Liz just wants a happy birthday.
Is that too much to ask?
A beautiful antique bed: her birthday present to herself. The nice delivery men set it up in her bedroom, and then all Hell breaks loose. Literally.
When it turns out the bed's former owner isn't basking in the glow of a happy afterlife, Liz must face some nasty adversaries to help him. Why on earth would she risk her life and her sanity to help a ghost? Certainly not because she’s in love with him.
Jenny Erpenbeck opens #Spring 2024 with Sloughing Off One Skin, a haunting #ShortStory that explores truth and identity, translated by Michael Hofmann.
So here's a little taste of the marvellous #ShortStories from Jenny Erpenbeck, Jakub Żulczyk, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz for #Spring 2024.
The winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. The New York Times took three: One for its coverage of the war in Gaza and others in the Features and Investigative categories. The Washington Post tied with wins in Commentary, Editorial Writing and National Reporting. The Fiction Pulitzer went to West Virginia writer Jayne Anne Phillips for her novel, "Night Watch," while the Nonfiction prize went to "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy," by Nathan Thrall, which tells the story of a Palestinian father living under Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Here's the full list from NPR. This Poynter.org story has links to all the winning pieces of journalism.
#Editors of #fiction, you've heard about @AmyJSchneider's new book The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction. Should you get it? Wonder no more! Longtime editing pro Adrienne Montgomerie says she even quotes passages of it to her university #editing students! https://tinyurl.com/y27jauz6
#PennedPossibilities 305 — Are there any characters of yours that you wound up HATING once you were finished with a story or WIP?
Taking a cue from @floofpaldi on how to answer this one, I have characters that are HATEFUL but none that I hate. I'm not to a Conan Doyle level that I can hate a character so much that I want to kill off my Sherlock Holmes.
Occasional hateful characters are great fun to write and pit against my MC. She ticks off one misogynist prizefighter during a press interview where her trainer presents her as a contender. An off-handed remark. He becomes her boogeyman, but he's stupidly angry, obviously uses steroids, blurts racist epithets, and gets used by others as muscle. The time he attacks her on a crowded public street, she manages to get him to trip into traffic where he breaks his legs. She walks off with her "Starbucks" she'd put down on a newspaper rack to deal with him.
Another time he ambushes her in a quiet neighborhood midday when nobody is around. His first punch to the head renders her unable to use magic part of her martial art and leaves her stumbling. He fights only with brawn. He wants to kill her. How could you hate a character on character setup like that?
She defeats him with a child's wooden pull toy. Anymore would be spoilers.
It was warm out today, one of the first really warm days we’ve had this summer. I was walking up 14th St NW and noticed a vehicle in the bus lane.
“I think I’ll take the bus the rest of the way’, I thought.
I got into the vehicle and greeted the driver politely. The air conditioning was a great relief. I didn’t see a place to tap my Metro card but maybe the reader was broken.
“What the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] are you doing in my car?” The driver said, rudely.
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “I think you’re mistaken. See the red paint underneath us? This is a bus lane, so this must be the bus.”
Am I the only one who regularly fantasizes about this? It’s normal, right?
A new month means a new @InterzoneMag - and I couldn't have hoped for better weather to sit down with what looks to be another cracking issue of science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, and more.
If you fancy being on the receiving end yourself*, in DRM-free ePub format, subscriptions are available on the Interzone site!
#WordWeavers 2405.01 — Introduce your setting as if it’s a character in your story.
[/Well, I decided to jump ahead in the WiP and write what might be the start of the next chapter. The title may be named:You Have Mail. Pardon the Dickensian texture; this is a first draft. —RS/]
I never expected a human habitation to feel as protective as my dorm room did. Sure, my lodgepole tent protected me through the blizzardy winters in the Fell Wood, as it did the wolf pack that had adopted me. I provided the tent, though. I repaired it, stored it, and raised it year after year. I maintained the cooking fire for all the wolves and cubs. It was I who was being protective, not it—or so it felt.
My dorm room wanted me to know that for the next few years, at least, it existed solely to protect /me,/ to comfort /me./ Increasingly, it did so as I added memories. Mother Wolf and I used one of the two small beds, the left one, piled with fuzzy brown blankets as needed or clothed with luxurious white cotton sheets that felt cool against cheek or jowl. Since I was tasked with the cleaning instead of the dorm servants, my room smelled of us, faintly of yeast, sweat, and a wolf that occasionally hunted rabbits but favored the cafeteria's pasture-beast stew.
The little red iron stove kept us warm through winter; the room's wood panel walls kept us shaded from the hot summer sun. It lovingly provided a rare enclosure—almost like walking within the orange and white rock walls of the slot canyons of the south woods—creating a remarkable silence in a land of noisy humans and huffing machines. This and its soft radiant cloud-light ceiling made me feel... what? Swaddled? Like being /home,/ as my parents would have used the word back on the farm when I was a child. My spirit books, fashion magazines, and papers cluttered the worn ink-stained blond pine desk. I ran my bare feet over the oval tapestry rug letting the patterns of wands and dryad trees caress my toes. My skin stuck to the cushy tan leather chair as I stood, but I knew that was it hugging me.
Situated to the rear of the building on the first floor, the casement window at the end of the rectangular space opened to the clay roof of a shed. Crisp autumn breezes fluttered the gauzy drapes as I looked out at the barrier forest beyond the stables, lit by the setting sun. The window conveniently allowed Mother Wolf to jump up, as she did right now, and clatter into the room as she pleased. She greeted me with an ever-wet red tongue on my face and backside. (A white wolf opening the front door of the women's dorm, with a key in her mouth, and walking in always frightened at least one student or professor. People called me their Wild Woman, but still never got used to the implications of the name.)
Best of all, as the special guest of Her Highness, nobody dared inspect my room. Everyone knocked, no exceptions. Wolf inside, right? Framed pictures of my boyfriend hung suspended by single powder blue silk ribbons, and they were /very/ inappropriate. Looking at him warmed me deeply, reminding me of being /us,/ together—so I didn't care that my foolish "civilized" human brethren might think. People existed to enjoy themselves, regardless of what nosy people might say. This room supported me as I lived here, trapped in the Townships because circumstance required me to learn to be "more human" as Her Highness was fond of saying. My little supportive enclave encouraged me to be me, and allowed me to dress or not dress as I pleased behind its closed oaken door.
When the House Mother knocked, I simply threw on a dressing gown. I turned the pictures around before answering—to be respectful. It tickled me that she never asked why I always smiled when I opened the door.
#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 8 Nbr 29 — Do you share your name with other writers?
Now, in publications or on the Internet, no. People do call me R.S. I first used this pen name when I went to Clarion. I used it to obfuscate my gender in email before the workshop for reasons of what I write. The gender of the author adds subtext to gender fiction. Statistically, most people guess wrong. In person, and when money is involved, it's inescapable and I share my name. I use a different name in photography and a different ungendered pen name when writing non-speculative fiction. Who I am isn't hidden, but I'd ask you not to investigate or reveal it for the reasons stated above.