Tag Archives: mystories

Snippet: “The Boy Who Would Not Be Enchanted” (free @BCSmagazine)

Posted on October 7, 2016 by

SONY DSCVerdanii is the most powerful of the great nations, and everybody knows, much as they pretend to be a nation of citizen democrats, that the Allmother is the heart and soul of that mighty and often arrogant isle.

To have seen her in the flesh, me, a twelve-year-old from across the sea—it’s so fantastical that I rarely brag of it. Only my mother believes me.

Her head was round and bald and capped in dandelion fluff, a thick slurr of white seed-bearing parasols that whirled off her in every twist of breeze. She was tall, broad-shouldered, generous of hip and bosom, and she moved like a strongman or wrestler. She smelled, ever so slightly, of milk.  She bore a harvest-scythe and a small sack of grain in her big hands, and her face carried so much age that the years thrummed around her like the low boom of an elephant drum. My breath caught, to see life in the eyes of one so frighteningly old. It made my chest hurt.

She weighed and dismissed me with a glance, closing on Garland with brisk steps. She tipped up his chin with the scythe—testing his nerve, I thought—and gave him the sort of looking-over you might expect of a buyer in a slave market.

When she’d done, and before she could speak, he bowed, in the manner of an officer of the Fleet. “It would seem superfluous, at this point, to introduce ourselves.”

Story Sale: “Snow Angels” to Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post Apocalypse

Posted on January 10, 2014 by

2006_1128snowday0056I am pleased to say that Silvia Moreno-Garcia has purchased my novelette “Snow Angels” for her antho FRACTURED: TALES OF THE CANADIAN POST-APOCALYPSE. The full ToC is at the link: it will have stories by Claude LaLumiere, Jean-Louis Trudel, and twenty-some other Canadian writers.

Silvia will be here in March, at the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium, along with Christopher Golden and the ever-awesome Peter Watts.

Super Stories of Heroes & Villains is out next month!

Posted on August 22, 2013 by

SuperHeroes_BookpgeOur move from Vancouver had just started to build up a little momentum this spring when I sold Claude Lalumiere my story “Faces of Gemini” for the Super Stories of Heroes and Villains anthology, and even though I’ve been reposting Claude’s interviews and articles about the book, which contains stories by George R.R. Martin, Camille Alexa and Jonathan Lethem, among others, I’d entirely forgotten to let you all know.

“Faces of Gemini” initially appeared in Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks. It’s about being dumped, and picking up the pieces. Plus, also, super heroes and villains!

Here’s a snip:

Gemini nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The horde had thundered into Stanley Park at dawn, killing everyone they found. The barbarians’ weapons had been primitive, but pitted against a scattering of unarmed joggers, tourists and kids, they had done plenty of damage. Dozens of civilians had been murdered before Crucible had arrived to contain the threat.
“So…” Leela said. “Bad guys gone now?”

The book will be out in September.