Category: Short Fiction

This month, I have a new short story out in Plott Hound Magazine Issue 2 – a very new and very exiting magazine all about animal POVs, which is one of my favorite genres, so I’m happy to contribute a marine story to it. It’s a tiny tale, but it touches on topics that are very close to me: animals and death. The things that brought it forward were a loss, of course, and the wonderful Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó, a non-fiction book about comparative thanatology which investigates what animals could possibly know of death (spoiler: a lot!) Oh, and playing Spiritfarer, a premium piece of death fiction if there ever was one.

If you are comforted by the thought of the Rainbow Bridge (originally written in the late 1950s), by all means, take every bit of solace you can from it – it’s sweet and important and hey, who doesn’t want happiness forever for lost puppers?

Alas, for me it always fell short. It’s as if we can’t imagine animals having a lot of agenda or deep inner lives, and therefore also no complexity for their possible afterlife. And since my heart beats for ocean biomes and marine life, I wrote of an ocean beyond, beyond the mouth of the River Lethe, and what it would mean to explore it.

I wanted “In the Sea of Binary Stars” to be somewhat open, too – anyone can imagine going to an ocean beyond, dream of swimming free in an endless sea, that’s not limited to certain species. But if you can’t guess and want to know who exactly I wrote this story for, whose little lives often slip away in no time, there’s a hint in my bio accompanying the story.

Thank you to Allison Thai of Plott Hound Magazine for giving “In the Sea of Binary Stars” a home, and to Jennifer Hudak and Aimee Ogden for being my first readers! And thank you, (potential) reader, for considering supporting the magazine. This might not be the last animal story I write, because at this point, why not accept that human POV is not for me?

Can I write three posts about the same old story in a row? Turns out I can, at the risk of having written more words about this story than there are words in the story, but such is life. Who knows, in the age of social media decay, there might be more things to say in my own little space again soon.

Anyway, if you’ve been waiting to read “Forever the Forest”, now is the time, because the lovely people at Escape Pod published it as a reprint, and it’s available to read or listen to over there (the latter with an amazing performance by narrator Hugo Jackson). You know you’re longing for green, lush woodlands stretching out forever (but are they really green? Trees have no eyes, so we don’t know, and while I was researching for this story I stumbled upon some interesting articles about potential colors for alien plants.)

Escape Pod had my story out on Christmas, so that’s a 2024 publication for me, yay! 2025 has just begun, and I don’t know if anything will happen, story-wise, but my one little weirdo I have written last year keeps raking in light-speed rejections, so probably not that one.

I’m very happy to announce that not only am I still alive, but so is my short fiction! Last year’s “Forever the Forest” from Life Beyond Us got picked up for a reprint in The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 4, edited by Allan Kaster.

The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 4 is out now, so you’re able to feel rootless all over again while visiting the woodlands, plus a fine selection of 13 other stories. It’s a particular joy to share the ToC with Rich Larson’s “Heavy Lies” again – one of my absolute favorites from Life Beyond Us.
So if you find yourself in need of more short fiction, you know what to do.

After burn-out and other unpleasantnesses I’m also writing, still. Again. Always. Forever glacial. One story is out there looking for a good home right now (but it’s a strange one, so who knows …), and another one is slowly taking shape, and it may have a tail and claws, and it may be conlcusion-of-a-trilogy-shaped. We’ll see. Murky shapes under water, that’s how emerging stories always look to me, and most of the time the shapes are not what I imagined or desired when they finally become clear. But for now, they are moving!