author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Hello! Happy New Year! Happy new blog post! [Insert ritual self-deprecating quip about not having posted in seventh months, assume appropriate New Year's resolution as read.]

Things I did in 2023:

• Had two new poems published in Eternal Haunted Summer: "Fiat Nox" and "The Curious Incident of the Black Dog of the Night"
• Had a previously published poem designated a Rhysling Award Finalist (but not, ultimately, winner)
• Skated a hell of a lot of roller derby with the BCRD's "Flatirons Phoenixes" (A team) and "Boulder Bolters" (B team)
• Also skated in a mix-up bout in Salt Lake City and was awarded MVP Blocker
• Learned how to cook biryani
• Completed two solo LibriVox audiobooks: Lud-in-the-Mist (Hope Mirrlees), What Dreams May Come (Gertrude Atherton)
• Uploaded a whole bunch of Friday Fictionettes (but not, alas, as many as I should - I'm still behind schedule)

Things I would like to do in 2024:

• All of the above, only moreso; where applicable, on time
• Attend my 30-year high school reunion
• Attend WorldCon in Glasgow
• Blog! Here! Regularly!
• (Maybe make this blog look more attractive? Ye Gods, this post looks like ass)

To those ends, I will:

• Renew my intention to get up on time, that being 7:00, every weekday (thanks, Focusmate!)
• Renew my intention to write every day (and not just my daily freewriting and fictionette work either)
• Renew my passport

That's it. That's the blog post.

There should be another tomorrow. Stay tuned.

At least one post per week: Check. I have not been uniformly On The Ball since last post, but this much I can do.

This week's post will be my "what I had published last year" roundup. It will be fairly short, because 2022 was not a great year for writing new things or submitting regularly. But there were some things published:

New poetry: "On the Limitations of Photographic Evidence in Fairyland," Eternal Haunted Summer, Summer Solstice 2022 (theme: Other-Than-Human Realms).

In fairy folklore, there's a story that turns up now and again involving a human who gets invited into Fairyland to perform some necessary function, and has to have magic ointment applied to their eyes in order that they might see true while they're there. Much later, after their return home, a fairy looks them up in their day-to-day and asks them, "Which eye is it you see me out of?" Turns out they did an imperfect job of removing the magic ointment, which means they've got a loose end to tidy up. Can't be having random humans going around able to see fairies clearly! So the human answers, "The left eye," and the fairy says "Cool, thanks," and immediately puts out the human's left eye. As opposed to dunking them in a handy ditch to just, y'know, wash the ointment out. Because fairies are cruel and capricious and, above all, dramatic.

Anyway, I wanted to play with that trope, such that the "eye" that had to be put out was the photographer's camera (the photographer's services having been engaged for an important fairy wedding). The fairy would smash the camera, and maybe even blind the photographer (see above: cruel and capricious), but of course the photographer still has the negatives, which they would pass down to future generations along with the story of the photographer's adventures.

One day I will actually write that poem. Or story. It could be a story. In any case, it wasn't what I wrote in time for this submission deadline. I wrote this other thing instead.

Reprint poem: "Reasonable Accommodations," The Future Fire issue 2022.62

My poor little corporate weredeer first appeared in Departure Mirror Quarterly Issue 2 (Winter 2021). You can still download that issue, but you'll have to do it from the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine," because the publication sadly had to close its doors before Issue 4 came out. In which issue, incidentally, another poem of mine they'd solicited had been set to appear. Alas. That poem remains unpublished, and not for want of my sending it out. Maybe 2023 will be its year.

Reprint story: "Survival, After," Apex Magazine 2021 (or via Weightless Books)

Originally published and podcast by Apex Magazine in August 2021, this story was included, along with every other story they published in 2021, in the magazine's yearly anthology. I understand it's their biggest table of contents yet! There's lots of amazing stuff in there that quite frankly blows my little tale out of the water, so it's well worth the price. Yes, you could just go read all the stories for free on the website, but the print anthology, in addition to being extremely convenient in providing all the content in one handy codex (no need to click all over the place! Just turn the pages!), is a truly gorgeous artifact. It would look beautiful on your bookshelf or your coffee table.

