mariness

As I've previously noted, Donkey-Skin is not exactly high on the list of anyone's favorite fairy-tales. Part of the problem is that it repeats elements of other fairy tales -- notably East o'the Sun, West o'the Moon -- but also Goose Girl and Cinderella. The larger problem is its initial subject matter: incest, an element that got the story kicked out of fairy tale books for young and old alike.

I'm not fond of it myself. So, naturally, I did what I do with so many other fairy tales: I did a little something with it. "The Princess and Her Tale" was sent out to Daily Science Fiction subscribers last week and is now up on the web. Enjoy!

(And consider subscribing -- they'll be offering another little tale from me in the indefinite future.)

Issue 15 of Shimmer, with my story, "A Cellar of Terrible Things," is now available in print or electronic form.

Shimmer is one of my favorite zines, focusing on really beautiful language and tales, and I'm very pleased to be part of this issue. I talked a little bit about the story came about here, probably not well, since I'm not very good at describing how I write a story, partly because each story is a little different. Some come a little faster than others, some need more planning, some need more revision or rework, and often, by the time I'm asked about the story, I don't remember the specifics.

Anyway, enjoy!

My story, "Nameless," was emailed out to Daily Science Fiction subscribers today - yet another reason to sign up for this zine. It's free, and I love it. Admittedly, I'm biased since this is my third piece in it, but even if you hate my stuff, DSF offers a lot of other excellent work. (I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they get a Hugo nomination tomorrow -- I know there were several deserving semipro zines, but these guys have put in a LOT of work, what with the email subscription, the stories on the site, monthly Kindle digests and upcoming collections, while managing to publish a story every weekday, and I'd love to see that recognized.)

I'll have more to say about this story next week, when it goes up on the DSF website, but for now, I need to take a moment to recover from the, um, experience of watching Wrath of the Titans. Snark for this film is coming, guys, it's coming. Oh, is it coming. In the meantime, I can only urge you, as you approach the theatre, to consider popping into the 3D Titanic movie instead.

My short story, In the Pits of Isfhan is up at The Red Penny Papers today.

A few points about this: one, this is my seventh published short story this year, a big jump from last year's three published short stories (not counting flash fiction and poetry). Two, this story was featured as the cover story and illustration, which is new for me and pretty. Three, it's not easy to tell, I admit, but although this story was written much earlier, it's in the same setting as Trickster -- different planet, same multiverse, nyagon -- and Love in the Absence of Mosquitoes (although with that story, it's more that one of the characters makes an appearance in at least one and hopefully more stories set in this multiverse; when I wrote that, I set it in a future Earth, and was quite surprised when a character decided to walk into another tale, giving me the chance to learn much more about her. As these things happen, I suppose.)

These three stories are remarkably different -- fantasy, fantasy/science fiction (yes, the references in "Trickster" that sounded vaguely like computer equipment were computer equipment) and pure science fiction -- which gives me some hope that this flexibility can continue in future stories.

And with that I'm pretty sure this ends publications for 2011, except for the last two Tor.com posts for the year. Don't be too down -- I have a few things popping up in 2012. I'll probably do a general summary of 2011 sometime in the next two weeks.

A few quick self-pimping notes:

1) My short story, "Green," just went up at Bourbon Penn today. It's also available the Kindle and in hard copy form at Blurb.

This story was written a few years back, and although certain details allow me to date it pretty precisely, I don't remember much about writing it. Like many of my contemporary stories, it's set in a very precise place -- the apartment and other details mentioned actually exist, along with the South Florida rain. If I wrote it now I would probably remove a certain frequently repeated name.

2) I went with starting the reread of the Dark Is Rising series after all since I had to return most of them to the library. The post about Over Sea, Under Stone is up at Tor.com now, and is already generating some comments. I suspect we'll have more when I reach the fifth book, a book that I remembered being very unhappy with and which lived down to my expectations. (I did enjoy this one.)

3) And if for some reason you missed it last week, Trickster is up at Clarkesworld. And today, I actually met a random stranger at a coffee shop (ok, it's me; the coffee part wasn't that random) who had actually read Clarkesworld, if not this story, so I almost felt quasi-famous. This feeling was immediately dispersed when we realized we were not actually talking about the same zine at all and he had the name wrong. Quasi-fame, it is fleeting. Just like the real thing!

My short story, Love in the Absence of Mosquitoes, is now up at the Journal of Unlikely Entomology.

