Hi friends,

Happy (one month late) New Year! Really hoping that the Year of the Rabbit means this year is going to be a good one.

Publication updates

Chinese School Cinderella - this is my personal favorite flash fiction out of the ones I wrote last year, and it’s out in Pidgeonholes. I first discovered Pidgeonholes via reading a K-Ming Chang story on their site (it’s no secret I’m a big fan of K-Ming Chang, I reviewed her short story collection Gods of Want on here last year), so I’m stoked to have a story also in here. This is my take on Cinderella and Ye Xian, the Chinese version, with special guest appearances from video games and Linkin Park.

How I ________ Your Mother - Another fairytale flash about names and silences. CW: misogyny.

The One Where Our Neighborhood Demon Twirled His Sign by the Red Light - Something I wrote real quick for fun for a HAD submission call and then it got rejected. I wiped most traces of what sub call it was for and sent it out to about a dozen places, and now it’s up on Bullshit Lit.

Other cool news: My story Recipe was featured on Aigner Loren Wilson’s roundup of the Best Horror Short Fiction and Poetry of August/September 2022 in Tor Nightfire, which is the publisher Tor’s horror imprint. I will come clean and confess that I didn’t even consider the fact that it could be construed as horror when I was writing it (although upon rereading it clearly is) and even while shopping it around for publication, so this was really cool and unexpected!

I’ve got a couple stories coming out in April, one of which is a cozy fantasy/slice of life thing. The other is one of my few 100% realist-with-no-funky-magic pieces. So please look out for those, if you’re interested in seeing me flex my genre muscles. At some undefined future point, this newsletter is due for a post about genre and writing and publishing in the interstitial space in between, since I can now claim to have a decent amount of experience with both the short SFF and short literary fiction ecosystems (caveat that with the latter, I mostly have experience with flash). I promise there will be one, but I can’t promise when.

Reading Update

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link (March 2023)

It’s no secret that I love Kelly Link. When I found out her new short story collection was about fairytales, I audibly gasped and then dashed over to see if I could get my hands on an ARC. (You may have guessed I have a weakness for fairytales based on the recently published pieces, and you would absolutely be right!)

I loved this collection so much that I’m tempted to pre-order the book to have a physical copy, even though I am moving and existing in a liminal space for the next few months. My favorite stories were the retelling of Snow White and Rose Red (a Grimm Brothers’ story about two stepsisters not related to that other, more famous, Snow White) about a PhD student housesitting in Vermont in a house with strange rules and unexpected guests and “Prince Hat Underground,” which is a retelling of “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,”a Norwegian fairy tale that I wasn’t familiar with before reading Kelly Link’s version.

In “Prince Hat Underground,” an old couple who love each other very much but have kept many secrets from each other end up having to confront those secrets after one of them, Prince Hat, is abducted by his former fiancée from many decades ago after Agnes spots him at brunch. Prince Hat’s ordinary human husband Gary ends up going on a quest to rescue him and encounters all kinds of trials and tribulations, including, but not limited to: struggling to get help from a random bartender in Reykjavík who can’t speak English, running into immortal beings slut-shaming Prince Hat, and confronting Agnes herself in Hell, which in this world appears as suburbia. “Prince Hat Underground” is on the longer side for a short story, but Link’s precise prose and sense of humor keep it moving quickly. I hope you don’t mind the spoiler that they do end up happily together again at the end.

These stories are brimming with Link’s sense of humor and heart—I laughed out loud many times. If you love fairytales, you will love this collection. If you don’t like fairytales, maybe these stories will show you why they have endured so long.

What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

I picked up this book because I saw Alexander Chee, Melissa Febos, and Carmen Maria Machado had essays in this essay collection. The lineup is stacked—there are also essays by Brandon Taylor and Kiese Laymon in here. I picked this up partly for inspiration for a couple of things I’m currently working on where a mother-child relationship features prominently, and boy, did I come away inspired! If you’re curious to see the entire range of relationships mothers have with their children, I highly recommend this book. Brandon Taylor’s essay was one of my favorites, as was “16 Minetta Lane” by Dylan Landis, which was about her mother’s ill-fated relationship with an artist years before Landis was born.

“The Big Glass Box and the Boys Inside” by Isabel J. Kim

This story came out in Apex earlier this month and is definitely worth a read if you have a spare half an hour. You might have heard me scream about this story already, but I loved the corporate America = faerie contract metaphor in this story so much! Highly recommend this one (and any of Isabel J. Kim’s other stories).

I have no idea when the next update will be, but I hope I won’t be too long.

Until next time,

tina

the bookcave

jan/feb 2023