#uncanny magazine

[always-coffee]

New Poem: The High Priestess Writes a Love Letter to The Magician

Darlings! I have a new poem out today in Uncanny, and I am excited about it!! It's really mean a lot to me, if you gave it a read. It's up online here:

[sarahreesbrennan]

Thrilled to have my short story ‘Happily Ever After Comes Round’ out in Uncanny Magazine alongside such fabulous contributors as John Scalzi, John Wiswell, Angela Liu and Arkady Martine. But listen. LISTEN. ALL POSSIBLE WARNINGS APPLY! This is an adult short story that makes the fairytale Hansel & Gretel as disturbing as it is possible to be. Sometimes fairytales are diluted & sometimes they are concentrated, and sometimes a sinful writer asks herself certain questions like ‘what did Hansel & Gretel do with the witch’s body? Wasn’t their stepmother’s death… extremely convenient…?’ The blood and serial killing is only the beginning. ALL POSSIBLE WARNINGS.

Plus I’m in the podcast, chatting about how I love how stories change as they change from hand to hand, and my commitment to the sinister.

[daisychainsandbowties]

with cassandra khaw writing the laudna origin story i wanted to share my favourite short story of theirs

monologue by an unnamed mage, recorded at the brink of the end

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

"you ask me, lips pressed to vertebrae, about the ocean: does it weep for all those lost at sea; does it remember all it’s taken?"

Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!

[theimaginauts]

Art by GALEN DARA

[thoughtportal]

a flash fiction story told in the form of a crumpled up note, stuffed inside a geode, hidden in your bedroom wall, from the father you’ve never met, explaining how he knew you’d find this one day.

{read}

[geekynerfherder]

'Sleepless On The Silk Road' by Tran Nguyen.

Used as cover art for 'Uncanny Magazine' issue #20, published January 2018.

[moonshinemagpie]

60 short stories in 30 days: Was it worth it?

What I didn’t learn:

1. How to Write a Short Story

One of my main goals in reading short stories was to become better at writing them. The thing that holds me back is envisioning satisfying endings for my stories. Unlike novels, short stories often end on an unresolved discordant note that should nevertheless feel meaty enough for the reader to ponder. I struggle with that a lot, and reading 60 short stories quickly didn’t get me any closer to the end of my own short story.

But the foundational goal of “reading challenges” is to expand my reading in directions it wouldn’t otherwise go, but which enrich my life and thoughts. In that regard, the 30SFF challenge was very successful.

Keep reading for the 5 things I did learn, plus recommended reads.

[sophiainspace]

Fanfiction was, basically, the fun part of writing, the part I dreamt about when I was a nine-year-old girl who made books out of construction paper, pencil, and crayon. It was the part that didn’t include due dates or professors giving me guidelines. I was free to create what I wanted, when I wanted, how I wanted. I could play within the established universes of the shows I loved, start from scratch by building new worlds for my favorite characters, or add extra details like, you know, “Character A is queer and really into character B.”

But then.

I graduated college.

And folks decided to give me some career advice: get real.

There are two levels to feeling the need to prove that writing is a real job. There’s the “It is a viable career, Chad” level, and the “It’s more than just fun and games, Susan,” bonus round. Both of these parties feel like writing is easy and stress-free, it’s just that one looks on in disdain (Chad) while the other looks on in envy because they think it’s so much fun that there’s no way you’re not enjoying every aspect of it (Susan). I’d gotten over Chad in 2018, because Chad was never gonna see a career in what I did. So screw Chad. But Susan? Susan was stressing me out to the point of me feeling like I had to hide the fact that I’d gotten tired of writing. I mean, how could I be tired of, quote, “living the dream,” as they say. I was getting writing gigs. I was promoting my new book. I was visiting new cities for the opportunity to promote myself and my work.

But the truth of the matter is that, like any job, writing will wear you out.

- Briana Lawrence, Uncanny Magazine

[daisychainsandbowties]

“Will you sell me something?” she asks. “Just a couple of lines?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

Because I don’t want you to pity me, I don’t want your charity, I want to be able to give it all away with open arms and open chest and open bloody wounds.

I say none of this, but then she takes my hand in hers anyway, there by the fire, under the vacant sky, and my mind fills with poems.

I see why you like this one

honestly there are so many free & absolutely bloody stunning stories on the Uncanny Magazine Website 🫠🫠 like oh my god look at this

anyway yes please read this one it’s like. what if we were trans and we survived the apocalypse and we carried poems like handfuls of light and what if being trans was a poem and what if the world was broken, but we never were?

[ailelie]

an excerpt:

We are told of wolves in the world, and we but girls. We are told of girls in the world, and they but wolves who cannot help themselves. We are told to be girls or wolves be eaten or hungry but we are never hungry who make meals of ourselves who chew the insides of our cheeks, bleed into our bellies. We are told that to be bold is to be bled that red’s what brings the wolves around that we’re better off drowned. They come with axes cut us to pull the good girls out.

[rivertalesien]

Ever just go gaga for a story? Steampunk author P. Djeli Clark is a master (read his novel A Master of Djinn if you don't want to believe me), and his latest short is a masterwork of sharp parody, commentary and the ambition of idiotic Europeans, especially the English.

[vincaminor42]

Who is really really bad at actually getting around to continuing the plan she started over a month ago? This gal!

Okay, I am way way behind on my short fiction reading (I could blame the 2024 Hugo ballot coming out and me focusing on that, but to tell the truth I haven't been working on that much either >.< I'm gonna have so much reading to do before July)

But I did finish the Jan/Feb '24 issue of Uncanny, so let's get some thoughts down on the last few stories

"An Elegy of Soil" - Natalia Theodoridou - 6/10; on the longer side at 17k words, a woman returns to her childhood village to care for a dying father (again with the old/dying parents theme) and has to deal with a soil-based curse from a mountain god. Felt kinda long, and the bit with the priest just felt weird

"A Recipe for Hope and Honeycake" - Jordan Taylor - 7/10; short, sweet, cozy, but felt like it could've been fleshed out more. A fairy makes honeycake to help with a hard year in a village.

"La mandíbula del río" by Ana Hurtado - 6/10; magical realism about friends dealing with drama set in a South American eco resort, with a (possibly hallucinated?) shape-shifting pink river dolphin as the only actual fantastical element.

Will I be more timely in getting to the next post? Will I actually read any of Mar/Apr before May starts? Who knows!

[rsagarcia]

Covid and Other Things

Sorry for the long silence. As it turns out, I ended up going to my doctors several times and spending a couple thousand dollars on tests, only to find out on my own due to a home test, after I suddenly developed flu-like symptoms, that my sister and I had contracted Covid for the first time. Cue both understanding why my symptoms were so weird, and also, existential panic. I think my weakened…

[moonshinemagpie]

one of my writing goals this year is to submit (at least) two short stories to SFF outlets.

Although I have conceptual ideas and characters, I'm having trouble writing something story-shaped, so I'm going to spend the next 30 days reading two short SFF stories every day. I'll develop a better instinct for the flow and pacing of short stories, which will help me outline my own.

I'm making this spreadsheet to track my reading. It'll help me see what genre(s) I gravitate towards as a reader, get an idea of what each magazine/press is looking for, and help me make sure I'm reading a mix of recently-published works and lauded backlist stories.