Wonderful Short Stories Online

Since I started university, I often haven't had the time or brainpower to sit down and finish a novel. I've therefore got much more into short stories - my dad gave me a copy of Borges' Fictions just before I went to university and I fell in love utterly and completely. Since then I've read some fantastic collections - including the one I'm reading at the minute, Diving Belles by Lucy Wood - but I've also got into reading short story magazines. Partly this is, ahem, market research; I've started writing short stories myself, since I realised that I enjoy writing fiction but can't sustain a novel-length plot for shit. But short story magazines, especially those with a SFF/speculative fiction focus, are having a bit of a renaissance.

I was very excited when I found out that you can submit your short stories to these magazines and get paid! And pretty well - the "pro" rate is 6 US cents a word or more. It's also common practice for these magazines to release their short stories online, where I've been devouring them. I love short stories about magic and ghosts much more than short stories about divorce and middle-aged problems. ;)

So, here's the short stories that I've really enjoyed! I hope you do too - they're easy to consume in a single sitting, perfect for busy people like me who've been promising themselves they'll get to reading War and Peace for, oh, two years now...

An Index of How Our Family Was Killed, Matt Bell
This is a strange and rather heartbreaking story, using the alphabetical format to tell you all the details in the wrong order. You slowly piece together the story, and although the writing itself is beautifully bleak and evocative, the greatest satisfaction comes when everything you've read comes together and you realise "how our family was killed".

Dustbaby, Alix E Harrow
The descriptions in this story are just - I'm open-mouthed. They're vivid and almost hallucinatory in the picture they build up of this alien, dustbowl landscape. This story is an apocalyptic tale set during the Depression in the US South (I think? My American geography is not great). There are tons of specificities which make this story come alive - the pamphlets issued by the federal government about how to stop the red dust that's rising everywhere, the preacher, the nosy neighbours that are an inevitablity of rural life, and of course the dustbaby herself.

The Earth and Everything Under, K. M. Ferebee
This is one of the first online short stories from the "establishment" of US-based SFF magazines I wrote, and it remains one of my favourites. It's a beautiful narrative of death and grief, with a dual POV between the man who's dead and wandering around the underworld in confusion, and the woman who's left alive, grief-stricken, and avoided by her neighbours because they think she's a witch. I still think about the images from this story sometimes.

Help Me Follow My Sister Into the Land of the Dead, Carmen Maria Machado
I adore Carmen Maria Machado! I still haven't read the stories she's most famous for ("Descent" and "The Husband Stitch"), but I've read a lot of others, and I think this is one of the more accessible and also maybe a little fun? It's in the form of a Kickstarter campaign, with the story taking place in updates from Ursula, whose sister has gone to the land of the dead for a laugh. It's funny and wry and a little heartbreaking.

Pocosin, Ursula Vernon
A possum god, a Pratchett-esque witch (so other people have told me), and the Devil and Death and it's so lovely. It has a very strong sense of place, of the land and what it feels like and represents, and I love that in, well, anything really, but especially short stories. It is very sad, but the witch is fantastic and no-nonsense and she's an utter delight.

Cat Pictures Please, Naomi Kritzer
After all these rather depressing stories, I'll end with a fun, light-hearted one. This is about a benevolent AI (they explicitly dismiss all the sci-fi examples of AIs going evil) who just wants to help people, by finding them different jobs, making them meet potential partners; all of which sounds very nice until you realise that, as an AI, they don't have a great grasp on appropriateness, and sometimes their well-intentions don't turn out so well. However, there is a happy ending! And cat pictures.

I hope you enjoy at least some of these; let me know what you think of them!

The Power of Photos

I spent some time today looking through old Facebook photos. I was a little late to Facebook - I didn't get an account until, I believe, 2010, and I didn't use it very much until 2011/12. But I do have some old photos of me on there - and by old, I mean photos when I was about 15. Some of them have gone since the friend who uploaded tons of photos has taken them down, but it's been interesting to see not only what I used to look like, but the things I used to do and the friends I had, many of whom I've lost touch with.

