'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 28

Short Stories 366:313 — “The Materials at Hand,” by Jessica McAdams

[image error]And here we are at the end of The Clan Chronicles: Tales from Plexis! An anthology of shared-world stories set on Plexis, the interplanetary supermaket that flies between stars and offers the slogan “If You Want It, It’s Here!” (and definitely lives down to many interpretations of said slogan), these stories are absolutely set in editor Julie E. Czerneda’s Trade Pact universe, but the vast majority of the tales read as standalone tales in and of themselves, and so if you’re a fan of short fiction with wide-ranging space-aliens, and want to read some new (or just new-to-you) authors of some sci-fi stories that run the range of comedic borderline-capers, darker mysteries, moving character studies, high-tension thrillers and more, I’m confident there’s something in here for most readers.

The final story, “The Materials at Hand,” is a great way to send off the collection: we meet a janitor on the station, Minnic, an alien who is just trying to do his job and get by and hopefully prepare for the arrival of his mate and the announcement of his being a father. Then Minnic stumbles into a smuggler moving things about, and Minnic’s stammered confession that he’s not security, that he’s just doing his job as a janitor and it’s his job to go everywhere doesn’t exactly work out the way he’d hoped. I mean, yes, the smuggler spares his life (for the moment), but now he’s being threatened to use his job and his ability to go anywhere on the station for her benefit.

It’s not long before Minnic is in over his head, things get violent, and he realizes that the smuggler isn’t just trying to smuggle. Trapped in a small space with only whatever is in the room to work with, Minnic figures his skill-set as a janitor is woefully inadequate to the task at hand… until he realizes that might not be true.  Minnic’s solution, and his attempt to be “heroic” in the face of the danger at hand, is borderline goofily charming, but the end result has a lot of heart, and leaves the collection on such a fun, upbeat note, and Plexis moves on to the next star, the next deal, and the next hustle.

Short Stories 366:312 — “Ben and Jilly,” by Elle Rush

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One of the best things about holiday romance novellas is how, often, they’re series and authors who have output much, much better than I’ll ever manage, so they release new books in the series each year. So I end up revisiting the same world each holiday season. It’s like taking a fictional holiday, catching up with old friends, and meeting new ones, and Elle Rush has been sending me on these trips since 2016, when she began her North Pole Unlimited holiday romance novella series. I first bumped into her at Romancing the Capital, and we had a moment of gushing over holiday romances and that was basically that.

“Ben and Jilly” (the most recent visit to this series) hit the sweet spot for me in two very specific ways that I really want to highlight. One was it was about Jilly (who, throughout the series before this point has been pretty much a backbone of the holiday kind of character when she appears in the background), but specifically about Jilly coming to terms with a Christmas that wasn’t going to be anything like she imagined or wanted. And, hey, it’s 2020, that vibe is so very real, no? In Jilly’s case, it’s because she’s got an empty nest, and even her regular social connection of one of the North Pole Unlimited truck drivers who she tended to connect with every time he returned from a long-haul is ending because he’s shifting out of the truck and into the office. Her son—who she hosted with his boyfriend for Thanksgiving—is spending Christmas with the boyfriend’s family. Her parents are on the vacation of a lifetime. And so on. There’s going to be nobody home at the holidays, and Jilly is trying not to descend into full on Grinch, but… well.

Luckily, that truck driver I mentioned? Ben sees what’s happening and works a bit of magic of his own, and while it’s not an easy start, I loved this friends-to-lovers holiday romance all the more because it started grounded so much in a man who knew this woman well enough to know he couldn’t just “fix” it, he needed to help her find her own new point of view about it all. Also? There’s a doggo. You know how I feel about holiday doggos.

The second thing I want to really point out I already mentioned in passing but it was that Jilly’s son isn’t going to be there because he’s with his boyfriend’s family for Christmas. I talk a lot about how casual inclusion (not tokenization, but actual inclusion that reflects the real world around us) means so much to me as a reader, and this was a pitch-perfect example. It’s not a plot point (well, beyond the fact that her son’s relationship is why he’s not at home this year for Christmas), it’s not a reveal, it’s not traumatic or difficult… it just is. Even better, we get to see Ben not so much as blink or bat an eye when she mentions her son and his fella, and if you want me as a queer reader to buy in to a hero in a romance, this is such an easy target to hit. It reminded me that in this holiday world Rush has built? I’m invited. It’s why I can’t wait to go back every year.

