Writer & Editor
It’s been hard to sit on this one, as I was very very keen to submit a story to Kneeling in the Silver Light: Stories From the Great War. That was way back in November 2013, but now editor Dean M. Drinkel has released the table of contents, so I can announce that I have a story, “The Wolves of Vimy” in this collection.
Kneeling in the Silver Light is published by The Alchemy Press and released in time for FantasyCon, held this year in York.
It’s been too long since my last roundup of weird search terms. Maybe it’s because I seem to get a lot of repeated hits about Ace Frehley and Peter Criss and I don’t feel they’re quite weird enough. But mainly, it’s that I wanted to share only the best with you, my loyal readers and hopeful Googlers.
I blog and write about werewolves, so it’s heartening to see that people find this site by searching for such specific topics as “werewolves in manitoba,” ” celtics and wearwolfs,” “songs to help write about werewolves,” and “would i find werewolves in canada.” To which I would answer: 1) read some of my short fiction, 2) learn to spell, 3) read this post, and 4) no: they find you.
Wait, what? It’s July already? Not sure how the first half of 2014 burned up like that. Oh wait, yes I am: I’ve been writing, editing and submitting like a fool. Well, a circumspect fool.
The year has been full of werewolves so far.
I meant to announce this earlier, but a brand-new werewolf story of mine, “Caged,” was accepted into Guns and Romances, a new anthology from Dark Continents Publishing. I’ve wanted to send them something for a while, so when the submission call went out, I thought hard about how I could come up with a story that would fit DC’srequirements for the antho. If possible, I wanted it to fit into the cycle of stories I’ve been working on for the last year and a half, and meet most of the criteria for Long Hidden, which is something I’ve been trying to do with new stories since submitting to that anthology last year.
I’ve written in previous posts about why I wanted to write for Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction From the Margins of History and how I went about it. This post will be a bit shorter, as it is mainly about other details that you don’t need to know to enjoy the story, but that you might enjoy knowing anyway. Plus: maps!
(Also, did you know, that Long Hidden is available as of May 9?)
In a previous post, I talked about why I wrote and submitted a short story to Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction From the Margins of History. Given the differences between my personal background and that of the main character in the story, I had to do a lot of research just to write the first draft. This post is about that.
The main character, Thomas Greyeyes, lives in a different era from me (the story is set in 1919), is a First World War veteran, is an Anishinaabe man who worked as a trapper in northern Manitoba, and has barely seen his children in years. I’m of English and Icelandic descent and grew up in the late 20th century. About the only things I had in common with my main character are where the story is set (Winnipeg, where I have lived most my life) and age — Thomas and I are both around 40 years old. And, like him, I’m a father.
Writing and submitting a story for Long Hidden has changed the way I approach speculative fiction. Probably not enough, but it’s a start.
If you’re not familiar with Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, click on over and see what it’s all about. One of the purposes of the anthology edited by Rose Fox and Daniel José Older, published by Crossed Genres, is to put marginalized people at the centre of the story, with the added context of real-world history blended with speculative elements.
A big part of the reason I wanted to submit a piece to Long Hidden was I wasn’t sure I could do it.
