Story Notes: "Sasquatch Summer"

First things first: Yes, after four long years I have another book coming out. I'll be making another post about it soon, but just in case that future post as delayed as this one I should mention that it's cyberpunk set in rural West Virginia, you can pre-order it now, and the cover is amazing. Oh, and the title is Busted Synapses, a reference to the side effects of the drugs used in the book, because you can't have cyberpunk without drugs. I'll be talking about it anywhere I can (which unfortunately doesn't include any bookstores or conventions), including here, but if you liked my previous book Stay Crazy I'd be real stoked if you pre-order this one too.

But the novella isn't the only thing that's going down. I'm still writing short stories from time to time, and earlier this month one of those stories was published! Not getting around to writing up story notes until now is pretty inexcusable, but call it a combination of 2020, laziness, and believing the story pretty much speaks for itself.

"Sasquatch Summer" is my first attempt at writing historical fiction. Set in turn-of-the-last-century Oregon, it centers on a small town torn apart by the fight between a small-time timber industrialist, a trainload of New York City anarchists, and the gentle socialist sasquatches that lived (and as far as I know still live) inside Mount Hood. The narrator is Helen, a plucky girl who stumbles into this messy political situation when her brother is kidnapped by sasquatches. Here's an excerpt:

That was the summer the sasquatches came down from Mount Hood and put Papa out of a job. 

It wasn’t their fault, not really. Sasquatches don’t need tools to work. When a sasquatch wants to tear down a tree, he doesn’t use an axe. He grips each side with his leathery hands and just pulls until the earth decides to let that tree go. When a tree falls on a sasquatch, the company doesn’t have to pay his family any compensation like they did to Jimmy’s family. That creature just rolls out from under the tree and keeps on walking. 

Of course, most folks didn’t see it like that.

Automation has arrived in the Oregon wilderness, courtesy of cryptids who are too intelligent to understand money. To the rescue of both the exploited sasquatches and the dispossessed townsfolk come a motley gang of proto-feminist city folk who seek to form a sasquatch union, but the cultural disconnect between the brash newcomers and the unemployed townies seems like it may do more harm than good for everyone. In the end, the sasquatches need to speak for themselves, but how can a creature that doesn't talk have a voice?

Though written as a several-years-after-the-fact reaction to Occupy Wall Street, this story is really damn 2020. Because I want you to actually read the story, I won't go into the resolution, and will only say that it emphasizes the importance of helping communities on their own terms, and that it's pretty optimistic for one of my stories. You can read it right now at Kaleidotrope, one of the best smaller online magazines out there, and there are many other great stories in this issue. So go read it!

Story Notes: "Trial and Terror" (psst... A PUNK ROCK FUTURE comes out today!)

Somehow, the van makes it most of the way through Iowa. Then it dies all at once, spectacularly, farting out its reserve of gas like an old man on taco night in the run-down nursing home his good-for-nothing children stuck him in after he drove the family sedan into a telephone pole. 

Most of those things don't exist anymore. No nursing homes. Only a few sedans. And don't get me started on the lack of taco nights.

Another two months, another story post! My newest one is the 6000ish-word "Trial and Terror," which is my first published sequel.

When the editor of A Punk Rock Future solicited a story from me for the anthology, he specifically mentioned my Interzone story "The Big So-So" (also in audio at Escape Pod) as a story that would fit the theme. And that was when I realized that I wasn't quite done with these characters or their world of permanent ennui due to the sudden withdrawal of alien love drugs. So what did I do? I, uh, wrote a 40,000-word novella with these characters.

I am not a fast writer, nor do I really like writing or pretty much anything about the process other than the brief shot of dopamine when I see my name in a table of contents. However, I finished this novella in about three months, with over half the work squeezed into a two-week span, and I enjoyed nearly every minute of it. The story, naturally, was far too long for a short fiction anthology, so I wrote another story (the aforementioned "Trial and Terror") that chronologically takes place after the novella, which means that this is not just a sequel but the sequel to a sequel, although all of the stories can be read separately from one another and make total sense.

So, anyway! "Trial and Terror" is, as its name implies, a courtroom tale. As in all the Magic Band stories (so named due to featuring a band that is magical, because I bleed creativity from my very pores), your unreliable narrator is Syl, who's not unreliable in the "lies about murdering people" way but instead in the "has spaced five times on picking you up at the airport, will absolutely flake again" way. Not that there are airports in this acktshually decimated world. Unfortunately for them, the band encounters one of the few towns that still clings to something like law and order, and it's up to Syl to get her friend/vocalist Frank's head out of a noose. And maybe there's some romance in the mix? (There is!)

Like I said before, this story (and everything featuring these characters) was insanely fun to write and also funny, at least to me. Maybe you'll laugh too? To find out, buy A Punk Rock Future at Powell's, Amazon, or anywhere else books are sold. There's 25 other "punkpunk" stories in this anthology, including rocking tales from Spencer Ellsworth, Sarah Pinsker, Marie Vibbert, Wendy Nikel, and many more.

(And that novella? Well, I'm still tinkering away at the edits, and whether it's published by someone else or self-published it won't be out until 2021 at the very earliest. In the meantime, I'm definitely open to writing more stuff in this milieu that I love. Big hint.)

