Nudity is Only Skin-Deep

I'm gonna share a bunch of my writing resources with you. These are things I check frequently, and have helped me with my publications.

The Submission Grinder: I find this one a little tricky to use, but it's very helpful for looking up magazines by pay rate, genre, etc.

Submittable: Invaluable resource. I track my submissions here. Membership is free, and you can find all sorts of calls for submissions, contests, fellowships, and more. The downside is there is no way to search for paying magazines only, and there are no ways to filter out magazines you don't want to see.

Chill Subs: A lot of people swear by this resource, and the folks running it seem like good people doing this as a passion project. They also have a mailing list which includes special calls for submissions as well as writing workshops.

Authortunities: You can sign up for the mailing list to get a curated list of magazines/anthologies seeking submissions. The free version is all you need. The paid version shows a bit more stuff from the next month, but that will show up in the next free email. Friendly community, too.

Writing & Selling Stories with Angelique Fawns: Various writing resources for novels and short stories. Also includes interviews with authors and a curated monthly list of upcoming calls for submissions--mostly speculative.

Moksha: A list of magazines and anthologies seeking submissions. Primarily speculative fiction/poetry. I've had several pieces published through this.

Query Tracker: A place to track literary agent queries and to find which agents are open to submissions.

The Horror Tree: Not just horror. Covers speculative fiction in general. Has craft essays, calls for submissions, writing prompts, book reviews, and more.

Write, Publish, Shine: Run by the wonderful, super-supportive editor Rachel Thompson, this is a writing community and publishing school. I took her Lit Mag Love course, and it's what really got me organized and turned into a publishing machine.

Community of Literary Magazines and Presses Calls for Submissions: A bit of a pig in a poke, really. I've found a few good things here, but it also includes magazines which charge you money in order for you to submit work, and it doesn't say if this is the case in the listings. A bit of a pain in the arse, in that regard.

Canadian Authors Awards and Competitions: Not just for Canadian authors. Listing is by deadline, and entry fees and prize amounts are shown prominently.

Publishing... and Other Forms of Insanity: Terrific resource with lists of paying markets, free competitions, residencies, and more.

Science Fiction Poetry Association: Lists paying magazines which do not charge you money to submit your speculative poetry.

Literary Outlets for Environmental Writing: Some of the places listed are no longer around, but still is the best (and only) list I've seen for this genre.

Aswiebe's Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Market Listings Online: A spreadsheet of speculative magazines listing word counts, pay rates, etc.

The Short List: Places which publish flash and micro fiction.

Eric J. Guignard: Personal blog which includes calls for submission for dark fiction.

Alex Davis Events: Alex puts together workshops, festivals, and other events which feature excellent authors and scholars on speculative fiction. Specialties include folk horror, body horror, ghost stories, and the uncanny, but there are also courses on science fiction. Good stuff. I've gotten a lot out of these courses over the past few years.

The Fairytale Sessions: An excellent and inexpensive series of generative writing workshops hosted by Saraswathi Sukumar. These focus on fairytales, especially the works of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. I've written many stories based on writing prompts here.

Weird West Fiction: Do you write weird westerns? This is where to find resources for this cross-genre.

Authors Publish: Website and mailing list with lots of upcoming calls. Great for authors, not so hot for publishers, as being on that list results in a lot of authors sending things which don't match up with the submission calls. For example, if someone is publishing only military thrillers, they might be sent high fantasy instead. Always make sure you're sending a publisher the sort of stuff they are looking for.

Weekday Night Bites has a heap of videos about horror writing and the history of horror.

Not writing related, per se, but if you're sick of trying to read a story only to find it's behind a paywall, Paywall Reader will help you get around that.

It's rare that I read a short story and feel a deep need to study it intently. Ecdysis by Jess Koch is one of those stories. I love everything about this horror story. I love the pacing, the creeping dread, and the dawning realization that happens in this one. And the language, too. Delicious.

In case you're wondering where I lurk these days, it's mostly on BlueSky. A lot of authors hang out there, and I've discovered so many cool books and short stories through their posts.

However, it's not without its share of annoyances and things that make my Spidey senses tingle. The other day, I shared that I had finished a new short story called "Myrtle McKenzie's Angels." A few people congratulated me, which was lovely, but one person--someone I didn't know and had never posted anything on my account before--said they are available to beta read my story if I would love that.

Love that?

Spidey senses on high alert.

I'm not averse to beta readers. I have a strong collection of peers who exchange beta readings. But for this stranger, who appears to run some sort of book coaching business, to say they're available if I'd love it? Hmm. Makes me think they want my money. Or maybe they're a bot trying to scrape my story.

