Some publications

The blog has been quiet for a while. I won't get into reasons or make any promises about its activity going forward. But I do want to get out here the things that have been published since my last update.

"Tending a Trace of Chaos" is a sonnet that appeared in Star*Line 40.1. I'm much more likely to write free verse than to follow any strict forms...but this is the second Mars-based, strict sonnet I've had published (and second I've written as well). Perhaps it's my niche...

"The Front" is a short story that appeared in Bourbon Penn 12, my third short story in that excellent magazine. It's an older story, written at a time of deep pessimism about war. The tagline in Latin reads, "art is brief, war is eternal." It's a play on a line of wisdom from Latin (and Greek before that) that I must have first come across in high school, and for some reason it always stuck with me. It translates as "life is brief, but art is long."

"The Poetics of Defiance" is one of the longer stories I've had published. It's a fun one that I'm very proud of. It started with an idea to come up with the two most unlikely jobs for a traditional sword & sorcery story, and I came up with an alchemist (I've liked the idea of a traveling alchemist ever since I was into D&D back in high school) and a poet. It ended up straying from the S&S idea somewhat... I had a lot of fun with creating the snippets of poetry for the attack poet.

I had two poems, "Uncanny Instrument (a fib)" and "Usurper Autumn," in last autumn's issue of Illumen (issue 23). Brought to you by the letter U, I guess. "Uncanny Instrument" is the second fib I've had published--another form poem. "Usurper Autumn" is free verse.

"The Essences of Good and Evil" appeared last week in Every Day Fiction. Like many of my stories, it started as a one-hour exercise with some writer friends. It takes a cliche I never would normally touch--a dark lord brought down by a plucky band of heroes--and gives it a playful, what-comes-next storyline that turns it somewhat on its head. Based on the reviews below, I think many of the readers don't exactly share my sense of play... Ah well.

There will be some more publications coming up fairly soon (I think...). But this is enough of a post for one day.

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