The paperback copy of the FAUNA: Winter of Wonder anthology is officially out! I really love this cover and am so delighted that my story "Feathers and Ash" found a home in this collection of stories.
The paperback can be purchased here: FAUNA
Thanks for reading!
I feel so fortunate to have had SEVEN fiction stories published this year! Here's the complete list for the new 2022 Awards Eligibility season:
1. "Luna Britannia" For Page & Screen Magazine, Issue 1: New Beginnings, Jan 2022. Read for free here.
2. "Dental Hygiene on Orbital Station #57" Solarpunk Magazine, April Micro Fiction Contest Winner, May 2022. Read for free here.
3. "The Tale of Starling" Pumpernickel House, Issue 1: The Blue Door, May 2022. On Amazon here.
4. "Born in the Watchmaker's Garden" HyphenPunk Magazine, Issue 4, June 2022. Read for free here.
5. "Raspberried" 101 Words, July 2022. Read for free here.
6. "Ponte Selvaggio" Tree And Stone Magazine, Queer As F*, Issue 2, October 2022. Read for free here.
7. "Feathers and Ash" Cloaked Press, FAUNA: Winter of Wonder Anthology, forthcoming in December 2022. On Amazon here.
Thanks for your support, Readers!
The new Queer As F* Issue of Tree And Stone Magazine has been released on the magazine's Patreon page! Here's the amazing cover art:
I'm honored that my story "Ponte Selvaggio" is included in the issue. Support this great magazine and read the issue early by joining Tree And Stone as a Patreon subscriber!
Very happy to announce that my story “Feathers and Ash” has been accepted by Cloaked Press for their upcoming Winter Of Wonder anthology titled FAUNA.
Inspired by the mythical phoenix, this story features a rebellious character (my favorite type). Both this story and "Ponte Selvaggio" began as images from dreams that I wrote down after waking up, and then many months later, molded into stories.
The anthology is scheduled to be published in December and will have a print edition!
The results were released earlier this month for the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction challenge. For the 2nd story challenge, I got 5th place in my group for my Suspense (Sci-Fi-ish) story "The Heat From Beneath" which gave me 11 points to add to the 1st round story (a Romantic Comedy that only got 2 points at 14th place).
So with my 13 point total, I got 8th place overall in my group, which wasn't enough to push me into the next round. Only the top 5 places advanced. The feedback on the story from the three judges was really positive, and I'm working on expanding the story into a full Sci-Fi tale!
Meanwhile, I've signed up for the next NYC Midnight challenge starting in November: the 250-word Microfiction!
I was ecstatic to receive an acceptance this weekend on a speculative short story titled "Ponte Selvaggio" for Tree And Stone Magazine's next Queer As F* issue! This story started from an image in a dream: a red convertible car speeding across an aqueduct-style land bridge while the waves of a chaotic sea threatened to crash over the precarious structure.
With the help of many critique partners, the idea evolved over the years into a story about sea levels rising, food insecurity, and a sapphic couple trying to stay together through all the stress. The title translated from Italian is "Wild Bridge" inspired by the Mediterranean vibe and my year of Italian language classes in college.
The story was longlisted last fall during Uncharted Magazine’s first SFF story contest, but it didn’t go any further. I'm happy it found a home with Tree And Stone! Publication details to come soon. I believe the issue will be out in October.
I'm delighted to announce that my fantasy folktale "The Witch in the Woods Who Sold the Spark" has been accepted by Crow & Cross Keys for publication sometime around January 2023!
The NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge is underway. The results for the first round came out recently, which will be added to the second round. I posted about my RomCom story and more details on how this challenge works in a previous post: NYCM Update.
I got 14th place for my RomCom story, so I received 2 points for that round. The second round assignments were released and I was much happier with my prompts:
GENRE: Suspense
LOCATION: A cave
OBJECT: A selfie stick
The story I wrote in less than 48 hours took a bit of a Sci Fi turn, so I hope that doesn't hurt me with the judges. But I've also realized that I have two goals with doing these NYCM Challenges:
1. To stretch my writing muscles in genres that I'm not skilled at.
2. To create some new stories that could eventually be submitted for publication. (Sometimes this will mean revising the stories after the contest to make them better, of course, and more speculative if needed.)
Title: "The Heat From Beneath"
Synopsis: While researching an unusual source of heat in an underwater cave, a pair of marine archeologists encounter trouble.
The results will be out in October and only the top 5 point-earners will advance.
Two of my career goals were met at the end of July: joining SFWA, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, and Codex, an online community for "pro-level speculative fiction writers." I'm so thrilled that my story sales this year have pushed me to the next level where I could qualify for these groups. I'm looking forward to improving my writing and getting more stories published in the future!