Now, I mentioned I met Elle Rush at Romancing the Capital, so I reached out and asked her if she’d share a bit about where Ben and Jilly came from, and here’s the scoop:

I’ve been wanting to write this story for a while. Jilly Lewis appeared in the first North Pole Unlimited romance as an unrepentant pot-stirrer and matchmaker. Since then, her reputation as a holiday legend has only grown. I knew she wouldn’t find a partner who could out-Christmas her, so it was challenging to find her a man who could hold his own.

I finally decided that the only thing more inspiring than turning Scrooge into a model of Christmas would be finding a Scrooge who used to be an elf and returning their holiday spirit. You’d need to pull out the big guns to fight that battle—I’m talking candy cane cannons and armoured reindeer. Fortunately, I found the hero for the job.

— Elle Rush

Short Stories 366:311 — “A Sorta Fairytale,” by Suleikha Snyder

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Y’all know I love me a fairytale retelling, and today’s short story, found in Prem Numbers, is exactly that, retelling “Bearskin” in “A Sorta Fairytale” with what is, frankly, a much better message and twist and reveal and… Okay, if you don’t know “Bearskin,” the basic plot is of a deal-with-the-Devil where a former soldier who has nowhere to go is given a magical coat that will always be full of money, and seven years where he’s not allowed to shave or bathe or pray, and at the end of those seven years, he will be rewarded. The soldier has no other options, so he takes the deal. Long story short he ends up with a bride and the bride is the only woman to treat him remotely like a human during the midst of the worst of his seven years, and the Devil gets a couple of other souls as part of the bargain because of shallowness and actions of two of her sisters.

Anyway. In “A Sorta Fairytale,” we have a woman running a small bakery in a borderline part of town, where a trio of men are harassing her, and a hitman who has agreed to serve someone he refers to as “the Devil” for seven years in exchange for… something. He’s well-paid, the people he kills all deserve it (he always asks), and when he shows up at the right time to defend her from the trio of men they have a scorching moment despite his unkept state (or, in a way, because of it).

That sets the stage, albeit without souls at stake, but Snyder gives it a tonne of steam and the heroine’s determination to make something of her bakery, and “Bear”‘s realization he has something to aim for when his years are done, and fast-forwards both their lives to the turning point with a lovely little denouement. It’s a solid little scorcher of a retelling, and I left the tale with a smile on my face.

Short Stories 366:310 — “Twelve Days of UPS,” by Eli Easton

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When I saw Gifts for the Season was a charity anthology, I nabbed it despite not knowing more than a couple of the names in the anthology, and I’ve been reading it out of order depending on the story length and the time I’ve got. I stared with “The Twelve Days of UPS” because I tend to do a re-listen of Eli Easton’s holiday novellas as the holidays approach, and I was happy to find a new holiday themed story from her. To my surprise, this one is set during 2020, complete with Covid, and while that made me nervous when I realized it was happening, honestly? It worked.

The set-up is simple: a fellow who has a more-than-passing crush on the burly UPS delivery guy (who fills a uniform superbly but hasn’t revealed his face, thanks to face-masks and social distancing) starts to receive a box a day. They boxes are from anonymous senders, and they seem sort of random at first, until he realizes they follow a loose theme based on the “Twelve Days of Christmas” carol. Are they from a secret admirer? That would be sort of a nice, wouldn’t it?

Well, except that would mean they’re not from the UPS guy.

This is a charming little story, and the slow “getting to know you” set-up of brief conversations during delivery and then one evening meal shared at a social distance in the back yard made for a nice slow pace. Ultimately, this being a romance collection, you know who is going to end up with who, but the “how” of it was cute, and had just enough holiday sparkle to it to make me smile.

“In Memoriam” is now available on Libro.fm

[image error] “In Memoriam” is available across many more platforms now at this link.

So, the title kind of says it all right there, but here’s the longer version, with background. Years ago, when I was just starting to show up at a few conventions as an author, a recurring question was often “Do you have anything on audiobook?” The answer, unfortunately, was “No.” Most of that no was price: it costs a lot to make an audiobook, and audiobook sales, though nothing to sneeze at as a whole, rarely return the cost of investment on titles that aren’t, well, written by people like me. Small-pond people. I hated that the answer was no; I listen to audiobooks often, to the point where it’s about half my reading in a given year, partly because reading in a moving vehicle makes me feel sick and partly because my migraines and vision problems sometimes allow me to listen to a book when I can’t do much else.

But, again, expensive. Also, the rights to audio are generally held by the publisher in question, so even if I wanted to take a loss with an audiobook (a huge one, again, if I’m being clear), it wasn’t up to me to do so.

