As Hollow as a Heart

My story, “As Hollow as a Heart”, is out now in Volume 5, Issue 2 of LampLight magazine.

This story has a curious history. It features Lady Blue, the same gender-flipped Bluebeard character from 2015’s “Lady Blue and the Lampreys”, but its tone, setting, and treatment of the character are very different. It might be a sequel, or a prequel, or an AU. My money is on “both AU and prequel”, but with a person whose life is as long and cyclical as Lady Blue’s, who knows?

You don’t have to have read “Lady Blue and the Lampreys” to understand this story, or vice versa.

Personally, the first draft of this story came to me about two years ago, when I was in the very late stages of a relationship that was going very bad. I had not yet discerned that the relationship was actually abusive, and that I needed to end it. I would, only a month or two after writing the story, but I had not yet then. And although there is no overt abuse in this story, looking back, that’s what the heart of the story is all about. That strange feeling of wanting something, of knowing it is rotten at the core, and of staying anyway.

Read safely, if you read.

Updates and sales

I’ve been continuing to sell things these past few months, which is gratifying.

My short story “A Spell to Retrieve Your Lover From the Bottom of the Sea” will appear in Strange Horizons next week. This is my first short story sale in quite a while, hopefully with many more to follow.

Another short story, “As Hollow as a Heart”, will appear in the December issue of LampLight. This story is about Lady Blue, the gender-flipped Bluebeard protagonist of “Lady Blue and the Lampreys”, but may or may not actually take place in the same universe at that story. More on that later.

For poems, I’ve sold “The Giantess’s Dream” to the very first issue of the erotic speculative poetry magazine Twisted Moon, which is coming out tomorrow – eep! I guess you’ll get another post tomorrow. Another much shorter poem, “Unicorns”, will appear in a future issue of Liminality.

Finally, a few updates on works that are already in the wild. I neglected to mention that earlier this month, “Million-Year Elegies: Edmontonia” went up on the Mythic Delirium website and is now free to read. And the HWA 2014 Poetry Showcase, which features my poem “Evianna Talirr Builds a Portal On Commission”, is now out in paperback. Happy reading!