New story out, er, yesterday! I’ve just returned from travel and am still a little behind, but Nature Futures put The Bursar out into the world anyway! It’s perhaps not what one might call light and fluffy fare, but I hope you find it interesting all the same.
Tag: short story glory
We just keep trying
New story out today in Lightspeed: Until the Cure is about eldercare, exhaustion, and supporting each other through the worst of it. It’s feeling appropriate in my extended family (thankfully not in my household) today, but then I think, well, when wouldn’t it, that’s kind of why I wrote it….
Short things I’ve liked, third quarter 2026
As always, but possibly more so, I haven’t gotten to everything, so please feel free to recommend more things in the comments!
Chorus for Solo Voice, Marie Brennan (Sunday Morning Transport)
A Game of Go, P.A. Cornell (Adventitious)
Sturgeon Baby, Sophie Fink (Reckoning)
Indigo, Heera Kumar (Strange Horizons)
Pieces of Anna, R.L. Meza (Haven Spec)
And So I Open My Fists, Rachel Sobel (Clarkesworld)
“Gramarye,” Sonya Taaffe (Not One of Us)
Leavetaking, Tia Tashiro (Uncanny)
Can’t Rain All the Time, Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (Gavagai)
If You Don’t Return, I Want You To Know, Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (Haven Spec)
Tomorrow night’s appearance
There’s a lot going on this month, and here’s tomorrow night’s plan: Cole Sarar’s SciFi Reading Hour at the Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis!
That’s right, 7:00 tomorrow, cool SF stories by me and Cole Sarar, read with specially composed musical accompaniment by Martin Law! Come on out to the Bryant Lake Bowl if you’re local, it’s going to be a good time!
Good company
I’m happy to say that one of last year’s stories, “And Every Galatea Shaped Anew,” will be appearing in Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year 2025. You can see the full table of contents and how to preorder here!
Ghost story with tomato soup
New story out in Strange Horizons today! Scarcely Gone is a thing I haven’t done much of: it’s a ghost story. In this case it’s a ghost story with a John Denver title: “he’d rather play his banjo in the morning when the moon is scarcely gone” from “I Guess He’d Rather Be in Colorado.” That makes this one of a random series of stories I’ve written from fragments of my dad’s music, which are not linked in any other way except that their titles came from singing artists Dad loved around the house.
(This is why, incidentally, “the story behind the story” is often so hard to write: because “how did you come to write this story?” often has a beginning like “well, when I was preverbal my parents listened to a bunch of James Taylor, so….”)
Anyway, hope you enjoy my foray into the world of ghost stories!
Planting a seed
Good morning! I hope you had nice dreams last night! Here’s a new story from Sunday Morning Transport, The Seed of a New Dream. May you find your own dreams…and your own way to work around them….
Short stuff I’ve liked, second quarter 2026
As always, I am nowhere near reading everything, so please feel free to recommend more lovely things in the comments.
The Dream of Jeannie, Marie Brennan (Strange Horizons)
Expendable Me, P.A. Cornell (Gavagai)
Hell Is Empty, J.R. Dawson (Lightspeed)
This Is Not My Timeline, J.R. Dawson (Reactor)
Remade, Reshaped, Remembered, Sydney Paige Guerrero (Otherside)
The Stone’s Choice, Anaea Lay (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
obsolesce, Macey Levington (Otherside)
In the Foothills, Rajiv Moté (Reckoning)
The Best of Intentions, Mari Ness (Lightspeed)
The Mermaid Speaks of Social Justice from the Bathtub, Nico Martinez Nocito (Strange Horizons)
Once, I returned Tulip, Once I became, C.P. Nwankwo (Reckoning)
Reap the Rules, Sonya Taaffe (Reckoning)
Song, Skin, Sea, Tamara Vardomskaya (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
A Mermaid Looks at 40, Fran Wilde (Uncanny)
Welcome to Heroism, John Wiswell (Uncanny)
Immigrant Girl from the End of the World, Hannah Yang (Uncanny)
Short stuff I’ve liked, first quarter 2026
This is more partial even than usual, because I’ve had some download problems that I’ve since fixed. But we can let that filter out to the second quarter; time waits for etc. etc.
This Is Not a Love Poem, Alexandra Dawson (Reckoning)
I Met You On the Train, J. R. Dawson (Uncanny)
The Doorkeepers, A. T. Greenblatt (Uncanny)
Unsettled Nature, Jordan Kurella (Apex)
Straw Gold, Mari Ness (Small Wonders)
No Kings/No Soldiers, A.M. Tuomala (Uncanny)
Blade Through the Heart, Carrie Vaughn (Reactor)
Antediluvian, Rem Wigmore (Reckoning)
I speak fluent human
New story out in Clarkesworld: Person, Place, Thing! This was such a fun voice for me to fall into writing, and it ended up surprising me with how many Muppet references it wanted. Usually I am opposed to “I am but a servant of the muse” claptrap from writers, but when that muse is demanding aliens who have very earnestly learned from mid-to-late period Henson…well, what am I to do?