New Fiction Coming out in August & September

My story "Bonfires in Anacostia" will be appearing in the August issue of Clarkesworld. Yes, that Clarkesworld, as in, one of the best science fiction periodicals in the world today. In a certain sense, the story has come full circle: It was reading Nick Mamatas's LJ, back when he read slush for CW in its early days, and the links he would post to their stories, that got me to start taking science fiction seriously as a literary mode. So seriously that, at some point in the mid-2000s, I started writing a story entitled "Bonfires in Anacostia". That first version was terrible, polemical infodump, that I never finished because I realized it was terrible. It has been through several more versions since then. The improvements were more than incremental with each try, but it had a long way to go before it could be sold. And because it was near-future, it kept running the risk of being overtaken by events technological, political and economic. What did not kill it made it stronger. I'm proud of the story I ended up telling, and look forward to people being able to read it on August 1st (and tell me why it sucks, of course).

This marks a few career milestones: My biggest payday to date for a piece of fiction; the first publication that could conceivably put me in the realm of being eligible to be nominated for a 2015 Campbell award (ahem, ahem); first story I've published that my wife actually likes.

Such a big sale, however, doesn't mean that I've turned my back on the little people, the peculiar zines and whatnot. How could I? Most of what I write is a bit too bizarre to get a hearing elsewhere. So I will be making a second appearance in FLAPPERHOUSE, this time with a story entitled "Cold Duck". It was inspired, in part, by a Twitter interchange with the poet Anne Boyer, who deserves to be more widely read.

By the way, you can now subscribe to a year's worth of FLAPPERHOUSE for only $10. So if you want to be sure not to miss "Cold Duck," go ahead and subscribe.

A reminder also that Phantasm Japan, which includes my story "Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self," is available for pre-order. I don't know the exact ship date, but it might be September-ish, so I'm including that in this blog post.

On a much lighter note, I have been reminded of the existence of my Tumblr Yiddish Curses for People Who Think I'm a Shaygetz, and will be posting a few more imprecations in the coming weeks.