It's a Jumble

I’m thrilled to announce that my latest story, “ Wild Ones,”  is now up at Bracken Magazine . I have loved this magazine since it’s first issue, and am so happy to be appearing there now, alongside absolutely lovely artwork, poems, and other stories. Bracken Magazine’s tagline is “lyrical fiction and poetry, inspired by the wood and what lies in its shadows.” “Wild Ones” indeed takes it setting from the woods. It’s the story of a mother and her teenage daughter, and of the wildness within us all. Some notes on inspiration: --Years and years ago, I read Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and fell in love with its invocations of Celtic mythology and Old European legends. The scene where Herne the Hunter leads the Wild Hunt against the Dark has never left me. --There is a patch of woods near my home, a tiny scrap of forest hemmed in by suburban development. I like to walk there, especially in the fall. --The fall is my favorite time of year. And the sound of the...

I am late with this, as with everything these days. I had only one piece of fiction published this year: “Taiya,” which appeared in the fall in The Future Fire . But this one piece has received more attention than any other short story I’ve written. It’s received some wonderful reviews. Maria Haskins and A.C. Wise both featured it in their recommendations . It’s listed in the 2017 Nebula Suggested Reading List. And today I found out that it’s also featured on The Book Smugglers website in “12 Short Stories as New Year’s Resolutions.”  (Click on those lists above, please. They feature amazing, amazing authors and works that I love, and I am still stunned to be listed alongside them.) It means so much to me that “Taiya” has gotten this attention. It means so much to me that this story resonates with people. This was one of those stories from the heart; this was the first story which truly scared me to write. I described some of its inspirations and background, an...

Snow is falling in thick flurries past my window as I type this. Winter is finally here; the nights are long and the daylight brief. Stories are lights in the darkness. At least, the right ones can be. And even dark stories can bring comfort; they can give shape and a semblance of control to that which is chaos; they let us know that we’re not alone, that others have been through the darkness, too.  This past fall brought so many wonderful stories of dark and light, often in the very same piece. I can’t hope to read more than a tiny fraction of all the worthy work being published these days. But of all the great stories out now, here are some that I did find and love. I hope you love some of them, too.   Stories of Sea and River  Gone to Wrack and Ruin by Meryl Stenhouse at Empyreome Magazine Oh, what a creepy, eerie read!  Yeva and her granddaughter Lusine eke out a precarious living from the sea, gutting fish in warehouses and collecting wr...

The moment I heard the premise of Jeannette Ng’s debut novel, I knew that I wanted it. Victorian missionaries in Fairyland? Dark Gothic alt-history inspired by the works of the Bronte sisters ?  This sounded like the book of my dreams. And indeed, Ng’s novel is a dream that does not disappoint. It’s a rich, strange, increasingly nightmarish phantasmagoria of both horror and beauty. It’s impressively erudite and sly. It draws the reader expertly in, builds steady tension, then lays shocking plot twist after plot twist. It’s a novel that opens into landscapes of wonder, and becomes a moving, even rapturous, journey.   In the alternate-history world of this novel, the Faelands (also known as Arcadia) were discovered on the fourth voyage of Captain James Cook, when “the greatest navigational mind became impossibly lost and thus impossibly discovered a different realm.” As with all other lands discovered by the English, the English of this novel decide that the Faelands m...

Disclaimer: Rati Mehrotra is a friend, and I received an advance review copy of this book from her. I’ve been looking forward to Markswoman since first hearing about it. Rati is an accomplished short fiction writer (see links to her short stories at https://ratiwrites.com/ ) and I was eager to see what she could do in the long form. Reader, I was not disappointed. Markswoman takes place in a world I’ve never seen before: a seeming post-apocalyptic Asia which mixes science fiction and fantasy. In the distant aftermath of a Great War, five Orders keep peace over the numerous clans of Asiana--Orders of warriors who are telepathically bonded with their magical knives. Kyra Veer is the last of her clan and a young warrior in training in the sisterhood of the Order of Kali. As the novel opens, she is completing the last task needed before becoming a full-fledged Markswoman of her Order. Kyra’s future should be relatively set after this. But, of course, there is no smooth sailin...

A few weeks ago, my latest fiction story was published. It’s called "Taiya," and you can read  i t  here at The Future Fire.   It’s a ghost story set in an imaginary country. And it’s been getting some wonderful reviews. Maria Haskins included it in her September 2017 Short Fiction Round-up A.C. Wise featured it (and me!!) in her series, Women to Read: Where to Start: October 2017 post. The website Lady Business also has a lovely review (warning: spoilers! I’d suggest reading the story first before reading the very perceptive analysis here) As a writer, I am of course always thrilled by good reviews and attention to any of my stories. But this one is particularly dear to me. I wrote it three years ago, and it was the first story that truly scared me to write. It wasn’t the (named) ghost in the story that scared me. What scared me was the feeling of exposure, of revealing something about myself that I perhaps didn’t want anyone else to see. This is wh...

"It was my mother who tucked him in and told him that there exists a sort of love in the world that only survives as long as no one speaks of it, and that was the reason why he would never have to worry because my grandmother was never going to be the kind of mother who held her children in her arms and told them how smart and beautiful and talented they were. She was only ever going to scold them, make them feel diminutive, make them feel they were never good enough, make them know this world wouldn’t be kind to them. She wasn’t going to let someone else be better than her at making her children feel pain or scare them more than she could, and to her, that was a form of protection. That’s how we will be with our own children, my mother told my uncle, proud that she had realized this."               --Jenny Zhang, "Our Mothers Before Them," from her collection Sour Heart