mariness

My story, You Will Never Know What Opens, just popped up at Lightspeed Magazine.

You can also get a copy of the issue for $3.99, or, better yet, buy a year's subscription for $35.88 - which is a savings of about 25% off the cover price.

I had a horrible time trying to figure out a title for this story.  That's not one of my skills to begin with - thus the questionable titles for many of my pieces - but this one was particularly difficult. I finally submitted the piece under the title "The Doors," only to have the editor, John Joseph Adams, tell me that the title was not very good.

I couldn't argue the point, and focused on coming up with more titles. Alas, the Lightspeed editors were equally unenthusiastic about:

"You Are Incapable of Summing Up This Story with a Decent Title"

"For the World Is Hollow and I Can't Think of a Title"

and the one I still kinda regret not going with

"Hamlet, Because That's Been a Pretty Successful Play, and Maybe the Title Is Why"

Ah well. At least the story has a title now.

Enjoy!

The latest issue of Fireside Fiction just went live, and with it, my short story, The Middle Child's Practical Guide to Surviving a Fairy Tale, the story I read at last year's World Fantasy Con and this year's ICFA. Originally written as a Twitter joke, it slowly grew into a blog post, as these things do, and then mutated into a short story.

Also just going live, the latest issue of Lightspeed, available for subscribers or as an individual issue, which includes my short story, "Deathlight," along with new short stories by An Owomoyela, Seanan McGuire, and Wole Talabi, reprints from a number of well known names including Tim Pratt and Elizabeth Hand, and Hugh Howey's "The Plagiarist."

I may have a bit more to say about this one once my individual story goes live on the web on May 17, but for now, I'll just note that the two stories are, I think, quite different - and not just because one is more or less fantasy (if a bit snarky about it) and the other marks my return to hard science fiction.

Enjoy!