New Fiction and Poetry

"In the City of Kites and Crows," a dark dystopian fantasy about love in the wake of a revolution, has just been published in the autumn issue of Kaleidotrope. In September, my Weird tale "It Will Make You Hate the World" appeared in Mantid Magazine and my poem "To the Waters"--the first I've published since 2014!--appeared in Liminality.

In more personal news, the ongoing family crisis (TM) is ongoing and critical. Thoughts, prayers, and good vibes appreciated.

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Saturday, October 01, 2016

poetry, short fiction

This isn't a blog post

...because I should be finishing revisions on a book chapter right now. So. In one hundred words or less:

It's November!

Jose Cruz has written a wonderful spotlight on "Final Exam" over at The Haunted Omnibus. Also check out the interview, in which I discuss genre, Lovecraft, humor, and futility.

And I have a new short story, "What Hands Like Ours Can Do," in the November issue of The Dark:

She’s washing the dishes after a simple breakfast of fried eggs and tomatoes, looking out the window towards the river winding low and shaded beneath the willow trees, when she sees a man coming up the road from the south. He’s dressed nicely, gray suit and waistcoat, well fitted; his shirt looks new, with one of those low Mandarin collars that take a pin instead of a tie. No hat, and his dark, longish hair blows across his eyes like a veil. She thinks to herself that there’s rain coming, with that kind of wind.

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Thursday, November 05, 2015

academia, horror, interview, short fiction

August: writing, Mirror Dance, new publications

I'm back in California after a relaxing beer-and-sausage-filled trip back to Wisconsin, and my timing could not be more perfect. I missed the worst of the wildfires and arrived in time to enjoy a stretch of unusually temperate days: the breeze stirring the loose pages on my desk is a mere 88 degrees. The sunflowers are blooming in the fields alongside the freeway. This is the weather that makes people want to move to California.  

So what am I up to now that I'm back? Well, I'm spending nearly every waking hour reading for my upcoming prelim exams. My progress on short fiction this summer can be measured in inches, although I'm wrapping up a flash piece for the next volume of Rhonda Parrish's alphabet anthology series, C is for Chimera. (So what is L for? You'll have to wait and see!). I'm also poking at a Bluebeard story that I started ages and ages ago. It was missing a vital piece in the main character's motivation, but I think I've figured it out as of last month. 

The Autumn 2015 issue of Mirror Dance is ready to go for September 1st. While our Autumn issues aren't themed, there's a general focus on vocations and professions in the short stories this time around. On the other hand, I've been seeing a noticeable uptick in mermaid and selkie stories in the slush pile. Hypotheses? I'd blame it on the drought, but we see submissions from all over the globe.

I have two new stories out this month: "Love in the Time of Markov Processes" in Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists (Lethe Press) and "And This is the Song it Sings" in Nightmare. The first is about alternate universes, Tam Lin, whale falls, and unrequited love; the second is about ghost stories and hitchhiking. Also serial killers, symbiosis, and Rilke (maybe). I talk about that in the Author Spotlight. 

And now: back to reading.

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Monday, August 24, 2015

Mirror Dance, short fiction, the writer in its natural habitat, updates

A Recommendation...

...of the if-you-liked-X-you-should-read-Y variety: readers who enjoyed the curatorial, documentarian, found-footage feel* of “Désiré” might appreciate Jake Kerr's story in the latest issue of Lightspeed, "Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince."  Kerr puts bluetext and the Wikipedia article format to good world-building use; the result feels compelling, emotionally satisfying, and above all authentic.

*Not to mention the meditations on intersections between art and global disaster, and the artist's role and responsibilities in the creation of each.

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Monday, March 11, 2013

Lightspeed, literature, recommendations, short fiction

Empowering Ghanaian Communities

My sister, the illustrious speculative fiction writer Therese Arkenberg, will be traveling to Ghana next month as part of an Economic Development service learning project. She and her classmates are seeking to raise funds for the community-led nonprofit group Capacity Rural International; this group distributes microloans to  Ghanaian women for the purchase of yield-increasing seeds and to Ghanaian students pursuing careers as carpenters and seamstresses. 

Please help Therese reach her funding goal by donating through the program's IndieGoGo campaign or through PayPal! Therese has made a short story available on her blog as an added incentive to donate.

