Infernal Salon: The Stream Recording!

This past Sunday, C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez hosted the Infernal Salon to support Strange Horizons! With the use of Negocios Infernales, a dice-less roleplaying game, each writer on the stream was challenged to write a short piece in a little over a half hour. The result was a four hour stream and a boost to Strange Horizons' Kickstarter for the coming year!

You can skip ahead to 2:18:38 of the four hour stream to see me reading a section of the 900-word (!!!) flash fiction I wrote. It's currently titled, "Poisoned Crossing," but may change once I get a chance to edit it.

Come to the Infernal Salon Sunday, 10/24/21!

On Sunday, October 24 at 7:30-9:30pm EST, I’ll be taking part in the live literary event! Talented writers C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez will be hosting an Infernal Salon on Arvan Eleron's Twitch channel to support Strange Horizons in the final days of its annual Kickstarter!

Our hosts will be giving every writer (like myself) a prompt of one or more cards from the very spooky deck they and artist Rebecca Huston concocted for their TTRPG "Negocios Infernales." Once every writer has their prompt, we'll set a timer for 30 minutes while they interview Strange Horizons affiliates.

At the end of it all, the writers will share their infernally-inspired works with the stream.

You can register here or learn more about the authors on the Facebook event here. See you then!

Here is the Mirror Dance Girl Ghost

So, because I am a walnut sometimes, I completely forgot to promote this flash piece that was published in Mirror
Dance for the Spring 2021 issue. It's called, "Here is the Girl Ghost." Editor Megan Arkenberg kindly gave it a home.

It took me a long time to place this story and it's a piece close to my heart. I don't pull straight from my own life a lot, but the memories attached to France are real. If the ghost is real, too, I haven't spoken to her, as far as I can remember.

It's a Beautiful Nightmare

IT'S HAPPENING.

Not only is it spooky season, but my short story, "Frost Bloom," is in this month's issue of Nightmare Magazine along with an Author Spotlight. You should absolutely buy an issue and support editor Wendy Wagner and my fellow authors, Orrin Grey, Franklin Ard, and Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas. 

But, if you don't want to, that's fine, because it's free today!

Enjoy some queer horror, friends!

Readercon 2021: Online!

The time is upon us. Readercon 31 lives!

I'm really excited to be part of such an all-star line-up. Register for the upcoming weekend of August 13-15 for a damn good program. And on Sunday, you can see me yelling about the ethics and boundaries of fiction! Hurray!

Sunday - 2:00 PM Main Track 1 • Everywhere a Threshold • Gillian Daniels (moderator), Amal El-Mohtar, Erin Roberts, Geoff Ryman, T.X. Watson 

Fantasy has always drawn energy from the border between quotidian Here and numinous There, out beyond the fields we know. But we can no longer assume we share the same Here. The shrinking of the globe has brought many of us into contact with worldviews that are profoundly different from the ones we know, in addition to uncovering unexpected commonalities. How does fantasy handle this tectonic shift? What are the works that navigate, nimbly or otherwise, this multiplicity of Heres and Theres and the blurring of the borders among them?

 

Sunday - 4:00 PM Main Track 2 • Content Tags: Implementation, Accommodation, and Ancillary Art • Katherine Crighton (moderator), Gillian Daniels, Foz Meadows, AJ Odasso, Megan Whalen Turner 

The increased prevalence of content tags has lead to growing questions around implementation. Useful for accommodation, content tags are also deployed on dynamic platforms such as AO3 to warn, advertise, and joke, becoming extra-diagetic material that is enjoyable on its own terms while providing meaningful context for the work. Still, there is a divide between those who want them and those who find them objectionable. How do content tags enhance and complicate reader experience, and what are emerging best practices that bookstores or publishers could adopt?

Cowboys and Cannibal Brides!

I'm completely bowled over. In early July, I quickly wrote and sent a submission to Flame Tree Fiction's newsletter flash fiction challenge, Hungry Cannibals. Thursday, I got an acceptance for the story.

Today? My horror flash fiction piece, “A Bride from the Hill Folk,” went out in the newsletter! It has cowboys, a post-apocalyptic landscape,  and, yes, cannibals. All in 1000 words!

I'm shocked and pleased by the quick turnaround time. The story will appear on the website in a month. I'm also very proud of it and think it's one of the creepiest things I've managed to publish. I can't wait to share the perma-link with everybody.