"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!

The Cosmically Cool Katherine Cowley*

* Dorky alliterative title because I can.

Why, yes, I am really terrible at getting good photo lighting.

ONE DAY UNTIL THE OFFICIAL RELEASE! (Also, if you want to buy a copy and haven’t yet, tomorrow is the perfect day to do it and benefit us authors. Amazon likes it when there’s an uptick in purchases on a single day.)

Now let’s talk about how nifty Kathy Cowley is!

In the process of joining this project, I let Kathy know that I was willing to do some of the copyediting/proofing. I felt so privileged to be able to help with a little bit of this work, and it meant I got a preview of many of the stories along the way. In doing this, I also got to make friends with Kathy Cowley, and I consider that definitely one of the highlights of working on Unspun. I’d already read and loved some of her flash fiction. (“Celestial Accounting” in last year’s Mormon Lit Blitz was my favorite piece other than mine. It is so good! Also, “The Last Bathroom” is just the right level of weird-but-fun.) So getting to know her as a person was fantastic.

In looking at her blog again to find links to some of her stories, I made an amazing discovery. Kathy wrote “In Which Eve Names Everything Else,” one of my favorite pieces from a different year’s Mormon Lit Blitz too! I had no idea this one was hers, but people, it is beautiful. Kathy just keeps getting cooler and cooler the more I know about her.

We’d been working together for a few months when she emailed to let me know she would be visiting family in Arlington—and did I want to get together for dessert somewhere in between there and here? Yes! Of course! I will even brave my driving phobia about new places!

So we met up at a restaurant one night and sat and ate tremendous quantities of cheese (no dessert in the end, but the cheese was definitely worth skipping the cake). We talked writing, our latest projects, family, etc. As expected, Kathy is as fun and cool in person as via email and phone (and on the phone she sounds like one of my dearest friends, Sariah). She’s working right now on a book that just sounds so very fun (if I get permission, I’ll tell you what it is).

Kathy took on so much of this project. It absolutely wouldn’t be the lovely book that it is without her. She coordinated people, arranged multiple edits, and probably did about a thousand other things that I don’t know about. Oh, and did I mention she did all the interior design?

Since we met, she has also given me fantastic (and speedy) critiques of a ton of my short stories, and her suggestions have been invaluable in them all. Finding a great critique friend is awesome, and I’m so glad to add her as one of mine.

Anyway, I’ll stop fangirling now. Let’s just say she’s awesome, and when she publishes more books, you should go buy them. Immediately.

The End.

P.S. Her website is down at the moment (stinky hackers!), but as soon as it is back up, you should go check it out.

A True Story (about Unspun)

Now for a true story:

A little less than a year ago, I got an email from Kathy Cowley (whom I did not know at the time). It was an invitation to submit some poetry for an anthology based on what happened after the fairy tales ended. I don’t know if you’ve missed it, but rewriting fairy tales is kind of my favorite thing. But poetry? We are not the best of friends. So this email was both awesome and devastating at the same time. Exactly the sort of anthology I would jump at! Right at the time when I was looking to write more short fiction! Hooray! But poetry. Despair.

Here’s the embarrassing part: I might have cried. Okay, I did cry. Maybe it was hormonal. Or maybe I already knew how much I wanted to write a story for this collection.

Whatever the reason, I spent maybe the next twenty minutes or so trying to convince myself that my poetry skills weren’t utterly awful and that maybe I could indeed come up with a poem. Alas, I knew that was a lie. So I wrote back that tragically I did not write poetry, but if she needed any short fiction, maybe let me know. Pretty please with a cherry on top? (No, I did not write that part.)

I may have kind of done happy dances around the house when Kathy wrote back that she had accidentally sent me the wrong email. She was actually looking for a short story, not a poem.

The wheels started turning. I came up with an idea that quickly expanded into the novel I’m working on right now (and seriously, I’m so excited about this novel—these characters! if I ever used heart-eye emojis, I would do it here—but that’s beside the point at the moment). So that wouldn’t work for the anthology. Then I came up with a couple other ideas that quickly sputtered out. Then I started writing “Breadcrumbs,” which was originally a lighthearted romance between Gretel and the woodsman from “Snow White.” Ha! Lighthearted romance! Not so much.