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Wednesday, February 20, 2013

economic development, feminism, Ghana, help, short fiction, Therese Arkenberg

Okay, so where did all THESE stories come from?

Once again, I'm updating my website. Since I last checked the story links, Every Day Weirdness has passed to the Great Server in the Sky, so my three publications from that awesome e-zine are now archived on this blog. I've also included a previously unpublished flash piece, "Between a Sleep and a Sleep," which I wrote for the OddCon OddContest back in 2009. Enjoy!

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Friday, June 15, 2012

archives, short fiction

Lightspeed and io9

Topping the list of things that are totally awesome this morning, "How Many Miles to Babylon?" appears in io9. Every month, io9 will publish a story from Lightspeed's current issue; you'll be able to find those stories on io9 here.

Also, "Lessons from a Clockwork Queen" is included in the Lightspeed ebook sampler, which is pretty cool.

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Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Lightspeed, short fiction

Recommended Reading

I'm flattered to see that "Lessons from a Clockwork Queen" appears (with three stars!) on Tangent Online's Recommended Reading list for 2011.

Also, Lois Tilton gave "The Gardens of Landler Abbey" a "recommended" rating, which is wonderful and unexpected.

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Monday, January 02, 2012

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, fantasy, reviews, short fiction

Roses in December

The Winter 2011 issue of Mirror Dance came out this morning. We have some lovely retold fairy tales, surprising takes on folklore, entirely original pieces, and an insightful interview with Mike Phillips. I'm particularly pleased with the poetry in this issue, so be sure you check it out!

My pseudo-Jamesian secondary-world ghost story "The Gardens of Landler Abbey" appears in today's issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the very queer "Portrait of a Courtesan" appears in Crossed Genre's final issue. As a bibliographic note, "Landler Abbey" is my most recently finished story, having been drafted, edited, and submitted this September. Make of that what you will.

In other news, please think positive thoughts for my mother and aunt, who lost their beloved mother (my wonderful and elegant grandmother) on Saturday.

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Thursday, December 01, 2011

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, editing, ghost story, Mirror Dance, No Exit, publishing, queer fiction, short fiction

Where's all these stories come from?

A number of my older (read: prehistoric) stories are vanishing from their graves on the internet, so I'm archiving them on this blog. Mostly, this is so I have a solid page to link to on my bibliography page. If it please you to browse, gentle sirs and dames, be my guests, though I have to warn you that some of them are embarassingly bad.

Anyway, that's why there's all these new posts. Move along, folks, nothing to see here.

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Saturday, September 03, 2011

archives, short fiction

British Fantasy Awards

Any readers who are eligible to vote for the British Fantasy Awards might be interested in knowing that All the King's Monsters and First Born are on the ballot for best short story of 2010.

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Monday, April 11, 2011

short fiction, that's MY name on the ballot

November drives a hard bargain...

It's that time of year again: National Novel Writing Month. Last year, I failed miserably in my goal to write 50,000 words of short fiction, and I look forward to failing miserably again this year. But for tradition's sake, let's look at the long list of stories who want so desperately to be written.

1. The Dead Women of Bajos Court
Four dead women live in four gray houses at the end of Bajos Court.

It started as a horror story and ended as a reimagining of Bluebeard with a blame-the-victim complex.

2. The Women of Arcadio Leon
My body is a map of places Arcadio Leon has loved.

Experimenting with a new framing technique. A man's neighbor gives him the accumulated detritus of the local film college, but the box includes on particularly interesting film. I got halfway through this one and realized I spent all of it introducing new characters. Several of them need to be eliminated, but I haven't decided which.

3. The Dream-Gardens of Revenant Road
After the war, a woman calling herself Theophile Saint-Armand bought the old Venusberg place past the curve on Revenant Road.

Botanical gardens, and a woman with a terrible secret. But how do the two connect? That's what I've got to figure out.

4. The Riverland
Sixty-four miles past the Junction, the land becomes a red and vibrant place.

Still magical lions, still railroads, still a woman building the former without being killed by the latter. I've located a narrator and several key plot points. Now all I need is a voice.

5. All in a Hot and Copper Sky
The boy who wants to write a book about Socorro Mariner sits on the edge of my couch, tapping a pen against his knee.

The ex-mistress of the Queen of Mars reminisces. But what does the boy who wants to write a book have to do with anything? And what were they doing on Mars in the first place? Bogged down in research purgatory.