Reprint story: "First Breath," penumbric speculative fiction mag vol vi issue 4 (December 2k22)

Originally published in Ellen Datlow's vampirism anthology Blood and Other Cravings (Tor Books, September 2011), this is my most reprinted work--less because of its classic staying power, I think, and more because it's the story I keep sending out in hopes of getting it reprinted. But this is its third outing (not counting its debut) so I guess editors like it. (Previous reprintings: Denver Horror Collective and the Tales to Terrify podcast.)

I'm saddened to discover the purchase pages for the original anthology are gone. But I suppose every anthology must go out of print sometime. You can still find copies via that online retailer named for a river in South America, because of course you can, but it's no longer available via Macmillan Publishing or Barnes & Noble that I can see. So instead I've linked the Publisher's Weekly write-up, which actually name-checks me (I was a "newcomer"! I arguably still am) so that's kinda cool.

I suppose that will be one of my 2023 goals: Get "First Breath" reprinted again.

Anyway, that's the 2022 Publications Roundup. As you run off to click the links and check them out, do check out the rest of the relevant issues (or the relevant year, in the case of Apex). There's some great stuff in those tables of contents, written by some enormously skilled wordsmiths, and you need to get your eyeballs on 'em STAT.

Until next week!

Today is the happy day! My story, "Survival, After", is now live on the website of Apex Magazine. The issue it's in debuted some weeks ago for subscribers to read in its entirety, but today my story became available for all and sundry, subscriber or not. You can read it here.

You can also listen to it at that link, too! Or via the page for Apex Podcast Episode #80. I'm thrilled beyond words not only for KT Bryski's brilliant production of the episode, but also for her giving me the opportunity to read the story. This is my first time doing fiction narration outside of my own Friday Fictionette Project--reading fiction on someone else's podcast, how about that?!--and I'm so grateful to be given the chance.

In other writing news, my most-reprinted story and first professional sale, "First Breath," will be reprinted again! But not for a little while yet. I've signed the contract, but the magazine has a lead time of a good handful of episodes. I'll give you more details as we get closer to release date.

And in writing process news.... this week is weird. Last week was weirder. The week before last sucked. Over the years, I have constructed this huge, detail-oriented edifice of rituals and routines in the service of Getting The Work Done, and it has, for the most part, worked--but sometimes, depending on how much avoidance and/or executive dysfunction I'm suffering, that edifice turns into a barrier. Like, "Oh, shit, it's almost 10 AM. I should be writing. But I'm going to have to do nothing BUT write, no distractions, for twenty-five minutes at a time, which sounds like an AWFUL act of penance. And also I need to set up my timesheet, and also before I can get to the Overdue Thing I have to do the Daily Things That Come First, with all the rest of the rigmarole and hoops to jump through, and--hey, how about I just play this stupid clicky game for another half hour? And another half hour after that..." And that's how the whole day goes, for days at a time. And that's what week before last was like.

Don't get me wrong--like I said, the edifice of routine and ritual usually works. It's structure, and I need structure. Without structure, my day tends to float away from me. But sometimes structure is itself the thing that avoidance accretes to, like barnacles on a sunken ship's hull. And when that happens, I can do one of two things: I can try to muscle through somehow, or I can say "to hell with timesheets! To hell with the daily order of operations!" and just, y'know, open the file of the Overdue Thing and start doing it, self-discipline optional.

So my timesheet is still on timeout. The order of operations has returned, sort of, but it's an informal checklist rather than a clock-scheduled list of tasks. And I'm allowed to just drift between the task at hand and the stupid clicky game if I want. Look, when some of the avoidance arises, stupid as it sounds, from "oh, no, getting started on the next writing task means putting away the mindless clicky game for twenty-five whole minutes," it's amazing how much of that avoidance simply evaporates if I give myself permission to keep messing with the mindless clicky game while doing the writing task. Write a few sentences, click a few things, write a few sentences more. Like that.

Like as not, the way it turns out, once I start the writing task, the writing accrues sufficient momentum of its own to make me totally forget about the mindless clicky game after all.

Brains! How do they even brain?! I dun geddit, y'all. But whatever. We work with what we've got, or we don't work at all. And the work has to get done somehow. So here we are.