Skip forward a bit, and the unfortunate closing of Wilde City Press meant I could get the rights back to one of my novellas, “In Memoriam.” A novella-length, wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey gay romance, “In Memoriam” was suddenly not in print and without a home, having originally appeared in a collection of four novellas alongside three other authors. The opportunity was there, and since the costs would be all mine, I decided I would absolutely take the plunge. I got very, very lucky and it turned out my editor for the project, Jerry L. Wheeler, was looking to get involved in audiobooks, and his voice suited James, and we were off.

Then I hit roadblock after roadblock, mostly thanks to being a Canuck. The end result was going to new publisher and though it took effort and more time, “In Memoriam” appeared on Audible (and also as an e-book in the Kindle Unlimited program, since one of the roadblocks was that the book had to be available as an e-format as well as an audiobook). I bought a new cover (via the brilliant Inkspiral), and that, as they say, was that for quite a few years.

In the meanwhile, I learned more and more about how Audible is, well, kind of not-great with accessibility. Books listed with Audible are often world-exclusive to Audible, and that means also that libraries can’t get them. Their app isn’t always the greatest. They offer no-questions-asked returns, which may feel great from a customer point of view, but can be abused into turning them into a loss-lead at best. (I feel similarly about Kindle Unlimited, but at least some authors there manage to earn a living). When I got the rights back from the publisher who’d kindly helped me get onto Audible in the first place, I was able to opt out of Audible’s exclusivity clause, as well as Kindle Unlimited, and was able to re-release “In Memoriam” across platforms (including making it available on Kobo and other e-book e-tailers, which is a big deal as a Canadian author).

I also started the long, long process of getting the files to other audiobook sellers, and as of last night at some random point in time, the title of this blog post happened, and “In Memoriam” is finally available on Libro.fm. I cannot tell you how happy this makes me, not the least of which is how shopping on Libro.fm allows you to support local brick-and-mortar stores. When I buy my audiobooks from Libro.fm, I get to support Octopus Books. Especially right now, this feels like a massive win.

I’m not going to delist “In Memoriam” anywhere else. My goal is to have it appear in as many places as possible so people can find it wherever they’d like, if they’d like. I realize some might be upset that it’s no longer in Kindle Unlimited, but to be a part of Kindle Unlimited you have to not be available anywhere else, and that’s just not an option for me, I’m afraid.

But most importantly, this means it’s possible to get the audiobook into libraries, which is my next (hopeful) step. Fingers crossed it doesn’t take me another few months, but if it does, that’s okay.

Short Stories 366:309 — “Three Stars in the Sky,” by Stacey Agdern

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Even before Hallowe’en passed us by, I began my traditional dive into holiday short(er) fiction because 2020 was being, well, 2020 and this year I’ve had some great luck in finding some stories outside the usual Thanksgiving and Christmas. Now, I don’t discount the two holidays, but I’m all for spreading the love out elsewhere, and so as soon as I heard about Love All Year: A Holidays Anthology, I was more-or-less over the moon to have a new option to dive into (especially as it’s an anthology). Put simply, it’s an anthology of holiday romance stories, but we’re not just talking Thanksgiving or Christmas.

The first story, “Three Stars in the Sky,” leads off with a tale about a Jewish country singer (and rising star), a songwriter with whom he has history (and, let’s be clear, not a great history), and their agencies putting them together to try to create a new hit song (or more than one) to release an album that’s Jewish, country, and—can’t stress this enough—a really, really big success. Given that he stood her up for prom without any notice, and they’ve not seen each other since in years, things might be a tad awkward, but he’s counting on trying again, and is hoping tying his music—and his apology—to Sukkot.

This story was as much about making music, following the muses, and giving each other room to have feelings as it was about the romance between the two, and as a whole I think it worked, with more of a gentle touch than scorch. I appreciated that, as well as reading more about Sukkot (a holiday I’ve got only a bare-bones understanding of, myself, and certainly haven’t read as a central holiday in a story before). It’s a romance short story, so you know things will end well, but I truly appreciated how much the narrative underlined “I can apologize, but she doesn’t have to accept it” as a message (which is very counter to Christian stories where characters are often considered to be doing ill if they don’t immediately turn around and offer second chances).

Short Stories 366:308 — “New Girls,” by Crystal Frasier

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Okay, so it’s likely no secret that during the pandemic here I fell happily into a Mutants & Masterminds hole. It’s a superhero role-playing game from Green Ronin Press, and the joy of it is in the flexibility: you can make pretty much any character you can think of. But the “default” setting of the M&M universe has been evolving for decades now, and this anthology, Powered Up! An Earth Prime Anthology, crosses a few key periods in said setting, and honestly? The stories are really great. And, more than that? They’re often really queer, which let’s be honest, is so not the norm when we talk about superheroes.

