A Trove of Fabulous Short Stories over at Curious Fictions!

If you’re looking for short stories to read, be sure to check out Curious Fictions. This little known gem is a platform for short story reprints. The site will ask you for credit card information up front, but all the content is completely free, though tipping is encouraged. You can also subscribe to your favorite authors.

It is a great option for short story writers who too often see their previously published stories vanish into a kind of oblivion a few months after being published. I have uploaded a few stories there and like having a no fuss place to give these stories a second chance to be seen.

 

Most recently, you can find my story, Short Straw, on the site. It previously appeared in the Lost Worlds anthology by Flame Tree Press (print only). The link for Short Straw in the sidebar will now direct to Curious Fictions. 

 

While I hope you'll enjoy the stories I’ve posted there, I know you won't be disappointed with the site: it is stuffed with amazing stories, easy to navigate, and easy to read on a variety of screens.

 

Here’s a little teaser for Short Straw:

 

“Don’t tell the trees your name,” the wild grasses whispered as they batted their bearded heads against the linen skirt wrapped around Nina’s thin hips. Her great grandparents, the first colonists, had brought rice and wheat, barley and rye, and crossed their seeds with the new-world plants. But the grains they produced were inedible. Still, they abandoned grasses persisted, and the wild meadow won a few more inches of ground every year.

 

She looked up, past the settlement to where the tallest branches of the forest canopy snared the sinking sun. “I have to go,” she said.

 

“If you must go, take us with you,” they whispered.

 

Nina closed her hands capturing two fistfuls of seed heads, pulled them off their stems, and shoved them into her skirt pockets. "There. Happy?"

 

“No.”

Save the Date Writing Butterflies, This Year’s Armadillocon Writing Workshop is Friday, August 3!

Crack your knuckles and warm up your keyboards, it’s time to polish up your short story or first chapter for the annual Armadillocon Writing Workshop!

Submissions are DUE Friday June 15, 2018

This is an excellent, low-cost workshop for writers who want to:

• Work with professional writers and editors familiar with speculative fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. 
• Learn how to give and receive critique in a small-group, face-to-face setting
• Find out if workshops and in-person critique groups are useful to their writing progress
• Find their tribe and make connections with others that will serve their writing year round.
• Take their writing to the next level.

The workshop will be Friday, August 3, 2018 

We will spend the morning in panels on the craft and business of writing and doing a writing exercise or two. Then, lunch with the professional writers and fellow students in your breakout critique group. The afternoon will be spent in in-depth, collaborative critique sessions where you will be both giving and receiving critique. 

Just $90 gets you the full-day workshop and a full convention membership to attend all of the activities for the entire weekend. ArmadilloCon is an excellent regional literary convention, which means there will be lots of great panels about writing, reading, and the state of the genre (there are also panels about movies, tv shows, gaming, and everything geek). 

Sponsored seats for writers of color!

We are committed to promoting diversity and access for all workshop attendees. Writing in a genre centered on exploration and encountering the Other must include voices and visions from writers and readers of all kinds. The Workshop actively seeks to include students, faculty, visiting scholars, and volunteers from a variety of backgrounds including, but not limited to race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, economic status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, and ability. 

To that purpose we are offering a limited number of sponsored seats to the workshop for writers of color. To apply for a seat, follow the link on the workshop page.

If are interested in sponsoring a seat for a writer of color, contact me at armadilloconwritersworkshop@gmail.com

Fantastical Fictions Bookclub: The Door to Lost Pages by Claude Lalumière

It seems fitting that we’ll be meeting at one of Austin’s most unusual bookshops, Malvern Books, to discuss lovely mosaic novella centered around an idiosyncratic bookstore. Although, Malvern has 100% less dogs than the bookstore featured in Claude Lalumière’s The Door to Lost Pages, it has some of the magic.

But don’t take my word for it, swing by the store to pick up a copy of this lovely little book, and then come back on Wednesday, July 12 at 7:00 p.m. to discuss The Door toLost Pages.

