I never know what to blog about unless something comes up to blog about, if you know what I mean, but luckily something’s come up! Or three things, I guess.
THING THE FIRST: The very first anthology I ever made a pro sale to just won a World Fantasy Award! I am so, so happy for ‘She Walks in Shadows‘ – the editors (Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles) did a great job curating it, and that’s not just me tooting my own sackbut now that it’s won an award. I’ve read some collections where stories stick out like a tentacle in a church, but these ones all go together. Plus, I love the interior art.
Derek Newman-Stille of Speculating Canada did a terrific, thoughtful writeup of my story in this anthology, by the way! It’s always thrilling when you’re trying to make a point in a story and somebody actually, you know, gets the point exactly the way you wanted them to.
I need to work on titles, though.
Fun fact: I only submitted to this because my buddy MHK sent me the link and said “Holy moly, does this look up your alley!” I hadn’t even written a short story since, probably, high school. So I threw something together from an idea that I had in my Ideas Folder, didn’t even edit it, and sent it in, and when it got accepted, I was like “Gosh, this whole writing for money thing is a doddle!” because my submission success rate at that point was 100%. My first ever story submitted, first ever accepted.
I would like to go back in time to 2014 Premee and just like… laugh in her face.
THING THE SECOND: I placed in the Molotov Cocktail’s Flash Fear contest, go read ‘Sixteen Minutes‘! Tenth, so barely squeaked in (omg like a RAT), and a drop from the previous years’ Flash Phenom contest in which I placed seventh (…no rats in that one, but there’s a joke about a squeaker somewhere, I know it), so I dunno, next one I enter I had better BRING. THE. PAIN before I drop off the list entirely!
I was quite proud of this one, as I wrote it very quickly, telling my internal critic to stfu, and edited almost 500 words off it (so I’m frankly kind of surprised that it makes any internal narrative sense at all, given my penchant for run-on sentences and trainwreck clauses), and I was really pleased to place. I also don’t write horror, so this was kind of a first. (I do think I’ve written things that might fall into a horror category if you classify it pretty broadly – like last year’s entry, ‘The Cave‘ – but this was the first thing I set out to write that was scary instead of just icky or creepy.)
This means that I will be in two prizewinner’s anthologies with some incredibly talented company. I’ll post the link here when the book comes up for sale! Super excited.
THING THE THIRD AND MOST EXCITING, AT THE MOMENT: A longer piece of mine, ‘The Honeymakers,’ (see what I mean about titles?) is in Syntax and Salt’s ‘Gods, Myths, and Monsters’ special issue, out now!
Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point.
I was going for kind of an unspecified time-period, small village in England, Wickerman-But-No-Nicolas-Cage vibe in this story, in which I think I succeeded, except for the “Not the bees!!!!!!” part because, you guys, so many bees. So it was a thrill to write about bees, which I love, and creepy unspecified forest gods, which I also love, and sisters, which I should know nothing about since I just have a brother, but which makes it creepier as the girls get drawn deeper into the bee problem.
Actually the rest of this issue is ace, and ‘Sirena’ made my hair stand on end, and I also liked ‘We Are the Night, We Are the Day.’
I also did a bit of a Twitter monologue about gods, myths, and monsters in general that starts here: https://twitter.com/premeesaurus/status/792832816887181312
So yeah, that’s news for now! I guess the bad news, related to this good news, is that I have two more pieces coming out in the next…I don’t know, they’re not very good at getting back to people, so let’s say six months?? And that means that I have fewer pieces on submission that are awaiting replies, and that means I have to get my ass back onto new short fiction because my trunk is emptying out, which really isn’t a sentence (in both meanings of the term, ha) because the ideas folder is bulging at the seams (58 files!) and I’m sick of looking at this goddamn novel to be honest with you (I think I’m on revision 8, also known as the revision that broke the stupid book because I decided to invent a secret society to fuck everything up further and now I have to go through all 98,000 words making sure that it’s incorporated with the other stuff that people are talking about in the book and doesn’t just fly in out of left field) (anyway the moral of the story is stay away from secret societies which I feel like is good life advice as well as good revision advice).