Austin Worley's Blog: Writing, Reading, and Living with Austin Worley, page 10

Update: December 2022

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I’ve been so busy with writing this month that today is the first time I’ve really had a chance to sit down and whip up a blog post, so let’s dive right into things.

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My plan was to tackle that Pied Piper-inspired fantasy story I mentioned in last month’s update, but a stronger sword & sorcery premise walloped me right before I was about to start. “The Martyrdom of the Blessed” follows Knight-Mother Arlise Dun as she tries to take down the mad, sorcerous artist behind the titular sculpture.

This story is set roughly three years after “The Skull in the Tree” and has a wide range of inspirations. My villain draws heavily on Dr. Steinman and Sander Cohen from Bioshock. In fact, the story was inspired by a remark in one of Steinman’s audio diaries that with the biochemical substance ADAM “flesh becomes like clay” and my own realization that blood magic in my fantasy world could do something similar, which opens up so many horrific possibilities.

Some of my other inspirations for this piece are “Rogues in the House” and “The Tower of the Elephant” by Robert E. Howard and “Pickman’s Model” by HP Lovecraft. “Rogues in the House” is probably the biggest one for the overarching plot, since “Martyrdom” is also centered around the infiltration of powerful mage’s death-trapped home.

Unfortunately, writing is going pretty slow. I’m still on the first scene, so I’ll probably need a miracle to hit Die by the Sword‘s deadline on New Year’s Eve. Nailing the horror elements–especially when it comes to describing unnatural, incomprehensible sights–is really tricky. Nevertheless, I’m happy with the quality of the prose and plan to finish the story even if I miss out on this particular anthology.

On the publishing front, there isn’t much to report. Fantastic Detectives still isn’t listed for pre-order, so I imagine we’re now looking at a release date in 2023. I plan on reaching out after the holidays, so I’ll share anything I learn. “Rekindling” and It Takes Two still seem like they’re on course for May. Adekon Publishing hasn’t informed of a release date or issue number for “A Helping Hand”, but payment came through, so I don’t really have anything to complain about.

By far my biggest publishing news landed in my inbox right after we finished opening Christmas presents: “Lightning Between Your Fingers” has been accepted for reprinting in Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Volume Two. This will be the second reprint of the story (the other being from MetaStellar back in May), and it actually pays more than the original! Worldstone Publishing is currently looking at a release date in June 2023.

They’re also launching a Kickstarter to raise payrates and otherwise support the anthology, though it isn’t live yet. If you’re interested, here’s a link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/scifiandfantasy/summer-of-sci-fi-and-fantasy-volume-2

This month, I’ve been on a fantasy kick. Lots of Conan for reference on both fight scenes and eldritch horror. The fight with Thog in “Xuthal of the Dusk” proved an especially good reference for how to handle weird, horrifying entities who shake your protagonist to their core. I’m only about a tenth of the way through The Blade Itself but enjoying it so far; it’s been a while since I’ve dived into a brand new fantasy series.

Finally, I returned to Dragon Age: Tevinter Nights after watching Dragon Age: Absolution when it launched on Netflix. I’m about halfway through the anthology, which is pretty good for a video game tie-in.

Last month, I mentioned I’d be getting a phone-to-eyepiece adapter for astrophotography and might have some new astrophotographs to share with you. Well, here’s my first one! The fuzzy patch you see in the photo above is the Orion Nebula, one of my favorite deep sky objects because it’s so easy to find even in light-polluted areas. The adapter helped so much with keeping the phone steady. The results aren’t going to knock anyone’s socks off, but I’m proud of how good this first effort looks with absolutely zero editing.

Even aside from astronomy, this month has been lovely. The very edge of that big snowstorm hit us on Thursday, so we actually have snow on the ground on Christmas! Enough melted yesterday that calling it a White Christmas might be a stretch, but it beats last year where we had temps in the 70s.

