These friends have thrived on a feeling of “us against the world.” That kind of loyalty is appealing, but it’s also demanding and high-pressure. What happens when it explodes?
Read more about my newest story, “The Staircase”–along with thoughts on YA, mythmaking, and writing during a pandemic–in my interview with F&SF blog.
This October, I’m bringing back my four-week “Structure Your Novel” boot camp, via Catapult. Through reading assignments, exercises, and discussion, you’ll find your story’s central conflict, establish a satisfying arc, and expand your outline. The course is designed for writers in both the drafting and revision stages. We’ll meet Thursday evenings over Zoom.
Read more and sign up here and/or ask me a question.
People are natural storytellers, yet writing a compelling story isn’t always intuitive. This four-week course recognizes that a good story requires technical skill, but that finding that organic and individual story also requires reflection, practice, and conversation.
This course—open to those who have yet to start writing, and those who are revising full-length drafts—guides you in developing a complete story structure for your novel. It provides tools for outlining new projects and finding fresh insight into stalled projects.
In this course, we will use written guides, writing exercises, assigned stories, and discussions to move from premise to detailed synopsis, identifying universal principles that will make your distinct story a satisfying read. Writers will leave with outlines for their works-in-progress and a toolkit of strategies for future projects.
In our town, there are two roads that cross on top of a hill. Go through the intersection and you’ll tip down toward the mall (east) or the turnpike ramp (west) or the high school (north) or the endless town-house developments (south). But everyone at school says there’s another tipping point there, a fifth cardinal direction.
Specifically, there is a staircase cut into a grassy hill: fifteen wooden planks, the final one inches above the asphalt. If you walk down them, if you take that last step, your foot will never hit the street.
You will disappear.
My new story “The Staircase”–about urban legends, gossip, and what we’ll do to keep our friends–is available now in the July/August 2020 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
You can now order individual paper copies (click the PayPal link) and e-books (all formats).
You can also subscribe! Order paper copy subscriptions from F&SF, a digital subscriptions (all formats) Weightless Books, or Kindle editions.
This past year saw the release of two stories eligible for awards consideration:
“The Children’s Cabinet”
Shirley Magazine, Issue 13 (spring 2019)
730 words / short story
“The Albatwitch Chorus”
Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2019
8,000 words / novelette
Read in the SFWA forums. (Log in required.)
I was also pleased to discuss the story with the Asimov’s blog, From the Earth to the Stars.
Thank you for reading!
I recently spoke to From the Earth and the Stars, the Asimov’s Science Fiction blog, about my new story “The Albatwitch Chorus.” I confessed to things like:
This idea, like most of my ideas, came both quickly and slowly. When I learned about the albatwitch, a kind of mini-Sasquatch from Pennsylvania folklore, I knew I wanted to write about it. I like cryptids and have a weirdly specific phobia of uncanny, humanoid tricksters.
Read the whole interview here.
You can find my newest short story, “The Albatwitch Chorus,” in the Sept./Oct. issue of Asimov’s. It’s about a witch going through a midlife crisis, her ex-husband, her teenage intern, and the cryptids in her backyard:
“Possum?” I asked, but the wind shifted, revealing the body was too big. Curled hands and pointed black ears of a raccoon, but sparse fur and no tail. I had never seen one before, but I knew.
“Albatwitch,” Jonas said, his eyes still fixed on the creature. “Go call animal control.”
Very little scared me, yet I nodded mutely, hurried through the kitchen door, and stood at the window with a phone in hand. Albatwitches carried disease. They attracted predators. And they had mysterious funerary rites one did not want to interrupt. They mostly kept to themselves, but they were quick to retaliate, and usually as a chorus—that was the name for a group—at least, before the 1979 Treaty of Half Moon Rock, sealed with an exchange of apples (from us) and a mound of empty soda cans, a few nuggets of raw garnet, and a deer carcass (from them).
You can order print and digital subscriptions, purchase an eBook copy, or find the issue on the shelves at Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, and a million other stores.
The baby — well, she’s no longer a baby. She stands at the cabinet door, only wobbles a little as it swings back. The baby — the youngest and the last, forever the baby — has inherited the amusements of three older siblings. To you, the cabinet is an archive of ten years of raising children, but to the baby, it contains the future.
Read my new flash story “The Children’s Cabinet” in Shirley Magazine.
The September/October issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction is here, and it brings my story “The Witch of Osborne Park.”
It was expensive to live in Osborne Park, but it was worth it, the realtor promised. You were paying for the charm, engraved corner stones and peaked attics. You were paying for block parties and solstice celebrations. You were paying for the Neighborhood Association; for tranquility and protection.
(Spoiler alert: neither tranquility nor protection are found.)
It is a special joy to share this story with the world during the fall, when the children of Osborne Park gather in their purple robes and don their wooden masks. Happy Halloween, and hold your children close, unless maybe you shouldn’t.
You can order print and digital subscriptions, purchase an eBook copy, or find the issue on the shelves at Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, and a million other stores.
Our first review is in! Kirkus writes:
Feldman (The Angel of Losses, 2014) and Popkin (Everything Is Borrowed, 2018, etc.) gather a medley of diverse voices to reflect on politics, society, and culture in contemporary America.
Essays, poems, fiction, photographs, and cartoons bristle with emotion from contributors responding to issues they consider most urgent: racism, sexism, poverty, and injustice. Nancy Hightower, who grew up in the evangelical South, captures the tenor of the collection when she urges the church, academia, and publishing—which she sees as being largely white—to break down racial boundaries and become “filled with, and overflowing with diversity.” She suggests that “if those in the literary arts want to transform the landscape of America, they need to be better evangelicals.” By that, she means that they must “write and publish work that speaks to students in the Bronx and LGBTQ teenagers in Oklahoma.” Inclusivity, she asserts, would produce a “glorious rhetorical army” to resist the president “and his corrupt administration.” Not surprisingly, many contributors rail against Donald Trump. Fiction writer Carmen Maria Machado cites her observations of racism and homophobia as reasons she should have known that Trump would be elected president. Poet, novelist, and creative nonfiction writer Samira Ahmed, who was born in India, takes on racism, reporting that she has been called terrorist, rag head, and sand nigger. “You realize, too young, that racists fail geography,” she writes, “but that their epithets and perverted patriotism can still shatter moments of your childhood.” Keeping silent is no adequate response, she warns: “in this land of the free and home of the brave, you plant yourself. / Like a flag.” Cartoonist Liana Finck depicts a map of America with U.S. crossed out, substituted by T. H. E. M. Novelist Diane McKinney-Whetstone celebrates the “hopeful vibe” she felt when she participated in the Women’s March. Hope counters an undercurrent of despair for many contributors: “I don’t want to give up the struggle,” says a despondent individual drawn by Finck. “I want to win and move on.”
A heartfelt and thoughtful collection.
I’m thrilled to see my story, “The Hermit,” in print in issue 4.1 of The Maine Review. Living in a decaying neighborhood, a young woman thinks her only hope of salvaging her inheritance–and the life she hoped for–is to sell her mother’s rowhouse to the company planning to demolish her city block. But when a religious hermit moves into the abandoned house next store and begins dispensing wisdom through the boarded windows, she realizes her loyalties are more complicated than she thought. Ultimately she must decide what kind of neighbor she truly wants to be, and what it means to call a place home.