It's a Jumble

  Late as usual, but here are some stories I loved in January and February of this year.   Things of the sea and water “False Gills” by M.A. Blanchard in Uncharted Magazine “ I want to be real,” I say, though she didn’t ask. “I want to be like you, an unreal thing more true than real things know how to be. I want to be myself and nothing else. I want to breathe underwater and gnaw on the bones of people who think that they can own me.” Oh, this dark story of desire and rage. A story that starts off in sunlight and domestic bliss. Two women in love live happily in a fairytale forest cottage, filling their days with mushroom hunting, baking, pickling, cleaning, homemaking. . .until one of the women is seduced by an undine who lives in a well. I love the shifts in this story, how we come to realize that what we thought was domestic bliss wasn’t at all; how our view changes of Lorna, the woman whom the narrator loves. It’s a wonderful, weird, atmospheric and shifting piece of cottag

Light in the sky when the kids get up for school now. The song of birds outside the window. It’s still cold, but the signs of spring are here. The earth is thawing. There are horrors on my news feed, and amid that there are small beauties in the world. Some things I’ve published and other news, if you care to hear:   New stories In case you missed it. . .  “An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words”  was published in Lightspeed Magazine at the start of the new year, and became free to read on Jan 20. It's a story about a magical language that can say all things. It's about the power and limits of words. And it's almost all I want to say about writing. Stefan Rudnicki gives a marvelous narration (his voice is an exact match for my character’s!) on the accompanying podcast. “Before We Drown”  was published January 30 in The Future Fire . It’s a little flash story about memory and the light between storms. “Once on a Midsummer’s Night”  was published Febr