6. The Treasures of Orfeo [Name]

No first line yet. A story about fairy gifts, and the gifts princes really need to survive.

7. There Was No King is Israel
The girl called Requiem follows Levi to the edge of camp.

A retelling of Judges 19-21 in a post-apocalyptic setting. I'm a little reluctant to put effort into it, considering how difficult it's been to find a home for its sister story "Jericho," but I love the characters.

8. How to Howl at the Moon
You are standing in the forest, waiting for the wolf to find you.

The most intensely autobiographical piece I've ever started. It's about mental illness. I won't be surprised if I never finish it, to be honest, but I feel I have to try.

9. Café Macondo
"This coffee came from another dimension's grocery store," I explained.

Finally, all those hours spent working in a grocery store pay off! Yes, it's about interdimensional coffee, and yes, it's based on personal experience.

10. 29 Florist Avenue
Above all, a queen of [city] must know how to die.

I have a first line, and a setting, and a cast list as long as my arm. The plot will show up later. I can't wait to get to work on this one!

11. The Small Rain Down Can Rain
"We think there might be some interest," Stephan said, "in a posthumous collection."

Time-travel poetry is a dangerous art. Sometimes, people die. Laura Blumenthal is left to pick up the pieces of her poet sister's final collection.

12. The Improbably Library of Asmodeus Foster
Rosamund found the body in a footnote on page 216.

A great novel pulls you in, but what if you die there? A murder mystery, that's what! Like Laura in "The Small Rain Down Can Rain," Asmodeus Foster is protecting a poet sister's legacy, though I have the feeling Ms. Foster's is significantly more sinister.

13. "Four Burning Things" and "The Oracle and the Sea"
Mama Babel sets the coffee pot on the fire, stirring it with her bayonet to keep the gritty stuff from burning. and She hates the sea. For a long time, she thought it was the only thing she hated.

Are these the same story? If not, which pieces belong to which? I have complete drafts of both of them, but they seem to be lacking something, so I thought they might go together. But how? The quest continues.

14. Danae [working title]
He likes the owl best.

It began as a retelling of Perseus's birth, but now it has a healthy dose of sibling rivalry. And clockpunk—don't forget the clockpunk. I'm getting a distinctly "All the King's Monsters" vibe from this one, but that might have something to do with all the huge clockwork animals lumbering around.

15. Krahe [working title]
He wants to see the Crowgirl.

Ravens eat carrion. Zombies are carrion. Ergo, ravens must be the perfect defense against zombies. And being the alienated girl whom the ravens befriend could become very beneficial indeed. More sibling rivalry at work, and there remains the fact that I don't write about zombies and am not entirely sure where to go from where I am.

16. The Unbinding of Artemis Kale
Forty years later, when the murder of Artemis Kale had faded to a bourdon note in the amusement park's dying fugue, people still remembered the day Persephon Wilder came to Bluefish Bay.

Escape artists, and mediums, and murder in the sideshow tents. This story suffers from being loved too much. It desperately needs editing, and I can't bring myself to cut it into pieces. I need to see if I can coerce some family members into beta reading the current draft.

17. The Moth King
The National Library of Extinct Stories takes up three blocks of Vervain Street in downtown Andvarsuveld.

If Cathrynne Valente's gorgeous prose is a drug, I wrote this story in a drug-induced haze. It's missing huge chunks (I even marked them as I wrote the current draft: [huge chunk missing here]), so my task for NaNoWriMo will be shoving those in and making sure they fit seamlessly. Oh, yeah, and making sure the story doesn’t completely suck. Beta readers, to arms!

Whew! Looks like it's going to be a full November…

(Oh, yeah. The post title? Comes from a poem I also need to finish this month. My list of poems-in-progress is much, much longer than this.)

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Monday, October 25, 2010

first lines, insanity, NaNoWriMo, short fiction, writing

O Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness...

Hooray for autumn and the plentiful publication it brings!

1. The Autumn 2010 issue of Mirror Dance is live and lovely. Check out the great fiction, poetry, and a piece or two that falls between the cracks.

2. My story "Rosewinter" appears in the current issue of Niteblade. This is a pretty old story, originally written in fall of 2008, though reworked quite a bit since then. For those of you playing along at home, "Rosewinter" uses a spiral chronology similar to the one in "The Copperroof War," and is (along with "Cesare") one of the only villanous-woman's-first-name-titled stories I ever successfully completed, though I have ten or twelve sitting around in draft form.

