"What is a feminist movie anyway?"

A thoughtful post from screenrant.

Having thought about it since I saw it, I feel like the movie, despite the bulk of what people are saying, doesn't put forward any particularly feminist message past "human beings aren't things," but it's definitely a movie that comes as a result of feminism. I was also super pleased that 78 year old Melissa Jaffer did all her own stunts. If that's not super badass feminism, I don't know what is.

(I'm sneaking back in with links for now, but I do plan to start posting again after the long hiatus.

Flash Fiction Online!

Flash Fiction Online has published a piece by me called "Cliona's Coat" and to my surprise and delight they've also done an adorable little illustration for it!

These guys have been absolutely wonderful to work with.

Female Professor Offers Good Grades for Unshaved Legs

Or, if you're a dude, shaving everything. Everything. 

Story a Day in May Debriefing

It's May, so I've done Story a Day in May again. As usual, it's been a fun and enlightening project, and I've probably gotten at least a couple of small, saleable stories out of it.

I actually started out quite poorly. I've been transitioning some work stuff, and while I was writing every day, the stories were all turning out too long to finish in a single day. Stuff I liked, mind you, but I wasn't hitting my numbers. So I backed away from the nice ideas that I was taking several thousand words to explore fully and instead I picked a single theme that interested me (in this case Superheroes) and resolved to write a load of little flash pieces about it, which worked fantastically. Planning to do more than one story on the subject eased up the pressure to make sure I was covering everything in each piece, so I could be more focused. Working in a subgenre with very clear rules and conventions gave a nice iceberg effect where I only had to show the 10% above water and the reader could collude in the other 90%. And it doesn't hurt that the subgenre is, by its very nature, picaresque (look at me, using grown up writer words!). Detective fiction probably would have worked well for this too.

Also, there was a point at which I typed the words “the office building was over-run by inter-dimensional werewolves,” and I stopped and sat back in awe of the revelation that I really could write ANYTHING. Anything at all. No matter how silly or irrelevant. It didn't have to make any damn sense whatever. I was completely free. It was awesome.

(It might seem to the casual observer like this was something I already knew or believed, which is true as well as not. One can certainly believe something full and still be surprised when confronted with the profound truth of an already held conviction.)

Anyway, I had a great time, and that's really the most important thing I get out of Mays. Sometimes it's so easy to get caught up in craft and seriousness that one can forget what riotous fun a good bit of writing can be.  

Unburied Treasures!

Lydia Kurnia and Erika Wilson have put together a fantastic anthology of stories from myself and several other long time writer friends. It's $2 on Amazon, and it can be yours right now!

Aside from the stories inside from Daniel Ausema, Barbara A Barnett, Nyki Blatchly, Lindsey Duncan, Indigo Dylis, Jonathan Pembroke, Erika Wilson, Lydia Kurnia, and myself, I want to draw your attention to this fantastic cover, which is the fine work of Lydia Kurnia and Armando Barnaba, and contains references and nods to every single story in the book. Seriously, if you're looking here and thinking "hey, I could really use a cover for my next book or magazine" go talk to these people. They're amazing. 

Vignettes from the End of the World!

Vignettes from the End of the World is now out! With the awesome tag-line: "This is how the world ends. Not in a bang, but in a book."


58 individual apocalyptic flash pieces, including one by me. Do go enjoy it.

Some Math

Today, my insane project was to try to figure out about how many speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) stories are published per year at a pro rate.

Obviously this count is not remotely scientific.

Counts here are derived from using reported frequency of publication times either the number of stories in the last issue or the average number of stories in the last set of issues. Question marks are presented when content updates on an irregular schedule, even if it's frequent. This count excludes anthologies (even annuals), magazines for children, stuff open only to Australians or Canadians, and magazines set around a shared pre-set world. It does, however, include magazines which are not currently accepting submissions, magazines open mostly to Canadians and Australians, magazines with narrowly themed issues, some magazines that have only put out one or two issues, and some magazines that have missed an issue or two. The count does not include novellas and novelettes, as a rule, though several of the bigger magazines totally do these. It doesn't generally include flash either, though there's a big giant asterisk on that generally for Daily Science Fiction, which publishes 260 stories a year and tends toward low word count.

Again, I want to stress. These are rough numbers. This is a guess.

AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review- ????
Analog- 12x a year 6 short stories- 72
Apex- monthly 6 stories- 72
Asimov's- 12 x 6- 72
Beneath Ceaseless Skies- 26 x 2- 52
Cemetery Dance- 6 x 10 - 60
ChiZine- ???
Clarkesworld- 12 x 6 = 72
Crossed Genres- 12 x 3 =36
Daily Science Fiction- 260 x 1 = 260
Escape pod- 52 x 1 = 52
Fantasy and Science Fiction- 6 x 10 = 60
Fog Horn* - 12 x 4 = 48
Inscription*- 12 x 1 =12
Jamais Vu - 4 x about 7 =28
Lightspeed -12 x 10 = 120
Lore -  2 x 9 = 18
Musa - 12 x 5 = 60
Nightmare - 12 x 4 = 48
One Buck Horror- ? x 6 = ??
Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show- 4 x 5.5= 22
Phobos - ?? x 15= ?
Shimmer- ? x ???= ?
Shock Totem- 2 x 13= 26
Strange Horizon- 36 x 1.75 = 63
Tor 12 x 5 = 60
Unlikely Story- 3 x 6 - 18
Waylines- 6 x 3.75 = 22.5
Wily Writers- ??

So. 1353.5, even without the magazines I didn't get a total for.

There (probably) are AT LEAST one thousand three hundred and fifty three professional rate speculative fiction stories published every year.

That's not an exact number (it's not even a whole number). But it is a big number.

That number's slightly less big when you look at the tables of contents and see Stephen King, Ted Chiang, Neil Gaiman, Laid Barron, Joe Hill, Michael Swanwick, Jack Ketchum, and other big pretty names on the front covers. But it's still a big number.

It's a big enough number to sneak away a tiny fragment of, certainly.