Big Announcement!

I’ve been sitting on this announcement for a while now, for various reasons, but I am so very pleased to announce that I have joined the Board of Deep Magic Ezine! You can see it looking all official right here.

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I have been so pleased to work with Deep Magic, their first readers, and their Board members for the last couple of years. It’s solidified even more for me something that I relish participating in—finding and bringing to light stories that are filled with awesomeness, joy, good people, and wonderful writing. I feel especially passionate about this place where I can almost always happily share the stories with my voracious 13yo and where I myself end up loving the majority of our publications. As a slush reader, I always waited with anxious excitement to see what stories the Board would choose from those that I had loved in the slush pile, and I always cheered when something I adored got published.

I love getting to work with all the people I’ve met through this process—the fun, funny, and helpful first readers, and the brilliant, hardworking, and encouraging Board members that I now get to work even more closely with. And of course the authors, who put their art into the world in the hopes that it will find a home.

It’s also been humbling to see this business from behind the scenes. I continue to be amazed by how many wonderful writers are out there. How many great stories get written. How many beautiful new worlds come to life through these words. The lovely stories—sometimes silly, sometimes bittersweet, sometimes joyful—that we get to accept! And sadly, how many fantastic stories we have to reject.

I have loved being part of the slush process, and I’m even more excited as I settle into my Board member duties. I look forward to finding more incredible stories and more authors to publish. I look forward to helping shape this magazine that I love. This is a place where I know I belong right now, and I see a thousand little steps that brought me here. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Turning Forty

This is the year I turn forty.

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I’m rather excited, and I have plans that I need your help with. But first, the explanation:

***

On the way home from another woman’s fortieth birthday bash recently, my husband turned to me and asked, “What do you want for your fortieth birthday?”

And I wasn’t sure what to answer.

I can usually buy for myself most of the “stuff” that I want. And the things that I can’t buy—time, patience, sleep, etc.—can be carefully worked in to life but can’t really be given as gifts. (Though my husband, Brice, is always excellent at working in extra time for naps and alone time around my birthday.)

Parties? Gifts? What did I really want?

***

A couple years back on Twitter (I think) I saw someone make a comment about how women turning forty come into their powers and should celebrate by running wild with the wolves, that sort of thing. And for a while I kind of envisioned doing something immense and wacky for my fortieth. But to be honest, I’m not a run-naked-in-the-moonlight kind of gal (plus, egad, all the prickles here! and the summertime snakes! no running naked in the bush, thankyouverymuch).

I spent a lot of time wondering what I really did want to do. What would make me the happiest? I have lots of swirling thoughts, but I have condensed some of them down to a few actionable items, and I need your help to make them happen.

 

So what do I want?

I want to support my friends in their creative endeavors.

I want to support the creation of things that bring beauty into the world.

I want to support things that bring joy into the world.

I want to be a creator of some of that joy—or at least contribute to its creation.

 

 

Here’s how you can help:

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1. Sell me something beautiful. Or charming. Or quirky and fun. Are you a maker of something? Crafts? Art? Photography? ... Something else? (Not books, we’ll get to books in a minute.) I want to know about things that you (or your children or spouse) make. Or I guess I’d also accept things that someone you know makes, if you think they’re wonderful (but I want to stick to people I’m closely connected to; don’t just tell me about a cool creator you ran across on Youtube).

Tell me about the thing you make. Give me a link (if you don’t have an online store, send me a picture!). I can’t buy everything, of course, but I can buy some things. So tell me so I have lots of options to choose from! As a sidenote, I’d especially love to hear about why you create what you do—this isn’t a sales pitch, I am just excited to hear your stories.

2. Author friends: Tell me about your favorite book by a different author friend. I have no doubt your books are amazing (and, given that I buy a LOT more books than I ever manage to read, I probably have already bought one of your books), but I want to hear you brag about books by your friends this time around.

3. Tell me about a mutual friend who could use a gift. In theory, I could be buying several items, and I may not be keeping them all. Who knows? (Not me. I have no idea if this idea is going to really explode or totally tank.) But, as my 13yo decided this year for her birthday, I want to at least sort of celebrate “hobbit style” (by giving gifts to other people). So who needs some extra love via a silly small gift? (Tell me this privately please, via messenger or email or something).

4. Make a video and share your love of simple things! Are you a pet rock enthusiast? Do you love telling people about your favorite dinosaur? Have you just been waiting for someone to ask you about how to ___________? Now’s your chance! Pretend I asked, and send me a short video (1–3 minutes) about something you adore, something that excites you, something you think is just plain wonderful.

It doesn’t have to be professional or fantastically edited or anything nifty. Just something you love. I really, really want to hear about it.

 

So, if you are inclined to help me celebrate my fortieth birthday in the way that would make me ever-so-happy (and will hopefully make you happy too), then help me out! I would appreciate it a lot.

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Give Me Alice Springs

As of today, my family and I have been a year in Alice Springs, Australia. There are so many things I could say about this time so far. I could tell about the growth my kids have experienced, the walks through the bush behind our neighborhood, the different things I’ve noticed about life while living out of the US for my first time. So many things.

