It’s that time of year again, when writers of all stripes start dusting off their resumes and start putting out the word that yes, indeed, they did publish things this year and that YES, in fact, we’d love to be considered for any awards or recognition you’d like to throw our way – Hugo nominations, Nebula nods, Dragoncon recognition, book club invitations, obscure internet badges, WHATEVER IT MAY BE!

I am one of those writers! And though I know the odds of me, a relatively unknown writer with a fairly small following, getting enough people interested in my work to bother filling out an internet form and vaulting myself to fame are pretty unlikely, hope springs eternal for the hard-working author, and here is what I managed to publish this past year. All of them are good work! I recommend checking them out and, if possible, supporting the publications that put them out (and therefore the editors and staff).

“Brood Parasitism”
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March 2024
Short Story

Another in my series of linked shorts about the shape-shifting assassin Faceless and its adventures in the far-flung Union of Stars.

Excerpt:

She was right about that part. Most assassination jobs were public—had to be, really. If an organization hired an assassin, they announced that they’d done so. They even had to announce who they were planning to have killed. Only the assassin’s name was kept out of it. This was something that was part of the tradition—part of the code we assassins lived by. It kept us from being the target of revenge, you see. It wasn’t us who killed you, it was our employers. We were just tools. Weapons, like any other. No remorse, but no rancor, either.

That was how I felt, anyway, before I watched the city I’d lived in for years scream and die in five minutes of pure terror.

Now?

Let’s just say there was some rancor involved.

And the cover art is inspired by my story!

“The Puzzle Vault”
Baubles from Bones, Issue #2, September, 2024
Novelette

This is a story that had been shortlisted for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award many years back, but which finally made print in this new magazine dedicated to cool fantastic fiction. This story is a favorite of mine and I feel it deserves a lot of love. Please check it out!

Excerpt:

“What can we expect tomorrow? I have heard so much and yet so little about the Vault. What can you tell me?”

The flute fell silent. Beatriz looked across the fire at the other men. They were all listening now. “It is hard to explain. I can tell you that most of you will probably die, and those of you that live will blame me for what happens to the others.”

“Why? What is so fiendish that guards the treasure?” Santuva gestured towards his saddlebags. “I have antispell, wards, talismans, weapons—what could it be?”

Beatriz closed her eyes. She could picture the Vault clearly, as though it were etched in her eyelids. “The warlock king who devised the Puzzle Vault knew his enemies would seek to plunder his treasures with sorcery and brute force, so he devised a trap that uses no sorcery and cannot be overcome by force of arms. Within is a lion’s head. One of you must put your arm inside the lion’s mouth. This will open the shaft leading down to the maze and, beyond that, the treasure vault itself, but the man who puts his arm in will be trapped. Those of you who descend will have exactly three minutes to solve the maze, enter the vault, pillage what you can, and return.”

“And the man who puts his arm in? What happens to him?” The Illini asked.

Beatriz opened her eyes. “He dies.”

“Things Lost Forever”
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #419, October 2024
Novelette

This one, in the always fantastic BCS, was the result of me wondering how all those fearsome chairs of skulls and what-not get built, and resulted in this story about a woodworker living in a city ruled by vampires. You can even read it online for free (a rarity for my work, for some reason)!

Excerpt:

“It will need skulls on the armrests—fresh ones, mind you, not some yellowing, brittle things you drag out of the sewer.”

Lucas flinched as the dread vampire Adelard, one of the Harvest Lords of L’Ombre, snapped a piece of parchment taut before his eyes and those of the two other mortals kneeling in his throne room.

The parchment had an illustration of a chair on it—high-backed and forbidding, with iron spikes and bladed edges and the aforementioned skulls as armrests. Lucas got the barest glimpse of it in the flickering candlelight and did his best to commit it to memory. No doubt the terrified men kneeling on either side of him did the same.

“The chair must be menacing, you understand? This is to be my throne when I assume my new post. When I sit in it, I must appear… appear… ehhh…”

The young man next to Lucas—a furniture maker from the Chanceries named Hubert—spoke up. “Imperious, my lord?”

Adelard’s hand flashed like a blade, and Hubert crumpled to the ground, mouth open in a silent “o.” The vampire lord paused, looking down at his work, considering. “Hmmm… yes. Imperious. I suppose.”

“That Far Uncharted Ocean”

My name even made the cover!

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2024
Novelette

This is my longest published story to date, about a USCG officer sent to a distant planet to help some alien snails (Thraad, for fans of the Faceless stories) win a sailing race on an ocean planet. Sort of like Project Hail Mary meets White Squall. It’s about sailing and first contact and technological and cultural blind-spots, and it’s a pretty good time!

Excerpt:

…that door—the door I was never, under any circumstances, sup-posed to open—opened all by itself. The aliens, it turned out, didn’t know about knocking.

I was mid-run at the time. I was so shocked at the sudden change in air pressure that I messed up my rhythm and fell right off the treadmill and smacked into the base of my bed. I wasn’t wearing my uniform. Hell, I wasn’t wearing much of anything at all—just my underpants and my running shoes—so I spent the next three seconds trying to sort out my NASA jumpsuit, which was hanging in my closet but had fallen down when I hit the wall and was now in an irritating little ball that would not sort itself out. It was in that state—me, sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to get a zipper to unzip, still panting and sweating and pale as the day I was born—when I met my first alien.

It looked like a snail. A huge, meaty snail about the size of a postal mailbox with a colorful, lacquered shell and a yellowish-green, slimy head poking out of one end. The head had two big, unblinking eyes on the end of long, muscular stalks, a wide, flat mouth, and a set of four tentacles arranged sort of like a beard beneath that mouth. It was creepy, for sure, but not half as creepy as the guys in NASA had anticipated, judging how long they’d spent telling me not to flinch and then showing me pictures of hideously deformed creatures with compound eyes and bloody fangs and skeletons on the outside of their body and stuff.

The alien stood there in the doorway for a second, a dim green corridor behind it, looking all around my living quarters with its weird little eyestalks. The eyes moved independently of each other, so this thing could look me in the face while checking out all my stuff simultaneously. It didn’t speak. Neither did I, for a second.

My training—drilled into my head for months leading up to this mission—finally kicked in. I stood up, still in my underpants, and “affected positive body language” by showing the palms of my hands and slowly waving one in an exaggerated “hello.” “Greetings! I am Lieutenant Commander Amos Tambly of Earth. I come in peace!”

The alien’s chin-tentacles adjusted some little box that was on a kind of lanyard around its neck, and then it opened its mouth and started croaking at me. The box, though, chirped out words in perfect English. “How did you know?”

Of all the dozens of potential responses I had been taught to expect, this was not one of them. “I . . . uhhh . . . what?”

Well, that’s it! I swore I was expecting others, but a couple things fell through this year, so this is all you’ve got of my work with which to shower me with praise. Go forth and nominate! (And thank you very very much for reading and liking my work!)