“Themis,” Starlit Wood, & Other Things I Wrote

I wrote some fiction recently! We’ll start from the top.

First, I’m very happy to have a novelette in Clarkesworld’s tenth anniversary issue! “Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home” is a story about systems of power, also bread. (Also, generally speaking, don’t name your first settlement on a new planet after the personification of long habit, social stasis, and rightful order. That’s asking for trouble.)

 

Second, my story “Familiaris” is in The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales! It’s based on a very interesting Bavarian fairy tale that is extremely concerned with ambivalence toward motherhood. My story is about that ambivalence, and what stories about motherhood can do. It’s not pretty, but neither is the original, so it works out.

I mean, if you don’t want to have one,” he says, that single line down the center of his forehead like his face is about to peel.

“Someday,” she says. His hand is too tight in her hand. One of them is sweating.

#

The prince and princess had no child.

Eventually, wolves.

#

Long ago, a woman in Bavaria had to peel some potatoes. She had to do the washing. She had to check on the soup that simmered on the stove and was never quite thick enough. She had to watch her smallest child where it lay wrapped near the fire and sweating, and watch her oldest daughter tying back her hair to look finer when she went to trade the day’s milk for some woolens from the merchant with the unmarried son. She wanted to tell a story that could lock the door.

If you want to read the original, very surreal story (currently available in The Turnip Princess and obviously recommended), you can find it here.

 

I also have a comic in the ATTACK ON TITAN ANTHOLOGY, out today! (Yes, it needs the allcaps, just this once.) You can see the details here.

 

Last but not least, I’m very happy to have two reprints in Best of the Year volumes out this month.

“[dis.]”, which first appeared in Hanzai Japan, appears in The Year’s Best Crime and Mystery Stories. And “Visit Lovely Cornwall on the Western Railway Line,” which first appeared in The Doll Collection, is out now in The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 3.