But in the end, what I did recently was write a poem, which is very much not my medium. I started it out as a kind of essay about my experience of the natural world here and how life here has forced me to change, but it didn’t feel right and it wasn’t working. So I condensed and altered, and this is what is left. It’s not complete. I actually kind of hate the idea of sharing it because it feels both too personal and not personal enough. Plus, it is poetry, which—I cannot stress this enough—is not my thing. But I’m trying to be brave. 

It doesn’t take into account a lot of the joys and wonder. It doesn’t tell you about the months when I thought, “I will never step out into cool weather and no flies again; I will never be cold again,” and then suddenly, within about a week, all the jumpers and long sleeves and jeans came out again and I remembered that there was cold in the world.

It doesn’t tell you about the hike we took one day that led us past a strange combination of objects—old tin cans, a whole lot of golf balls, little paddymelons, and a kangaroo carcass that had probably become food for dingoes or at least kites. How what might have been disgusting was merely fascinating—a part of the natural world, a part of real life. How we examined its bones and remains, appreciating a kangaroo’s incredible structure and adaptations for the life it leads.

This poem doesn’t explicitly mention that this experience is so very specific to my life, here, as a white woman transplanted into a world I have never lived in before. It doesn’t discuss what it would be like to actually live off this land, and it only skims the surface of some of the beauty here. It also only skims the surface of how I have changed in the last year—both so much and so little at the same time. And how there’s still so much to learn. So it feels so incomplete in some ways, but hopefully it captures at least a moment or a feeling or just a tiny bit of what life has been here for me.

And so, without further ado (because that was definitely plenty of ado already!):

“Give Me Alice Springs”

Some people love

the lush, bright greens,

the wet humidity,

of lands where rain is plentiful and gardens grow

a rainbow of color

even in neglect.

I have loved them too.

But for me, for now,

give me the granite, the gneiss,

the red rock rising in ridges and crags,

the dust and dirt,

the sand that stains every white

a perpetual pale rust.

Give me the greens of the desert,

a thousand shades of muted sage.

The restrained reds and softened yellows

in the grevillea, the bottlebrush, the wattle—

flowers that know

how to grow in drought.

Give me a land

stripped down.

Give me the sturdy strength that survives—

flourishes—

in the searing of a too-close sun.

Give me the sky as wide as eternity,

as sharp as certainty.

Let me search,

work,

dig deep to find

infinitesimal treasures

buried in the rubble

of broken rock and hard-packed earth.

And then,

after I’ve gathered piles of pebbles,

let me spend a day in the sun,

trickles of mud pouring down my arm

as I hold a sieve full of hope

to the sunlight,

seeking the tell-tale glint

of garnet red.

Here I have been forced to strip away

what would not grow.

Felt weak things wither painfully.

Felt myself held up to the

scorching sunlight,

searched desperately for value that came

not from trappings or titles or tasks

but from me—

the garnets of who I am among the dross

of what I thought I was meant to be.

Here,

when the rain comes,

it must come for days,

for weeks,

before the river flows.

When it flows, the land wakes.

We flow to the water as the water flows into the land,

we come to splash

and wade

and expand.

The night silence is broken

by the croaking of frogs,

singing their mating songs, celebrating new life,

then burrowing and laying their eggs

once again

as the river shrinks and disappears.

The eggs will hatch

when the next rain comes.

Someday I will return to a land

of brilliant greens,

a land where I must ever work to weed

what is not wanted,

not carefully cultivate

what I wish to keep.

But for now, I am content

to be refined in the heat of this sun,

to let my chaff blow away in the searing desert wind,

to soak and splash in the water that heals, that makes everything live where it goes.

For now, I am content in Alice Springs.

Mormon Lit Blitz Semifinalist

A month or two ago, I went into a rather unusual productivity spike for me. The deadline for submitting to the Mormon Lit Blitz was approaching, and I really wanted to submit. Most years, I struggle to come up with even one idea for this competition, even though I love it—and even if I do get an idea, I struggle (more than just the usual) with how to put it into words. This year, I had about six ideas, and I found myself actually pulling some of them together and getting them into words.

The results: One story that started out as a tale of midwives and took a slight turn, requiring a lot of editing and revision to bring it a place that (to be honest) I’m still not entirely happy with. One story that popped into my head, almost fully formed based on a prompt from an episode of Writing Excuses. One poem. You read that right—a poem.

Pieces for the Lit Blitz are always excruciatingly difficult for me to have beta readers for. As I mention in this previous post, I can’t even let my husband read them—and he beta reads everything for me and is an incredible help. But somehow it’s too weird.

To make a long story short: I submitted all three pieces (three are allowed), and two of them were selected as semifinalists (interestingly, the two that I thought were weaker, but sometimes you just don’t know what’s going to work). However, when the finalist list came out, both were dropped. This honestly doesn’t surprise me. I pretty much expected it; they’re just not as good as I would have liked them to be (though they are the best I could make them for now). So while it was a bit sad, like I said, not surprising.