There's a lot of well-founded paranoia out there. Artists and writers routinely have their work stolen by LLMs and AI-trawlers. They're repackaging our plagiarized works and trying to sell it back to us with handy AI-powered tools that will write and rewrite stories for us, act as accountability buddies, etc. And because these bots are trained on our work, elements of our writing are now regarded as proof that our writing must have been generated by AI.

It's a vicious circle, especially when our work is being fed into AI-checkers by teachers and ill-informed editors. The AI-checkers then claim our work was probably AI-generated, whilst squirreling away that work into its library of stolen valour.

Thanks, tech bros. I hate it.

In other news, my story "Rich-People Houses" was just shortlisted for an award. I think I'll be finding out pretty soon if I've won or not.

I haven't done a link dump in years. My open tabs have taken over my computer. Time for a cull. I'll share them with you, because you too may find them interesting.

Queer Horror with David Demchuk: An interesting talk about the history of queer horror.

Cut and Shuffle Exercise: A tutorial on poem generation.

Inuit Myth: a listing of Inuit gods and goddesses.

Rachel Attituq Qitsualik: A collection of amazing Inuit stories and lore by a master storyteller.

Caribou shooting in Newfoundland; with a history of England's oldest colony from 1001 to 1895: by Samuel T. Davis, 1838-1908. I used information from this for some essays I wrote.

the birth of Newfoundland archaeology, and the
end of history: A talk about the "first Newfoundland archaeologist" and the Beothuk

Fourth-Person Point of View. I hate that this is full of AI slop art, but I found the write-up informative.

Imaro: what may have been the first foray into the swords and sorcery genre by a Black author.

Photos from my trip to Newfoundland last year: Some gorgeous shots in here.

A Smurfy Tale: Papa Smurf Meets the Jehovah's Witnesses: This may very well be ground zero of the Jehovah's Witness urban legend about demonized Smurfs.

A Brief History of Killer Smurfs

Fabulous Animals, by David Attenborough. This is a documentary on cryptozoology that came out in 1975. Was missing for decades.

The Short List: Publishers who take stories up to 2500 words.

Anthony Casteel’s Account of Scalping Proclamations in Colonial Nova Scotia: Firsthand account of Englishmen held hostage by Mi'kmaq warriors.

Kishotenketsu - a plot structure without conflict: a four-act structure common in Asian storytelling.

Erika Krouse’s Ranking of 500-ish Literary Magazines for Short Fiction: Ranked according to circulation, reach, pay, and prestige.

How to Play a Jaw Harp: I want to work my way through these exercises and unlearn the poor technique I came up with without instruction.

Eskimo Folktales: Collected by Knud Rasmussen, these are a treasure.

A Discussion of the Inuit Artist Osuitok Ipeelee’s Sedna, Mother of the Sea Beasts

Ululijarnak: The Inuit Disembowelling Goddess: She used her knife to help people give birth and poop.

Sermerssuaq: The strongest, strangest Inuit woman ever: the Hercules of the Inuit world, and she had a giant clitoris.

The Not-Deer and Weird Appalachian Lore: Deer that don't act the way deer should.

Not sure how this happened, but I'm enrolled in several writing classes/workshops at the same time. Almost all my time is spent reading/writing. Here's what I'm taking:

• The McCormack Writing Center Winter Workshop. I'm workshopping an excerpt from my memoirs tentatively titled Leaving Armageddon. It's about my childhood as a Jehovah's Witness kid.
  
• GrubStreet's Short Story Collection Builder: I've begun work on a new short story collection tentatively called Every Tear From Their Eyes. In it, I imagine what a world would look like if Jehovah's Witness teachings were literally true. It's bonkers.
  
• Alex Davis's Horror-Writing School. Each week, new lectures and workshops by Nina Oram, Charlotte Baker, JS Barnes, Gemma Amor, Daniel Carpenter, and Val Nolan.
  
• The Loft's Gender is Our Playground: An exploration of gender in storytelling.
  
• The Fairytale Sessions: On occasional Sundays, I do generative writing workshops focused on classic fairytales.
  

Good lord.

I think I have six different publications coming out in January. I'll share them as they pop up.

I've had five acceptances for my writing so far this month. Crikey. That's a record for me.

I've had two editors request bespoke stories from me, too. I just finished writing one. I need to figure out what I'll do for the other.

