Here are a few places where my stories have appeared this fall. Some of these stories (“Touch,” “Settlement,” and “Devotion”) I wrote several years ago but resurrected in late 2013 / early 2014 when I needed a break from the mind-bending work of creating a story from scratch. When creating a story from scratch, often I’m miserable. It’s exhausting. I don’t want to talk to people. I ask myself, why am I doing this again? My first drafts suck. My ability to form coherent speech is all used up. (And I hang out with my kids all afternoon so this is a problem). Revising old work, in contrast, is fun. The words are there,  all you need to do is rearrange them (or, in my case, take them out!). And I get to realize, oh yeah, I actually have learned something in the past decade as a writer. 

“Touch” at Interfictions. This is a companion story to “The Pleasure Exercises” published in Confrontation earlier this year.  (some background on these stories) ((one of io9’s best stories of the week)

“Away” in Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science. I wrote this during my first time away from my kids during an artist residency at Saltonstall. You don’t have to dig very deep to figure out how I was feeling (hint: very, very guilty) at the time. Anguished backstory aside, this was one of the most fun stories for me to write ever. I loved the challenge of the specific word count that Nature’s Futures column has (between 850-950 words) and I loved the fact that this piece did not take me months to write. In fact, I wrote it in two evenings at Saltonstall (and to write in the evenings! Lovely). I’m kind of obsessed with Mars One which is what sparked this idea–you know, the all expense paid trip to Mars where they can’t bring you back  (did any parents apply?) (I missed the deadline) (Not that I actually would have applied) (I don’t think)

“Not Like What You Said” in Alaska Quarterly Review (background on story) (nice review in the Alaska Dispatch News) (nice review in Ploughshare’s The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week)

“Devotion” at the Southern Review.  This was the first story I wrote after I came back to writing after I took some time off when I had my first kid. It’s the story that kicked my writing into high gear, I think: imagining what if God told you, a mother, that you had to kill your child in order to save the world, but you refused? Before kids, I wrote about–what, a guy and a girl who either liked each other or didn’t. Boring. Motherhood did not do great things for the amount of time I have to write, or my focus, but it did help deepen my subject matter. (listen to me reading this story)

“Settlement” at the Massachusetts Review.

A review of Ozma of Oz at HTMLGIANT