This story was sparked years back during a graduate class on chemical ecology, where I was supposed to be focusing on corals and naturally went other places instead. I admit that I hesitated before sending it to this particular journal, since, as you may note, the journal is supposed to be dealing with unlikely entomology, and I was dealing with quite likely entomology indeed. But a previous editor had loftily informed me that the science of the story was "too implausible," so I decided to gamble that the editors of this zine had not spent too much time perusing technical articles on chemical ecology and would agree that the science here is too implausible. Events proved me right, but I would like to note, for the record, that the science of this tale is quite, quite real, if still in the development stage. The rest is not.

Vani later decided to walk into a few other stories of mine, something I was not anticipating when I wrote this tale. Some of those stories happen to be in a very loosely linked series of tales, only one of which (And in its absence, hunger) has appeared so far. When I wrote this, I had no immediate plans to feature Vani again – although I knew she had more of a story – and certainly no plans to link her with the nyagon/Isfhan tales – so I'm not certain whether this story can be called part of that series or not. Hmm. Let's call it an accidental addition.

Since it's Saturday, and people often miss Saturday posts, plus the Rapture and all that, I'll probably throw up another link to this story sometime this week.

No matter how much I try to prove otherwise, I can't seem to shut down the persistent little rumor that fiction and poetry are dead. Dying. Murdered by the internet. In the case of poetry I think the internet proves the direct opposite. When I first attempted to publish (very bad) poetry back in the 1980s publishing poetry was hard. Limited markets, and attempting to get a copy of the poetry journals in print to see what was they were publishing (always good advice) incredibly difficult even for someone living in a very wealthy town with an excellent library, and later, with an eh college library and an outstanding university library. Multiple people told me, at university poetry readings and assorted other seemingly poetry friendly places, that poetry was dying; writing it was pointless.

Hello internet!

I won't go so far as to say that the internet saved poetry – an at least 4000 year old art form is not that dependent on technology – but it has certainly made it much easier to publish poetry, find poetry, hear poetry, discover forms not listed in the various Norton Anthologies, find minor poets, minor works by major poets, and more. It hasn't, as far as I can see, helped poets earn money – but if I recall correctly only four or five poets in the 20th century could earn their living through poetry alone (as opposed to inheritances, handouts from friends, medical careers and so on) and I may be overcounting that number. So that hasn't changed much.

But I digress: this was supposed to just be a short introduction to "Save Our Zines" day, a day to celebrate the multiple print and online zines that are, often at a financial loss, keeping poetry and fiction alive. Here's just a few of the many, many zines that deserve your love, and prove that short fiction and poetry are very very much alive:

Online:

Abyss and Apex publishes a strong blend of science fiction and fantasy. Check out Wikihistory.

Apex Magazine does horror – but horror of the good, shivery kind, not horror of the gross out kind.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies: Rich fantasy.

Café Irreal: This one may not be to everyone's taste, but if you like your fiction really inexplicable and literary, this is the place to go. They published one of my personal favorites,Broomsticks, some time ago, and that, oddly, didn't put them out of business, and continue to print little bits of weird.

Clarkesworld has one major flaw: it doesn't publish often enough. Mostly science fiction, but sometimes fantasy or science fiction tinged with fantasy.

Fantasy doesn't just publish the occasional tale of mine, folks. In the last year they've also printed tales by Nancy Kress, selfavowedgeek, wirewalking, camillealexa and more. This is as good a time as any to link to the utterly hilarious Teaching a Pink Elephant to Ski.

Farrago's Wainscot sucks because it's closing down. Sniffle.

Goblin Fruit is, simply, drop dead gorgeous. And more importantly, poetry. Fairy tales. What's not to love?

Innsmouth Free Press. CTHULHU.

Three Crow Press. Not Cthulhu. But fun stuff nonetheless.

McSweeney's probably doesn't need the publicity, but I love this site: daily snippets of sarcasm/wit/humor, sometimes even literary.

Print:

Shimmer: Speculative Fiction for a miscreant world.

Sybil's Garage is a beautifully put together zine – illustrations and side notes and little things that you miss the first time and see the second time.

Weird Tales. They like, won a Hugo, folks.

Electric Velocipede. They also won a Hugo, folks.

Feel free to recommend the many, many zines I've forgotten and overlooked in the comments. I haven't had enough coffee yet today.