Today I am going to brag about my recent and forthcoming publications! 

(I have mixed feelings about the publicity side of writing. I feel awkward promoting my own work, but I also want other people to read it. So here we are.)

Working backwards, let’s start with the Kickstarter for CATS: Cycling Across Time and Space! A feminist science fiction anthology about cats and bicycles, edited by Elly Blue. It is already fully funded, but you can still back the project and get fun extra stuff with your copy of the book (including a very cool enamel pin). But it ends tomorrow, so you don’t have long!

My story in the anthology, “The Certainty of Danger,” is about a woman dealing with the after effects of a marsquake accompanied by a cat she can communicate with through a neural implant. You can read more about it in the short contributor interview I did.

(I’ve had stories in other volumes of the Bikes in Space series, The Sound of Home, in Dragon Bike (February 2020) and Leaving, in Bikes Not Rockets (December 2018).)

In August, my flash fiction piece “The Present” was published in Ink: Queer Sci Fi’s Eighth Annual Flash Fiction Contest anthology.

The word limit for the Queer Sci Fi contest is 300 words and I enjoy the challenge of writing a complete story within such a small space. I also appreciate that each year’s theme allows for an impressive breadth of story ideas.

(I’ve also had stories in previous anthologies from Queer Sci Fi, What Is Left Behind, in Migration (July 2019) and The Moment of, in Impact (July 2018).)

And in May of this year, my story “The PILGRIM’s Guide to Mars” was published by Diabolical Plots (my first pro sale!). I really love this story, which took a long while to find a way to come together. I started thinking about a Martian pilgrimage route around the time the rover Opportunity stopped working, but I went through a lot of ideas before this one unfolded for me.

So far it has been a nice and productive year. It looks busier than it feels, though. So many stories submitted and rejected, so many abandoned before the submission point because the requisite pieces were not there.

But those are all equally valid parts of the process. Not every idea finds its appropriate expression in a story. Not every story finds a place of publication.

But some do and they are precious.