"Forged in Iron and Blood," out today!

I’m so pleased to finally be able to share “Forged in Iron and Blood.” It has been embarrassingly long in the works (like, most authors spend less time on full-length novels than I spent on this one), but I’m immensely happy with how it turned out,* and I hope you enjoy it! You can order it, along with a bunch of other great stories, here.

I figured that, now that this story is out in the world, I’d share a few bits and pieces about how it came about. No spoilers here.

A couple years ago (seriously), I saw an open call for short story submissions that really struck my fancy (I can’t remember it exactly, but it was something about iron and oak, I think—tales of the fae), and I started mulling over it. My husband and I were just about to leave for Italy for an anniversary vacation, and I remember standing in line to board our first plane (before we were so massively jetlagged that we could hardly string together complete sentences)** and explaining the theme to him and starting to brainstorm. At that point, if I recall, I had about one idea—I wanted an awesome older woman in my story.

Brice (the husband) is my most fantastic brainstorming partner. I bounce all my best ideas off him, and they get better. There are also about a million zany ideas that I immediately discard (he usually brings up dinosaurs or explosions at some point, or weird stuff like talking goats and such). But it’s so much fun that I don’t mind. 

By the end of our first brainstorming session, we had a character named Lina, who was a retired soldier, and she had an awesome berserker fairy friend, and there was going to be a kind of Wild West shootout sort of thing.

I took the ideas and ran away from that plotline, but I saved a few of my favorite parts (including bits of the early description of her berserker friend), and I came up with an ending that I was soooo excited about, and I wrote that. And then I stalled out. (I have an embarrassing number of stories that have an awesome beginning and ending written, with absolutely no way to get from one to the other.)

So it sat around for a while, while I worked on some stories inspired by our Italy trip (those are still drafting—one is a novel, one is a short, a couple are totally dead in the water) and the deadline for the submission call went whooshing by. And I finally wrote it and workshopped it and was still stuck on a couple of little elements. So I kept putting it off to work on other stuff. And/or avoid working on other stuff.

Finally, in August of this year, I had an awesome experience that kicked me back into gear. As you may know, I’m a slush reader for Deep Magic.*** Our fantastic board members (Jeff Wheeler and Charlie Holmberg in this case) occasionally offer us various opportunities to learn from them, and they gave us the chance to submit a first page to them for critique. I submitted the first page of “Forged in Iron and Blood.”

To make a long story short, Jeff especially liked it, and I made a commitment to submit it by the end of the current submission period. Now I had a deadline! And suddenly, just like that, I got back to work (I know there are these magical people who work better when they’re not on deadline, but I’m not one of them). There was more drafting, more critique, and an amazing editing cut by my husband. I was trying to drop the dross from 9000 words and struggling over a couple hundred. Brice got hold of it and somehow managed to delete about 3500 without even breaking a sweat! I ignored about a third of his changes and smooched him for the rest—he made the story so much clearer and lovelier—and it was ready to submit!

And that’s the story! One final note, though: The day I got my acceptance letter had been a bad day. I don’t even remember why, but it was blech. When I saw the email come in, the little preview of it on my phone made me think it was going to be a rejection—yuck. So then when I opened it and got the acceptance, I had to do a little happy dance. It definitely helped make the rest of the day a lot better.

If you read the story, I hope you enjoy it. If you haven’t bought it yet, you should! ;) It’s only $3 for my story and a whole bunch more! You know you want to.

* Except that one sentence that I just today realized how I would have liked to rewrite it! Sigh. The life of a writer—nothing is truly done, you just have to let it go.

** Little did I know how much worse jetlag could be, traveling with small, sick children literally to the other side of the planet—13.5-hour jetlag is crazy talk.

*** This means I get to read through tons of submissions that come in to the magazine, and I pass the stories that best suit Deep Magic up to other readers—it’s an awesome opportunity, and I’ll have to write about it more sometime!

Brief commentary, "Diamonds and Pearls"

My flash fiction piece “Diamonds and Pearls” is loosely based on an old Perrault fairy tale called “Diamonds and Toads.” In “Diamonds and Toads,” a fairy places a spell on two sisters—one kind and the other unkind. To the kind sister she gives a gift and to the other a curse. The “gift,” however, is to have precious gems spill from the girl’s lips every time she speaks. Of course, in the story, a handsome prince recognizes her value (we can only hope/pretend that it’s not her monetary value he recognizes) and rescues her from her cruel family. They marry, live happily ever after, la di da.

But that never really worked for me. Spitting out jewels every time you speak? This does not sound like a pleasant experience. Plus, I was never really convinced by that prince’s love. And what if someone in today’s world were to receive such a gift? It’s easy to think, “Oh! Then I’d be rich!” But really, would you? You’d have to sell the jewels somehow—which would probably require some tricky handling or some blackmarket dealing (and how would you account for the ongoing supply?). You could never speak in public, or you’d suddenly be an object of curiosity and freakishness. So… sounds good in theory. In practice, not so much.

And thus the idea for this story was born, on the whim of an idea, and carried on through an evening of rocking and holding my daughter as she drifted into sleep.

And then, as I got some critiques from some friends, I discovered that not everyone is familiar with the original story. I know I grew up with it somewhere in my vague past, but I don’t have any idea whether it’s a common enough story for most people to know. So if you’re reading this, I would love to have you comment and let me know—did you recognize the original fairy tale?

Whether or not you recognized the original, I hope you enjoyed my take on it. Thanks for stopping by!