This summer, I joined the Clarion West Write-a-Thon for the first time! I've been so busy with it, that I've forgotten to do a blog post until now and we're already in Week 5. It's almost over! There's been virtual writing sessions and helpful webinars that I've joined along the way, but the most beneficial part for me has been signing up for the Flash Fiction Critique Groups.
In June, I was matched with 5 other writers. We've exchanged flash fiction stories each week and sent critiques to each other. I haven't been workshopping my stories very much since Covid began (and my college courses finished), so it's been really helpful to get back to giving and receiving feedback! It's pushed me to finish up a lot of story ideas that I had sketched out, but hadn't actually taken the time to complete. I have a lot of revisions to do now to get these stories sent out on submission.
Now that it's the end of June, here's a mid-year update on my publishing stats for January to June of 2022 (short fiction, flash fiction, and poetry):
4 Acceptances (Born in the Watchmaker's Garden, Dental Hygiene on Orbital Station #57, The Tale of Starling, and Raspberried)
Bonus (1st place in NYC Midnight Short Story Round 1)
23 Rejections
32 Submissions
8 Pending
4 Publications (Luna Britannia, Dental Hygiene on Orbital Station #57, The Tale of Starling, Born in the Watchmaker's Garden)
My goal this year has been to submit something at least once a week, and I've met that goal with 32 submissions so far! I also passed my submissions total for all of 2021, which was 29 subs.
Thanks for reading!
I received an acceptance email last Sunday from 101 Words, a site that publishes micro fiction stories that are exactly 101 words long!
I submitted a story to them that I originally started as a poem. But as I've been practicing flash fiction and micro fiction over the last six months, I decided to turn the poem into a teeny tiny story. "Raspberried" is not as speculative as my other fiction stories. It deals with reflections on life and death and, of course, raspberries. My early title for it was "Bury Me With Raspberries" and I use the made-up word 'raspberried' at the end to convey this idea of the homonyms 'berry' and 'bury' that intrigued me.
I'll share the link to the story when it is published!
- Meg
The full eBook for HyphenPunk Magazine's Issue 4 was released today! Happy Summer Solstice, readers. Read some awesome -PUNK stories in this issue including my Clock-Punk fairy story inspired by radioactive material used in watchmaking in the early 20th century!
Buy the full eBook issue for just $2.99 here: HyphenPunk Issue 4
Happy reading!
- Meg
Look at this beautiful art for the cover of the upcoming Issue #4 of HyphenPunk Magazine! Such a treat to see my name here for my clockwork fairy story "Born in the Watchmaker's Garden."
Issue 1: The Blue Door from Pumpernickel House has been released! My story "The Tale of Starling" appears in this issue. It started as a NYC Midnight writing prompt and I'm so thrilled it found a home in a magazine.
I have a description of the story and its origins on a previous post here: Round 1 Story
I'm really looking forward to receiving the paperback version of the issue! You can purchase it here: Amazon paperback or Kindle version
A short excerpt of "The Tale of Starling" is below.
Thanks for your support, readers!
- Meg
The results were out earlier this month for Round 2 of the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. Unfortunately, my story (details here: Round 2) didn't make it into the top 5 stories for my group, so I won't be moving on to Round 3.
I'm looking forward to results from the 100-Word Microfiction contest and the prompts I will get for the first round of the Flash Fiction competition!
This month has been so busy with my kids' end of school year activities. I'm finally getting some breathing room this weekend. Preparing for summer activities and fitting in writing time again! I'll be posting about my latest short story publication soon, as well as my plans for finishing my novel this summer!
Happy writing, everyone!
- Meg
https://hyphenpunk.com/fiction/born-in-the-watchmakers-garden/
The story will be published in an eBook for Issue 4 of the magazine in June.
HyphenPunk previewed the story perfectly in this tweet & excerpt:
Thanks for reading!
- Meg
New accountability post for my novel progress in 2022!
I finished up last November's NaNoWriMo with 33,568 words in my novel draft after writing on 27 out of the 30 that month. I'm now looking at doing another rigorous plan to get the draft finished up so I can send it to beta readers.
To get back into the mode of my story, I've been working on making lists of my characters, place names, and other terms used in the building of the novel's world. I'm also going to reread the 33k words I've written and update my chapter-by-chapter outline. Then I'll keep going, full steam ahead, to The End around 100k words.
Here are some details I posted last November about my WIP novel:
23rd century Earth
paganism
advanced medicine
pregnancy
rebel teens
lotsa fire
Happy writing, everyone!
-Meg
I entered the NYC Midnight contest for the first time this month with the Short Story Challenge. There were over 6000 writers entering this first Round!
How it works:
