My story “Clear Skies in Pixieland” just came out in the first issue of Nine, a brand-new e-zine. If you’re interested, you can buy a copy of the magazine (or even a 3-month subscription) here. The authors will receive royalties if the magazine sells enough copies, so if you buy one, you’re helping out the authors as well as the publishers!
“Clear Skies in Pixieland” is a contemporary fantasy loosely connected to “The Kiss of the Blood-Red Pomegranate”, which appeared in the December issue of Aoife’s Kiss. The shadowy villain mentioned in TKotBP actually shows up in this one.
This is an important story for me, because it’s the first one I finished after deciding that I wanted to make a serious attempt at writing and publishing short fiction. Before that, I’d mostly worked on novels. I’d written a handful of short stories, even submitted a couple to magazines, but I’d give up after they were rejected two or three times (with those earlier stories, giving up was probably a good idea). This was the first story I wrote after deciding that I was going to write short stories, and I was going to keep submitting them until they were accepted. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the version that you can read now in Nine doesn’t bear much resemblance to that first version that I started sending around. The basic premise is the same, but it’s been almost completely rewritten. Twice. As I learned more about writing, I would take another look at that old story, and realize that I could probably do better. So I did.
There are eight other stories in this issue of Nine (hence the name), one by Hugo- and Nebula-nominated author Ken Liu, who is also, coincidentally, one of my husband’s coworkers. I haven’t read his story in Nine yet, but I really liked the story he had in last October’s Clarkesworld, “Staying Behind”.
So, check out Nine! Tell your friends.