Hopefully y’all are having a holiday season as blessed as mine. I’ll leave you with a Christmas haiga I made last month with Canva Pro. See you in 2023!

Update: November 2022

November flew by so fast I almost forgot to post this update!

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My focus this month has still been “The Captain and the Crown”, but writing the second scene is like crawling through barbed wire: excruciating. The second main character, Prince Luis Ordóñez, is dealing with a lot of complex emotions as the reality of leaving his old, privileged life behind starts to sink in, and showcasing them in an interesting way has been a tremendous challenge. I’m currently on the fourth version of this scene, and things are finally starting to fall into place. Hopefully I can finish it off by the end of the week.

If everything goes well, I may set aside “The Captain and the Crown” in December in favor of writing a sword and sorcery piece for DMR Books’s Die by the Sword! anthology. I’ve been chewing on an idea for a Watcher story featuring elements of the Pied Piper legend for years now, and pieces of a coherent plot are finally snapping together.

My stay in publishing limbo continues. No word from Worlds Enough or Tannhauser Press on a new release date for Fantastic Detectives, and the anthology featuring “A Helping Hand” still seems to be in the embryonic stage. It Takes Two is probably the farthest out from publication in terms of time, but it’s also been the most active. We went over proofs of the anthology earlier this month, before it heads to print, and Cleis Press had an editing query for me yesterday. “Warden of the Wex Wood” is still in the second-round of consideration over at Savage Realms Monthly.

One good bit of news: “Lightning Between Your Fingers” has also been passed to the second round of consideration for Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Volume Two. We’ll see whether or not they choose to accept it–I’m supposed to hear back by New Year’s Eve–but if they do, it would be the second time this story has been reprinted!

Aside from my fiction, I’ve also been taking advantage of Canva Pro while I still have my free trial to create haigas and visual poems from my haikus and other works of poetry. I created fifty of them just this week! They all look pretty good, if I do say so myself, but the haiga version of “Easter” might be my most beautiful creation ever.

You might’ve noticed the site has its own icon now, which I also made with a template from Canva. Nothing fancy, and I might tinker with it in the coming days, but taking this step makes me feel even more professional.

Canva also presented me with a great opportunity to create a star map for my military sci-fi setting. Check it out:

This version of the map doesn’t include the hyperbridges linking the star systems, so you don’t get the full picture of how they shape trade, travel, and politics, but their absence simplifies things. Here you can see the member systems of the Eleutherian League–my protagonist star nation–in gold along with a few minor star nations in various colors. Green for the Kingdom of Heiau. Blue for the Republic of Ithaca. Purple for the Principate of Cassowary. White denotes unclaimed star systems, while the two turquoise stars are part of the larger Republic of Nebesa, red the Algonquian Union, and gray the Goídelic Raiders.

The galaxy is slightly different at the time of “The Captain and the Crown” than in 3530 AD, which is when A League of Honor will take place, so I plan on making another version for the borders in 3461.

Halloween aftermath left me with a taste for spooky stories at the start of the month, but I actually ended up reading Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher for most of November. Honestly, it might be the best romance I’ve ever read. The characters, the romance, the humor, the worldbuilding and premise…perfection!

I also picked up The Lost Metal when it released earlier this month.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, I had my best night of stargazing since picking up the hobby way back in elementary school. Not only did I finally nab Uranus, but I discovered you can actually make out the band of the Milky Way despite all the light pollution around here. The guided tour from my go-to telescope was the real treat, though. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, the double-star Albireo, the Orion Nebula, Messier 2 (my first ever globular cluster), and a long list of open clusters topped by the phenomenal Double Cluster.

Since I’ll be getting a smartphone-to-eyepiece adapter for my birthday, I hope to have some nice astrophotographs to share with you in next month’s update. See you all again soon!

