2017 in short stories

I’m going to make this short and sweet: Here are my stories that were published in 2017. I am very proud of them:

Itself at the Heart of Things in Shimmer #38. Dismantling yourself as a defense mechanism is admittedly unorthodox. (A very nice and thoughtful review of it at Quick Sip Reivews.)

Side note! I made a poetry toy as a bonus feature for this story. Dada was a big inspiration for this story, and Dada cut-and-paste is fun: BREAK/MAKE, or, itself at the heart of— poetry.

Three Ways to Ruin Your Best Friend’s Birthday (and How She Fixes It) in Flash Fiction Online in August. This is a short, humorous story about friendship, polar bears, and moving house. (Another Quick Sip review.)

Raise-the-Dead Cobbler in Shimmer #40. Modern-day witches make questionable decisions, text a lot, and bring dead people to life, sort of.

Minor update

Ahh, tiny wee little improvements. The Stories page is shiny and reformatted, and yet all the links to my interactive fiction still work.

This was more doing than you might think, because Past Me was a little dumb. Let’s just say redirecting parts of a subdomain while leaving other parts of a subdomain alone is a little bit annoying if you are a Casual Coder like me. Why did I even put my interactive fiction on a separate subdomain? I don’t know, ask Past Me, she’s the one who did it.

Anyway. Stories! There are lizard people, post-apocalyptic rocket farms, mysterious portals, space monsters, and (of course) space witches. Etc.

The Fairy Woods title art
The Fairy Woods: A tale of rescue, or not

I’m going to take a second to feature this story. The Fairy Woods took me ages to construct, but I loved creating each bit of the world and each character you encounter. It has multiple endings and some neat hidden tricks involving remembering states and paths and character choices, but of course none of that matters if people don’t bother to click past the first choice.

So, um. If you feel so inclined, check it out! You might get to fight a troll or chat with a witch or muddle your way through a labyrinth.