And now it's time for another bowl of the crock-pot posole that's been happily simmering away since noon, and that has been on my mind ever since tonight's roller derby practice started. I tell you what, you want that happy warm emotional hug of "Somebody loves me!" when you walk in the door after a long and tiring day, you want to get yourself a crock-pot and a recipe for something long-simmering and hearty. It's a really lovely feeling.

Hello, the blog! Have I got some news for you! Today is July 6, and July 6 is release day for Apex Magazine #124. Check out that gorgeous cover art. Check out those contributor names! (How did I end up in such astounding company?)

So the way Apex does it is, the whole issue is available for purchase and to subscribers now. But if you wait long enough, the whole issue will be free on the website. My story, "Survival, After", will be released on August 3. Meanwhile, the first story that's been released on the website is "Eilam Is Forever" by Beth Dawkins. It is, in part, a story about things going spectacularly wrong on a generation ship. It's also, very poignantly, a story about loneliness. You should go read it right now. Go on. This blog post will still be here when you get back.

Excited yet? Need more hype? Author Leah Ning has livetweeted her way through the whole issue, and her mini-reviews are super hype. (I'm so very, very thrilled by what she said about my story! Hearts and flowers and rainbows!)

If after reading that thread you just! can't! wait! for the stories to all trickle their way onto the website, you can buy the issue, subscribe, or become a Patron to get instant access in varying shapes and sizes.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Apex Magazine's Kickstarter, launching on July 19, that will help support their continued existence through 2022 and, hopefully, beyond. Visit that link to be notified when the campaign goes live.

So that's what I've got for you today. Tomorrow I may have a certain amount of whining to do about my extremely inefficient writing process. But today I got nothing to make but happy noises. Hooray!


Hey y'all! It's been a FULL week, a week very much full of things--most of them good! if ultimately tiring!--but I think I can sneak half an hour to blog about some fun stuff surrounding my latest poetry publication.

Y'all remember that my poem "Apotheosis" was reprinted* in The Future Fire #57? (*Original publication here.) I know I at least blogged that it was going to be reprinted, and then, when the issue came out, I did at least post briefly about it on social media. Right? (Yes. I kind of suck at self-promotion. We know this.) Right.

Well, since then, TFF have been posting mini-interviews with that issue's contributors on Facebook and rebroadcasting the links on Twitter. It's been lots of fun! Here's the mini-interview with me, and here is the mini-interview with Toeken, who created the gorgeous illustration that accompanies my poem.

Meanwhile, Charles Payseur has reviewed TFF #57 (alongside a truly ginormous amount of other material also reviewed in that self-same blog post, because Charles Payseur is quite possibly the hardest-working reviewer in SFF, and it is only right and just that Quick Sip Reviews is a finalist for the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine) and, as always, he has lovely and insightful things to say about the whole table of contents. If someone were to ask me what my poem is about, I'd be hard-pressed not to just point them to Payseur's review. "That," I'd say. "What he said. It's about that."

Now. There still remains some workable time in the day, and I have a new short story--the one I mention in my mini-interview--that I'm trying to feel my way into. Guess I'd better go work on that.

Writing content in this blog post will be minimal. THE OYSTERS HAVE ARRIVED and I'm a little obsessed.

You remember, right? The mail-order oysters I mentioned splurging on? Yeah. They showed up today. And I have successfully shucked and eaten a few of them. Hooray!

There was a little anxiety at first, because I had no idea how to read a timestrip. The Real Oyster Cult FAQ says that if the temp sensor hasn't turned blue, you're cool. Great! So I open up the package, I pull out the two baggies of live oysters (Truro Pearls and Irish Point, 20 each), I find the temp sensor strip at the bottom of the box, I flip it open, and it is all blue. Oh shit! Panic! Needlessly. I was looking at the completely cosmetic faceplate color, rather than the actual temp sensor window--which was still empty and white, indicating that the oysters had spent no appreciable time above 50 degrees. To be fair, making the faceplate the same color as the temperature sensor dye was definitely a choice. Anyway, an email to ROC with a photo of the thing cleared up the whole misunderstanding without delaying my dinner one bit.

