Tag: fiction

Two Pics, Two Points: New Story, New Rock

First, as you may recall, I was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award this year.

🚨SPOILER ALERT!!!🚨 I did not win.

But I did learn that all of the finalists get a “token”: a nice smooth river stone, suitable for all your smoothest, roundest river stone needs. Pictured above is mine.

Second, on the day this came in the mail, I also got my contributor copies of the Sept/Oct 2023 Asimov’s Science Fiction, featuring my most recent novelette, “The Dead Letter Office.” That’s shown below. Look for your copy wherever delightful nonsense is sold.

Asimov’s is also running an interview with me about writing in general, this story in particular, and my history with the magazine, who’ve been publishing my drek for about 13 years now (my first pro sale was to Sheila Williams back in 2008, although that story didn’t see print until 2010, I guess).

The cover of the Sept/Oct 2023 issue of "Asimov's Science Fiction" shows a eerie swampy forest with a wolf stalking in the distance, and hails this as their "Special Slightly Spooky Issue!"

Recommended Read/Listen: PseudoPod 867: “Chainsaw: As Is” by Gillian King-Cargile

PseudoPod 867: “Chainsaw: As Is” by Gillian King-Cargile

I like a lot about this story: the pacing, the order and layering of new information, the economy of that information and how it’s conveyed, the lightly experimental use of evolving ad copy to punctuate and modulate that story (and, in the case of the audio, the sound engineering around that to differentiate these asides from the main narrative flow). It’s worth a half-hour of your time.

PRE-SALE ALERT!🚨 “There Was No Sound of Thunder: A Time Portal Novel” for 99-cents!

My latest novel, There Was No Sound of Thunder: A Time Portal Novel, is available for pre-purchase now. For less than the price of a very cheap cup of coffee you can have that ebook in hand the very moment it drops next week.

On Amazon: https://amzn.to/3P3gxlu

On Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1363713

What if your great new job had dire consequences for space-time integrity?

Fresh out of college and unsure what’s next, Taylor has lucked into a cushy job in human resources. Most companies keep costs down by outsourcing and off-shoring. Taylor’s bosses are different. They’re committed to staying “100% MADE IN AMERICA”—by bringing in cheap labor using a time portal. But their latest batch of “New Guys” aren’t like the others… 

  • “The movie pitch to the Sci-Fi Channel would be Breaking Bad meets Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book. If this all sounds a bit grim it is anything but. Like Breaking Bad this has a strong streak of black humour running through it and is very entertaining.♥♥♥+”—SF Magazines
  • “The big pleasure of this story is watching all the pieces come together. Rating: ★★★★★ Fun story with a sophisticated plot.”—Rocket Stack Rank
  • “An intriguing take on minimum wage employment and how it can be made to pay.”—John Fairhurst

Pre-order on Amazon (https://amzn.to/3P3gxlu) or Smashwords (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1363713) right now.

My novelette “This Place is Best Shunned” has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. Read it for free!

My story “This Place is Best Shunned” (Tor.com, July 2022) has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award!

The Shirley Jackson Awards honor Jackson’s defining contributions to modern literature by annually recognizing “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” I’m tickled pink to have been nominated, as “psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic” are pretty clear the bullseye I’ve been aiming to hit for the past couple decades.

Here’s their official press release:

2022 Shirley Jackson Awards Nominees

Boston, MA (June 2023) — In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, The Shirley Jackson Awards, Inc. has been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.

The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories:  Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Fiction, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.

The nominees for the 2022 Shirley Jackson Awards are:

NOVEL

  • Beulah by Christi Nogle (Cemetery Gates Media)
  • The Dead Friends Society by Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall (Encyclopocalypse Publications)
  • The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias (Mulholland Books)
  • Jackal by Erin E. Adams (Bantam)
  • Unwieldy Creatures by Addie Tsai (Jaded Ibis Press)
  • Where I End by Sophie White (Tramp Press)

NOVELLA

  • The Bone Lantern by Angela Slatter (PS Publishing)
  • Bound Feet by Kelsea Yu (Cemetery Gates Media)
  • Catastrophe by Deirdre Danklin (Texas Review Press)
  • Lure by Tim McGregor (Tenebrous Press)
  • Pomegranates by Priya Sharma (PS Publishing)
  • The Wehrwolf by Alma Katsu (Amazon Original Stories)