Story Notes: "Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse?" (+ Bonus Flash!)

After over a year of not having any stories published at all, suddenly I had two of them come out in the same month. That's how these things happen sometimes! The first and shorter of these is the self-explanatory "You Have Contracted a Deadly Song Virus," which you can read for free at Daily Science Fiction. It's my tenth story there, and probably my most horrific one.

If you like your stories to take longer than five minutes to read, pick up Interzone #282, which includes my short story "Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse?" illustrated by Vincent Sammy. (Aside: This is my third story with a Sammy illustration, and damn if he doesn't do some insanely incredible work.) A very short excerpt:

A dozen little dead kids sit on the Styrofoam steps outside the only apartment building on Gumdrop Road. They're listening to the newspaper seller. He's talking to them about time.

As is obvious from the title of the story, Gumdrop Road isn't a real place. Like the educational program/media empire that it's based on, it's a television show watched by the last remnants of a dying world that's been annihilated by a virus that attacks the reproductive system. In a world where there's nothing new -- because what's the point? -- people escape into a reboot of childhood comfort viewing. But how do you get child actors when nobody can be born? Well, you read the excerpt.

This spun off from the same flash-writing challenge that spawned "Song Virus," although it quickly expanded beyond flash length. What I'd intended to be a cynical commentary on reboot mania became something much more, as I thought about how this form of cultural recycling might be a reaction to the apocalyptic feel of our times. If you and everyone you love is going to die anyway, why not go with what's safe? Nobody cares about innovation when the world is coming to a close, especially not in the arts. And if it takes digging up a bunch of dead children to lend your comfort viewing the proper amount of verisimilitude, that's not really so bad, is it? It's the end, after all.

Yeah, real cheery story I wrote here.

Anyway, you can get a copy of Interzone #282 from the TTA Press site, on Amazon, or in your classier local bookstores. I have at least one more story coming out by the end of the year, which means I'll be posting on this blog at least one more time. Smell you later.

Story Notes: "Like Fleas on a Tired Dog's Back"

It's been a while! About five months, to be exact. In that time I've finished one instantly trunked novella, one short story, and another novella that is my heart's true joy. I also had two short stories published which I'm going to talk about now!

Interzone no. 275 includes my flash story "The Fate of the World, Reduced to a Ten-Second Pissing Contest," which is the third-longest story title I've ever written. It's a nasty little story about (of course) aliens who make life pretty difficult for a handful of barflies. You can get it and four other stories at the link, one of which ("The Purpose of the Dodo Is to Be Extinct" by Malcolm Devlin) is one of the best stories I've read this year. So you might want to get this issue for that story alone.

The other story, "Like Fleas on a Tired Dog's Back," isn't officially published yet; it will be in the anthology Nowhereville from Broken Eye Books. However, if you don't want to wait you can read it right now! Eyedolon Magazine is a Patreon-based dark/weird fiction publication where you can read stories slated to appear in Nowhereville and many other anthologies! Sign up here for as little as $1 a month and read my story along with all-new work from Kathe Koja, Lucy A. Snyder, Bogi Takács, and Ramsey Campbell.

After her parents are thrown from their car, killed by a moment of planetary betrayal, Megan comes back to the city where she grew up.

The city is of course Pittsburgh, and our planet is pissed off at humanity, just because we destroyed it. Go figure. Earth only has a moment to get its revenge, but it does it in style, creating a catastrophe that spans the globe and leaves aftershocks of both the physical and psychological kind. Humans attempt to survive using technology, but modern-day band-aids aren't going to fix things this time.

Obviously this is a climate change story, based on the Gaia hypothesis. A few months before I wrote it, I read an article about a parasite that makes you allergic to red meat, which made me wonder if the Earth has fail-safes: mechanisms that kick into action when its survival is threatened, that slant the behavior of humans toward ways more befitting to the planet's health. The idea of the Earth suddenly waking up and shaking off its human parasites like the fleas we are was just so appealing. This is also a sibling story, with the bond between Megan and her brother Kyle alternately strained and close in the wake of mass revenge.

Anyway, I hope you read it, either on Eyedolon Magazine or in the Nowhereville anthology when it comes out. I've been exploring climate change in many of my recent not-yet-published pieces, although really, that's just called setting something in the real world now. Watch out for the firenados!

Story Notes: "The Big So-So"

I write relatively few stories in first person. (Regular-sized stories, that is. I write a lot of flash in first person but writing flash is in my opinion completely different from writing a regular-sized story, so of course the techniques are going to change.) I can think of some reasons why that might be, but I think the main one is that most of my stories don't need a first person narrator. Besides, at any length much above a thousand words my own internal voice is going to kick in, and I don't want all of my stories to sound the same.

But hey, I can have one story like that. One story where I get to indulge a goofy internal narrative style. One story that's more about the way the story is being told than plot or conflict, one story that needs to be in first person because that's the only way it can be written. And that story is this story, "The Big So-So," which is out in the current issue of Interzone (November/December 2017).

I look over at Dorky. She looks over at me. She mouths the words "play along."

And I mouth the word "what?" because for the life of me I can't figure out what the hell the point of this little stunt is.

The seed of this story came out of my novel Stay Crazy, specifically the fact that while I share many demographic particulars with Em-the-protagonist, I don't have schizophrenia, though am "neuro-atypical" (a term I grudgingly use) in other ways. This led to a lot of waffling about whether I could really consider the book "ownvoices," and I decided that as a kind of balancing tactic I'd write a story about a character with my own strain of "neurodiversity": attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

One of the quirks of ADHD is that chemicals (especially stimulants, but others too) don't affect us in the same way as non-ADHD people. So for "The Big So-So," I came up with the idea of an alien love drug that has a drastic effect on everyone except Sylvia, the attention-deficient narrator. But being spared from the high also means Syl is saved from the crash that happens when the aliens withdraw the drug, which means she's in an excellent position to help society rebuild.

In addition to neurodiversity, I wanted to write a story where restoration of the world after social collapse happened slowly and organically, and not as the result of any sudden heroics on Syl's part or anyone else's. Small actions making a positive change in the world one at a time. This may just be the most positive story I've ever written. (If you're curious, the band in the story sounds a lot like Brokencyde. Also, you should probably not listen to that video.)

And the story is set in Pittsburgh, because what city better exemplifies a slow recovery from a death spiral, and is also a place I lived for five years?

If you want to read the story, you can buy the issue here from TTA Press, or email me at satifka at gmail dot com. By the way, the title comes from the opening line of the song below. Sleater-Kinney is a much better band than the one in the story.

Trying to Try: My 2017 Award Eligibility Post!

It's award season, the most stressful time of a writer's year, or so I've been told. As winning the British Fantasy Award was one of the best things that has ever happened to me, I figured that it would be a not-terrible idea to list the fiction I've had published this year, in case it happens again? But it probably won't. But it might??

While I didn't write as much this year as I'd hoped to (for reasons possibly to be enumerated in a non-writing-related yearly roundup post I may write but probably won't), I had five stories out: two flashes, two regular size dealies, and one novelette (!). I'll go through them from longest to shortest.

The novelette is "The Goddess of the Highway" at Interzone, which is a new market for me. At approximately 12,600 words it is the longest thing I've ever had published that isn't Stay Crazy (please buy now), and one of my longest stories period. So if you like reading my stuff, well, here's a big old chunk of it. I wrote a post about it here, but the keywords are: prosthetic brains, road trip, socialism, pancakes. It's not available online since Interzone is a print magazine, but you can get the digital issue here or email me at satifka at gmail dot com and I'll just send you the damn thing. (EDIT: This story is now available to read for free at my website at this link thanks to Interzone editor Andy Cox.)

The next-longest short story is "The Big So-So," which is also in Interzone! Just like "Goddess" the print copy features some amazing interior art by Vincent Sammy. This story came out so recently that I'm still behind on writing a "story notes" post about it, but basically it's about a bunch of slackers living in Pittsburgh after aliens hooked the whole planet on happy juice (and then took it away). One of my quirks as a writer is that I write very few stories in the first person, and this was my attempt to write a short story that could only be told in first person, because the way the story is told is just as important as the plot itself. Just like above, you can get the digital issue at TTA Press or email me. This story is around 5200 words long.

Story number three is "Lucky Girl" at The Dark, again a new market, and this one is online! I call it an ontological horror story, and it's pretty damn terrifying to me, although it could also be read as just a straight non-genre piece (but where's the fun in that?). The story notes are here, although they mostly wound up being about Sliders. 3900 words.

We also got this cat in 2017, so as you can see, not a complete loss.

Taking up the rear are my two flash pieces, which were both published in Daily Science Fiction. "Attending Your Own Funeral: An Etiquette Guide" is a quiet piece about alternate universes and taking it easy, and "Bitter Medicine" is about humans being human (that's bad). I don't usually have much to say about flash, even when it's my own, but if you've only got a few minutes and you really want to read a Satifka story, well there you go.

So, that was my year in publications. Not quite as prolific as 2014 and 2015, but better than last year, because let's face it anything was better than last year. If you like any of these stories, feel free to recommend them or (if you're a SFWA member) put them on the Nebula Suggested Reading List ("Goddess" is already on there, which makes me incredibly happy). And here's to hopefully a 2018 with even more published work, which means I have to write more stuff, because except for solicited pieces I'm fresh out. Maybe I shouldn't admit that. Well, can't erase it now.

(Oh, and if you're wondering whether these stories are fantasy, science fiction, or horror? Yes, they are!)

Story Notes: "The Goddess of the Highway" / New Flash Story!

So now that the magazine it's printed in is almost off the shelves, I figured I'd blather a little bit about my novelette "The Goddess of the Highway." It appears in the September/October issue of Interzone, and it's the longest story I've ever had published aside from Stay Crazy. The beginning:

Sixteen hours, four minutes, seven seconds. 

He’s tired and wired all at once. His shoulders ache with the tension brought on by the bennies, and his teeth have worn down to nubs. He can hear them grind even through the soothing tones of the in-cab entertainment system, which is currently broadcasting soft piano paired with roundish blue-green shapes. 

Sixteen hours, eight minutes, forty-nine seconds.

