It’s been a nice year for short story sales, especially as I didn’t seek them out–two reprints and two new pieces. Joe Pulver asked me for a story for his all-women King in Yellow anthology Cassilda’s Song, and I sent him a piece called “Stones, Maybe”. It’s part of my rural eastern Ontario oeuvre. Lucas Law and Susan Toy asked me for a story for their new anthology, Strangers Among Us. Strangers is a fundraiser for mental health, and as such is reminiscent of my 2014 Hidden Brook Press anthology, They Have To Take You In, which raised awareness and funds for The Dana Fund for women in transition, administered by Gordon Langill of the local (Kawartha Pine Ridge) CMHA. Strangers will launch next year at When Worlds Collide in Calgary.
It was great to be interviewed at Hugo-winning Lightspeed, and to see a reprint of Python, a short story much loved by editors. Joanne Merriam at Upper Rubber Boot Books took a reprint of “Airport Shoes” for her new anthology The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom, due out in 2016. “Airport Shoes” first appeared in Strange Horizons.
Here’s the TOC for Museum:
Table of Contents:
Khadija Anderson, “Observational Couplets upon returning to Los Angeles from Outer Space”
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, “Photograph of a Secret”
Kristin Bock, “I Wish I Could Write a Poem about Pole-Vaulting Robots”
Alicia Cole, “Asteroid Orphan”
Jim Comer, “Soldier’s Coat”
James Dorr, “Bubba Claus Conquers the Martians”
Aidan Doyle, “Mr. Nine and the Gentleman Ghost”
Tom Doyle, “Crossing Borders”
Estíbaliz Espinosa, “Dissidence” (translated by Neil Anderson)
Kendra Fortmeyer, “Squaline”
Miriam Bird Greenberg, “Brazilian Telephone”
Benjamin Grossberg, “The Space Traveler and Runaway Stars”
Julie Bloss Kelsey, two scifaiku
Nick Kocz, “The Last American Tiger”
David Kopaska-Merkel, “Captain Marshmallow”
Ken Liu, “Nova Verba, Mundus Novus”
Kelly Luce, “Ideal Head of a Woman”
Tim Major, “Read/Write Head”
Katie Manning, “Baba Yaga’s Answer”
Laurent McAllister, “Kapuzine and the Wolf: A Hortatory Tale”
Martha McCollough, “valley of the talking dolls” and “adventures of cartoon bee”
Marc McKee, “A Moment in Fill-In-The-Blank City”
Sequoia Nagamatsu, “Headwater LLC”
Jerry Oltion, “A Star Is Born”
Richard King Perkins II, “The Sleeper’s Requiem”
Ursula Pflug, “Airport Shoes”
Leonard Richardson, “Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs”
Erica L. Satifka, “Thirty-Six Questions Propounded by the Human-Powered Plasma Bomb in the Moments Before Her Imminent Detonation”
G. A. Semones, “Never Forget Some Things”
Matthew Sanborn Smith, “The Empire State Building Strikes Back!”
Christina Sng, “Medusa in LA”
J. J. Steinfeld, “The Loudest Sound Imaginable”
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, “The Wanderers”
Lucy Sussex, “A Sentimental, Sordid Education”
Sonya Taaffe, “And Black Unfathomable Lakes”
Mary Turzillo, “Pride”
Deborah Walker, “Sea Monkey Mermaid”
Nick Wood, “The Girl Who Called the World”
K. Ceres Wright, “The Haunting of M117”
Ali Znaidi, “A Dolphin Scene” and “Australian Horoscope”
The image is by Francois Thisdale who did the cover art for my 2014 PS collection, Harvesting the Moon.