And then came the next tricky bit. Would I share them now? The nature of the Lit Blitz is such that my writing for it really won’t fit in any other market. There’s no point in keeping them locked up because they’re never going to sell anywhere else. It’s Lit Blitz or Bust! But if I couldn’t share them with my husband, how could I do it here? Well, to make another long story short, I’m just gonna do it. I’m going to post one now (for reasons you’ll see when you read it), and then I’ll take a break because the actual finalists for the Mormon Lit Blitz are going up, and I want to just pay attention to them. Then I’ll post the others later, provided I still have the courage.

Regardless of my pieces, though, I hope that some of you will take the time to read the finalists when they come out. So many of the stories are wonderful every year, and though many speak specifically to an LDS audience, a lot of them also transcend that border and speak to human experience in general.

Book Review: Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik

(Caveat: I read this a couple months back, so some of the details are going to be woefully wrong—like I can’t remember for sure if the rulers are tsars, but I think they are.)

Rating: 4.5 stars, maybe 5

Clean rating: 

PG-13, largely for thematic elements (it’s a harsh sort of life, there are demons and other evil beings, there’s a forced marriage in which the woman worries quite a bit over where the sex life is going to go, etc.). I didn’t find it unreasonable or gratuitous.

Overview: 

This book is an awesome, complex tale loosely based on Rumpelstiltskin, with nods to a number of other fairy tales (I caught Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, a couple others that seemed like maybes). It’s set in an Eastern European feeling world.

The story follows three women in very different situations, starting first with Miryem, the daughter of a Jewish moneylender, dealing with a lot of the real prejudices a Jewish moneylender would have faced in this kind of a world. Next is Wanda, a poor daughter of an abusive and drunken father. Finally is Irina, a rich noble who, despite her better economic situation, has very little control over her life, just like the others. Their stories start separate but interweave until they all work together.

What I liked:

This story was exactly my cup of tea. The characters are highly flawed in a lot of ways, including being sometimes downright unlikable—but they’re all in untenable situations and doing the best they can. I loved the writing. I loved the nods to fairy tales but how much richness was added to the narrative beyond the basics of a fairy tale. I liked the worldbuilding with strange fae-like characters (called the Staryk) whose motivations seem incomprehensible but maybe aren’t really, once you get down to the details. 

Plus, no spoiler here, but I thought the very ending (we're talking about the last couple paragraphs) was spot-on perfect. Love love loved it. I think the story may have earned an extra half a star from me for that alone. It’s certainly what left me smiling goofily and telling my husband all about it after I finished.

What I didn’t like:

I’m sure there was something here, but it fades. I don’t really think the story was perfect, but I enjoyed so much and felt like it all came together—even the things I didn’t like about it as I was reading it came together in a way that I felt satisfied with. I will say that as I was going, I was not convinced the author would resolve the romantic storylines in ways I felt good about, given that so many of the characters were selfish, incomprehensible, or sometimes downright evil. And I’m sure that those resolutions didn’t work for many readers—but for me, they did.

Other notes: 

In looking at other people’s reviews of the book, I began to consider the POV issue. This book is written from three main POV characters, but then there are another 2-4 minor POV characters thrown in as well. I didn’t have a difficult time figuring out who was speaking, though some readers complained about that. But I do think some of the POVs seemed unnecessary, and I didn’t love having them jump in just when I’d gotten used to how many POV characters we had. So if you have difficulties with multiple narrators, this is likely to be distracting and unpleasant to you. 

Final thoughts:

I enjoyed it. I know not everyone did, but I thought it was a wonderful book and if the POV thing and some sometimes-unlikable characters don’t throw you off, and if you love fairy tale retellings, you should read it. The end.

"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!

How NOT to Write a Short Story

Step 1. Have a short story idea for a submission call. Two years ago. It has one POV character and is, loosely, a romance.

Step 2. Start to brainstorm it. Run it by an agent, just for funsies, because you already paid for a pitch session and have nothing else to talk about.

Step 3. Hear these fateful words: “It sounds like a novel.” (Cue ominous music.)

Step 4. Yeah, it does sound like a novel. This would be pretty great.

Step 5. But it needs two POV characters.

Step 6. And an antagonist, obviously, who’s pretty awful. But he doesn’t need a POV.

Step 7. Enter the very important sister with a very detailed backstory—enough for her own short story at least.

Step 8. That villain is getting pretty loud. Definitely need to do some scenes from his POV.

Step 9. Some first chapter contests, some workhops.

Step 10. One round of NaNoWriMo (but only 30k words, because you’re working on other stuff at the same time).

Step 11. More brainstorming, more outlining. Because finally you’re really seriously going to finish up this story idea. No more sidetracks.

Step 12. Wait, what? That new character idea would really be super intriguing. She totally deserves her own sequel. But for now, she’ll just show up as a hint at the very end. Right?

Step 13. Wrong. She’s totally a POV character. Maybe?

Step 14. But at least I don’t have to write the sister’s POV! (Yet.)

And that, my friends, is how a 7k-word story idea I had a couple years ago has blossomed into today’s NaNoWriMo project, projected to end up probably somewhere around 80­-90k, with four POV characters.