It's easier than ever to take and share photos of yourself, and for all that I do roll my eyes at people who have to photograph every part of their lives - I also tend to, myself, mostly take artsy rather than personal photos - they are really fun to look back at. I'm proud of the landscape scenic photos I've taken but I also like the photos of people I know just having fun. More than anything else, they can be such a strong reminder of parts of your life that you don't think about that often.

They can be a record of who you were with at that moment...

The family mob back in 2009. At least half of us are missing.

My friend group at school on our last day, 2011.

Or of a particular event you may have forgotten...

HAHAHA so this was taken at a benefit concert we were playing at. We got slightly drunk before performing and had a whale of a time backstage.

Of the styles you used to try...

God, I used to spend so much time on my hair. This is dyed and curled with tongs!

Obviously this was not an everyday look! But I had just discovered backcombing.

The places you've been...

On top of Table Mountain in Cape Town, with Robben Island in the distance.

Rehearsal on a music project in Turkey.

Or even hold a premonition of the future in a weird sort of way...

As a seventeen-year-old on a summer school, I am standing on the quad of what, just over a year later, will be my college at Oxford.

So none of these photos are great examples of photography, and a lot of them have no real point to them - no one needed to take photos of us at the benefit concert we organised or disobeying the rules about not standing on the grass (oops...). But what they lack in skill they make up for in memories (and also cringey memories of hairstyles past!).

A March Day in Oxford

I've finished my thesis, it was sunny today... life is good. The only not-good thing was that I went out with my camera to take photos, because I don't take enough of this ridiculously photogenic city, but most of them didn't come out because I forgot to adjust the ISO and they were all massively over-exposed. :( By the time I realised there was no point retaking them, so I just have a few. I got some good ones, anyway.

As it says on the plaque, this is Christ Church War Memorial Garden, part of Christ Church Meadow. You can see the clock tower in the background.

A statue on the side of Magdalen College. Not sure who it is though!

Shadows of the dreaming spires. I edited this to look a bit moodier, I hope it worked...

Pastel houses in Holywell Street!

Anyway, I've been really behind with blogging, but soon enough the term will be over and I'll have nothing to do. Which won't make for very interesting blog posts, but I'll have the time to write said posts.... ah, the circle goes on.

Stuff.

Holy shit, I got 250 views on my blog last month from Russia. I am sorry, Russian readers, I didn't update for ages. It's because I have to write my thesis and it has consumed my life. I barely have enough time for keeping up with my friends, let alone blogging.

So of course I started a book blog! This will remain my personal blog, for photos, ramblings, linkspams, non-book reviews, and such, but I now have a book blog at Sporadically, Books! I have a grand total of one post there, but I hope to write a lot more about books, doing stuff that isn't just reviews. (I want to do a post about ugly book covers at some point, because God knows I have enough of them in my collection...)

I will leave you with some links, so I can delete at least some of my tabs and you can hopefully learn something.

• HfBK Dresden | Historisches Frieseren 2-4.Studienjahr - pretty historical re-enactment photos.
• The Almost Forgotten Race - an article about Eurasians in Singapore.
• Serbia's Geopoetika Publishes English Translations with an Eye Towards Foreign Rights Sales - phew, that was a long title! Anyway, I'm really interested in the issues and practicalities of literary translation, and this was an interesting way of going about it.
• Ann Morgan: My year reading a book from every country in the world - related to the last link, this was a really interesting experiment. I ended up scrolling through her blog for recs!
• Notes on Science Fiction and Fantasy in Latin America - wow, I have a lot of literary and language-related links today! I've known for a while from Argentinian friends that fantasy is a core part of the literary canon in at least Argentina, and operates quite differently from the typically secondary-world fantasy of the Anglophone world, but I liked reading about these genres across the whole continent.
• Finding Alice's 'Wonderland' in Oxford - I love Alice in Wonderland and I live in Oxford. I like this article. :>
• Splendid Photos of Salvador Dali being Salvador Dali - needs no explanation. Also, splendid.

P.S. my computer crashed twice writing this post, but I persevered!