Like a lot of my stories, "Goddess" was inspired by something I hate, specifically the movie Idiocracy. If you haven't seen it, Idiocracy is about a dysgenic future where only the stupid have bred, so people water their lawns with Gatorade and elect a pro wrestler as President. (Hey, our President only guest starred on wrestling!) Of course, as everyone knows intelligence is impacted very little by genetics, and environment is by far a larger factor.

In "Goddess," intelligence-destroying bombs ruin people's brains, requiring prosthetics to replace the lost functions. And of course, the prosthetics are coded by color and material, running from Plastic (the lowest caste) to Platinum (people as smart or smarter than today's geniuses). A Plastic-plated truck driver named Harp meets up with a Platinum rebel with an unclear cause named Spike, and together they might just figure out the secret behind the bombs, and a way to fix everything. Oh, and there's a metaphysical being that appears whenever you've taken way too many amphetamines, because yeah.

Under the influence of the neurobombs, society has become static. Like in Brave New World, humanity has been strictly corralled into castes, but their limitations are not inborn. Desperate to get their old brains back, lower-caste humans gobble up smart drugs, but those are only a temporary reprieve from the cruel system. What's needed is revolution, but what kind of revolution can you have in a world where most of the citizens can't even remember how to tie their shoes? Well, you'll see.

This is also a commentary on artificial scarcity and how it's used to control working-class people. There's nothing keeping everyone from having the best prosthetics, just as there's nothing keeping us from socialized medicine or a better public education system or luxury gay space communism. Nothing, that is, except our own need to control other people. Of course, once the society of "Goddess" is set up, it's hard to break out of it. Even if the limitations are not inborn, they're still there. Most of the people in the story are only vaguely aware they're being oppressed, which makes the task of toppling the social order even harder. And then there's the ontological mystery of the Goddess herself, who might be real or just a figment of Harp's shattered mind, or maybe it's some kind of Schrodinger's Cat thing. So it's a lot of my favorite themes all wrapped up in one super-sized piece of fiction.

It's not online, but you can buy the issue here, and also on Amazon if you so wish. I'm immensely proud of this story, and super stoked to have made a sale to Interzone.

***

Also, I had a flash story out yesterday! "Bitter Medicine" in Daily Science Fiction is the story of an alien hunter/medical researcher who does what humans do best. If you didn't already know I was a huge misanthrope, well, now you do. Go and read if you wanna.

The SFWA Fantasy StoryBundle!

Good news, everybody! My British Fantasy Award-winning novel Stay Crazy is included in this StoryBundle, comprised of books written by members of SFWA and curated by president Cat Rambo. Five bucks will get you four books, but $15 will get you all twelve, including mine! Some selected reviews:

"She writes the scenes of madness with pure poetic fire. The kind of writing that slinks in and settles into you, and makes you keep reading and reading onward. The moments when she was off her medications and her schizophrenia is taking hold feel so true and so right and so on point." --Paul Jessup, The Unsung Letter #12

"[T]he greatest strength of Stay Crazy is its incredible depiction of paranoid delusions and the way those delusions mix with the sci-fi element to keep both Em and the reader off their game." --N.S. Dolkart, author of Silent Hall

Get the bundle here, and help support an organization that advocates for professional science fiction and fantasy writers, as well as fill you up on reading material for the rest of the year!

Story Notes: "Lucky Girl"

It's a new story day! (Actually, a double-new story day, but I'm saving the other announcement for later.) This month in The Dark is "Lucky Girl," a little bit of parallel-dimension existential horror. A clip:

Mike’s sister Natalie had attempted suicide on eleven separate occasions, each time using a different method. Cutting her wrists, knocking back three family-size bottles of Tylenol, hanging herself with a hospital bed sheet, jumping into the Columbia River with a bag of stones around her waist. She’d even gone into the woods smeared with bacon fat and gotten herself mauled by a cougar, which only seemed ridiculous because Natalie had survived with barely a scratch. If she hadn’t, it would have been tragic.

The background: In the nineties, there was this really bad show called Sliders that I thought was very good, because I was a teenager. It was about a group of people who traveled to parallel worlds where a minor change in the past caused reality to branch out, and it blew my mind. Were parallel worlds real? What caused them to splinter off? Could my everyday actions cause a parallel world? If I were smart, I'd have gone into physics, but instead I became a science fiction writer.

A few years after I stopped paying attention to Sliders (the show having gotten too bad even for me), I discovered a band called The Eels, which happens to be fronted by the son of the man who created the many-worlds theory, Hugh Everett III. In case you don't want to click through that Wiki link, just know that the Everetts' story is interesting as fuck. The Eels' best album, 1998's Electro-Shock Blues, is about the frontman's sister Elizabeth, and this is the part where I start relating all this background information to the actual story.

Elizabeth Everett, like Natalie in "Lucky Girl," committed suicide in order to travel to a different parallel world. Hugh himself neglected his health after coming up with the many-worlds theorem, and died at the age of fifty-one from preventable causes. These things are tragedies, but it made me think about how thoroughly an idea can shatter someone's world... and this being science fiction, about what happens if that idea turns out to be true.

