Heath Lowrance's I Was Born a Lost Cause

 

I am a huge fan of Heath Lowrance's short stories. I've read a number of the ones in this collection and I look forward to re-reading them and discovering new ones. Look for a review soon. And in the meantime, buy your own copy here.

Get writing!

Editing Death in the Drowned Lands reawakened my love for writing short stories. Even though I'm trying to concentrate on my longer work, I keep getting distracted by ideas that aren't novel or even novella length. So I'm thrilled to see how many places are looking for short stories.

For example, Dragon Soul Press has a whole slew of anthologies that are open for submission from now into 2021.

Abra Staffen-Wiebe has just updated her monthly market list of PAYING markets. I appreciate her list because it's heavily fantasy/science fiction, horror, speculative--genres I love writing.

Angie's Desk always has an updated list of anthology markets. She only posts once a month, so ost of the markets listed right now are closed.

Duotrope costs $5 a month for its listings, and it can be a tremendous resource for information on magazines and publishers.

If you've been looking for something to do in lockdown besides back cookies and watch Tiger King, why not do some writing?

The Heart of a Devil

I'm always interested in the villains. YYou HAVE to have great villains to have a great tale. My short story "The Ugly One," a tale of a mermaid's revenge, is in this collection. I can't wait to read the other stories. Here's where you can get it.

An anthology of political satire

My story, "Looking Good America," is part of this new anthology, We've Been Trumped, timed to hit the bookstores a month before the election. The genre is political satire, the them is what life might be like under a Trump presidency. There are some excellent stories in the collection, and if you enjoy snark, you might enjoy them.

Ending soon! Suicide Blonde is free until end of day.

My short collection of short stories, Suicide Blonde, is free today. I'm particularly fond of the title story which took me forever to research because I wanted all the little period details to be accurate. The artwork is by Mark Satchwill, who is my long-time collaborator and partner in crime. (He provided many illustrations back in the Dark Valentine days and also provided illos for my stories on NoHo Noir.)

The Time Traveler's Almanac

I am a fan of short stories. I'm a fan of time travel stories. So this collection of short stories (edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer) sounds like it's right up my alley. And I would never have known about it if I hadn't stumbled across the cover in a review. I love this cover. I love that the butterfly is a call out to one of my all-time favorite short stories, Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder." I remember reading that story for the first time and just being stunned by it. It was my introduction to Ray Bradbury and, most likely, the beginning of my life-long love of the short story form.

This is not the first cover this book has. When I went searching for it on Amazon--because to see it is to buy it--an older cover came up. And for me, the older cover was not as inviting. Maybe it's the background color. I used to work in print magazines and one of the things we were always doing is gathering data on which covers sold the best. (Covers with white backgrounds were not that popular.) For me this alternate cover looks like it might be a work of popular history or popular science. It doesn't say "fiction" to me the way the butterfly cover does. But either way, this book is on its way to me and I can't wait.

Neon Noir and returning to my roots

My name is Katherine Tomlinson and I'm a short story writer.
There, I've said it.
Yes, I write longer stuff.
Yes, I still write non-fiction.
Yes, I write scripts and teleplays and web series episodes.
But in my heart, I am a short story writer. I say this knowing that even masters of the short story form don't really make much money from their work. Paying markets for short stories are few and far between, although the mystery, science fiction, and fantasy genres are putting up a valiant fight to keep the short story form alive.
I've been concentrating on longer work of late, trying to ignore the siren call of the short story. I'm writing something for Gerri Leen's "Dark Goddess" anthology, and every time the new "Dark Markets" comes out, I see one or two "calls for submission" that pique my interest. Most of the time I ignore that little tingle of electricity and go back to working on my novel. But every so often, I see an opportunity that I cannot ignore. Like the one for a crime fiction story that's "Neon Noir."  Inspired by the 80s with all the fashion and music and awesomeness that decade possessed.
I lived through the 80s.
I got this.

What is it?

There are times when I can't buy a creative idea and there are times when I honestly can't turn it off. (Mostly when I'm on deadline for some chore I find tedious.) But there's been something going on in my backyard for a while that is just fascinating to me.

The house we rent was built in the seventies, but we live in one of the oldest neighborhoods on this side of the city. So who knows what was here before we were. (Pretty sure it's not a graveyard but hear me out.)

About a week after we moved in, we found a single rusted razor blade lying in the grass. So ... was someone out here shaving one day, letting the rain wash off the lather? About a month after that we found a small, olive green "plastic soldier" of the sort made memorable in the W.D. County short story "Plastic Soldiers." (If you haven't read "Plastic Soldiers," you need to spend 99 cents right now and go buy Speedloader, an anthology that also contains stories by Nigel Bird and Matthew C. Funk, whose writing is also always worth reading. But "Plastic Soldiers?" It's a one-of-a-kind story. Brutal to read and absolutely unforgettable. I've read a LOT of short stories, and it's probably in my top five, right up there with Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and "the Rockinghorse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence, and Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder." "Plastic Soldiers" should be taught in high school English classes.) But I digress.