"Lost Pages wasn’t the only bookshop I frequented, but the books I found on its shelves were… unique. I never saw any of these books anywhere else. Bizarre Bestiaries. Dictionaries of dead, obscure languages. Maps to lands that may never have been. Essays on religions with unfamiliar names. Obscure mythologies. Accounts of wars no history teacher had ever mentioned. Such were the wares of the bookshop that fed my teenage dreams."

More magical realism than straight up fantasy, this book combines elements of urban fantasy with lonely childhoods and difficult family relationships that are rendered with gritty realism. There are also winged skeleton creatures, dark gods, tentacles  and a shifting pack of friendly dogs. It’s a homey multiverse of myth, folktale, dreams and nightmares. Be warned, the erotic and sexual elements that are often latent in fairy tales are more overt here as the characters wrestle with desires and both visceral and ethereal.

In the true Austin tradition, this is an author that knows how to keep it weird. If you enjoy The Door to Lost Pages, Claude Lalumière will be in Austin for the ArmadilloConConvention on August 4 – 6, and back at Malvern Books to read from his latest book Venera Dreams on August 9 at 7:00 p.m.

Talking with Robert Jackson Bennett

Hello again! I've been busy not blogging. Busy doing what you might ask? Well, talking with Robert Jackson Bennett for one. Here's the first half of our interview at Malvern Books for their Fantastical Fictions reading series. You can read a bit more about him and this event here. And, not to leave you hanging, here's the link to the second half of the interview.

It was great fun discussing what goes into crafting great stories and creating imaginary worlds. Having read some of Bennett's work I can vouch that he is excellent at both. 

His newest book, City of Miracles, is about to drop in May. It is the third book in his Divine Cities series (which means you have time to get up to speed with City of Stairs and City of Blades before spring). BTW, Malvern Books should still have some signed copies of City of Stairs and City of Blades.

If you're looking for something a little more literary in the great American horror tradition, consider picking up a copy of American Elsewhere. 

"Mad and humorous, gory and poignant, American Elsewhere is a sort of mid-20th-century retelling of the embodiment of Lovecraftian Elder Gods by way of Alamogordo's legendary atomic tests. It's not to be missed."  ―Seattle Times

Let's see, what else? You can also check out my review of Room Magazine over at The Review Review.

And on the home (fiction) front, I'll have a short story publication to announce soon. I have also finished a rather involved revision of a novella, which will be on it's way to some lucky editor before the year is out. Then it is on to/back to 'the novel.' More about that in the next post - next Thursday.

Brave Writers, Brave Readers: Exploring the Fantastic Realities of Imagination One Book at a Time

Nisi Shawl brought her Retro-Afrofuturist Steampunk novel set in the Belgian Congo to Austin's own Malvern Books last Friday night and it was fantastic! Every copy of Everfair was snapped up, and it was standing room only for Nisi's engaging reading. She even got us to sing a bit. If you don't believe me you can see it for yourself.


After the reading she sat down with Fantastical Fictions host, Christopher Brown, to discuss how this book came about. It all started when she was asked to be on a panel about steampunk, a sub genre she didn't particularly enjoy. Instead of saying no, she asked herself, why do I hate steampunk? Her answer was because it supported colonialism. Then she thought, it doesn't have to be this way and set out to write a steampunk utopia set in King Leopold II's Congo. Now that's the kind of bravery that generates great writing. Instead of saying no thank you to a discussion about a subgenre she disliked, she interrogated her own opinions and came up with something completely original. 

Exploring other worlds, other voices and visions of reality is the heart of speculative fiction. Exploration is exhilarating and dangerous and sometimes frightening. Exploration inevitably leads to contact and raises questions about how we treat the Other, how we see the Other, and, of course, how we see ourselves. Brave writing requires brave readers who must be willing to question their own opinions and biases. For both readers and writers who can do this, the rewards are great.

When Brown asked her why a utopia (they both agreed, and I do too, that utopias are much more difficult to write than dystopias)? Shawl dropped some real wisdom:

"The world that we live in is based, in part, on the world we think we live in, and so if I can change how people think about the world -- If I can change the world they think they live in, then they can take it to the next step."