NOVELETTE

  • Azeman or, the Testament of Quincey Morris by Lisa Moore (Black Shuck Books)
  • “Challawa” by Usman T. Malik (Dark Stars:  New Tales of Darkest Horror)
  • “Sweetbaby” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld, October 2022)
  • “This Place is Best Shunned” by David Erik Nelson (Tor.com)
  • What the Dead Know by Nghi Vo (Amazon Original Stories)

SHORT FICTION

  • “Brother Maternitas” by Viktor Athelstan (Your Body is Not Your Body)
  • “The Church of Divine Electricity” by Emily Mitchell (The Southern Review)
  • “Dick Pig” by Ian Muneshwar (Nightmare Magazine, Issue 112)
  • “Halogen Sky” by Wendy N. Wagner (VASTARIEN:  A Literary Journal, vol. 5, issue 1)
  • “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867” by Kim Fu (Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION

  • And At My Back I Always Hear by Scott Nicolay (Word Horde)
  • Breakable Things by Cassandra Khaw (Undertow Publications)
  • Hell Hath No Sorrow Like a Woman Haunted by RJ Joseph (The Seventh Terrace)
  • Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu (Tin House)
  • Splendid Anatomies by Allison Wyss (Veliz Books)
  • We Are Here to Hurt Each Other by Paula D. Ashe (Nictitating Books)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY

  • Chiral Mad 5, edited by Michael Bailey (Written Backwards)
  • The Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors, edited by Doug Murano (Bad Hand Books)
  • Other Terrors, edited by Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason (William Morrow)
  • Screams From the Dark:  29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor Nightfire)
  • Your Body is Not Your Body, edited by Alex Woodroe and Matt Blairstone (Tenebrous Press)

2022 SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARDS CEREMONY

The 2022 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented in-person on Saturday, July 15 at 8pm at Readercon 32, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Quincy, Massachusetts.

“re: Thesis defense issue…”

I loved this story, “RE: Thesis defense issue – kalirush 🐍” —and only later learned that it was a riff on an old McSweeney’s piece that, yeah, is fun but suffers from the baked-in McSweeney’s problem (i.e., that it “approaches humor with a lab coat and tweezers.”)

Anyway, this amateur fan-fic riff is better, because it is actually funny, not just theoretically funny and basically funny shaped.

[the image above is an XKCD comic]

Recommended Read/Listen: “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism” by Jon Padgett

PseudoPod 433: “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism”

I absolutely guarantee the last couple twists are ones you ain’t gonna see coming, dummy. 

[photo credit: “Photo booth portrait of two clowns and a ventriloquist dummy” by oakenroad is licensed under CC BY 2.0. ]

Halloween Treats from Dave-o!!! 🍂🍁🎃👻🕯🤡🔪🥩💀

A handful of seasonally-appropriate tales:

“This Place is Best Shunned” 😱⛪️🦑

My latest dark tale, “This Place is Best Shunned,” is free to read on Tor.com RIGHT NOW!!!

Allie and Rooster are heading down to Asheville for Rooster’s new gig, a cushy stint as artist-in-residence at UNC. Rooster is more of a con artist than maker of art, but Allie doesn’t mind, because he’s good-looking, charming, and values what she is: a girl with a keen eye for abandoned places and a knack for getting into them. But when they stumble upon an old backcountry church—the perfect backdrop for Rooster’s latest project—they discover that some “abandoned” places have a knack for keeping themselves occupied.

(Amazing cover art is by David Palumbo!!!)

FLASHBACK FRIDAY: Tardigrade Expiration Date ♬♫♪

Good friend (and maven of Arbor Teas) Aubrey Lopatin recently shared this song with me and reminded me I wrote this novella for her and her hubbie roughly one-billion years ago: Expiration Date.

In honor of this Season of Joy and New Beginnings, I offer this free read and song to you, my all my Best Belovéd Readers.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: OMFG! In late December a frozen tardigrade became the first ‘quantum entangled’ animal in history (researchers claim). If you’re a child of the 1970s, you no doubt appreciate the fact that this is the first ever successful creation of artificial extra-sensory perception (ESP) in an animal!!!1!

(Meanwhile, if you are a scientist or someone who read the entire article, you more likely appreciate that these researchers “did not entangle a tardigrade with a qubit in any meaningful sense”—but it’s still neat that they took a tardigrade down to nearly absolute zero and successfully revived it. Hearty lil fellas, right?)