The thing about quantum immortality that makes it horrific is that it's deeply solipsistic. If you're the only constant in your universe, you can die over and over again without ever reaching what Natalie in the story (yes, most of these story notes are only tangentially about the story, I realize that now) calls the "zero point zero zero zero zero one universe," the one where you're least likely to be alive. After a time, it would wear on you, to have a "life track" where you're the only real inhabitant. Far from being something desirable, quantum immortality would kill your soul, and once you'd shunted yourself into more than a handful of "split-offs," it makes sense that you'd keep dying over and over again. Because what else is there to do? Might as well keep traveling now that you've gone this far. And if you die when you're old from natural causes? Then expect an infinity of parallel worlds, where your mind keeps flipping into a succession of nearly identical hospital rooms, trying to survive. Better hope you're not in any pain!

Basically, what I'm saying is that I desperately hope Hugh Everett III was full of shit.

So anyway, that's "Lucky Girl," or at least some rambling about things kinda relating to the story but not really. Physics are wacky, guys. Oh, and listen to The Eels. Here's the opener from the album, "Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor."

In Which I Am Nominated for an Award!

You know how it goes: You're sitting in a neurologist's waiting room running on a medically-mandated two hours of sleep. You're reading Twitter, because you're always reading Twitter, and you see that you've been nominated for a British Fantasy Award. And then the EEG tech comes and gets you, and you can't play with your phone anymore, and you mumble something like "I think I've just been nominated for an award" but the tech is all "oh dear, you are tired, aren't you?" You lay in a quiet room for an hour trying to take a medically-mandated nap but you can't because you're wondering: did it happen?

It totally did.

I am so thrilled and honored that my debut novel Stay Crazy has been nominated for a British Fantasy Award in the Best Newcomer category. My first shortlist! So incredibly stoked! This book is pretty important to me, and it means the world that some other folks liked it too. Thank you judges and readers, from the bottom of my heart.

Assuming we can get passports and a hotel, I'll be attending Fantasycon 2017, as well as spending a week in the UK because why not. My first trip overseas! Exciting! See you there!

More STAY CRAZY Reviews!

Response to Stay Crazy has been trickling in slowly but surely. Over on LiveJournal (still!) Nick Mamatas lists it as one of his best five books of the year, saying "I blurbed this one! 'Had Philip K. Dick lived through riot grrrl and the collapse of America's industrial economy, Stay Crazy would be his memoir. Erica Satifka is a prophet.' I think this book was hilarious, telling, and raw. It definitely worked hard to avoid crazy-person-is-magic cliches at the same time. Plus, after the largely unexpected election result, the United States will become more and more like the town in Stay Crazy. I'd said that Satifka was a prophet before Trump won the election—I hate to be a prophet myself, but..."

Meanwhile, at Bogi Reads the World, Bogi Takács also puts it on eir year-end list, with this blurb: "On the surface a snarky, cynical romp with a mentally ill woman battling aliens in a big-box store, then a semi-autobiographic examination of class issues in rural America, and then sheer Dickian existential vertigo. At one point I had to stop reading this and wait for the sun to come up, just to make sure all was right with the world. Then Trump got elected. (To make it clear, I am not blaming the book.)"

(Maybe I did cause Trump! Uh, sorry about that? Like, really really sorry?)

Jason Sanford calls Stay Crazy the best SF debut of the year, remarking "Stay Crazy mixes a fast-paced science fiction plot with deft social criticism, characters you'll love, and laugh-out-loud humor. The novel is also an excellent exploration of neurodiversity and how there are multiple ways to see both your own life and the world around us." (And if you haven't read it, check out his easy fix for the execrable film Passengers.)

And last but not least, James Nicoll (one of my fave reviewers) posted a review saying in part: "Mentally unstable protagonists offer authors an easy way to keep the audience unsure as to whether what seems to be going on is what’s actually going on. Also, they offer an even easier way to for authors to treat their protagonists in a shallow, exploitative way. Satifka avoids that trap: Em is a rounded character. She may be an unreliable observer but she’s not a caricature."

Not doing a 2016 wrap-up post because I wrote very little this year what with the election and all. Next year's output will depend on whether we're fighting Civil War II or World War III or both (the smart money is on both), but hopefully I will squeeze in some fiction. After all, who doesn't want to escape reality by reading a book? Oh wait, what do I write again.... aw, crap.

A Banana-Cream Pie Dropped from a Stepladder: My 2016 Award Eligibility Post

So we seem to have entered the time of year when I have to look away from the trainwreck of American democracy and list the works I've had published this year! Between the election and -- okay, it's all election -- I haven't been doing much writing or submitting. I only had four things published this year, which is half of what I had published in 2015 and and also 2014. As a certain President-elect would say, sad!

However, one of them is a novel! Stay Crazy is 65,000 words of paranoid Walmart alien fighting action, and it's already gotten some amazing reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. As a debut novel, it's eligible for all first-novel awards as well as the standard ones, and while I'm not convinced a little book like this has a hope of being nominated for a big-time award, I'd be honored if folks would consider it. (And for the rest of today, November 28, it's available for 40% off directly through Apex.)

I am also equally proud of my short story "After We Walked Away," which was published last week by Apex Magazine. It's an answer to Le Guin's story, but a million times more dark and desperate and gory. It's so new that I haven't really gotten many reviews of it yet, but people who've read it seem to be digging it, and at 3700 words it's also a bit on the short side. If you know Ursula, feel free to send her a copy, I'm too scared.

