Surprise!, A Sojourn In The Fifth City in Lightspeed, and other odds and ends
Hello everyone!
I know it’s been quite a while since the last newsletter, but I haven’t really had anything to report in 2023. But this year should have more short fiction publications and thus more newsletters.
Normally I have a little essay about something ready to go out with these, but this month I just completely forgot, so you’ll have to make due with just the story.
A Sojourn in the Fifth City in Lightspeed
A Sojourn in the Fifth City is free-to-read in Lightspeed Magazine. It’s a story about an apprentice caught in a nearly impossible pilgrimage to a city of the dead, far in the future and on a distant world. I wrote an enormous amount of the development of the story in the Lightspeed Author Spotlight, but in some ways of looking at it, it’s a story I have been working on for 30 years. In another way, it’s a birthday present for Kelly Link, so: happy (quite belated) birthday, Kelly Link!
Though this story sort of gently skims along the surface, this is a world that I have spent a lot of time and blood on. I hope that maybe, someday, I will be able to return to it with a novel. If you also hope that, let me know! Maybe it will happen.
I’d like to specifically thank Kerstin Hall, who gave me some great suggestions on this story that improved the beginning considerably, and Rachel Swirsky, who convinced me that it wasn’t too weird to be understood and was worth submitting.
Odds and Ends
Also in this month’s Lightspeed is Wen-Yi Lee’s What Becomes of Curious Minds, which is a really lovely story that I was fortunate enough to read an early draft of. The premise—a human child raised in Alice’s Wonderland who has positioned himself as the resident expert on our world, despite having never been here—is brilliant and the execution is pleasantly unsettling.
I have another story coming out in Lightspeed next month, a flash piece called Only Some of True Love’s Miracles. So I will see you for the next newsletter then—hopefully with a small essay as well. I also have two more stories forthcoming in Lightspeed at some point and a story with ReacTor (formerly tor.com) in October.