Goodbye to one book - hello to a new one
More exciting news on the horizon
RECENT NEWS
As you know, last month I said goodbye to my debut novella, Lost Cargo, which has now officially gone out of print.
While I shut the door on that particular book, I’ve opened another door on a new one. I recently sold my novelette, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, to Stars and Sabers Publishing. I can’t tell you too much about this book yet, but I can say Stars and Sabers have so many exciting ideas for it that I know you’re just going to love. This new book is a blend of retrofuturism, noir, love story, set in an alternate Toronto. I had so much fun writing it, and I know it’s in good hands with this new publisher. I can’t wait to share it with you. Right now it’s slated to come out in February of 2026, just before Valentine’s Day, so keep an eye out for that. Read the full press release here.
Also newsworthy is that I recently won the Unicorn Mech Suit Short Story Contest with my rogue nanobot SF story, “Side Effects May Vary.” If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, you might recall that story had previously sold to an anthology, but I hadn’t been happy with the contract terms, so I ended up walking away from that sale. So I’m thrilled to see it win this award (that received nearly 300 entries!) while also finding its way to publication. You can read my story here.
OTHER NEWS
Last month I told you about my friend Derrick Boden’s new website Cool Story, where you can check out fiction recommendations, including a couple of my stories. Well it seems that recommending short fiction is in vogue, and I’m here for it! Too often you’ll hear about a story when it’s first published and then it quickly falls off your radar. So it’s great that places like this are popping up to help readers find great short fiction they may have missed.
A website with a similar idea is InkFoundry, created by author Erin Cairns, who like me (and Derrick) is a member of the Codex writers group. As with Cool Story, InkFoundry allows you to search for stories by title or author. Among other recommendations you can currently find four of my stories: “The Body Remembers,” “Chief Scavenger’s Log in the Climate Apocalypse,” “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont,” and “Decorative.” All are linked here.
And Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (also a Codex member—we’re everywhere!) recently curated a list of list stories—yes you read that right. This list is available as a public post on Merc’s Patreon, and you can find it here. You’ll find a couple of my own made the list: “8 Laws I Wound Up Breaking While Attempting to Restore the Timeline,” and “Nine Lives.”
If you’re hankering for some great short fiction, be sure to check all these awesome resources out.
RECENT & FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS
In this month’s issue of Lightspeed Magazine you’ll find my story, “The Life You’ve Given Me, Rusty.” It’ll go live on October 10, and will be available in both print and audio on the Lightspeed website. This story will be the first published of the three stories I’ve sold Lightspeed this year. It’s told from the point of view of a human boy raised by a robot in a post-apocalyptic world.
October is also the month in which “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” will be reprinted in two “Best of” anthologies.
First up is Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 2 (Edited by Stephen Kotowych). Last year’s edition, which also included one of my stories, just won the Aurora Award, so keep an eye out for more outstanding fiction by Canadians in this one, which should be out early in the month.
Then on October 22, “Oakmont” will pop up again in, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 (Edited by Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams). This series has been going strong for ages and this edition continues the tradition of bringing readers some of the year’s top stories. You can pre-order yours here.
And if you’re a member of The Writer’s Union of Canada, keep an eye on your mailbox for the Fall Issue of Write magazine, which includes my non-fiction article, “My Top 7 Tips for Maintaining Productivity When You Don’t Write Every Day.”
WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO
This past weekend, I was a panelist during the Flights of Foundry convention. If you attended, you might have seen me on one or more of the three panels I participated in:
Self-Care for Creatives
Get Your $#!ˆ Together: Organization Tips and Strategies for Creatives
So You Want to Start a Writing Critique Circle
If you missed these, check out the Dream Foundry YouTube channel where they often post these and other helpful videos.
INTERVIEWS
September 15 – October 15 is Latinx Heritage Month. With that in mind, the Horror Writers Association has been publishing interviews with Latinx horror writers, including me. I share my thoughts on the genre and why I love it, and how my cultural identity plays a part in the way I choose to tackle it. The interviews are being posted to the HWA website, a new one each day. Keep an eye out for mine.
I also participated in a fun chat with my friend and fellow Hispanic author, Pedro Iniguez, where we interviewed each other about our heritage, our writing, and working with our mutual publisher, Stars and Sabers. Find that here.