And I had been very good. I had put in my time and my wordcount by then. I'd got the beginnings of a new poem, a decent start on the February 19 Friday Fictionette (still a month overdue, but still uploading a new one every Friday or as soon afterward as possible), and real progress on revising the story I intend to submitting to Nightmare Magazine this week. (I've got until Sunday to submit it, so everything's fine.) I'd even done my bunny chores--I gave Holland his daily fresh veg, tidied up his habitat, refilled his various hay containers, and gave him treats.

I'd done my homework, is what I'm saying, so I was free to play with oysters.

They were a lot easier to shuck than I remember from when Dad taught me several years ago. But then they were a lot smaller than gulf south oysters and also a bit pointier around the hinge. I made myself up a lovely little plate with a half dozen on the half-shell, each with a dollop of that fantastic caramelized shallot spread on top, and then a couple pieces of crawfish bread. Crawfish bread is not as effective as plain French bread for sopping up oyster brine, being already fairly sopping with cheese and spices and crawfish tails, but that's OK. It's tastier. And I am not above tilting the plate up to my mouth and simply drinking whatever's left.

As I mentioned before, this splurge was in celebration of a rather special huge big deal of a story sale, so when I placed the order, I left myself a little gift message commemorating that. It sounds hokey, and it is hokey, but I still got such a happy thrill when I opened up the shipping box and found a hand-written gift card inside saying, "Dear Niki: Congratulations on your first sale of fiction to Apex! Love, Niki."

So now I have a very hard choice to make. Do I commit the sin of drowning the delicate briny flavor of these maritime gems in kimchi? Or do I give myself the joy of homemade kimchi flavored with fresh delicious oysters? That's a trick question, of course. The answer is yes, and also yes. Besides, I'm only going to make half the recipe anyway, so there will still be a few oysters left to do other things with. (I'm thinking of subbing a few in for the shrimp in this dragon & phoenix recipe.)

So that's the story. It's Tuesday, I'm feeling accomplished, and life is delicious. I hope things are going just as well for you, whoever you are and wherever you may be.

So, just to remind y'all that the author is a New Orleanian author, lemme tell you what happened this week. So yesterday, OK, the payment for the short story I sold to Apex Magazine arrived via PayPal. Hooray! So today I decided to celebrate the sale, as I had not tangibly celebrated it yet, by splurging on mail-order oysters. In fact, I ordered the gift bundle (it's a gift for me! From me!) on the strength of it including a free shucking knife and gloves, reason being, I don't own any yet and I probably should, and I don't want to make a special trip to--where would I even buy an oyster shucking knife in Boulder, Colorado? A restaurant supply store, I suppose. Or I'd have to mail order it from somewhere and try to get the two separate shipments to coincide. Hell with that. This is easier.

Anyway. Oysters coming mid-March. Forty of 'em. I'm gonna slurp up a dozen on arrival, then chop up the rest for kimchi. (That link there, that's the recipe that got Dad's whole hunting club asking, "Niki's coming home next week, you say? Will she make us kimchi again? Tell her to make it spicier this time.")

All right, yes, I could have been responsible and left the money in my PayPal account against actual household necessities. But it's not like we're relying on my story sales to make household ends meet. (Hoo, girls-n-boys, would we be in trouble if we were!) Besides--a sale to Apex Magazine! The hell to the yes that deserves celebrating!

(Don't worry, it only cost about half the check. I'm sure I can find something responsible to do with the rest.)

So for my next trick, I'd like to see if I can get "Lambing Season" reprinted again. It initially appeared in NAMELESS Magazine #3 in March of 2014. (You can still purchase the issue as an ebook from that link for $3.99. I recommend it; there's a lot of good stuff in there, including a haunting story by my friend and colleague Nicole Cushing.) It's been reprint only once so far, as episode 413 of Tales to Terrify, narrated beautifully by Summer Brooks, on December 19, 2019. (You can listen to it there for free, along with a retrospective of the horror of the two-thousand-teens.)

...And that's probably a good thing. The only having been reprinted once, I mean. Because... Wow there's some problematic bits in the story. Which I completely overlooked when I wrote the story because Hi there, white privilege! Without even having laid eyes or ears on it since the Tales to Terrify outing, I knew I'd need to revise the opening a titch. Here's the second paragraph so you can see what I mean:

I'd so badly needed to escape. Months had passed since I'd last been able to relax. In my mind, I was always on duty, no matter what the clock said. Then my partner went to the hospital on a bullet fired by a twelve-year-old girl, and I started suspecting everyone I met of being armed and dangerous. The chief suggested I take off the uniform and badge for a while before I wound up shooting someone for startling me.

