Foam on the Water

My story, "Foam on the Water", is up at Strange Horizons right now here. Other good stuff in this week's issue includes an article on megastructures by Paul Lucas that I found useful and Deborah P. Kolodji's lovely poem, "Casting Her Lot".

I'm glad to see that story find a home. I wrote it the first week of Clarion West, when we were all trying to figure each other out and get adjusted to life with seventeen other weirdos in a sorority house. I've always been interested in fairy tales and mythology - when I was a kid and was running low on fiction in the children's room of the library, I was glad to find the folklore section -- and this story is an attempt to look at the oldest versions of the Little Mermaid and what a cruel story lies at its heart. Because it is, to some extent, a story about unrequited love and its pain.

In other news, I just sold my story about P.T. Barnum and Jumbo the elephant to editor Edmund Schubert at Orson Scott Card's online magazine, Intergalactic Medicine Show, whose upcoming issue #4 features another Clarion West-produced story by Ada Milenkovic Brown.

People interested in some bite-sized morsels of fiction might check out the progression of Escape Pod's flash fiction contest, (board registration required) which is in the semifinal stage. I've got a story still in the running there, as do so of my Clarion West classmates, but I won't tell you which stories they are!