“A Helping Hand” Accepted for Publication in Brief Encounters

On Halloween, I received what might be the best treat any author could ask for: a short story acceptance! My superhero suspense tale “A Helping Hand” is set to be published in an upcoming volume of the Brief Encounters anthology series from Adekon Publishing. No release date yet, so keep an eye out for more announcements in the coming months.

“A Helping Hand” is by far the earliest of my stories starring Whippoorwill. Only about four years into her vigilante career, and she’s just starting to operate around Oklahoma City. This piece also serves as a bit of an origin story for her adopted daughter Rosa Coronil, who appears later on as her sidekick and independent superhero Kingfisher.

I wrote this story back in 2020 as part of the Writers of the Future Online Workshop, but it spent most of the past two years trunked simply because there are barely any markets interested in superhero short fiction. Words cannot express how happy it makes me for “A Helping Hand” to finally find a home, especially at a market paying per word.

If you enjoyed “Law, Love, and the Whippoorwill” or “An Oath to the Sun”, you should definitely check out this anthology when release day rolls around.

Here’s wishing ya’ll a belated Happy Halloween!

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Review: War of the Sea by Dana Claire

War of the Sea features a lot of different genres and tropes. Pirates. Magic. Romance. Mythology. Action and adventure on the high seas. Enemies to grudging partners to lovers. They all intertwine to form a YA fantasy romance with a refreshingly unique premise.

Being a big fan of enemies-to-lovers, one of my favorite parts about this book was how Elouise and Rylander start off with very strong reasons to despise each other. Far too many enemies-to-lovers romances simply aren’t credible because the author makes them enemies over something trivial, which definitely isn’t a problem here.

The romance itself burns slow, avoiding one of the other common pitfalls with enemies-to-lovers: rushing right into the romance. Lou and Rye take quite a bit of time warming up to each other, which makes perfect sense given the history between them.

The actual romantic content is fairly mild, even by the standards of YA Romance. There aren’t any sex scenes—explicit or fade-to-black—and only a handful of kisses, though one gets pretty intense and probably would’ve led to sex if not for an interruption. In terms of heat, War of the Sea rates roughly a Level 2.

There were only two problems that stuck out to me:

Typos pop up throughout the book. They weren’t common enough to impact my enjoyment, and it was usually pretty clear what the author meant. However, there were some missing or misused words forcing me to guess. In fairness, this is an ARC. The vast majority of those shouldn’t survive into the final, published version.The decision to use Greek Mythology in what otherwise seems to be a completely constructed fantasy world is very…jarring. References to Greek etymology and Mount Olympus make it even more so. Bronze and Iron Age mythology clashes with the Golden Age of Piracy in the rest of the setting. I can’t help but feel the story would be stronger with either a fantasy pantheon for the secondary world or transporting the plot to a historical fantasy setting.

Overall, this was an enjoyable read. The action is vivid, especially by the standards of romance. The characters are well-drawn. In fact, Lou stands out as a rare example of a flawed FMC whose flaws are acknowledged by the narrative and actually get her into trouble.

Oh, and don’t worry, there’s definitely a happy ending.

If you’re looking for romance with a touch of magic, piracy, and mythos, War of the Sea is definitely worth a look.

4/5 Stars

Finally, thank you to the author for sending me an electronic ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Update: October 2022

Halloween is just over a week away, and I have some good news to share ahead of the holiday!

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Most of my focus this month has been on my military sci-fi romance novelette “The Captain and the Crown”. Based on the length of the first scene, I might actually have a novella on my hands. My main characters haven’t even met in person and the story is already pushing 2000 words. This means my original target market, a sci-fi romance anthology from Dragon Soul Press, might be out of the question. My outline has fourteen scenes; if they’re all this length, the story could come in around twice the max word count of that anthology.

Fortunately, there are quite a few romance publishers out there who accept novellas. Hopefully one like my final product.