Wow. Just... wow. That sounds like nothing so much as a "Blue Lives Matter" defense of the cop who murdered Tamir Rice. "How was he supposed to know it was only a toy gun? Some of those urban kids out there, those little monsters'd shoot you soon as look at you. You try taking time in one of those neighborhoods to verify if the gun is real, you're dead."

Eeeuuurgh. No. So much no. There is no way I'm submitting that story to be reprinted with that opening. Should be simple enough to fix, though. Instead of a crisis of paranoia, the main character can have a crisis of conscience over her partner having shot a child, and the rest of the department rallying around to defend him, and maybe the protagonist's reluctance to join in the defense is why the chief suggests she take a temporary unpaid leave. Much more believable of a scenario (except for the crisis of conscience part, I fear), and a lot more defensible then what's there now. Because, face it, what's there now is doing white supremacy's work of upholding the narrative of cops who are more wronged than wrong-doing even when they've just fired a bullet into a Black child's body, or knelt on a Black man's neck until he suffocated. As though that had anything to do with justice and keeping the peace. My God. No. I will have no part of even appearing to support those abominations. Not if I can help it. Not any more than I already have, Gods forgive me.

(Virtue signaling? Damn straight I am, and what's wrong with that? The bigots are out there signaling to each other all the time with their dog-whistles and bullhorns everywhere from the corner store to the Capitol. The rest of us are gonna damn well "signal" that we stand four-square against that shit. Got it? Good.)

Except it's not going to be as simple as fixing the opening, turns out.

The manuscript was still in one long LibreOffice RTF, so the first thing I did tonight was pull the manuscript into a Scrivener project and break it up into scenes. There were hard-coded tab-indents, too, so I had to remove those by hand because Scrivener for Windows still doesn't have find-and-replace for special characters. So that required traveling paragraph by paragraph through the whole story. Which meant I was lightly skimming the text as I went along. Which resulted in my realizing the racism kinda permeates the whole story.

I'm not going to get into the details at this time. It's not that I'm worried about spoiling the story for you; you can go read or listen to it right now if you haven't already. No, it's that I know, with a sinking, that I have yet to uncover all the details. Right now I just have a general impression of the dehumanization of non-white people in this story. And you could argue that it's not just the shepherds but all the townspeople too who are under Maud Shempf's sway, they're all going to wind up fleeced and turned into mutton eventually. But the predominately (implied) white townspeople get to act like human beings, even so, while the predominately (heavily implied) black and brown shepherds get to have "dead shark stares" while they menace the protagonist (including with a gun!). And yeah, that could stand as a metaphor for the way systems of authority regularly dehumanize non-white people--but that's not how it looks on the page at this time. At this time, it looks hella racist, and it makes me cringe.

So I'll be taking my time the rest of this week going over the story with a fine-toothed comb, trying my damnedest to blunt its capacity to do harm. It may take more than a week, in which case I'll put it aside temporarily, because the next story in the revision queue has a deadline. But then I'll come back to it, because this is job that needs to be done right more than it needs to be done in a hurry.

Whew. I warned y'all a while back this blog was gonna get political from time to time. Because the alternative is to be silently oblivious, and all that does is prop up the status quo. And the status quo has really gotta go.

Today had a smaller wonkiness quotient, so let's talk about why Codex is the greatest and its contests are the bestest.

Only sorta kidding. But to put it in less superlative tones: Codex is an online community for semi-pro writers, primarily in the speculative genres (see the New Member Qualifications on the linked page to see what that means). I joined shortly after making my first pro sale in 2010. To be very precise, I joined shortly after the convention at which editor Ellen Datlow hosted a reading from that anthology, in which I participated. I spent a large part of the train ride home in the lounge car chatting deep into the night with other author attendees who urged me to join Codex. And so I did.

Since then, Codex has been the biggest single boost to my writing career. Or, rather, it has represented multiple boosts. It's been a motivator, a networking outlet, an industry information warehouse, and just an all-around uplifting experience. I'm in a "face-to-face" critique group (over Zoom) because of Codex. I've found out about markets I might not have otherwise because of Codex. I've found out important things about the markets I might or might not submit to because of Codex.

