Renee Carter Hall's Blog, page 5

Coming soon: “Wishing Season”

I’m getting together a new short story collection for the holiday season, available soon as an ebook from Amazon and Smashwords! Wishing Season: Holiday Tales of Whimsy and Wonder will feature several previously published stories, including “The Gingerbread Reindeer” (first published in audio form in the Anthro Dreams podcast), “Nativity” (runner-up in one of Women on Writing‘s flash fiction contests), and more, as well as two brand-new stories — the fable of “The First Winter” and the tale of “Santa’s Summer Vacation.” Various real-life issues have delayed it a bit, but (fingers crossed and Christmas wishes) I’m hoping to have it all ready for release by next weekend. Watch this space!

Now on Kickstarter – Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things

Didn’t mean to be so long between posts — it’s been a busy summer and fall — and I’ll be back very soon with some updates of my own. Right now, though, I want to help spread the word about a new literary journal of stories and poetry, aimed particularly at young writers and readers ages 10-18.

It’s called Ember, and in addition to just plain looking like a gorgeous publication with a worthy purpose, they’re also planning to reprint my story “The Frog Who Swallowed the Moon” in their spring 2015 issue (after it appears first in their sister publication Spark: A Creative Anthology).

They’ve commissioned beautiful cover art for the spring issue, inspired by my story. (I’ve already pledged to get a print of it.) :) Please have a look at their Kickstarter campaign and contribute if you can:

https://www.kickstarter.com/project…..uminous-things

 

Beatrix Potter meets Stephen King…

Those of you who’ve checked out my pages on Amazon or Goodreads know that my bio there lists a rather eclectic grouping of influences — all the way from Beatrix Potter to Stephen King. So what might a story look like if it combined some of the tones and styles and subject matter of those two authors?

Maybe something like this…

How Mother Rabbit Lost Her Name

(Warning: Most definitely not a children’s story, unless perhaps you’re the type of parent who reads the original versions of Grimm’s fairy tales to the little ones before tucking them into bed without a nightlight.)

The inspiration for “Mother Rabbit” actually came from Nickelodeon’s children’s show Peter Rabbit (which I love, by the way). In one episode, the character Lily announces to her friends that she’s moving, because her parents just don’t feel like the Lake District is a safe place for the family to live.

At that point, I cracked up. Well, no, I guess it’s not safe, considering that you have at least two neighbors who actually want to eat your children! Like, literally cook them in a big pot and eat them. Yeah, I don’t really blame Lily’s parents — I’d want to move my kid, too.

And then I started thinking about all the storybooks with predator and prey species mixed, and how there’s kind of a potentially dark undertone there. How civilized do these creatures get by putting them in waistcoats? It took a while to figure out exactly what sort of story I wanted to tell from that notion, but in the end it became this dark bit of flash.

Apologies to Beatrix. And thanks.

Hero’s Best Friend: Roundtable Interview

I love doing interviews, even if it’s just a pre-written set of questions. And as part of the blog tour for the Hero’s Best Friend anthology, there’s now an author roundtable interview posted in 4 parts at the editor’s blog. (There are a lot of authors in this anthology.)

You can find all my answers — including the all-important Benji vs. Cujo one — here:

http://smsand.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/heros-best-friend-roundtable-interview-part-2/

Long live the king…

This was originally posted to my now-defunct LiveJournal five years ago (back when that was the place to be). The prompt was to write about your favorite Michael Jackson song, and today, on this fifth anniversary of his death, I thought it was worth reposting.

 

Somewhere in the early 80s…

My sister is babysitting me. This is really cool, because my sister is a teenager and in high school (or maybe even college, then), and that means I get to watch MTV. MTV plays all kinds of music videos, and my sister likes the Madonna and Cyndi Lauper stuff, but I’m sitting on the bed and waiting, hoping they’re going to play the only video I want to see.

Yeah. This one.

One of the first videos we rent for our brand-new VCR is the documentary about the making of it.

Another year or two passes, and I’m having a birthday party at the skating rink. (So cool that we have the same birthday.) It’s great, because all my friends are there, and I get tons of jelly bracelets and My Little Pony stuff, and we’ve all been roller skating for so long that it’s going to feel really, really weird to be walking in regular shoes again. And then they turn the lights down, and the disco lights are swirling in the darkness, and they play it. “Thriller” — my favorite song, off my favorite album, the one I have on LP along with my Care Bear records and Disney stuff. I race back out there. I have to be out there for this one.

That is the song, essentially, oddly, wonderfully, that encompasses my childhood. I love so many others of his, from that album and those that followed it, but that is the one that takes me back.

Again, this is why we mourn celebrities. Some of it is for the work we loved, a body of work that becomes now static and unchanging. And some of it is for how our lives entwined with that work. We mourn our own past, and we treasure the things that have the mysterious power to return us there, even just for 14 minutes.

 

Fanfic: “All the Time in the World”

This week, I added my 500th book to my Goodreads “to-read” shelf. Which doesn’t count the several hundred books on my Kindle I haven’t read, or the stacks of physical books waiting on my real shelves, or even the handwritten to-read lists that wind up in my journal…

…all of which made me think of the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last,” my favorite, in which a mild-mannered bookworm finally has time to read… because he’s apparently the last one left alive on Earth.

So, to celebrate my nuclear-holocaust-worthy reading list, here’s a bit of fanfic I wrote a few years back, when I’d watched the episode yet again, could no longer bear to leave Henry Bemis standing helplessly amid those stacks of books, and so decided to imagine a more hopeful future for him. (And yeah, it’s kind of sentimental, so if you’re allergic to that sort of thing, you’ve been warned…)

“All the Time in the World”

by Renee Carter Hall

inspired by the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last”

(teleplay by Rod Serling, based on a short story by Lynn Venable)

 

 

The problem, now, wasn’t what he couldn’t see.  It was what he thought he saw, the wavering forms that washed around him as he made his way through what was left of the world.  Every morning, the sun rose on a nightmare version of an Impressionist painting, a palette of grays and browns with occasional splashes of sparks arcing from power lines that had not, yet, gone dead.

The first three days, afterward, he spent searching for the gun.  Or for another one–it didn’t matter.  Anything that could fire a bullet would do.  In those first anguished hours, if despair could have killed him, if one could truly die of a broken heart, that would have been his fate.  But that merciful endless slumber passed him by, left him breathing and somehow sane — too sane, he reflected — and so he began the search, picking up anything that seemed to be the right size and shape, feeling for a barrel, feeling for a trigger, then dropping the piece of wood or twisted metal and moving on.

He resented his body for feeling hungry.  Every day he vowed not to eat, to die in the only way easily available to him.  And every evening the descending sun saw him sitting amid the wreckage of humanity, dutifully cranking open another can.  Now that he could no longer read the labels, it became a demented kind of game to see if he could guess the can’s contents by the label’s color, or perhaps by a fuzzy image he could make out.  He became best at guessing tomatoes, but different varieties of beans proved almost impossible to distinguish.

The fourth day, after he gave up on the gun, he threw the can opener as far as he could and heard it land, somewhere ahead of him, with a rattling clank.

The fifth day, weeping, he searched for the can opener until he found it.

Beyond that, every day was the same — wandering, lugging his stash of cans in an old pillowcase, calling out until his throat was raw even though no one ever answered.

“The only one alive,” he said — to himself, of course, always to himself.  “The only one — why, that just can’t be.  It can’t be.  There are other banks, after all.  Other vaults.  There must be someone.”

Of all of it, all the gray watery loneliness, he decided the dreams were the worst.  Because in them, he could still see.

He dreamed of being back at the bank again, counting out bills to Mrs. Chester — except her face was Helen’s, and the bills were leaves of a book he was tearing apart carefully, page by page.  And then he was holding the book, black leather cover stamped with gold leaf, and the cover read simply HENRY BEMIS, and when he opened it, all the pages were marked out with angry cross-hatches.  Then the pages slipped free, cascading to the floor with a dry, hollow rustling sound.  He snatched at them, gathering them up in handfuls, but they crumbled to dust and sifted through his fingers.

He lost count of how many times he woke from that dream — and always, upon waking, feeling for glasses that were no longer there.

Fool, his mind said in Helen’s voice.

He decided not to walk today.  What was there to go toward?  It would just be another day spent stumbling through what used to be his hometown, what used to be his life.

It was a sad commentary on the state of affairs, he thought, when he, Henry Bemis, became the last representative of humanity.  He could just see Helen’s face at the thought.  A fool like him, left to carry the sputtering torch of mankind’s knowledge and achievements.  He actually laughed a little, even though it sounded more like a cough.

And then the reality, the earnestness of it, struck him.  If he truly was the only one left–

“I must remember,” he said aloud.  “I have to, or it’s all lost.”

In his panic, he could remember nothing.  Lines of poems, openings of novels, radio jingles — everything went flying from his mind, scattering like a flock of birds.  At last he snatched something before it escaped.

“‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,’” he said.  “Yes.  Robert Frost.”

He did not ask himself who he was remembering these things for.  It was enough, suddenly, to remember them for himself, to linger over each word like a bead in a rosary.

“Whose woods these are,” he began, softly, “I think I know.”

The rhythm gave him strength; the rhyme, comfort.  He could see it all: the little horse, the shining bells on the harness, the snowflakes skirling in the darkening forest.

“But I have promises to keep,” he murmured, blinking back tears.  “And miles to go before I sleep.”

“And miles to go,” a quiet voice echoed, “before I sleep.”

He jerked backward as if yanked by a string.  He looked left and right, searching, and then a slight movement caught his eye.  Someone was standing there, facing them, a little ways off, but there.

Someone was there.

“Hello?”  He threw the word out like a stone into a still pond.

“I’m here.”  The voice was musical, feminine.  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”  He heard a shaky laugh.  “I’m afraid this is a social situation the etiquette books don’t exactly cover.”

“You’re… real?”  It was an absurd thing to say, but he had to say it anyway.

“Of course.  Here.  We’ll be properly introduced.”  She paused.

He waited.  “Yes?” he said at last.  He squinted into the jagged landscape.  “You’re — you’re still there — aren’t you?  Please don’t leave.”

“I’m still here.  I…  Forgive me, I didn’t realize you…  You can’t see, can you?”

“Not very much,” he said ruefully.  “I had perfect vision with my glasses — perfect vision — but they’re broken.  Were broken.  And now…”

“Here, then.”  He felt her slim hand slip into his.  “Margaret Wilkins.”

“Henry Bemis.  It’s — well, it’s such a pleasure to meet you, Miss Wilkins.”

“I would think it’d be a pleasure to meet anyone.”  She spoke lightly enough, but there was a roughness to her voice that made him wonder — though he could never, would never ask — if she had not, perhaps, found a pistol in the rubble as well.

“But you must call me Margaret,” she said.  “I know it’s awfully forward of me, but I insist that as the last two people on earth, we call each other by our first names.”

“Do you really think we’re the last?”  How sweet it was, to be able to ask someone what they thought, and to wait knowing an answer would come, even if it might be an answer he dreaded to hear.

“You’re the first person I’ve seen.”  Another pause.  “The first live person, anyway.”

“It’s been dreadful, hasn’t it.”  He reached out and felt her hands clasp his again.  She gave a low, strangled cry.

“Yes,” she said, and even in the single word he heard her voice shaking.

He was reeling with questions but knew better than to ask the first ones that came to mind.  “The poem,” he said at last.  “You… like poetry?”

“Of course.  Frost is one of my favorites.  I suppose he’s gone now, too.”

He couldn’t deny that.  “But we both know the poem.  So there’s a little — well, a little of him left then, isn’t there, since we remember?”

“Yes,” and this time it was clearer, stronger, “yes, I suppose so.  I suppose that’s how it’ll have to be.”

“We’ll remember,” Henry said, and despite all the strangeness and awkward sorrow, it felt perfectly right to hold her in his arms — one scrap of human warmth and memory clinging to another.  “We’ll help each other remember.”

 

*     *     *

 

The first meal they shared together was a tin of sardines and a box of crackers that had survived the blast without being crushed.  Once they were seated companionably on a chunk of concrete, he finally dared to ask the question.

“Where were you, when it happened?”

And though he could not see her expression change, he felt the sudden weight to the air, as if his words still hung there, pressing down on them.

“In the rare books room, at the library.  I was getting a book for someone doing research on the town.  He might have been a reporter.  I don’t remember for sure.”

“You worked at the library?”  And even now, even with everything in ruins around them, even with the blurry shadows mocking him everywhere he looked, he felt his heart lighten at the thought of the place.

“Yes.  I was there for almost four years.”

“Marvelous,” he breathed.  “How marvelous — to work surrounded by books.  By people who love books, who want to take care of them, to share them…”  He shook his head, unable to find any more words.

“Where did you work?”

“Oh, at the bank.  Surrounded by people who loved money.  I was in the vault, you see.  On my lunch hour, reading.”

“What were you reading?”

He felt his face pull into a smile, even though there were tears, suddenly, welling in his eyes.  “David Copperfield.  I didn’t know it would be the last book I would ever read.  But I suppose Dickens is as good as any to end on.”

“Why, you silly man,” she said, tenderly, and his world wavered again.  “I can see just fine.  I’ll read you whatever you like — it’s not the same, of course, but — if you’d like–”

“I…”  He swallowed and tried to smile again.  “Yes, yes, I’d like that very much.  Very much.”  He sighed.  “I’m afraid I’m nothing but a sentimental old fool, to care so much about people who never lived…”

She moved closer, and he felt her hand brush his cheek, her palm warm and soft against his skin, her voice warm and soft in the silence.  “You mustn’t say that.  Neither part of it.  They did live — they do live.  And caring doesn’t make anyone a fool.”

She moved back then, and he heard pages rustling.  “I happen to have something with me you might like.  Did you ever read Great Expectations?”

“No.”  Then, smiling, “Not yet.”

“Chapter One,” she read.  “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip…”

 

*   *   *

 

They went back to the library, together.  Margaret said she hadn’t been brave enough before, but she went now, and they filled scavenged knapsacks with all the books they could carry.

They found the house together.  Thank goodness it seemed no one had been home when the bomb fell.  That was how he thought of it — that it had fallen, not been dropped, no person or purpose behind it, just a phenomenon like a meteor or hailstones.

The house wasn’t much more than a few walls and most of the roof, but it was shelter.  The air felt heavy, and the sky was darkening.  There was one room without windows, where the door still hung on its hinges and still shut tight.  They lit candles inside and opened a can of beef noodle soup.

“There must be others,” she said.  “If we survived, so close to it, then there must be more people farther away.  Don’t you think?”

He allowed himself to imagine it.  “Well, I… I suppose, yes.  That seems reasonable enough.”

She laughed, and though he didn’t think he’d said anything funny, he was still glad to hear the sound.

“Listen to you, Henry!  Anyone would think you didn’t want to find anyone else.”

“Of course I do,” he said at once.  “Why, that’s silly — of course I do.”

For a moment, he imagined all of it back: electric lights, buses and trains on schedule, corner coffee shops with fresh peach pie, customers’ heels clicking briskly on the polished floor of the bank.  The world they’d always known.

The world where Henry Bemis was a simple bank clerk, a little man ordered about by everyone.  Where a woman like Margaret would only laugh at him, if she paid him any attention at all.

He realized he didn’t want that world back.  The thought made him giddy and terrified at once.

Thunder crashed overhead.  Beside him, Margaret yelped, a startled, animal sound, and when he reached for her, she was trembling.

“It was so loud,” she whispered, and he knew she wasn’t talking about the thunder.

“Yes.  It was.”  He held her.  This, then, was how it felt to be strong.  To comfort someone when you were still afraid yourself.  “But this is only thunder.  There, now, the rain’s starting.  Hear it?”

She rested her head against his chest.  “I always used to think that the rain sounded lonely.  But now it’s… so ordinary and safe.  It’s nice.”  He felt her relax.  “I’m so glad I found you.”

He swallowed.  Helen had never been the sort of woman one courted with fancy words, but now he wished he’d had the practice.

“I’m glad, too,” he said at last.  Perhaps if she could hear how much he meant them, the simple words would be enough.

 

*   *   *

 

“Henry?”

He woke.  “Mm?”  It took a moment, as it always did, to remember where he was and why.  But every day that moment got shorter.

“I’m back.”  Margaret’s voice was light, cheerful, almost childlike.  “I brought a surprise for you.”

They were still in the house — or the room, anyway.  With the door closed it was hard to tell what time of day it was, but it had looked like late afternoon when he’d gone outside earlier.  She’d been gone a day and a half, then, searching the rubble for food and other necessities.  He always worried about her, out there alone.  Or worse, not alone.

“Surprise?  What is it?”

“Close your eyes.”

And he felt the cool touch of metal hooked over his ears, the familiar weight at the bridge of his nose–

“All right.  Open them.”

He did.  And saw…

Everything.

The glasses weren’t perfect, not like his old pair was, but they were enough to sharpen the blurred edges, to bring cans and blankets and piles of books into focus.

“How are they?”

And her.  Dark, gently curled hair, smooth skin, a smudge of soot across her cheek, brown eyes wide and bright and brimming with eager joy.

“You’re… beautiful,” he breathed.  “I mean — I mean, they’re wonderful.”

“If those aren’t good enough, I have more.  I brought a whole bagful.”  Her voice was light enough, but now he could see she was blushing.

“Oh, no, these — these will do just fine.”  A sudden, horrible thought struck him.  “Margaret, where did you…  You didn’t take them from…?”

“I remembered an optometrist’s,” she said soothingly.  “I didn’t want to tell you before, because I thought they might all be broken.  And I couldn’t bear to disappoint you if they were.  Are they really all right?”

“Hand me the book.”  She did, and he opened it where they had left off.

“It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spiders’ webs; hanging itself from twig to twig–”  His voice broke, and he closed the book.

“Yes.  Yes, they’re just fine.”  He laid the book gently pack on the pile.  “Margaret, what I said before… I didn’t mean to…  That is, what I meant–”

“I know what you meant,” she said softly.  She tipped her face up to his, just the slightest motion, and he lowered his without even thinking, without even thinking of anything, so that the kiss, so sweet and long and lingering, seemed to happen all by itself.

“There’s more,” she said at last.

“More?”

“I found something else outside.  There was a sign in the street downtown, and arrows, spray-painted in the street.  We’re not the only ones.”

So there would be a world again, at least a little like the one they knew.  But maybe better, he realized now.  Already — even now, even as bad as things were — already it was better.

“Think of it,” she said.  “We can find them.  We can build again.  We could have a library, and we could keep all of it alive, all of the stories and history.  We could help everyone remember.”

Henry Bemis, carrying the torch of humanity.  All at once, it didn’t seem such a foolish notion after all.

“We’ll leave in the morning, then.”  He touched her cheek, trailing his fingers along her jaw.  “I must say, though,” he added, laughing a little, really laughing again, “I’d grown kind of accustomed to being the only two people in the world.”

She took his hand, twining her fingers with his.  “We can pretend.”

It was settled, then.  In the morning, they would set out with as much as they could carry — food and clothes and water, books and memories and hope.  It would take time to find the others, time to rebuild, time to remember.

But they had all the time in the world.

 

 

It’s a major award!

Or at least it feels like it, even though there are no aesthetically questionable lighting fixtures involved…

Near the end of March, I had hit something of a creative low. I’d finally completed a new story for an anthology’s deadline, was pretty happy with how it turned out, felt confident about it getting in — and, of course, it didn’t. As much as I’ve learned to bounce back from rejection (at least after a day or so), it’s always a letdown to feel like your work is perfect for something, and have such good feelings about it, and then find out you were completely wrong. I knew I had to send it back out again (always the best balm for any rejection letter), but because of a lot of other things going on at the time, I felt too tired and disheartened to figure out where.

And then I ran across a link on Twitter to a writing contest.

Whose theme just happened to suit the story perfectly.

With only two days left to submit.

So I shrugged, and sent the story in, and waited, and hoped, while at the same time trying desperately not to get my hopes up (because it’s been that kind of year), all the time thinking, “wouldn’t it be funny if…”

And now I can say that my story “The Frog Who Swallowed the Moon” won the fiction grand prize in the latest Spark contest:

http://sparkanthology.org/contests/five/

It’s my first writing contest win — for fiction, anyway, not counting things like essay contests in high school, so it’s pretty exciting.

This sort of thing has happened before — story gets rejected only to wind up getting published someplace that’s somehow better in the end — but not quite this dramatically, so in addition to being a nice ego and confidence boost, it’s also a nice boost to the kind of faith you have to have to keep writing and revising and sending stuff out time after time.

Although I have to admit, I always feel weird about writing these sorts of announcements. There’s such a fine line, to me, between announcing one’s accomplishments and sounding like you’re bragging about them. I’m taken back to that feeling of elementary school, sitting at my desk with a completed test, waiting for somebody else to finish and hand theirs in before I get up, so everyone won’t know I’m the first one to finish. And on the flip side, I know what it’s like to feel that everybody else’s success always happens during your own driest spells, and to write congratulatory comments with your teeth gritted.

In the end, though, I come back to this, a passage that’s been quoted so much it should feel like a threadbare cliché, but one that still rings true to me:

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

-Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love

And besides, I got a particularly snarky rejection letter a couple days later. So the universe is still in balance. :)

 

Poem: “The Unicorn at the Zoo”

The Unicorn at the Zoo

 

They put it among trees and rose bushes,

ringed a dry moat with an iron fence.

They’re still not sure if it’s

male or female; the ultrasound

goes to static and freezes every time.

They tried to test its blood,

but the silver serum in the tube

swirled and shimmered into nothing.

They held a contest to name it anyway,

and a third-grader won with Moonflower.

Tourists gather at its enclosure with

strollers and cameras,

whinny at it like a horse,

hold their children up to see.

In their snapshots, it is only

a vague white blur, a bit

of pearly horn here, a hint

of cloven hoof there.

The gift shop has no postcards of it,

but the plush horned ponies sell out every week.

The keepers aren’t sure what it eats.

Some say the flowers, but they’re untouched.

Some say water, some say air.

Some say love, but they’re laughed at

by people who feel guilty for it afterward.

The keepers hold somber meetings

with scholars and art historians.

Every day they worry it seems a bit thinner,

its coat a touch paler, more translucent.

The words on the sign at its enclosure

are starting to fade.

Sometimes the zoo director stands

before it in his three-piece suit,

slow tears tracing the lines of his face.

Some say he’s only thinking about

the money he might lose.

Others aren’t so sure.

 

 

          -Renee Carter Hall

 

Now available: Hero’s Best Friend

“We snowcats may be born for swirling blizzards and icy cliffs, but for myself, I’ll take a cozy cottage hearth any day. A bellyful of roast rabbit, a fire of crimson embers, the old rug covered with layer on layer of my gray-and-white fur — that’s comfort.

I was stretched out on that rug, dreaming of yellow butterflies, when the explosion woke me.”

–from “The Emerald Mage”

Sometimes an anthology comes along that just seems made for you — not just what you like to write, but what you love to read, the kind of book you’re just as excited about reading as you are about seeing your work included.

This is definitely one of those anthologies.

From Seventh Star Press and editor Scott M. Sandridge, I give you Hero’s Best Friend: An Anthology of Animal Companions. Publisher’s synopsis:

How far would Gandalf have gotten without Shadowfax? Where would the Vault Dweller be without Dogmeat? And could the Beastmaster have been the Beastmaster without his fuzzy allies? Animal companions are more than just sidekicks. Animals can be heroes, too!

Found within are twenty stories of heroic action that focuses on the furries and scalies who have long been the unsung heroes pulling their foolish human buddies out of the fire, and often at great sacrifice—from authors both established and new, including Frank Creed, S. H. Roddey, and Steven S. Long.

Whether you’re a fan of Epic Fantasy, Sword & Sorcery, Science Fiction, or just animal stories in general, this is the anthology for you!

So sit back, kick your feet up, and find out what it truly means to be the Hero’s Best Friend.

My story “The Emerald Mage” is told by the snowcat Jiro, longtime companion and friend of the Emerald Mage, as the two of them realize it’s time to face the aging mage’s mental — and magical — decline. I’ve realized I really enjoy writing about vulnerable characters (children or adults) with powerful animals as companions/protectors, and this story gave me a wonderful excuse to explore those possibilities. (And to throw some humor in there along the way, too, which I still feel I don’t get to write often enough.)

You can order a paperback copy from Amazon or B&N, or snag an ebook version for your Kindle, Nook, or Kobo.

A bit of shameless Valentine’s Day self-promotion

Since I have some newer followers who might have missed some of my earlier published stuff, I thought this would be a good time to highlight some of my more romance-focused stories. If you’re looking for a Valentine’s Day read, here are a few you might want to check out:

Moon, June, Raccoon

Karen’s sick of watching all her friends find true love. Out of sheer desperation, she decides to try casting a love spell — and winds up getting the attention of a neighborhood raccoon instead. But this furry matchmaker just won’t mind his own business. (All ages.)

Drawn From Memory

Lauren’s been a fan of Terrence Tiger since she was a little girl, and the chance to interview the cartoon star is any fan’s dream. But there’s more to Terrence than sight gags and pratfalls, and soon there’s more to their relationship than either of them expected. (Recommended for teen and adult readers.)

The Bear with the Quantum Heart

Since they first met that Christmas morning, Bear has wanted nothing more than to be by Kayla’s side, but when innocence turns to experience, is it just an artificial intelligence’s programming — or love? (Recommended for older teens and adults.)

“Moon” and “Drawn” also are included in my free short story collection Six Impossible Things, so if you want them in a more ereader-friendly format, you can snag the Kindle version at Amazon and all formats from Smashwords. And if you’re wanting one of those poignant, funny, kinda-happy-kinda-sad-ending stories, you might like “The Spirit of Pinetop Inn,” from Andromeda Spaceways #58, which tells the story of a young couple who decide to help their struggling bed and breakfast by hiring a ghost to haunt the place.

I’ll be back very soon with some other announcements — I’ve fallen behind this month thanks to paperwork for an attempt at a mortgage refinance, husband’s ER visit for kidney stones, husband’s outpatient surgery for same, husband’s overnight hospital stay after what was supposed to be outpatient surgery, and preparing for what we both hope will be his last outpatient surgery next week, not to mention the day job and various other necessary irritations. Lately I’ve been reminded of what Mary Schmich said in her “wear sunscreen” piece that went viral (though misattributed) years ago: “The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.” There have been a lot of those idle Tuesday troubles lately, and I’ve been caught in that lousy, exhausting, guilt-ridden spiral of very much wanting to write while at the same time being too stressed to spare any headspace for anything other than what’s required for work, household finances, my husband, and/or basic personal hygiene and self-care. I know I put too much of my self-worth and feelings of progress into my writing achievements, but I’m still hoping things will get back to normal (or at least closer to normal) soon, so I won’t have to watch more deadlines fly past. (That’s the plan, anyway…)