Like I mentioned last month, “The Captain and the Crown” takes place in the same setting as A League of Honor, but a few decades earlier. This will be another enemies-to-lovers story, with a prince fleeing an arranged marriage and civil war crossing paths with a captain whose family emigrated specifically to escape those royals. A tense diplomatic situation, lots of bad blood, and more than a little attraction should make for an interesting recipe.

Last week, the publisher where I submitted “A Helping Hand” came back to me with a revise and resubmit. The requested revisions were pretty minor, so I was able to rewrite a couple sections and beat their deadline with a few days to spare. Writing superhero stories again took a little getting used to, but I appreciated the opportunity to flesh out Whippoorwill and how she comes to adopt her daughter. Nobody has given me a precise timeline for a final response, but the urgency they were moving with makes me suspect sometime in the next week or two. Fingers crossed for another acceptance!

Aside from writing new material, I’ve also been handling edits on “The Skull in the Tree” for Fantastic Detectives and “Rekindling” for It Takes Two. There does seem to be a little more schedule slippage on Fantastic Detectives, it’s understandable when you’re working on a big project with lots of authors. Once the anthology goes on pre-order, I’ll be sure to post an update.

Anybody who follows this blog probably already knows, but my heroic fantasy short story “Warden of the Wex Wood” earned an Honorable Mention from the Writers of the Future Contest for the Third Quarter of 2022! This is my second, so I’ll have another certificate for my wall. Like I mentioned in the original announcement, this story is already back on submission and has made it through the first round of consideration at Savage Realms Monthly.

I haven’t heard anything more since the blistering progression from sample submission to full submission to passed up to the Editor-in-Chief, which just goes to show you how much waiting is involved in publishing as an industry.

Going forward, I plan to keep working on “The Captain and the Crown”. My goal is to finish by the end of the year, but we’ll see what the future holds.

For me, October has been a month of sword and sorcery. The Blood on the Blade anthology, catching up on Savage Realms, and a bit of Conan are all on my reading list. With Halloween on the way, I think I’ll probably throw in a bit of horror. And, finally, I signed on for an ARC of an upcoming YA fantasy romance novel. I’ll probably spend a good chunk of this week working my way through that to be sure I have enough time to write my review. Once I’m finished, I’ll be sharing the review here in addition to Amazon and Goodreads.

Last month, I mentioned spotting a possible galaxy while observing Jupiter. Today, I’m pretty sure I’ve identified which one it was: NGC 428. Its position right on the boundary between Cetus and Pisces, the off-center galactic core, one ragged edge formed by a trailing arm…everything fits. Here’s what it looks like with a telescope and imaging equipment far beyond mine.

Besides pinning down my mystery object, I also managed to catch Neptune! Hunting it took a few nights, but the go-to functionality of my telescope and a guide from Astronomy Magazine ultimately put me in the right spot. Very faint, and hard to distinguish from the surrounding stars, but its bluish tinge gives the planet away.

The only planets I have left are Mercury and Uranus, though I might have caught Uranus the same night I found Neptune. My telescope mount came loose right after I had the go-to drive slew toward it, so I can’t be sure the planet was actually in my eyepiece. If we can get some clear skies, I’ll try again. Mercury might actually be the bigger challenge, though. It’s close enough to the sun that it rarely comes too high above the horizon.

I’m thinking about getting a dedicated astrophotography camera, so I might have some nice pictures by the end of the year. Keep an eye out in my monthly updates for November and December!

It Takes Two Release Date

This past week has just been loaded with publishing news. Today, RKB and Cleis Press got back to me with copyedits on “Rekindling”, my contribution to It Takes Two. Those edits also came with an announcement: It Takes Two is currently set to be published May 9th, 2023!

This is a few months later than originally expected, but I appreciate how proactive they were about this. I much prefer knowing months in advance rather than finding out at the last minute…or after the previous release date has come and gone. Especially since this is an anthology that pays on publication instead of on acceptance.