Over the year we've lived here, various things have shown up in our lawn, sort of like dinosaur skeletons uncovered by scouring winds in the western states. Today this thing showed up.  It's made of wood and about the size of a gobstopper candy. It's made of wood and the spikes unscrew.  It's hard to tell how old it is but the scientist in the house thinks it could be many decades old. Wood decays at different rates. It'll take a downed pine tree 200-300 years to decompose, a spruce tree (what you find a lot of in the Pacific Northwest) will only last 50-100 years. So--what was this thing? A child's toy? Nowadays, we'd keep something like this out of a kids' hands for fear of choking hazards. But it doesn't seem strong enough for any industrial application.
But what it DOES seem good for is a story prompt.
"The Yard of Lost Things."
What would you do if things suddenly started appearing in your yard, dug up by your dog, or revealed by a hard rain? Would some of those items be valuable? Would some of those items be dangerous? Would some hold clues to murder? Or a wedding ring lost by a woman gardening 100 years ago?  I find the possibilities endlessly seductive. I want to write that story. But as it happens ... I'm on deadline. So it's going to have to go into the file for now.

Brain Food is Free

Sometimes you've just got to write a zombie story. Or two.  Or in this case--five. I decided to bundle up my zombie children and put them out there in a mini-collection. It's free until the 5th, so if you have a TASTE for the walking dead, you might enjoy it. Pick up BRAIN FOOD here.

Long story short

If you haven't already, you must head over to Brian Lindenmuth's short story challenge. I guarantee you'll find something new to read.
One of the things I'm finding as I search out stories for my own posts is how many writers wrote short stories I new knew about. Virginia Woolf, for example. I knew her as an essayist but not a writer of short fiction. Ditto Mary Shelley. (To be honest, almost the only thing I know about Mary Shelley is that she wrote Frankenstein.)Then there was L. Frank Baum who, in addition to all those Oz novels, wrote short stories and more than 200 poems. Tennessee Williams wrote short stories too. Who knew?

I (Heart) Short Stories

I came across this great quote by Isaac Asimove,"If knowledge creates problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them." and found myself thinking about his wonderful short story Nightfall.

And then I started thinking about the short stories that have stuck with me since I first read them. Yes, yes, yes, Jack London's To Build a Fire is a fantastic story, and so is Stephen Crane's Open Boat but the stories that really made an impression never made it into my English books--with one exception.

I was going to make a list of my five favorite short stories and then I realized, I had to make it a top 10 list. So here they are in no particular order:

Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. I know what you're thinking, how can I pick just one? But I recently saw Jeffrey Combs' awesome one-man Poe show Nevermore where he recited this one and it's still so potent.

Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.--I'm also fan of his Pretty Maggie Money-Eyes with its stinger of a last line.

Nightfall I once wrote Asimov a fan letter, one of the few I've written, and he was gracious enough to respond to me. His guides to Shakespeare and the Bible are outstanding works of scholarship and well worth owning in the days before the Internet.

Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. Written in 1948, the story goes that she wrote it because she needed money to fix her refrigerator. Her novel has one of the most chilling last lines of any ghost story I ever read.

Saki's The Open Window also has a great last line and a twist. He wrote a ton of great short stories, but this one is probably his most famous.

Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God. Just an awesome story and so incredibly simple. I love the collision of mysticism and technology.

Ray Bradbury's The Small Assassin is a dark, dark story of the kind you might find in a Stephen King anthology. (I love a lot of King's stories, and also many written by his son Joe Hill, but I read King as an adult. The stories here are the ones that shaped me as a writer because they just haunted me.)

Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game which has been used as a basic plot in a bazillion movies including the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Hard Target directed by John Woo.

Frank R. Stockton's The Lady or the Tiger is another favorite. I don't remember ever reading anything else he wrote but like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, maybe one thing is all you need.

And finally, W. W. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw.. This story was written in the 19th century and they'll still be reading it 500 years from now. Stephen King used it as the basis of his novel Pet Sematary and if you haven't read that, you should.

If I could go to 11 like the amps in Spinal Tap I would add one more, D.H. Lawrence's The Rocking Horse Winner. And then there are all those wonderful Roald Dahl stories. I skipped right past Willy Wonka and James and the Giant Peach and went right to his stories in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

What are the stories that shaped your life and your writing? I'd really like to know so I can go read them.