You can read a more about the book and Shawl process in her essay, Representing My Equals.



In other news, if you're looking for something to do this Thursday, I'll be among some great local writers opining about one of my favorite topics: the current state of speculative fiction!

Join the Writers’ League of Texas on BookPeople's third floor at 7:00 p.m. for this conversation with four science fiction/fantasy writers: P.J. Hoover, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Adam Soto, and  Rebecca Schwarz.


"We've all heard the statement, "It's like something out of science fiction." Changes in politics and technology often seem to resemble the invented worlds of writers like Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin. But those novelists' most famous books were written more than 40 years ago. What stories is this prescient genre creating today? What worlds do writers invent when reality seems so fantastic?"

Listen to Hands of Burnished Bronze at PodCastle!

Bronze hands by Rodin

My story, Hands of Burnished Bronze, is now live at PodCastle! It's read by the amazing Cheyenne Wright a freelance illustrator who just happens to have a voice made for invoking fantasy worlds. I love the extra dimension that his reading gives this story. 

As I mentioned before, I have been a long time PodCastle listener, so I'm delighted to hear one of my very own stories on this podcast. Do be sure to check out the many other wonderful stories on this site. There is plenty of fantastic fantasy ear candy to help you get through a long commute or whatever tedious chores await you.

See The Elephant Cover Reveal

My story, Fairview 619, is going to be in the fabulous See The Elephant magazine later this month. Check out this fantastic cover and peruse the table of contents here. 

Also, I'm delighted to announce that I have a brand new story, Hands of Burnished Bronze, that will be available for your listening pleasure later this year from PodCastle! This is one of the podcasts that I listen to regularly. I have heard so many wonderful stories here that I'm really over the moon about having one of my own join the ranks.

Just time for a quick update today. I'm mulling, outlining, and making some big changes to the novel. While doing that, I'm also revising a couple broken short stories that have been laying about too long. Time to get those puppies out the door. My submissions queue has gotten dangerously low. I'm getting lonely as I'm hardly receiving even one rejection per week.

"Naturally, she turned Mike into a dog."

My story, "Naturally," is now live for your reading enjoyment at NewMyths.com. And yes, it is about a rather creative solution to a difficult relationship.


I tinkered with this one for a long time and am delighted that it found a home at NewMyths. Be sure to stick around are read the rest of the amazing stories in issue 33 and beyond!

This seems to be my month for dog stories. Sometimes it just works out that way.

Daniel Ausema and the Meaning of Place in Fiction

Meadow to forest to pond, ecotones are everywhere.

Today, Daniel Ausema, contributing author in Ecotones is here to talk about his story of place in SFFWorld.com’s fourth anthology.

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The first time I heard the word Ecotone, it was for the literary magazine of that name. I didn't know its meaning, only that the journal's tagline was "a journal of place." Place to me is vital, both in real life and fiction, especially the natural surroundings—whether that's the deciduous woods and glacial lakes where I grew up or the mountains outside my door today. When we moved here I cared more for the view of those mountains and the prevalence of hiking, biking, and running trails than I did about the quality of restaurants and nightlife.

In writing, I'm often told that my stories have a strong sense of place, that people feel present within the imagined confines of the story. Even when that setting is surreal or out of the ordinary, readers sense that care I have for the physical surroundings. One of the joys of reading fiction of any kind is being brought to an unfamiliar place (or seeing a familiar one made new); one of the joys of writing speculative fiction especially is conjuring such a place out of words.

So when the anthology's theme was announced, I liked it even before I'd read the explanation. An anthology about place, an anthology of stories that take note of and celebrate their settings and the physical world around them? Sign me up.

Then I read the definition of ecotone and the full explanation of the theme and found it to be different: not about place per se but about those border zones where one real or metaphorical place blends into another. If anything, this made me like the idea even better.