Like I’ve said in the past, “Rekindling” is a pretty stark departure from my previous work. Even “Law, Love, and the Whippoorwill”–despite being a romance with an explicit sex scene–featured a lot of action and suspense. There isn’t any action in this one. At least, not that kind of action. If your pulse is pounding while reading “Rekindling”, it’ll be because of the scorching hot erotic content. Yet it’s also one of the sweetest stories I’ve ever written, touching on themes of postpartum body image issues, the impact of parenthood on a couple’s sexuality, and what it means to truly love someone unconditionally.

So, if you’re interested in erotica featuring established couples, if you shipped Arlise Dun and Earc Mac Toghda in “The Gale at Quiet Cove” (one editor kinda did), or if you’re just looking for something different, check out It Takes Two when it releases next May.

My Second Honorable Mention from Writers of the Future!

Back in May, I submitted my short story “Warden of the Wex Wood” to the Writers of the Future Contest. There weren’t too many other suitable markets open at the time, so I figured it was worth taking a shot at one of the highest paying, most prestigious contests in speculative fiction. Well, last week, they informed me my entry had earned an Honorable Mention!

This is my second Honorable Mention from Writers of the Future. My first came all the way back in 2018 for “The Gale at Quiet Cove”, which was published in Unreal in June 2020. I’d planned on entering more stories before now, but working on novels and novellas in 2018-2019, recovering from health issues in 2020, and a bunch of acceptances have left me with few stories at the right length or in the right genres for the contest.

“Warden of the Wex Wood” is already back out on submission, this time at Savage Realms Monthly. That submission has moved incredibly fast. On Thursday, I submitted a sample in accordance with their submission guidelines. On Friday, one of their editors requested the full story. On Saturday, that editor informed me the story had been passed up the latter to the Editor-in-Chief for a second round of consideration. I don’t know when I’ll hear more from them, but I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to share some more good news about “Warden of the Wex Wood” soon!

Fantastic Detectives Release Date

If you’ve been following this blog, you probably know my novelette “The Skull in the Tree” was slated for release this month as part of Fantastic Detectives. But as I mentioned in my last monthly update, I hadn’t heard anything about the anthology for quite a while, so I reached out to the editors.

Cover art for Fantastic Detectives

They got back to me this past weekend and mentioned there’d been some delays, so here’s the way things currently look:

October 15th: The eBook version of Fantastic Detectives becomes available for pre-order on AmazonNovember 15th: Publication of the trade paperback and eBook versions of Fantastic Detectives.November 15th-December 15th: Publication of the hardcover version of Fantastic Detectives.

They’re aiming for November 15th with the hardcover, but those are more complicated than publishing in paperback or digitally. It makes no difference to me, though. I’m just thrilled to see my work in a hardcover book!

Should this tentative timeline change, I’ll post another update.

Update: September 2022

Summer is on its way out, fall is on its way in, and it’s time for another monthly update!

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Things have been quiet on the writing front, with most of this month consumed by my editing contract. That project took a lot more work than anticipated. If this is representative of the other manuscripts the client has lined up, I’m not sure how many more I can tackle. The pay is decent, though, so I plan on editing at least one more.

There should be a few weeks before the next manuscript heads my way, so I’m looking at some bite-size projects to fill the gap.

One is a currently untitled military sci-fi romance novelette set in the same universe as A League of Honor. This should give me an opportunity to settle into the world and feel some things out–like space combat–on a smaller scale before I have to handle them in a full-fledged novel. It’ll also be a learning experience, as this will be my first time writing m/m romance. Right now, I’m about a quarter of the way through my outline. Once that’s finished, I’ll be diving into the actual writing. My target market for this story is a sci-fi romance anthology from Dragon Soul Press, but this story looks like it will be long enough I may be able to sell it to some of the smaller romance publishers as a standalone if things don’t work out there.

My flash story “A Pair of Twos” came back with a rejection from Troopers, so I might also rewrite the last half or so of it to allow the story more room to grow without the hard 1,000 word limit. This isn’t much of a priority, though. I’m just happy to have finished a new story for the first time since May!

