February fiction roundup

I didn’t keep up with my writing as much as I’d hoped in February. I stopped tracking word count because it became a slippery eel with all the edits I was making, but I did submit two stories before the month skittered off to hide under a sofa. I won’t tell you which sofa. It will be a surprise for later.

I also sold a story, “Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses,” to Innsmouth Free Press for their upcoming anthology, She Walks in Shadows. The cover is amazing. The other writers are amazing. My excitement has caused me to fumble all other available adjectives than “amazing.” They are probably under the sofa with February.

Stories I read this month:
The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill by Kelly Robson
And You Shall Know Her By the Trail of Dead by Brooke Bolander*
The Girl Who Ate Butterflies by Mary Rickert
Nine-Lived Wonders by Rachael K. Jones
B. by Nicola Belte
The Language of Knives by Haralambi Markov*
Traveling Mercies by Rachael K. Jones
The Joy of Sects by Joseph Tomaras
And the Winners Will Be Swept Out to Sea by Maria Dahvana Headley*
At Night, By the Creek by Ashley Hutson
A Shadow on the Sky by Sunny Moraine
The Weight of the World by Jose Pablo Iriarte
Map by Susannah Felts
The Ticket Taker of Cenote Zací by Benjamin Parzybok*

My favorites are marked with an asterisk.

I also read Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, which has won so many awards that it’s starting to pull readers in through sheer gravity. If you like mystery revenge stories with sentient spaceships and gender ambiguity, consider yourself directly targeted with this one. The way the plot unfolds through a dual-narrative in the past and present of the novel’s galaxy… It’s like rhythmic gymnastics, or wuxia pian: beautiful and perfectly timed. I was hooked immediately and then dragged in a nautilus pattern that tightened as new information was revealed about the characters and plot, and then I was left at the center of it all to watch how it unraveled. So well-structured. The characters were also fascinating, flawed but noble in their own ways, and I’m excited to see what happens in the sequel.

Next month: more links! More asterisks! Maybe I will read another book! It will be amazing.

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