And I've written a lot more than I might have otherwise because of Codex's contests.

Right now we are in week 3 of an annual flash fiction contest called Weekend Warrior. The conceit is simple. Friday afternoon, writing prompts go up. Sunday at midnight, the story you wrote inspired by one or more of those prompts is due. It must be 750 words or less. Until the next Friday afternoon--when the cycle starts over again--everyone reads each other's (anonymous) contest stories, gives each story a mini-critique (optional), and assigns each story a score from 1 to 10 (essential). It's super fun when your story scores high, but scoring isn't the real point. The point is, you wrote five new stories! And got them mini-critiqued! And now you can go revise them and start sending them out to paying markets!

Another benefit of the contest is having to read and critique some twenty tiny stories every week. I stress about it, because that's a lot to add to my weekly task list, but I really do benefit from it. Having to focus in and clearly identify what works for me and what doesn't helps me in turn to write stories that work well more often than they don't. And reading other peoples' comments directs my attention to aspects of those stories I might not otherwise have noticed.

I am doing unusually well in time management this week, yesterday's wonkiness notwithstanding. I've divided up my reading assignment into four parts, one of which I read per day. I'll be hitting the third batch tonight after this post goes up, and the fourth tomorrow afternoon after I get home from my BFR shift. I've feeling very proud of myself because of this. I can't tell you how many times I've done the whole lot in a panic during the last two hours on Friday, and then guilty about it. In my rush, I probably failed to read as closely as my fellow participants deserve. Better time-management this week means I can be so much more careful and deliberate and thoughtful about my reading--and that benefits everyone.

I am also very proud of the story I submitted for this week's consideration. I'm looking forward to what everyone else had to say about it.

I have a whole bunch of stories in my To-Be-Revised queue already, and they will stay there, untouched, because I'm not allowed to get started on them until I'm caught up on the Friday Fictionette project. (I'm sort of participating in three Weekend Warrior contests simultaneously. There's the one story I write for the actual contest, and then theoretically there's two Friday Fictionettes I'm writing a week in order to get caught up. Argh.) And yet I'm looking forward to adding five new stories to the revision queue. Well, really what I'm looking forward to is sending them out to play in various slush piles, and revision is just something that's got to happen along the way. Except I'm genuinely looking forward to getting these stories right.

So that's why Codex is the greatest and Codex contests are the bestest. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

If I'm being honest, my initial impulse is to announce these things in a manner something like this:

WHEEEEEEEE TWO ACCEPTANCES IN ONE WEEKEND and OMG I SOLD A STORY TO AN ABSOLUTE DREAM MARKET AAAAAAAAAA!!!!! I'M GONNA FAINT--

but that seems unprofessional. All the authors I admire tend instead to calmly and professionally post matter-of-fact announcements about where you can find their writing and/or hear them read their writing. So I'm going to try to be a professional about this.

*deep breath*

"Apotheosis" (poem) to be reprinted in The Future Fire - "Apotheosis" was originally published in the Summer Solstice 2019 issue of Eternal Haunted Summer. It was the first poem I wrote, and the first poem I published, after a poem drought of about twenty-five years. (I really don't know why I spent so much time not poeming. It seems rather silly of me in hindsight.) It will now be the first of my poems to be reprinted.

When will it be out? Current rough estimate is April. Emphasis on "rough." Might have a firmer estimate in a week or so. Stay tuned!

"Survival, After" (short story) to be published in Apex Magazine - This is where I start hyperventilating. Apex! Effing! Magazine! *wheeze* After I got the acceptance letter, I spent the rest of the evening emitting screams and other strange noises at random intervals, startling the bunny and making myself hoarse. It's a good thing John wasn't home at the time. I was insufferable.

And this story! I love this weird little story with all of my heart. To have it finally find a home--and for that home to be Apex! Effing! Magazine!