I’ve also been editing some of my own work a little. “A Helping Hand” received some touchups this week, so I might be sending it out on submission again soon. If only there were more markets seeking superhero short fiction…

“The Skull in the Tree” is slated for a release this month in Fantastic Detectives, but I haven’t heard anything about proofs or a release date, so I’m starting to wonder if we might be looking at a delay. Once I hear something back from the editors, I’ll be sure to let everyone know in a separate announcement.

Some of you might have noticed the website looks a little different. Since the old “Books” tab was getting long and unwieldy and my stories are starting to appear as reprints, I decided a little reorganization was in order. You can now find my stories by title under drop-down menus organized by series or genre. This reorganization should make navigating my website a little easier. Let me know in the comments or through the Contact page if you run into any issues.

My books this month have been a bit of an interesting mix. I’ve been enjoying Zoe Archer’s 8th Wing series, one of the better space opera/military sci-fi romance series I’ve encountered so far. My only complaint is both books are so short!

I’m currently reading Kull: Exile of Atlantis, which collects all of Robert E. Howard’s stories featuring the titular sword and sorcery hero. It’s interesting to compare and contrast Kull with Conan. The Kull stories are a lot more…melancholy and cerebral, I suppose you might say. While I personally prefer his stories starring Conan, there’s some very good stuff in here, particularly “The Shadow Kingdom”.

September means the return of football, which I’ve been enjoying. OSU is off to a good start, and my alma mater Union–officially renamed the Redhawks–looks the best they have in years. It’s nice to finally beat Jenks and win the Backyard Bowl again. They might even make a run at the state title, though Bixby looks scary this year.

Late summer has also brought some clear skies, so I hauled out my telescope for the first time in a while. Friday was a very productive night: the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and its moons, a couple star clusters, and a hazy object I’m still trying to identify. I might have bagged my first galaxy!

Friday was also my best night for astrophotography in a long, long while. This is probably my best shot of Jupiter so far. Not astounding, but nice enough given my equipment.

Ganymede sits a little to the left and just above Jupiter, while Europa is a little lower and closer to the planet. Io is to the right of Jupiter. The second pinprick is probably a star; Callisto should be far out on the left.

If we get more clear skies, I plan on hunting Neptune and trying to track down my mystery object in Pisces. Maybe I’ll even have some pictures by the time my October update rolls around!

“Rekindling” Accepted for Publication in It Takes Two

You might have already heard if you follow me on social media, but my fantasy erotica short story “Rekindling” has been chosen for publication in It Takes Two, an erotica anthology by Cleis Press dedicated to couples.

After she finally rejoined him at Quiet Cove following the birth of their daughter, Earc Mac Toghda figured his bond with Arlise could only grow stronger. But when she shuts him out and shies away from intimacy, he knows something is wrong. Something deeper than the usual trials and tribulations of first-time parenthood.

Desperate to heal this wound in their love before it festers, Earc decides to return to the place where it all began. A place guaranteed to rekindle their passion…

“Rekindling” is definitely a departure from my typical subject matter. This is only my second finished piece of erotica, so an acceptance from a figure as prominent in the genre as Rachel Kramer Bussel is flattering beyond words. Exploring postpartum body image issues and how a couple keeps their love life alive after becoming parents was a really interesting experience as an author, but I seriously doubted my work would hold up against stories from more experienced authors.

Thankfully, my fears were all for naught.

Even though she isn’t the POV character, this story–and “Enough”, which covers the start of their relationship–is a reward of sorts for Arlise. My most prolific character has been ruined, redeemed, widowed, and scarred both mentally and physically. After so much suffering, she deserves a little happiness.

It Takes Two is currently set for release in Early 2023–January, maybe?–but I probably won’t have a specific date for a while. Certainly not until the editing process is finished. Once I do, there will definitely be an announcement.