Some updates--short stories and poems

A bit of a ramble here:

First, the story I announced in my last post, "Last Farewell of the Emperatrix" in Adventitious, is now free to read for everyone! The story has been favorably reviewed by Tar Valon and in Tangent Online. On the zine's Patreon page, the editor shares thoughts behind all the selections for the issue. I won't share everything he says (if you can support the zine by buying a copy and or becoming a Patreon member do so!), but part of what he says is 

I chose this story for the issue not only for that philosophical foundation, but because I’ve simply never read anything like it. It pushes the definitional boundaries of speculative fiction.

All of which is to say, check out the story for yourself and see if you agree! 

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I've also recently sold three poems, two to Star*Line (the flagship publication of the SFPA) and one to Kaleidotrope. This will be my third poem in Kaleidotrope, and I'm thrilled to have it in this quirky zine! I expect the Star*Line poems to come out in the next month or two. Kaleidotrope always has a longer lead time, so it could be any time in the next two years.

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I'm starting to pull together all my publications from the past year for things like year-end summaries and award eligibility. And I realize I've had two stories published this year that I shared on social media, talked about in the Lyrical Worlds newsletter...and then never added a post here. Oops.

The stories share one important thing in common: they were both published in venues specifically for stories that have been rejected many times but that their authors still believe in.

Hell Itself ("There’s a bit of advice we give to writers: 'Keep submitting your story until hell itself won’t have it.'”) specifically wants stories that have been rejected at least 10 times or have been what they call a "market killer," in other words stories that were accepted by a market that closed down before the story could come out. 

"Grey Eytel and His Band of Birds" qualified under both criteria, as it was accepted on its 13th submission for an anthology that never came to be. It's a story set in the New Weird-inflected city of Boskrea, telling an origin story for the city and how it's been remembered and misremembered ever since. Narratively and stylistically it shares some DNA with the Adventitious story above (but I'll leave that to my biographers some day to tease out...).

And finally, "The Ways of Plants and Spells" is a story set in the city of Ormenna, a city of spell growers who tend their gardens of magic. A couple other stories from this setting have been published over the years, and various not-yet-publihsed stories, a novel, and a novella (that are out on submission) are set there as well. This one appears in Trunk: Stories That Took the Long Way from Metaphorosis Books. In this case, the stories had to have been rejected at least 20 times (I believe mine had racked up 25+).