to go with it.
Many thanks to the editor, Stephen V. Ramey, for some very thorough editing work. I’m sure he didn’t mean to make me feel like I’d been flayed alive…
This was a bit of bright news: my story ‘The Poet and the Lily’ (SQ Mag, Nov. 2013) was chosen for inclusion in the SQ Mag anthology for 2013, Star Quake 2, available for order here. The TOC is here, so you can see all the other amazing authors in it.
I have other short story news (about new stories, even!) coming up, but I’m going to keep it to myself for now, because I never quite trust ETAs until they materialise.
JULIA AUGUST 