So, let’s get to this first tale from Crystal Frasier, where we meet Centuria She’s kinda-sorta the daughter of Freedom City’s most noted hero, the Centurion (it’s complicated and involves multiple parallel universes but go with it). Centurion, who sacrificed himself to save the world from an invading alien force a couple of decades ago, was the leader of a team of superheroes, and Centuria is now on the same team of superheroes her “father” belonged to herself. And today, she is moving through the city in search of… baked goods. There’s these bagel-donut hybrid things she really wants to bring to the next meeting because she’s officially passing the “new girl” torch on to the newest woman to join the team, and baked goods are a great way to welcome new people.

Of course, crime hits, and Centuria is now juggling baked goods with saving citizens and stopping violence, and the whole thing is this brilliant mix of doing-the-right-thing! and but-no-my-baked-goods! and it’s funny and punchy and such a great starting story for this anthology. Even better, the new girl ends up showing up to help Centuria out, so they get to meet anyway, under perfect—if not perfectly ideal—circumstances for two women about to be on the same superhero team.

Short Stories 366:307 — “The Secret History of the Intrepids,” by D.K. Latta

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Okay, this was super-cute. An alternate-history version of Canada set during a WWII playing out differently—including Nazis on Canadian soil—Latta’s story is presented between clips and excerpts from out-of-print or forgotten texts about “The Intrepids,” a group of heroes who turned the tide. And who are the Intrepids? Well, they’re names you’ll recall from your Canadian History class, that’s for sure, just not quite the same as they were in your text-books. This story, found in Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories, is tongue-in-cheek, with sly references to people and places of Canadian history, alongside the fight-the-nazis! vibe of comics at the time.

The team, which is revealed one at a time to a reporter/writer who is sure he’s been thrown into a car to meet a grisly end for his investigation of odd occurrences, turn out to be assembling more-or-less for the first time to use their powers to get to where the Nazis have encamped in Canada, specifically because they know the Nazis are after something thats hidden there (which was, again, another reference to a Canuck urban legend—this story has no end to the supply thereof). The powers, the chosen figures of Canadian history, and what it is they bad guys are after is a whimsical mix of Canuck and pulp, and I had a great time with this story, as is obvious. Even the reporter character, once I clicked on the surname, offered a loud chuckle of recognition.

Would a non-Canadian reader “get” this story? I imagine not, unless they’ve at least delved into some of the history, but honestly, I don’t think I care. So much of alternate-history speculative fiction out there assumes you know every little nugget of US history, and it never stops me from hitting the web to figure out if the characters, settings, or events are based on parallels. This time it was just nice to sit back and be in the position of already knowing who all the players and locations were.

Short Stories 366:306 — “A Hold Full of Truffles,” by Julie E. Czerneda

[image error]Throughout The Clan Chronicles: Tales from Plexis, edited by Julie E. Czerneda, there’s an ongoing novella, “A Hold Full of Truffles,” happening between the other short stories. Sira and Morgan (the main characters from Czerneda’s series) have been hired to bring a load of truffles to Plexis, the interplanetary trading-post/space-mall where “If you want it, it’s here!” is the slogan and the wheels of the station tend to be greased by bribes, illegal trades, and worse. Upon their arrival, Sira and Morgan hit a wall, though. They need money (their ship needs some work, for one thing), this deal is going to make them the money they need (did I mention the ship needs work?), and they’re pretty much running on nothing—and then suddenly there’s a new “tariff” imposed on their truffles and they’re going to barely break even and that’s a problem.

As the couple work their way through Plexis (in interludes between the other stories, where sometimes we catch glimpses of ongoing events in those stories, and other times we just bump into someone we’re about to explore in a story), they make connections, talk to people they know, and Sira marvels at just how many people her human companion seems to know—and wonders at just what, exactly, his plan might be to get them out of this mess.

I had to go back and re-read the interludes once I caught up to this part of the story, since I’d been reading the short stories in the anthology between other books, but I imagine anyone reading this book cover-to-cover wouldn’t have that problem. The second time through, I caught a glimpse of Morgan’s plan, and by the time we get to the finishing parts of the story proper, I was grinning at his solution to the issue facing them, and ultimately had a good chuckle. It’s so very a Plexis solution to a Plexis problem, and Czerneda’s weaving of her story through all the other stories that came before it was a clever presentation.