I've also had a request to revise and resubmit my novella The Temperance Ridge Runaways. I'm feeling much closer to getting a book out there in the world.

My hard work is paying off.

Now to plug someone else. I keep coming back to Adam Nevill's wonderful story Hippocampus. It's a horror story with no characters in it at all. I'm obsessed. I want to try my hand at writing a characterless short story, too. This story has the best description I've ever read of a ship in heavy seas.

I'm busy, as usual.

My drabble The Bison Return with the Prairie Grass is a winner of Augur Magazine's microfiction contest.

My story "The Grave of Robert Kirk," a folkloric tale of what happens when the aforementioned grave is robbed, is forthcoming in Once Upon a Moonless Night. The Kickstarter is live.

My story "The Menopause Chrysalis," a weird tale of an ageing two-spirit person dealing with the medical system and the dream world, is forthcoming in Yay! Free and Queer All Queer. The Kickstarter is live.

I'm continuing to work on a story tentatively called "We All Fall Down." It was supposed to be a short story, but so far, it's a novelette and may end up a novella. Oops. It's about a nonbinary tween in a small, desert town, and is set in the early 1980s. It's a puberty horror story, and I'm having fun writing a ritual scene, most recently.

I'm also making good headway on revisions of my novel The Everwhen. I hope a publisher jumps on this. I'm proud of it.

Kwe!

That's one of the few Mi'kmaq words I know. It means "hello." I just started taking language lessons this week. It's gonna be a long road, but any word I learn is a huge level-up, considering I only knew two or three words to begin with.

I had a couple of acceptances yesterday, but I'm not going to count them because their acceptance letters were shady AF. Most of the letter was promotional material, urging me to buy multiple copies of the anthology ahead of time, plus stuffed toys, and, if I am lucky, I might win a prize. While I believe someone will get the prize money, the way this is being run is straight-up scam. Publishers ought not to get all their money and all their product from authors/artists. That is low. So no, I will not be sending more work to Polar Expressions Publishing, and I suggest you avoid it, too. I can see how this would win over someone new to publishing, but your work is worth more than this.

The erotic eco-horror anthology Silk and Foxglove launched yesterday and is available in e-book or trade paperback format. My story "All That Came From Our Lips Were Lilies" is within.

I want to share some of the stories I've been reading with you:

The Cost of Living by Jen Cornick. Creepy tale about the horrors of the working poor. I got to be a beta-reader for this, and it's delicious.

Proof By Induction by José Pablo Iriarte. A thought-provoking story about mathematical proofs, uploaded memories, and grief. This was a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award finalist.

Love is the Plan the Plan is Death by James Tiptree Jr. This is a surreal story from a unique POV. Who is speaking? WHAT is speaking? And what does it have to say about the nature of love?

And then there's this wonderful Inuit tall tale about Sermerssuaq, the strongest, strangest Inuk woman, ever.

I did not win the Aurora award, but I'm totally fine with that. Y.M. Pang's poem Cthulhu on the Shores of Osaka won, and deservedly so. Go give it a read. It's brilliant and fun.

My shortlisted poem "Angakkuq" might not have won, but it will be published in a best-of anthology. I can't say which one yet, but will share when that information is available!

I found out my personal essay "The Friday Plane," about drugs and my near miss with Pablo Escobar's cartel in the wilds of New Brunswick, has been longlisted for the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. Neat!

ALOCASIA has nominated my personal essay The Ghosts of Forests Past for the Best of the Net awards. I didn't make it to the final rounds, but it was nice to be nominated.

My story Sibyl Has a Heart of Gold has been nominated by The Temz Review for the Journey Prize for dark fiction.


Time to add some other fun stuff to this blog of mine, like what I'm reading and finding interesting.

I'm currently taking a course at Writing the Other with Henry Lien, author of Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird. It's a really interesting book on Eastern storytelling. I'm enjoying the readings for the course.

I just finished reading an essay for it called Shakespeare in the Bush wherein the author learns the true meaning of Hamlet from the Tiv of West Africa.

Unrelated to the course, but super-related to writing, here's the most useful craft essay I've ever read. It deals with the shape of story openings: The Wrong Shape for Your Opening by Vera Kurian.

Sorry I made no posts last month! I was off adventuring in Newfoundland. I went on the Viking Tour, travelling along northwestern Newfoundland with a trip to Red Bay, Labrador, too. I haven't been to Newfoundland since I lived there forty-four years ago. I didn't expect to have that homecoming feeling, but I felt it surge in my chest as we approached by plane and I saw the bogs.