3. My story "The Father of the Riverborn" appears in the current issue of Port Iris. This story is much newer, and the viewpoint character also plays a role in my novel-in-progress Jaquemart. This is also the only time you will ever, ever hear me talk about gender roles in fiction: "I’m familiar with psychoses...And this sexual-role nonsense sounds like a culture-wide psychosis."

4. I also have a story appearing in the September issue of Flagship, and poems appearing in Cabinet des Fees and Illumen. More on those as they come in.

5. The proof of Crimethink arrived today with all its pieces in the proper place! I pressed the fancy little approve button, and now you can buy a print copy from the Crimethink storefront: https://www.createspace.com/3476062. Remember that all proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders.

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Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Mirror Dance, poetry, publishing, short fiction, titles, updates

June Things!

The June issue of Mirror Dance is now online, and my story "The Copperroof War" appears in the June issue of Ideomancer.

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Wednesday, June 02, 2010

editing, fantasy, publishing, short fiction, updates, writing

Why, hello there!

I wrote this story a while ago, for a contest centered on this image. The story didn't win, and I trunked it...literally. While going through some old notebooks, I rediscovered it, and decided to share it with/inflict it on you, dear reader. Enjoy.

* * *

She had to be strong.

She had to be strong when, two weeks after the wedding, he came home and told her to pack everything she could into a duffle and meet him at the launch station in an hour. They had been chosen, he said, for the Alpha 340 rehabilitation project. Random assignment? Hardly—they knew it was the young ones, the strong ones, the open ones who found themselves stuffed into the long black ships, hurtling through space toward distant galaxies whose air man had never been meant to breathe. She knew it, and she knew it didn’t matter how they had been chosen; and instead of formulating an escape, of calling friends and neighbors and looking for places to hide, she took the suitcases that had been a wedding gift from her sister and began to pack.

She left the wedding dress hanging in her closet. Her daughter would wear it on her wedding day, she promised; together, they would return for it. She never came back.

She had to be strong when he called her from the station three years later, called and said there had been a mistake in his department and he would need to take the next ship back to Earth. He said it was only business and that he would return, but they both knew better. She had heard the other voice in the background of his call, heard the high-pitched laughter and muffled squeal of pleasure as he disconnected. She knew, as his ship left a trail of black in the blue-white sky, that Earth had nothing for her anymore.

She had to be strong in the six months after he left, in the first three months after the birth of their daughter. She heard the doctor explain it, again and again—what was wrong with the air on Alpha 340, and what was wrong with the child’s lungs. She spent long nights in rocking chairs in hospitals across the continent, shifting back and forth and watching comets leave blue-white trails in the black sky.

Sometimes, she rocked the child. She sang softly of blue Earth and black ships and the white dress in a closet somewhere, trillions of miles away, that her little one would wear one day.

Sometimes, she cried.

But she had to be strong. She did not cry at the funeral, or in the face of the reporters’ questions; when she wrote letters back to Earth, damning them for what they had done to her and to her daughter, the ink did not run from tears.
S
he had to be strong when they dismissed her from the mechanics plant, when her savings dried up, when the old man at the boarding house told her to leave because they didn’t want her kind around. She didn’t know what he meant by “her” kind—whether it was grief or poverty or strength he objected to.

But she knew she had to be strong. She filled her suitcase with tools and found a place far from the city, far from liars and fools and cruel curiosity, and made her own rehabilitation project. It would not abandon her, or sicken, or hate her for her grief. It would not betray her.

It would not be weak.

And with steel and wire, wrench and rivet, she made her own strength.

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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Cthulhu fhtagn, short fiction

Who let me on the opinion train?

This post called "Four Lies from the Mouth of God" "A beautifully written, truly awful story about the price women (and children) can pay for the political actions of men. Powerful reading, but I plan never to read it again."

My feelings are two.

1) Thank God someone appreciates the awfulness! I feared some things had lost their power to disgust.

2) Women paying for the actions of men? I thought this story was, if anything, about a man paying for the actions of a woman, children paying for the actions of that man, children paying for the actions of that woman, and finally the woman paying for her own actions. God save me from making a statement on gender--I am most horrendously unqualified.

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Friday, January 29, 2010

preaching to the invisible choir, reading, reviews, short fiction