As I really began to write into Gretel’s world, I realized her story couldn’t be that light. She was sent (with her brother, of course) into the forest to die of starvation. By her father and stepmother. Then she was held prisoner by a witch who wanted to eat her. And then she killed the witch instead—by pushing her into an oven. Imagine that for a moment. This was not a cheerful tale I was going to write, and no matter how much I wanted Gretel to have a quick, easy romance, she just couldn’t. But she could still have hope.

So I wrote and revised, had to totally rewrite the ending three or four or five hundred times, and finally here we all are, with a shiny new story almost in our hands. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes together, and I’m especially excited because I finally got a sneak peek at Ruth Nickle’s artwork in the book. She did the cover, so obviously she’s awesome, but seeing the interior work made my heart so happy. Her little mermaid artwork! Again, I’m not really big on using heart-eye emojis, but I love that piece so much. Her drawings are gorgeous and evocative, and I think they will add a fantastic dimension to the collection.

Stay tuned for my next gushing post in which I introduce you to how much I love Kathy Cowley.

P.S. Pre-order link for the kindle version here! The paperback will be available soon as well.

COVER REVEAL: Unspun!!

Cover Reveal: Unspun!!!

People! I have been waiting impatiently for the day I could post this news officially. I have a story, “Breadcrumbs,” coming out in this gorgeous anthology on April 10th, and I’m so excited about it. Unspun is an anthology devoted to what happens after the “happily ever after.” There are stories both happy and sad, scary and silly, beautiful and just a little bit crazy. I am thrilled to be associated with them. Here’s the back cover blurb:

Whatever happened to “happily ever after”?

Heroes search for happiness, villains plot revenge, and nothing is as easy as it once seemed. Gretel suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, an orphan girl questions Rumpelstiltskin’s legacy, a monster cat searches for a child to eat, and the pied piper realizes stealing a hundred and thirty children may not have been his smartest idea.

Fairy tales have endured for centuries even though—or perhaps because—their conclusions are often more unsettling than satisfying. In Unspun, eleven storytellers come together to challenge and explore a few of those classic tales. Unexpected twists are sure to provoke both thought and laughter.

Gorgeous illustrations by Ruth Nickle accompany each piece.

My contribution, “Breadcrumbs,” feels like a little bit of a different direction from much of what I’ve written. I tend to write young adult, for starters, and this piece is definitely not YA. Featuring Gretel (of “Hansel and Gretel” fame), it’s a little heavier than my YA work, but I’m so pleased with how it came out, and I hope you will be too.

But more than that, I am thrilled to get to tell you about the stories in this collection. It’s hard to know where to begin. Should I start with the tense, fast-paced “Rumpelstiltskin’s Daughter,” by Ruth Nickle? Or with Kathy Cowley’s novella about Tatterhood, a fantastic heroine who rides a goat and fights with a wooden spoon? Maybe I’ll mention how cool it is that I get to be related by marriage to two of the contributors. Sarah Chow’s story about the firebird is delightful, and Chris Cutler’s “Heart of a Thief” is such a sneaky post-beanstalk tale. Then there’s a story about a child-eating cat, a light romance featuring orange dresses and a heroine who’s still figuring out what she wants, a tale of Jewish grieving customs and a magical nutcracker, and a coming-of-age about what happens when you decide to off the evil witch in a rather gruesome manner.

I have to confess, though, my favorite is Scott Cowley’s “The Pied Piper’s Revenge,” which is an absolutely hilarious look at what happened after the pied piper wandered off with all those children. Oh, this piece made me laugh and laugh. My other favorite is PJ Switzer’s lovely poem “The Little Mermaid,” which is just a perfect, gorgeous slice of her life as sea foam (way better, incidentally, than my effort at this same topic last year on my blog).

But though those two are my favorite, I really love this whole anthology. Have I mentioned that I’m excited to be a part of it? You will love it. You should definitely buy a copy (it will be up on Amazon soon). Maybe two copies. Maybe three, just in case. You never know when you’ll need a gift to offer some poor old woman who just happens to be a sorceress in disguise.

P.S. Here’s a link to Chris Cutler’s fabulous reveal as well.
P.P.S. And here’s the purchase link!

Publication announcement: Love Undefined

Hey, lovely readers! I’m excited to announce that a new romance anthology, featuring a story by yours truly, is coming out next Thursday, December 7th!

Love Undefined is a collection of 12 short, clean romances ranging from contemporary to fantasy to sci fi. They’re by a variety of LDS authors, though only one or two are explicitly religious.

Enjoy the lovely cover. Isn't it beautiful?