It began as a 750-word entry in a Codex contest, where it fared relatively well. (Codex contests are the source of a not insignificant portion of my published works. Codex is made of awesome.) Then it sat around in the "I really should revise this" pile until Shimmer Magazine announced its imminent closure and kicked me in the butt. But of course my time management is on point (that was sarcasm) and so I barely touched it until deadline day, when I pulled a five-hour forced march of panic and despair to create and at last submit the new 3,500-word draft. As history shows, it did not get accepted on that outing. The editor, who'd once sent me a revise-and-resubmit request which did not ultimately result in a publication (hey, it happens), sent me the kindest and most wistful of personal rejections, regretting that we would not get to work together on a Shimmer story after all. I regretted that too. But hey, now I had a new story ready to be submitted to all the other places!

I submitted it to twelve of the other places over the following ten to twelve months. And then I submitted it to Apex. And here we are.

This, too, I do not yet have a firm date for. I'm told it'll likely be in Issue 124, maybe 123. That's just an early estimate, though. As scheduling firms up, I'll let you know.

I will be featured in an upcoming episode of The Story Hour - One of many examples of how the pandemic is why we can have nice things, The Story Hour began as a way to pierce our shut-in, isolated bubbles with live story-sharing. They put out a call on Twitter recently for published authors who might want to participate, and, as it happens, I've had some things published recently that I'd quite enjoy reading to a live audience. So I volunteered.

Of course I had to go and choose two stories which both make me cry at the end. I knew that already, but then I did a practice read-through in order to get a concrete idea of how much time each of them takes to read, and I found out it's worse than I thought. Well. I'm just going to have to practice a lot until I get better at holding it in, or until I've read these stories enough times to have worn out the effect.

The Story Hour airs live on Facebook and Zoom every Wednesday evening at 7:00 PM PST (so 8:00 PM here in Boulder, Colorado), and if you miss an episode live you can listen to its recording via Facebook. This one I have a date for! Unless something changes, I'll be reading on May 5, 2021. It's a ways out, but I'll remind you as we get closer.

And that is my first Upcoming Author Appearances and Publications post of 2021! Ta-da!

Just a short note today, because my day started late and went slowly and now I'm tired. But there is Actually Writing content, so yay for that.

Way back in April, I woot-wooted over having a poem newly accepted: "The Ascent of Inanna", originally a short-short then reimagined as a 22-line poem, was purchased by Dreams & Nightmares for publication in Issue 116, then-upcoming in September 2020. I am happy to report that my contributor's copy reached me safely despite this year's postal wonkiness, and it has been added to my Happy Shelf. While I wish I could just give you a link you could click to go read the poem (and the rest of the issue), there's something kinda fantastic, in an old-school way, about having a copy I can hold with pages I can riffle through. (Exceedingly affordable copies are available for purchase from the editor at the link above.)

Captain Holland, of course, has demonstrated a predilection for chewing on things made of paper. To keep the production of the above photo tragedy-free, I put my copy of the magazine inside the clear-sleeve front cover of a three-ring binder.

I am reminded by my colleagues on Twitter that it's time to make Awards Eligible posts. That is, to list all the things I had published this year, so that you can go read them and, if you wish, nominate them for awards. The very thought makes all the brain-weasels in my addled pate rear up and holler, "Who the hell do you think you are, suggesting that people nominate your drivel for awards? The nerve! The effrontery! The very idea! Hmph." So, OK, here is a list of things I had published this year, so that you can go read them. If you wish. The end. OK? *Nervously glances at brain-weasels* OK. (And I'm only including the word and/or line count to give you an idea of how much of a time investment reading each involves.)

Short stories

"The Rarest of Prey" in Daily Science Fiction (102 words)

"One Story, Two People" in Community of Magic Pens, print anthology, Atthis Arts (2600 words)

Poetry

"The Mardi Gras Tree" in Eternal Haunted Summer (34 lines)

"The Ascent of Inanna" in Dreams & Nightmares, print journal, see above (22 lines)

Reprints

"The Soup Witch's Funeral Dinner" in ep. 431 of Cast of Wonders (980 words)

I do not think that reprints are award-eligible. But this is not an Awards Eligible list. It is a list of stuff I had published in 2020, that's all. So "Soup Witch" belongs on that list.

So now I have fulfilled my promise to blog about Actually Writing "tomorrow" and thus may go to bed with a clear conscience. Huzzah! (There'll be more in days to come, of course; this was all I had the oomph for posting tonight.)