flash fiction

Publications in 2021

Posted on by Patrick
Image: scattered maps and old atlases

Out now on the fin­er Inter­nets every­where: my (very) short sto­ry “The Atlas”, which fea­tures an atlas, a bot­tle of absinthe, and a hunt­ing knife, pub­lished in Vol­ume 2 of Cloud Lake Lit­er­ary.

Forth­com­ing in Octo­ber 2021: Alter­nate Plains (avail­able for pre-order now!), fea­tur­ing my sto­ry “Sum­mer­time in the Void”, which is one answer to the ques­tion “What if the Sin­gu­lar­i­ty did­n’t want you?” (Can­ny Can­Con types might won­der if I lift­ed the title from an I Moth­er Earth song. The answer is “Absolute­ly.”)

(It’s been a long time since I had two pub­li­ca­tions in the same cal­en­dar year. I think the last time was ’04, when On Spec pub­lished “Res­ur­rec­tion Radio” and I won the Man­i­to­ba Short Fic­tion con­test with “A Map to the End of the World”.)

Publication day!

Posted on by Patrick
Image: scattered maps and old atlases

Today is the release date for Cloud Lake Lit­er­ary, Vol­ume 2, which con­tains my very short sto­ry “The Atlas”, which fea­tures an atlas with at least one extra coun­try, a bot­tle of absinthe, and a hunt­ing knife.

I just checked my stats on The Sub­mis­sions Grinder, and this one sold to the 18th mar­ket I sub­mit­ted it to. 17 mar­kets said, gen­tly or blunt­ly, “Thanks but no” before this one found a home.

I guess the les­son is, Keep try­ing. Some­one out there wants your story.

Writ­ers: If you’re not using The Sub­mis­sions Grinder, you owe it to your­self to at least look into it. It’s a mar­ket list for fic­tion and poet­ry, and it’s a sub­mis­sions track­er, and it’s free. It’ll let you import your data from Duotrope (if you were using Duotrope before, it’s kind of like a less-pol­ished Duotrope).

Cloud Lake Vol­ume 2 is avail­able for pur­chase from Cloud Lake’s site. For $10.00 $7.50 (Cana­di­an), you get fic­tion, non-fic­tion, chil­dren’s sto­ries, poet­ry, and art from 16 Cana­di­an cre­ative types.

Check it out!

Head­er image by Andrew Neel on Unsplash.

I’m in a podcast

Posted on by Patrick
fountain pen on notepad

Years ago I wrote a fun­ny lit­tle flash sto­ry, called “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One”, and shopped it around a bit to the few comedy/fantasy mar­kets I could find. Nobody bit, so I shrugged and post­ed it here on my site.

Ear­li­er this year, I got a mes­sage out of the blue from one of the peo­ple behind a SF/F/H pod­cast called Plan­et Racon­teur. He’d stum­bled across my sto­ry and was inter­est­ed in adding it to their pod­cast. I said “Sure”.

And now it’s been post­ed, as the lead sto­ry in Episode 11. Enjoy!

14th try’s the charm

Posted on by Patrick

I real­ly like my short sto­ry “The Overnight Shift”. I wrote it last sum­mer, in a week­end, at the start of my 2016 writer’s retreat. It was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten as a con­test entry in the NYC Mid­night flash fic­tion contest.

Since I wrote it, I’ve been try­ing to sell it. It’s right at the 1,000-word mark, mak­ing it what they term flash fic­tion. There are a decent num­ber of pay­ing mar­kets for flash fic­tion, and I was start­ing to think I was going to have to try them all.

Screenshot

That is a screen­shot of my Sub­mis­sion Grinder screen for “The Overnight Shift”. The num­bers in the square brack­ets at the end? That’s [the num­ber of cur­rent open sub­mis­sions for a piece / the num­ber of sub­mis­sions this year / the num­ber of all-time sub­mis­sions]. Those 14 are all the times I’ve sent this piece out into the world. 13 times run­ning, it was reject­ed (twice it made it to the sec­ond round, where it was then pruned).

And final­ly, this week, I sold it. It will appear some­time in Novem­ber in The Arcan­ist, a rel­a­tive­ly new online SF/F ’zine fea­tur­ing flash fiction.

I’ll be sure to post here when it goes live. Trust me, you won’t be able to keep me qui­et about it.