First, there's a long tradition in fantasy and folktales that the border between regions is important. Dawn and dusk, the shoreline, the cusp of adulthood, the edge of the forest, the turning of the year. These are key places (and times) where magic often seeps through.

The more I thought about this, the more I began to see all the possibilities. Borders are everywhere, literal and metaphorical places and times that bleed into each other. Those ecotonal zones are such a powerful place for a story to take place. I might even be tempted to say that at some level they become a key part of Story to make it real.

Add to that the ecological aspect. I grew up in a family that placed a high value on science and the natural world. We traveled to scenic places and even at home noticed the details of nature. My older brothers ended up with degrees related to ecology and biology, one as a teacher and the other as a park ranger. And I have been both involved in various environmental education settings.

So the theme of the anthology is a great fit for my interests, and add to that the keynote writers: I didn't know the full list of great writers who would be in the anthology, but I knew it'd be a great lineup. The chance to join such a group of excellent writers was one I couldn't pass up.

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Want to read Daniel’s story of a special magical place? Want 13 other great, ecotoned stories from professional and amateur writers from around the globe?

Then look no further than Kickstarter campaign!

Enter to win a $10 Amazon gift card by posting a link to this post on Twitter or Facebook. Remember to use the hashtag #Ecotone and come back here to let us know you promoted our anthology (provide link). The winner will be contacted via the email address used to comment. And we’ll announce the winner at the end of the blog tour (December 5th, 2015) on SFFWorld.com’s main site.

If you are curious, check out what other contributors have to say on this Ecotour check out the links below:

• Ecotones Guest Blog Post - Victor Espinosa 
• Why Ecotones? - Jon Laidlow
• Ecotour - N. E. White
• Ecotones Anthology - The Mary Sue
• Ecotones Pro-Am Anthology - Cli-Fi.net
• Climate Fiction Update, It’s now Eco-Fiction - Claude Nougat
• Eco-Fiction

Here's Ursula K. Le Guin's Fiery Speech from Last Night's National Book Awards

Give that woman an mic so she can drop it! Last Night the National Book Awards honored Ursula K. Le Guin with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. You can read more about it at NPR and Motherboard. It would be enough that one of my favorite feminist, science fiction authors won a prestigeous literary award, but then she gave a speech that encapsulates and articulates the zeitgeist of the world of letters right now.

She starts out by recognizing the importance of fantasy and science fiction in literature, and then wades into speak truth to the world of publishing. This vast and chaotic, somewhat broken machine that commodifies our art and letters for mass consumption. She uttered a battle cry that both gave no quarter and inspired hope - at least in this writer.   

According to NPR, at the after party, Le Guin said of her speech: "I hope it goes outside this room."
 
Parker Higgins transcribed her entire speech. I'm reblogging most of it below. Check out his post for her speech in its entirety, and stick around to check out his super cool parker higgins dot net blog.

"I rejoice at accepting [this award] for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
 
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write.

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. It’s name is freedom."

Neil Gaiman presents Ms Le Guin with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

Story Fail, Critique Win! Or, My Story Will Rise Again!

Red Bleed by Jon Coffelt

Another post about failing and just how awesome it can be!

I brought the first half of my novelette, Izzy Crow, to my local critique group on Tuesday night where it pretty much totally fell down. While everyone agreed that the writing was fine on the micro level (I like to think that I’ve achieved some competency in that area), the most consistent reaction overall was confusion. I want to elicit many emotions in a reader, but confusion is definitely not one of them.

While writing, I had hoped that I was pulling things off brilliantly. Yet I’m not surprised by my writing fail. Whenever I’m drafting I’m working hard to create the best story I ever have (my goal with each new project). I believe that you have to go into the first draft with a little hubris. A hubris born from an original idea so awesome that it inspired me to undertake the whole mad project in the first place. Hubris is also fuel for the engine that powers me through the thousands of words it takes to get the mangled corpse of the brilliant idea down on the page.

Another other thing that informs my first drafts is a piece of advice that I remember from last year’s Armadillocon. Unfortunately, I can’t remember who said it. It was during the opening session, when all the authors, editors, and various experts were arrayed across half the room, firing all their words of advice at us acolytes like so much buckshot. The advice was:

Don’t be afraid to fail.