Short Stories 366:305 — “Skin,” by Christian Baines

The end of October! Hallowe’en itself! This novella is the perfect mix of dark psychological/paranormal for me. I feel like I’ve repeated all month long my squeamishness with horror and how it often leaves me struggling to find horror I enjoy that doesn’t cross the line too far, but I’ll trot it out one more time because finding a paranormal nudging the edge of the both borders is a rare, rare treat for me, and Skin is the best example of this I’ve read in years.

I’m passing the baton today Christian Baines, to talk about his novella, Skin—which is excitingly now available in paperback—and holy flying crap, what a ride. So richly written, so incredibly twisted, timelines leaving you guessing, and so rewarding to me. If it’s possible to be darkly satisfied and still raw, that’s what Skin delivered. Grab it. Give it to all your friends who want to read something shadowy and twisted and vengeful.

As I said, I was also lucky enough to touch base with Christian Baines to blog about this novella, and here’s what he had to say:

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A City Under Your Skin

Exploring Darkness and Deviancy in New Orleans

Hi everyone! Hope you’re all keeping well and safe, and finding ways to stay connected. Thanks for stopping by, and a huge thank you to ‘Nathan for having me on the blog. Always a pleasure to share inspirations and thoughts with you. Today, I’m sharing a bit about the setting of “Skin.”

New Orleans is a place that feels almost too charismatic to exist. I’ve had the privilege of visiting half a dozen times, of spending time with locals and cultivating friendships there. I’m continually fascinated by its literary history, its unique blend of cultures and spirituality including its rich Voodoo history, its ‘anything goes’ attitude (including its gay life), and its inescapable precariousness. From petty crime to hurricanes, New Orleanians know all too well what it’s like to live with the darker side of life, even while the city’s famed bons temps are rolling.

To a storyteller’s imagination, even if it seems like everyone’s written a story about New Orleans, there’s always somewhere new to go, provided you’re faithful to the city as a unique setting beyond the cliches. I was lucky enough writing “Skin” to have some great local Nola writers who kept me honest in that respect.

New Orleans’ Voodoo culture had fascinated me since I was a child, so I decided to combine it with the local gay life into some kind of story. I had routinely read and learned as much about that as I could about New Orleans Voodoo, trying to sort the spiritual and factual from the sensational and hokey. I wanted to explore some of the queer aspects of Voodoo lore, with one the strict rule – while this would be a horror story, Voodoo would not be its villain.

When it came to gay bar life, one thing about New Orleans I definitely wasn’t used to was the presence of hustlers. Curious and naïve, I got talking to some of these guys, plying their stories for the price of a drink and trying to sift fact from fiction. Some of them hid behind a well-rehearsed schtick designed to part you from as many bills as possible, but some were more genuine, and happy to talk. As in most stories that emerge from New Orleans, there would always be some truth to discover, even if it was in what was omitted.

What better setting and what better protagonists could I ask for a queer story about the unreliable surface of things?

Skin is the only overt horror book I’ve published so far, and of all my books, it’s the most divisive. It’s a non-linear narrative, and its two main characters, Kyle and Marc, aren’t my most likeable creations, but they are in some ways my most innocent. They’re not savvy and snarky like Reylan in The Arcadia Trust novels, or Eric in Puppet Boy. They’re two deeply flawed country boys trying to do the right thing way out of their comfort zone in a city ready to eat them alive – one in a relationship that ends in tragedy, the other in one that’s a tragedy waiting to happen.

The reaction to “Skin” has run the whole gamut from enthusiastic praise to graphic revulsion, and that’s okay. I never write a story with the intention of shocking or repelling the reader for its own sake. I never want my readers to have an unpleasant experience. What I do want is for them to feel engaged, drawn into the story, and to feel something as they read, even if it’s challenging. There’s some challenging stuff in “Skin.” It starts with a horrible crime and follows a young man’s fraught, sensual, and very twisted path to revenge.

I wrote “Skin” for readers who want to dive into the underworld and explore those darkened New Orleans streets the locals warned me about, but it’s also for readers who want a little bit of that wonder that only New Orleans in all its scrappy, dangerous charm can offer. I drew on real New Orleans history, and tried to bring that to life by subverting character stereotypes – often racialized, where New Orleans and Voodoo is concerned – wherever I could. I played with the chronology of the story, which has confused some readers, but that’s also okay. What’s important to me when readers approach any of my books is that they draw from it what the story says to them or what it brings out in them.

If repeated visits to New Orleans have taught me anything, it’s to leave my preconceptions and assumptions about the city at home. I ask the same of readers who pick up one of my books. I don’t make promises as to what the story will be for you, but I do promise to make the journey worth your while and to take you somewhere you weren’t expecting.