Award Eligibility Thingawhahoosit

Well this is a fun blog post to write! Also terrifying.

I have two stories that came out this year that I love and are awards-eligible.

Hmm, I suppose I love all my stories, but these two, these babies, yeah. One I waited years to write, the other felt like it wrote itself in a mad rush to be made. There are pieces of me lodged like shrapnel in both of them, though I suppose that’s the goal when writing to begin with.

Okay, so . . . (links in the headings!)

My Heart The Bullet in the Chamber

This was my first pro sale. Code-named Mother’s Gun while writing, this story came from an image I’d had for years that really excited me (it’s the one that opens the story) but never wrote. Then the the writing group I was in decided to do a three-month, short story writing intensive based on genre, and the Western was one of them. Alice’s voice is like a klaxon call; I have to write about her and her world again. The story appears in Podcastle’s Artemis Rising 4 special event this past March. You can read it or you can listen to it!. (Do try the audio! My editor, Setsu Uzume, in awesomeness, landed Robin McLeavy, from the television show Hell On Wheels to narrative. Listening to it gives me chills. (When I’m not freaking out that someone is reading my work out loud, that is!) 

By The Hand That Casts It

This story, which was code-named Florist Assassin while I was writing it (because titles are hard), was the first piece I wrote whole-cloth after Taos Toolbox. It appears in the penultimate issue of Shimmer, issue #45, in September. I wrote it literally as a way to destress about my writing, and pulled in bits and bobs of things that had been on my mind — customer service work, career paths not taken, and the very idea of floriography, a Victorian way of communicating secret messages through flowers. (A real thing!) I worried it was too silly, too fluffy, but there’s some steel under it all, just like Briar herself, and the world is too fun to just let go with one story.. Thanks muchly to Elise Tobler, my fantastic editor, who told me in gentle yet in no uncertain terms that we had to have a duel. It’s a fuller story because of her. 

If you liked these stories, maybe nominate them? 2018 was a pretty spectacular year for fiction, short and long and everything in between, so there’s tons of great stuff out there to choose from. Nominate! For me or whoever. It’s all good. 😃

Okay, now where is a paper bag I can breathe into?