Stitched Lips and Penguicon Schedule

My latest news is that Stitched Lips is here, featuring my story “Chorus of Whispers.” It’s already getting a lot of positive buzz and a couple of reviews have called out my story, which is always nice. Best of all, the profits from the book go to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Additionally, I’ll be at Penguicon next weekend! Here’s my schedule:

Saturday April 23

12:00 pm – Read Like a Pro (panel)

2:00 pm – Short Stories: from Idea to Final Draft (workshop)

5:00 pm – Pandemics in Literature (panel)

8:00 pm – Cieslak & Hans Reading

My understanding is that the panels and workshops will have links to their platforms (Google Meet, Zoom, etc.) that will populate in Sched 10 minutes before they’re due to begin. The reading will take place on the Penguicon Discord server, I think? I’m terrible at Discord so we’ll see how that goes! This will be my first solo workshop, so I’m nervous and excited. It’ll be a little preview of a much longer, more involved workshop I’m planning to offer during the summer.

I hope you’re well! I’m working hard in Richard Thomas’s Novel in a Year class, but finding time and energy to write during the school year while a pandemic still rages is proving to be a challenge. How are you?

Simultaneous Kickstarters

Being a writer means long periods of inactivity between frantic flurries of movement. Thanks to having months to write in between teaching gigs, I’m now in a flurry period (yay). Which means two of my short stories are in two anthologies that are both on Kickstarter simultaneously. Let me tell you about them!

Book Cover

The first is The Bard’s Tale, a collection of stories and recipes edited by Daniel “Doc” Myers of Medieval Cookery fame. That’s right, this anthology is half short story collection and half cookbook! So if you like reading and cooking (or reading and eating!) then this is the anthology for you. My story “Voice of the Revolution” is a post-apocalyptic science fiction tale about an android bard, a description I hope you find enticing. The cover of the book is also gorgeous and the stories will each feature an illustration artist David Szilagyi, so I’m super excited to see it in print (I’m really loving the trend toward illustrating anthologies that crowdfunding has made possible). This Kickstarter campaign wraps up in only 8 days, so back it now while you still can!

The second anthology is Not Our Kind: Tales of (Not) Belonging edited by Nayad Monroe. You may remember Nayad as a contributor to both my anthologies, Sidekicks! and Steampunk WorldI was also a contributor to Nayad’s last anthology, What Fates Impose, a really well-received collection of stories about divination. I point this out so you’ll understand that we have a history of stellar collaboration. My story for Not Our Kind is called “FawnGirl14” and it’s about a girl who doesn’t belong because she has (NSFW) antlers. Why does she have antlers? Dark, urban fantasy reasons that are revealed in the story! The anthology is a Kickstarter Staff Pick and includes stories by big names like Ekaterina Sedia, Lucy A. Snyder, Remy Nakamura, and Damien Angelica Walters. As of this posting the campaign has 27 days left to go, and both my critiques are still available as rewards if you’d like to have up to 5,000 words critiqued by me, personally!

I really believe in both these projects, and both offer me actual money for my writing, so if you can back one or both I’d appreciate it. And if you’ve still got some money burning a hole in your pocket that you’d like to throw at another Kickstarter, please consider the campaign for Frame Shop, a novella written by Sidekicks! contributor Donald J. Bingle. Happy backing!