Story: Published

I can officially say, without controversy, that I am a published author

This edition of the newsletter is going to be a bit less cohesive than it normally is because THERE’S BIG NEWS TO SHARE RIGHT MEOW.

Cat?!?

Publication News!

Remember that short story I wrote about a witch who has not one, but two, familiars, and who don’t get along? Remember how it got accepted by the speculative fiction journal Mythaxis? Remember how they could print it in any one of their next six issues, and that it probably wasn’t going to get published until 2027?

It dropped yesterday.

It’s also got some cool artwork and a read-along, if you prefer audiobooks.

So stop what you’re doing and go read one of my better first lines and how to call someone a shit-for-brains in quartus paeonic meter (he comes in behind the beat).

And don’t forget to read the rest of the issue! I’m interested in reading the other stories so I can see why the magazine chose mine to go at the end.

Currently Reading

Lots and lots of short stories. I’m nearly done with a couple of collections of best American shorts, and have been looking for little elements that I want to explore more in subsequent readings. For example, short stories (by as much of a rule as there are rules in short stories) escalate in tension, but I’ve found it worthy of a reread to explore how it happens differently in:

• Hemingway’s “The Killers”

• Ring Lardner’s “Golden Honeymoon”

• Theodore Dreiser’s “Lost Phoebe”

• Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron”

• Greg Hrbek’s “Sagittarius”

A few other categories are Outrageous/Absurd (Vonnegut Jr.’s “Harrison Bergeron,” Phillip Roth’s “Conversion of the Jews,” and John Cheever’s “Enormous Radio”), Open Endings (Chekhov’s “Lady with the Dog” and Frank R. Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger?”) and Endings with a Surprise (anything by O. Henry, but “The Duplicity of Hargraves” was a good example (the offensive and obsolete word/practice that will jump out at you is exactly what you need to know for the surprise)). There are a bunch of other categories, so there will be a lot of rereading.

Speaking of rereading, I picked up George Saunders’ book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain again. I wanted to revisit what he had to say about reading consciously and how to dissect short stories. It’s actually only a little over a year since I read the book.

Life in the ‘Dacks

Well, we made it through Winter, Fool’s Spring, Second Winter, the Short Thaw, Ice Season, the Day It Was 70 Degrees, and Winter’s Last Grasp to reach Mud Season. This is when temperatures get high enough to finally melt all the snow that’s accumulated since late November (because it never gets warm enough during winter to melt much of it). Mud Season is when dirt roads look like a battlefield in the Somme and the Adirondack Park Agency begs people not to visit because it only takes light foot traffic to swamp out a path.

Looking through my Google Photos collection, a few things have happened since I last wrote to the both of you.

It snowed a lot.

I've never seen snow cling to a roof so desperately

(The video is an older one - I didn’t take many pictures of Marlowe this winter)

In less obvious news, the local county sheriff, who thinks that the videos of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis were AI-generated and is an idiot in many, many, many other regards, but who ran unopposed (I wrote in “Literally Anyone Else”) decided in January that he wanted to cooperate with ICE (the now infamous “287(g) agreement” that counties are doing). To give him credit, he asked the (strongly Republican) county legislature to vote on it, which he didn’t have to do. To take that credit back, he sprung the proposal on the committee in the legislature at the last minute, in a bill that was vague and even self-contradictory, and then the deputy that was sent to the legislature to explain what the bill meant, lied about its impact. The committee, which is composed of all 15 of the members of the legislature, passed the bill, which then advanced to the entire legislature (I don’t know why they do it like this, either, it’s dumb).

When news of the mess got out, we mobilized.

We got around 300 people to attend the meeting where they were going to vote on the bill, filling up the meeting room and then the overflow room, as well.

Someone in the overflow room was sick - I got a cold a few days later

Nearly a hundred people got up to speak against the bill and nearly another hundred submitted written comments. The head legislator (a Republican) said that the four hours of testimony likely made it the longest legislative meeting ever. They then voted on the measure, and… it passed. Only one vote flipped from cooperating with ICE during committee to a “no” during the legislative session. The head legislator then went on the news and said that everyone there had been a paid protestor from out of state.

So now we’ve found challengers for every single Republican-held county legislative seat. Fun!

A less dystopian surprise is that a local library has gotten creative in its programming and hosted a… heavy metal concert. It also happened to be Scumyard’s first gig ever:

Seriously, how cool is that? (Sound down for the video)

And finally, getting back to the literary world, I made an impulse purchase: A “map” of literature:

I’m not going to lie, I got a little scared that it was a scam when I tracked the package and found that it was shipping from Latvia, and didn’t believe that it would arrive and be legit until I’d actually opened it. When I did, though, it was super cool, though some of the conceits (like how the closer you get to the rim, the more recent it is (so in the middle are The Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh, while John Grisham is at the edge)) don’t hold up to scrutiny (William Shakespeare is as far from the middle in the drama section as The Yellow Kid is in the comics section), and some decisions are sus (why is Marquis de Sade more prominent than William Faulkner?). Still a cool thing for the wall in the room where I write most of the time.