mariness

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.