The other stories I had published this year are "Human Resources" in Fireside and "The Panoptimom" in Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things. They are also good stories that don't take much time to read!

If you like my story or book, or any others, you can list it/them on the SFWA Reading List if you're a member, or on your own site if you're not. Trust me when I say that no matter how dire things in the world are right now, every writer still feels a little lift when someone says they like our stories, and it lasts until the next time we check Twitter.

Story Notes: "After We Walked Away"

My short story "After We Walked Away" is now available to be read free at the Apex Magazine website!

Of note: this is my last short story scheduled to be published. I still have a handful of them out on submission, but due to the election my writing volume has gone way down. The results of the election obviously haven't helped matters. There are a couple other things wrapped up in this as well, but in short, living in a Philip K. Dick world is not really that much of an inspiration for writing Phildickian fiction. Who knew?

But! I do have this story, which draws its inspiration not from my #1 Patronus but instead from the seminal story by his high-school classmate. If you haven't already read "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," then I'm actually kind of surprised! You should read it now, because my story may not make as much sense without knowing the background. Also it's pretty fucking dark, maybe the darkest thing I've ever written.

So the complaint I've always had about Le Guin's story is that leaving doesn't really fix anything. I'm not the first person to point this out, but it seems to me that leaving Omelas isn't only useless for the child scapegoat that powers the city's uncanny joy, but it's also not a good decision for the leavers. While the original doesn't describe the world outside (saying only that it is "less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness"), one can easily posit that the world outside is our world, where there is not one scapegoat but many, and misery is not "concentrated to a single point."

From a utilitarian standpoint, Omelas is a paradise with no asterisk. Of course it's better that one suffer greatly so that many don't have to suffer moderately. It's logical. However, most human beings aren't logical. I'm certainly not. And so, Omelas is a horror, a place that knowingly makes a Faustian bargain in order to enjoy an easy, magical happiness.

And yet, I can't see the real world as being all that much better than Omelas. In fact, it's probably much worse than Omelas, because there are a lot more people in pain, and suffering is entirely random. If Omelas/Solved City is a utopia with a rotten open secret at its heart, the outside world is just rotten. The characters can't organize a fight against all these injustices, because there are too many of them. It would have been easier to stay and fight, or if not fight, then acquiesce to a world powered by "violence-magic." It's not a brave choice, but if the only other option is misery for all including you, then maybe that changes things a little. Humans aren't logical, but we're even less brave. (I told you this story was dark!)

Anyway, if you have a few minutes to spare, read the story. I can't promise you a fun time but at least it's a way to divert your post-election depression for a short while.

My Westercon schedule!

Westercon 69 is happening in Portland in three short weekends, from July 1-4, at the Doubletree Hotel near the Lloyd Center. As usual with cons, I am on a lot of panels, and a lot of these are political which I'm really looking forward to.


SATURDAY

5:00:pm - 6:00:pm: Creativity and Mental Health - The care and watering of the creative brain. Ways of actively taking care of mental health to optimize creativity rather than coping or thinking mental health struggles as the price of creativity. Blythe Ayne, Erica Satifka, Langley Hyde, Kristin Landon

6:30:pm - 7:00:pm: Erica Satifka Reading - (This will be something from Stay Crazy, just don't know what yet!)

7:00:pm - 8:00:pm: Obligatory Paranoia Panel - What's the government really doing? And why is this panel obligatory? Ari Goldstein, Erica Satifka, Frog Jones, Rhiannon Louve


SUNDAY

10:00 am - 11:00 am: Kaffeeklatsch - Small group discussions with authors, artists, and other interesting personalities (referred to as "hosts") Sessions are limited to the host and a small group of attendees. A.M. Brosius, Erica Satifka, Sharon Joss, Wendy Wagner

11:00 am - 12:00 pm: Future Laws - How is copyright law going to deal with 3D printers? Piracy laws on movies/music still don't work with the invention of videos/DVRs now, how will it handle physical mass copying of objects? Ari Goldstein, Andrew P Mayer, Erica Satifka, Sean Robinson, William Hertling

2:00 pm - 3:00 pm: Zombies, Vampires, and Capitalism - If the modern vampire may have functioned as an apt metaphor for the predatory practices of capital in colonial and post-colonial societies, today's zombie hordes may best express our anxieties about capitalism's apparently inevitable byproducts: the legions of mindless, soulless consumers who sustain its endless production, and the masses of 'human debris' who are left to survive the ravages of its poisoned waste." How apt are these analogies? Are there other ways to link our modern capitalist practices to the creatures of horror and fantasy? And if capitalism is a horror story, do other economic philosophies offer more hope of a happy ending? Emily Jiang (M), Bob Brown, Gwen Callahan, Andrew P. Mayer, Erica Satifka

6:00 pm - 7:00 pm: The Leisure Society: Phantom or Just Around the Corner? - People are working harder and longer hours over the last couple of decades, despite increased productivity and automation. Was the leisure society we were promised simply a fevered dream born of the a drug-fueled decade, or has the promise been somehow perverted or inverted? Bob Brown, Erica Satifka, Ramez Naam, Rhiannon Louve


And that's it! See you in two weeks!

It's Gonna Be June

Some things that are going on with me, in no particular order...

