Tag: fantasy

“The Girl with the Frozen Heart” coming soon from The Book Smugglers

March 20, 2018

Book Smugglers Publishing: Awakenings

My short story* “The Girl with the Frozen Heart” will be released by Book Smugglers Publishing in summer 2018. It will available on The Book Smugglers website and as an ebook.

Book Smugglers Publishing is the publishing venture of The Book Smugglers, a book review site run by two awesome people, Ana Grilo and Thea James. They have published writers such as Octavia Cade, Tonya Liburd, and José Iriarte. My story “The Girl with the Frozen Heart” will be one of six stories in their 2018 season, “Awakenings.”

(Dramatic voice) So, after slogging away in the rejection pile for ten years with nary a token-paying publication to my name,** I have finally sold a short story. And it’s to The Book Smugglers, who have a sizable audience and several years of impressive line-ups. And did I mention their awesome cover art?

Give the story a read when it comes out! I hope you will enjoy it.

 

*Long enough to be called a “novelette” in F/SF circles but for simplicity’s sake I will refer to stories below novella length as a short story.

**Admittedly, I didn’t submit to a lot of token-paying markets. Not because I thought myself above them—oh no—but because I’d get displeased with a story and retire it before I get that far down the list.

“The Cosmos Chronicler” forthcoming in Polar Borealis

March 16, 2018

Polar Borealis Magazine

My poem “The Cosmos Chronicler” will appear in Polar Borealis #6. The issue is scheduled for a spring 2018 release, and will be available as a free PDF download. Appearing in the same issue will be my friend Lena Ng, which makes this extra special.

Another thing that makes it special: Assuming (hoping, praying) all goes according to schedule, this will be my first published piece of either story or poetry.

The full impact hasn’t quite hit me. Maybe it will when it’s out. The past several months have been wonderful… and very, very strange. I went from ten years of rejections to several acceptances within a few months (idea for a future blog post: that rejection mountain). Not that I’m complaining—I know full well how incredible this is. It just feels surreal, more “is this really happening?” and less “this-is-happening-and-I’m-going-to-run-around-screaming!”

It may be a little odd, that my first publication will be a poem. But it’s fitting. Generally, I think of myself as a storyteller more than a poet. Telling stories is something I’ve done for as long as I can remember. Poetry I started doing in a more normal way, the way most kids start: with school assignments. (Some I went completely overboard for. Such as writing seven-page epics before I got out of elementary school. How and why did I do that? I can barely write an epic now.)

However, if you were to ask me which I started writing first, poetry or prose… I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Until I was ten I didn’t write my stories down. I’m not sure which came first: my poem about Christmas fairies or my Anne of Green Gables rip-off first chapter (Hey, I was ten!). So in a way poetry influenced me to write things rather than just imagine them.

Now I shall climb out of the nostalgia tunnel. More announcements soon, for short stories!