Things have changed, but some things are still the same. Hearing the outport accents brought me back to my childhood, and so did eating foods I haven't had in decades--things like partridgeberry, dewberry, bakeapples, cod with pork scrunchions, fish and brewis, and fried caplin.

Expect to read some stories inspired by my trip.



I was gone for ten days, and received ten rejections from magazines/anthologies. But just as I was waiting to board the plane to go home, I received an email that my short story "The Infective" has finally gone to print. I wrote that in October/November 2023, when I was laid low by my only known case of COVID (may there be no more). It's an uncanny tale of COVID anxiety, creepy AF, and you can read it in The Asylum of Terror: Vol. 2. It's a fun anthology with great illustrations. Recommended!

While I was there, I also got pre-order information for Silk and Foxglove: A BIPOC Erotic Eco-Horror Anthology. My experimental short story "All That Came From Our Lips Were Lilies" is featured within. An early reader compared it to the works of Angela Carter, and now I'm feeling all prideful.

Upon my return, I learned that my essay The Silent Madness of Whales has been reprinted by Zoetic Press and I won contributor of the month. The essay will be part of an anthology called Heathentide Orphans and will be published at the end of the year. I don't have pre-order information for that yet.

My personal essay Insides In and Outsides Out has been published in Breath & Shadow.

This month, I'm busy taking a course on Eastern storytelling with Henry Lien through Writing the Other. It's been pretty intense so far, with a lot of readings to do, movies to watch, and writing exercises to do. I hope I come out the other end a much stronger writer, with four-act storytelling structures as part of my toolbox. But in the meantime, it's kinda breaking my brain.

The reading at the Waterloo Bookfest was not my best. It was a cool and blustery day, and I read The Qalupalik from a printout on a single piece of paper. Normally, this would not have been a problem, but I was getting a lot of feedback from the microphone and had to grab the mic in one hand and hold the flapping piece of paper in the other while I moved further away from the stage monitor to get clear, unscreechy sound. Because I couldn't hold the paper in both hands, I got lost a few times during my reading. To top it off, there was a group of 12-year-old boys behind me being little shits. I was a little 12-year-old shit, once, too. It's a rite of passage, I think. They were roughhousing and once I finished my reading, one of them came up to the mic and made a big show of thanking everyone for clapping for him. All the while, he kept shooting looks at his friends to make sure they knew how cool he was. Oh, cringey tweens. You're only cool to one another. Hahah!

I have another reading coming up. I'm a featured performer at the Huron Multicultural Festival in Goderich, Ontario on June 28. I'll be taking the stage at 12:15 and this time, I will be prepared for cringey 12-year-olds, screechy feedback, and noisome gusts of wind. Prepare yourself for some spooky tales!

In other news, I've received dozens and dozens of rejections. For all the publications I get, folks are mostly unaware of how many things do NOT get published. I haven't done a specific count for a year, but I did count in May. I sent out 61 submissions. I had I had 23 rejections. I had three acceptances. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a couple of years to hear back from any particular magazine/anthology. Sometimes they never respond at all. And sometimes, things will be accepted, and then they never get around to sending a contract or responding to any further communications. Publishing can be a very frustrating endeavour.

All that being said, I've had three rejections since last night, and a couple of publications so far this month.

Flash Flood published my tiny tale of terror Overdrawn.

Terrain.org has published my short story If You Listen, a cautionary tale from the POV of Sedna, mother of the sea.

As I mentioned before, my poem "Angakkuq," as published by On Spec Magazine, is a finalist for the Aurora Awards. Voting is now open to members of the CSFFA (Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. You do not need to be an author to be a member. Membership is only ten bucks, and for that low price, you get a voters' package which includes all of the finalists for the year. This includes full-length novels, short stories, poetry, illustrations, and more. You don't have to vote for me (although I won't complain if you do), but I'd love to have you read my poem as well as check out the amazing work by Canadian writers and illustrators. The money supports speculative fiction in Canada.

Tenebrous Press has shared a mini interview with me. My story "The Snow Hath No Queen" is a winner of their Brave New Weird award, and will be published later this month in their anthology. It looks fantastic! You can order it here.

Now that it's up on their page, I can officially announce it now. My poem "Angakkuq" is a finalist for the Aurora Awards. This is my first time as a finalist there. I've been sitting on this knowledge for over a week. I'm so excited I could barf.

In other news, my interview with Moonlit Getaway went live today, too.

I'm still in Banff, still writing daily. I don't know that I'll finish the first draft of my novella while I'm here, but it is possible. I'm making headway.