“The Tube Worm” is now out in The Growers: Best of New Myths Anthology Volume V!

Who doesn’t like to be accepted? My fantasy story “The Empress and the Kite Maker” will appear in In Another Time. It features the greatest kite maker accepting a tacit artistic challenge from a new and radical empress. It’s very poignant. And it took so many rewrites to figure out.

Reedsy continues to provide great side gigs for me, especially when it comes to getting some extra cash for the holidays as well as feeding a need to see Broadway plays (whose tickets are often bought for the holidays).

I don’t want to talk about my jobs in particular for reasons of privacy, but what I value most about Reedsy overall is the ease of communication. For example, when I got a request, I quickly read over the brief and sample material to assess what the potential client needs, then respond with either a polite refusal and reason or either a query for more information and details on what I could do for them. In the latter case, I also provide a fee to get their approval before putting it in formally.

I’ll then discuss in more detail what my work will consist of before the fee is approved and the offer formally put in or the client decides I’m not the right person for them or the fee is not within their budget. Which is fine.

I know other freelancers who have a hard time dealing with clients, who can get nasty and who can’t be gotten rid off. Reedsy provides a great screen in this regard. It’s a safe place for both freelancers and clients.

I also appreciate reminders from Reedsy and notifications that payment has been made. A couple of times payment wasn’t made–in both cases for entirely understandable reasons–and Reedsy stepped in to handle the matter. Taking the matter of filthy lucre out of my hands let me focus on the editorial work and helped me maintain my relationship with the client.

Plus, I love to edit. So it’s fun to work with the platform.

If you’d like to work with Reedsy to, please click on this referral link : https://reedsy.com/p/stephen-s-power. Full disclosure: I’ll get a bit of that filthy lucre if you do.

Heathen #1 includes my story “The Dunwich Hunt Club.” The question, I’ve been asked is, Does putting on the wolf suit turn the main character into a wolf or is he still a guy in a wolf suit? What do you think?

And “Tales of Horror” accepted my story “The Revivalist,” turning around a contract in less than 12 hours (most of which I was asleep, so it could’ve been quicker). And it’ll appear in the next issue! I love this story. I’d love to turn it into a series of novels about an Explorer’s Club of the Weird featuring the main characters as steampunk Mulder and Scully.

It was nice to be include in this list from LitReactor: 10 Speculative Fiction Editors Who Have Worked on Mind-Bending Stories.

In the fastest sub to pub I’ve experienced, Unorthodox Stories has taken a story called “Tennis,” which I wrote based on a prompt in George Saunders’s online class, and Lightspeed has taken a second story of mine, “City of One,” which is written in the form of game instructions.

I still got it.

I haven’t written a short story in a long time, but my store of unpublished ones is being whittled down with two being accepted recently and two more enjoying holds. What I have been writing is the outline for a new novel, momentarily titled NIGHTMARE IN THE AFTERNOON, and several 10-minute plays, one of which I’ll eventually submit to the Cut Edge Collective, whose most recent 10-minute play festival inspired me.

I also contributed to Shepherd.com, a new book discovery site, a list of my three favorite reads of 2023. You can find that here, and the overall list of all the authors contributing here.

Happy to report that my mirror sestina The Water Dragon’s Lark will appear in the anthology A Flight of Dragons being put out by West Avenue Publishing. And I get paid! The poetry market being what it is, this is only the second time I’ve gotten a check. And I’m grateful.

The sestina, like those published by Clarion and Innisfree, uses as its unlike repeated word an “Avatar” element, in this case, stone (for Earth).

I realized I had a bunch of poems lying around, so I subd them, and The Sandy River Review picked up “Sakoku” in a couple of days.

The title is the Japanese term for “locked country” and means, politically, “the isolationist foreign policy of the Japanese Tokugawa shogunate under which, for a period of 264 years during the Edo period (from 1603 to 1868), relations and trade between Japan and other countries were severely limited, and nearly all foreign nationals were barred from entering Japan, while common Japanese people were kept from leaving the country,” according to Wikipedia. I was inspired by its emotional resonance.

A couple years ago I decided to stop writing short fiction and dedicate myself to writing novels because, as much as I enjoy writing short fiction, it takes up a lot of time and keeps me from doing other things, what a friend described beautifully as “the cul-de-sac of productivity.”

Trouble is, What novel to write? I outlined many, but nothing I could get any traction on. Finally last year, after getting laid off by Macmillan when they shuttered my imprint, Tom Dunne Books–historically for me a precursor to novel writing–I outlined a book that was a take on Martian Chronicles: what if the psychic Martians attacked Earth first? Trouble is, it was just people reacting. But Tom Dunne liked one element, so I outlined an entirely different novel around that. Which Tom thought was halfway there. So I outline another novel, and that’s what I’m going with.

I have a rough draft of the first 20 of 30 or so chapters. Once I finish the last 10, I’ll revise the whole thing to fix continuity problems, address changed premises, etc. The third draft will smooth out the relationship at the heart of the story. While the book has a very high concept–instead of straight SF, I’m going for a more Crichton-esque “SF for non-SF readers”–to me it’s really the story of a marriage. That background is important to me; even if it doesn’t show up on the page so much, it informs a lot of the little decisions and touches, the way The Dragon Round is a book about faith in a world about gods.

And now to update my story publications. I have two on the way as I continue to sell my dwindling stores. I also have several I’m trying to get reprinted.

So I haven’t been totally lazy over the last couple years.

Also I’m working on a play with the above mentioned friend, an actual playwright. We’ll see how that works out.