Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Two stories, one to read and one to hear. Wait, make that three!

The Dying Earth anthology is finally out. My story "To Climb by the Light of the Sputtering Sun" was written specifically for the antho. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was the only full short story I wrote in 2018. (I wrote some flash and micro fiction, not to mention the draft of one novel and a major revision of another. But only the one short story.)

We had a lot of discussion in the forums about what the Dying Earth subgenre really is. A lot of people, even knowledgeable writers, conflated it with your standard apocalyptic, end-of-the-world kinds of stories. But these have a different flavor, a mood and feeling of the world as an old, old place, where powerful technologies have been invented and lost countless times so that the line between what the characters think of as magic and what they consider science becomes blurred. It's a really fun space to explore. The writers in the antho just got our digital copies of the book the other day, so I'm looking forward to seeing how the other writers addressed it.

My story involves a team of scavengers, mistrusted by the other citizens of their aging city. But when the power goes out in the city, they're given the task to search for the magical? technological? parts to restore the electricity.

Be sure to pick up your copy of the Dying Earth anthology today!

Second, you can listen to me read one of my flash fiction stories at Beth Turnage's website. A few months ago, a group of us sat down and wrote entries for the Weird Christmas contest. None of us were chosen, but we got to talking and liked the idea of hearing each other read our own stories. Only problem for me: I fully expect to find a paying market for my piece and am planning to send it out again on submission. And releasing a recording of it would turn it into a reprint. So I went back for a suitably holiday-themed reprint of my own and read my story "Letter to Santa from a Budding Mad Scientist," which was published in Splickety Magazine a few years ago.

It isn't often you get to listen to me read my own work, so enjoy!

And last but not least, last year's SFFWorld anthology was the superhero-themed Pacific City shared-world anthology. It includes my story "Over Sea, Under Surveillance," about people who want to be left alone and a high tech government who won't let them. This leads to the origin story of a new superhero of the ocean.

The anthology is free for two days only...and one of those days is already past. So hurry for your chance to get a copy of the anthology, full of a wide range of superheroes fighting to save the city. Or maybe fighting the city to save something else.

Happy reading, whatever holidays you choose to celebrate!

Friday, December 06, 2019

The next Lyrical Worlds newsletter

I knew a newsletter going out at the start of the week would just get lost in Cyber Monday sales pitches (and yikes, I knew it would be bad, but it seemed like a lot more than other years this time...). So the December newsletter will be going out early next week.

You shouldn't miss this month's. In addition to news and the like, this month will include a seasonal story, "A Winter Solstice Sun,"--and it will even include some fan art that I was given around the time it was first published. Here's a teaser of a portion of that picture:

What? There's got to be a story around that. And there is. So subscribe to the newsletter now so you can not only read the story but also find out just how that all came about. My subscriber numbers have doubled in the past month. I'd love to see it double again--join in so you don't miss out!