1. Over on the Apex blog, there's a post with the cover art (YES!!) for Stay Crazy and a longer description of the book! In case you don't want to click over, it's right below:

Isn't it awesome?! Go check out Nick Brokenshire's stuff right now.

2. I have a rare young adult story out now in the latest issue of Ember Journal, "The Panoptimom," It's a story that equates parents with the surveillance state so yep, kid's story. Check out the art! (This is apparently my season for original art.)

3. But the biggest news in my life right now isn't writing-related at all, it's that we bought a house. Yes, in Portland. Yes, if you live in Portland you can come visit, although we're still painting the thing. And yes, I did convince Rob to let me paint the house all kinds of wacky colors:

So, writing has been on the backburner for... uh, pretty much this entire year now. I'm not proud about this by any means, but it is what it is. Now that we're moved into the thing and are almost set up for good, I should get back to it. As well as back to reading, riding my bike, and basically a whole plethora of things that aren't this house. At least I never have to move again? But I seriously love this house, even if it did derail the entire last six months of my life

4. Are you a true buckaroo? Love is so real, you guys.

January Hot Takes

1. My flash fiction story "Human Resources" is now live at Fireside magazine! Here's a clip:

I used to be vain. I didn’t want my body carved up, so when things got rough I auctioned off a small piece of my brain for a luxury condo and free food for a year. You’ll never miss it, the broker said, and most of the time he’s right. I can’t focus too well anymore, and my memory is shot, but it’s actually kind of nice sometimes. Like living in a dream. 

Celia only got a car. The economy really is weak right now.

Economics and mutilation, a winning combination. The rest of the issue contains stories by A.K. Snyder, A. Merc Rustad, and Aidan Doyle, with gorgeous art from Galen Dara. And if you like what Fireside is doing, consider contributing to their Patreon!

2. You may have a word count tracker for your writing, but do you have the best word count tracker, the one that has colors to keep you motivated but which doesn't have all that crap you don't need? The word count tracker that's basically perfect in every way? Well, now you do. All credit to Christie Yant, creator of the best word count tracker.

3. I read a lot of single-author short fiction collections. Partially for learning, mostly for enjoyment. In 2013 I picked up an e-copy of Jennifer Pelland's Unwelcome Bodies based on a vague memory of reading and enjoying one of her stories in a defunct magazine called Helix. The notable thing about this collection is that every story was basically perfect. The collection closer "Brushstrokes" (a novella) was especially moving, a dark SF love story with extremely unique worldbuilding. Reading Unwelcome Bodies taught me a LOT about writing, and I can guarantee that if you like my stories you'll like this collection. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that it's only a dollar this month for Kindle so pick this sucker up now.

Novel sale: STAY CRAZY to Apex Publications

It's on the publisher's blog, so it's official: I'm going to have a novel published. Here's the blurb:

Nineteen-year-old stock girl Emmeline Kalberg isn't surprised when voices start speaking to her through the RFID chips embedded in frozen food containers. Ever since she left college after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, voices have been a mainstay of her life, something to be ignored. But when Em's fellow employees at Savertown USA start dying around her, victims of a mysterious suicide plague, she decides to listen in. What she hears has the potential to tear apart the fabric of her small western Pennsylvania town -- and maybe the entire world.

The story of Stay Crazy began in 2006, when I wrote a novel called Entity that melded my experiences working for Walmart in that strange-ass year after I graduated college with my love of stories that question the nature of reality. Then a year later I quit writing for reasons that made a lot of sense at the time, and the novel was basically trunked along with the rest of my writing. But the story never left me, I always wished I had done something with the novel, and that wish especially grew stronger when I un-quit and my writing reached a whole new level. Some time last year, I pulled out the novel and well... I'm a much better writer than I used to be. So I rewrote it, line by painstaking line. I gave the story the writing it deserved.

And now... it's going to be published. My weirdo reality-bending category-bending novel with a mentally ill, working-class protagonist living in a shitty small town is going to be available for anyone to read, anytime, anywhere. I'm especially stoked to be published by Apex, since they've released a whole lot of books I've just loved.

Publication date is set for August 2016, so mark your calendars! In related news, I will be at WorldCon next year, so... book release party? Book release party, yes.

EEEEEE!!!!!!

My Stories for 2015

As I have no additional stories coming out in 2015, I guess it's high time for me to list the stuff I had published this year, as is the style of the time.

Anyway, I had eight stories published this year. Damn! Three of them are flash, five of them are not. Probably the most "important" one, the one you should read first, is "Loving Grace," which marked my return to Clarkesworld Magazine after a whole eight and a half years, which must be some kinda record. You can read story notes here, but basically it's about what happens when human minds (and governments) are too small to accept the gift of post-scarcity. This story was originally titled "Fables of Post-Capitalism" until I realized that title was extremely pretentious (I did keep the fables, however).

I also had a return to the pages of Shimmer with "States of Emergency," which is another story I really like because like life it's just a lot of insane stuff that happens for no reason. If "Loving Grace" is too political, maybe you'll like a story with a sin-eating shredder, I don't know.

In flash country, my Queers Destroy Science Fiction piece "Bucket List Found in the Locker of Maddie Price, Age 14, Written Two Weeks Before the Great Uplifting of All Mankind" got some buzz (the concept of buzz for one of my stories is new to me) and I'm happy that most people seemed to realize what I was doing (implication over action).