A lot of things have to happen if you want to continue to get better. You have to show up and do the work and you have to learn the craft, but you can’t just keep coloring inside the lines. Failing is all about putting yourself out there. Trying something crazy, untenable, something nobody’s ever tried before, because if you always stay safe inside your zone of competency, you’ll never really breakthrough. I believe that to create something great, something transcendent, you have to keep making that leap. Or as Robert Browning put it:

"Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?"

And that leap guarantees failure. That’s why failure is my friend. I really believe that you can’t find out what doesn’t work – until it doesn’t work. You can’t skip failing, just like you couldn’t skip falling down when you were learning to walk.

As for as the critique: I don’t bring a piece of writing to the group until I feel like it’s at a point were people can at least see what I’m trying to achieve. But by the middle draft, it’s been just me and the story for so long and I’m so deep into it that I can’t judge it any more. I really can’t tell if it’s great or terrible. And honestly, I’m usually a little bored with it too. Hearing everyone discuss what they saw – and didn’t see – in the story, can both reset my compass, and get me fired up about it all over again.

The group was able to tell me where they were confused and why, and what they were (and mostly weren’t) getting out of it emotionally. This is invaluable. They tossed around a lot of ideas that really got my brain cooking. Instead of coming home depressed that this piece of writing wasn’t working, I was excited and stayed up way too late restructuring, reoutlining, and sketching in the scenes that will make this into a different, but definitely better, story.

The Poetry and the Prose

Leonid Tishkov's Private Moon project

April is National Poetry Month, so let's talk about poetry. The point I want to get around to is that, if you're a writer, it's important to read poetry. But saying poetry is important is such a complete buzz kill. And it's not only important, it's demanding. Poetry requires more from you, the reader. It requires rereads and contemplation and mulling. So, it's important and demanding --ugh! Poetry is starting to sound like some horrible memo from management that you know you should have read, but you'd rather just fake it and hope you don't get fired for missing some action item in the third paragraph.

I truly believe anyone who gives poetry half a chance will be rewarded by the effort, but poetry has even more to offer writers. Matt Debenham makes an excellent case for reading poetry in his post: What Prose Writers Can Steal From Poets. He talks about the special way that poets use language (and how they often don't use adjectives and adverbs very much) to create a powerful experience. 

"[Poets] don’t have, usually, dialogue and scene to convey character. Their main tool is the image."

Poets do this to communicate to the reader across great distances or centuries or class lines or gender. They do it to find an emotional connection, to share something visceral that rings true and reaffirms our humanity. Wait, that's what we're all trying to do when we write.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Poets may not be concerned with narrative devices such as plot and character (though you might be surprised how often those elements show up even in the shortest poems), but there's a world of things a writer can learn simply by regularly reading poetry: economy of language and density, how to manipulate metaphor and simile, and how to work in images. The line is as important as the whole and how words sound is often as important as what they mean.

My favorite way to train my ear for rhythm and style, for the sound of my writing, is to read long form poetry. My favorites include classic epics such as John Miltion's Paradise Lost and Beowulf, and other long poems such as William Wordsworth's The Prelude and Ovid's Metamorphoses, but I'm the first to admit that these require a lot of the reader.

There is another class of long poem called verse novels, that is more conducive to -- well to just reading at the end of a long day. And I believe that just reading this stuff with a modicum of attentiveness (which as a writer, that's how you read everything, right?) will train your ear, and it will begin to show in your writing without conscious effort! The other advantage of verse novels is that they are big enough in scope to be concerned with creating a world, and usually have the narrative devices we enjoy in prose such as characters and plot, even suspense. 

Writing science fiction and fantasy is about exploring the unknown, invoking the alien and making it immediate, visceral, human. Poetry, long or short can show us new and different, and often brilliant, ways to accomplish great things, and if some of it is a little challenging, well, the greatest pleasures are often those we earn.