I don't know why I thought this was
the best photo to illustrate this post.

Additional stories published in 2015, some not available online:

"The Species of Least Concern" in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show: Genetic engineering! Disabled protagonist! I was reading a lot of Nancy Kress when I wrote this story and that's not a bad thing at all.

"Clarity" in Daily Science Fiction: May just be the most depressing story I have ever written.

"A Slow, Constant Path" in Cats in Space: Robot cats and cyborg girls on a doomed generation ship. It's cute!

"Dear Conqueror" and "Summer in Realtime" in Daily Science Fiction: More stories to enjoy, and only one of them is about death!

I also had quite a few reprints published this year, including my debut in Escape Pod ("The Silent Ones"), which was very exciting! Even if nobody on the message board understood the story (not that I ever know what my stories are about either).

Other things I did in 2015, writing-wise:

• FINISHED MY GODDAMN NOVEL. No, seriously this time, it's been submitted and everything. The one thing I wanted out of 2015 was a completed novel and that's what I got. So that's pretty sweet.
• Started another goddamn novel, the rough draft of which will probably be finished this year. Maybe I can not drag on the revision/abeyance stage as long as the last one?
• Finished nine short stories (and counting?), which doesn't seem like a lot, but one of them is a friggin' novelette and that one took forever so I think it counts as like four stories. Most would disagree. All of these are either sold or on submission. Crossing fingers.
• Started teaching occasional adult extension writing classes at Portland Community College. Want to take a class from me? You can! (Well, if you live in Portland.)
• Did a lot of freelance editing and here's a link for that too.

Anyway, that's 2015 for you. Not as productive as I should have/could have been, but isn't that always the case? Looking forward to what next year brings!

Some New Stories!

Hola, amigos. I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I have two new-ish stories out:

"Summer in Realtime" in Daily Science Fiction is a little YA virtual reality story:

"What's it like down there?" asked the woman sitting next to her in the mess hall. 

Tina closed her eyes, recalling the glory of the simulated Earth. "Well, you remember it. Don't you?"

"No. I've never been in the program." 

"Oh," Tina said, feeling sympathy. "Well, it's bright and green all the time. Nobody ever gets sick. Nothing's ever broken down or rusted over. You get everything you want by pressing buttons in your hand." She held hers up, examining it. Tina felt the loss of her palmtroller like a phantom limb.

There's also a reprint of my flash story "Real Plastic Trees" up at Fantastic Stories of the Imagination this month, which is its first time on the web! So check it out.

Meanwhile, I'm a little over a third of the way through the first draft of my second novel that counts, and man that is a lot of prepositional clauses. Like my first novel that counts, it's an SF story set in the present day with a ton of paranoia, because I guess I run to type? This is going to have an incredibly long bake time and I don't even know for sure that it will "count," so I don't want to provide too many details. But that's mostly what's been happening.

I also might spend the rest of December after I finish the first draft of this novel working on a novella. Or not! It's wide open!

"Loving Grace" Audio Version & Story Notes!

In case you missed it, the audio version of my story "Loving Grace" came out a little while ago on the Clarkesworld site. So if you like stories, but hate reading, give it a listen. Thanks to Kate Baker for the excellent narration!

While I think the story is fairly self-explanatory, notes seem to be the thing to do, so I figured I'd talk a little more about what inspired the story. It springs (sprang?) from one simple question: Why do we still have a forty-hour workweek?

Because when you think about it, we shouldn't. Advances in automation should have made our lives easier, but instead, people are working longer hours than ever. What makes it even worse is that so many of the jobs that we do are unmitigated bullshit. The job I have now is real, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who has had a job warming a desk for hours upon hours a day, not really doing much of anything at all. What is a "project manager"? Machines are taking our jobs, which is a good thing (as Marybeth says in the story, "machines can do things better than we ever could"), but we aren't seeing the benefits of automation, only a shift into jobs built on endless paperwork. Politicians talk about "job creation," which is another way to say "make work." Nobody is saying the obvious: that we need a Shift in the way we think about jobs and money, that we are closer to fully automated luxury communism than we know.

This could be us if we want it to be.

In the world of the story, luxury communism is within society's grasp. But because of the American work ethic, nobody is willing to just accept the fact that capitalism is transitory and enjoy this bountiful stage of advanced civilization. Or rather, they might accept it... except that the government has made it illegal to revel in your fully automated life. So in addition to the employment lottery, things are shoddier than they have to be. The characters could have real food, fine clothing, adequate transportation, but they haven't "earned" these things. Hell, setting up a draft and keeping everyone cowed is more work than just letting utopia reign, but living in luxury without "earning" it is obscene. Never mind that there is no actual way to earn it! The workers are psychologically invested in this racket as well (e.g. draft volunteers, Chase being anxious about the Shift instead of joyful, and so forth).

I believe in a basic income. I believe BI is the pathway to post-capitalist economic liberation, and that if we had one, scientific and artistic progress would skyrocket. But we'll never get there if people who stand to gain the most by a massive automation-fueled economic Shift remain obsessed with "welfare queens" and the concept of "earning" things we should have by rights.

So anyway, that's the story. Read or listen! Support basic income!