WHERE TO FIND ME NEXT
This month (Oct. 17-20) I’ll be at the World Fantasy Convention in Niagara Falls, New York, where “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” is a finalist for Best Short Story.
I hadn’t planned on being on any panels for this one, but I was invited to be on one and ended up accepting. So if you’re going to be there too, look for me on the “Brevity is the Soul of Wit” panel.
I also hadn’t planned on participating in the group autographing session, but a very persuasive Sarah Pinsker convinced me to, so now I am. The signing will be at 8pm on Friday, October 18, and I’ll have with me a few copies of Lost Cargo to sign, for anyone who’d like to buy one ($10 USD). And if you happen to have a copy of one of the various anthologies I’ve been in, happy to sign that too. You can find the full list of authors participating in the autographing here.
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “A Fall Backward Through the Hourglass”
Spoiler Alert: Be sure to read or listen to the story before the following.
I feel like I’ve said this for a lot of my stories in this newsletter but, this one got its start during Codex’s 2019 Weekend Warrior flash fiction contest and it far outscored the stories I’d written in the previous four rounds that year. If you’ve heard me talk about this contest before, you’ll know prompts are provided and you base your story (though it can be very loosely) on them. The prompt that inspired this one was, “What do you appreciate most about growing older?”
I write a lot about relationships, and have written about parent-child relationships in particular more than once. So when I started thinking about the concept of growing older, I naturally thought about what it meant not just for the point-of-view character, but also to those around them. As time passes, our relationships with the people close to us change and grow in their own unique way. We relate to each other differently at each stage of life. I wanted to explore how this would affect the parent-child dynamic.
But it’s also about our relationship with aging in general, and what it means for each of us, as well as who we are at various stages in our lives. These are things I also explored, albeit in a different way, through my story, “Splits,” (which had previously also been published in Cossmass Infinities).
Fun Fact: The story begins by referring to the way pregnancy can cause changes in a person’s body. For me, one unexpected change was that I’d hated Brussels sprouts all my life, but during my first pregnancy something changed, and I’ve loved them ever since.
This story takes those ideas and adds an element of fantasy by having one of the characters (Isla) age normally, while her mother begins aging in reverse. Some people have compared this to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which was not unexpected. I’ve never claimed to have invented the reverse aging trope, and while Fitzgerald’s story is one of the best known examples (thanks in part to the film starring Brad Pitt in the titular role), I’m pretty sure he didn’t invent it either, as you can find it in ancient mythology, among other places.
As you may know if you’ve read a lot of my work, I don’t shy away from using established tropes. My aim is to give them my own spin, which I think worked out in this story.
The idea of a parent-child dynamic altering over time is something that happens in real life as well. We start life so helpless, depending on our parents for everything, then becoming more independent as we age, and finally it’s our parent who comes to rely on us as they reach advanced age.
Fun Fact: In the story, Isla is born on her mother’s 30th birthday. My twins were actually born on my 32nd birthday. The three of us have now been celebrating together since 2007.
The tables turn perhaps a bit more dramatically in my story, but a lot about the process remains the same. For instance, over time, the protagonist loses her authority over her daughter, and must come to terms with the fact that she can’t control her. Something that in real life parents must also do if their child is to become a self-sufficient adult.
Similarly, the protagonist later struggles with losing control over her own body. In her case it’s because she’s transitioning into a toddler and infant, but it’s not far from the reality many of us face as we reach our later years and our bodies start to fail while our minds remain sharp enough to notice.
This story also speaks to what it means to be the primary caretaker for a loved one, something that sometimes comes with huge challenges as well as a need to make sacrifices. For many this type of relationship may be something they experience outside of aging, but it’s also often a reality for many as they become increasingly responsible for the needs of aging loved ones.
These are all subjects near and dear to my heart, and while I can’t say my aim was to tackle all of this when I first sat down to write this piece for the contest, they are ever-present in my thoughts and feelings, so it’s not too surprising that they found their way into this story.
I have been an infant, a small child, a teen, a young adult, and am now a middle-aged mother. I am now also the adult child of aging parents. I was raised alongside my grandmother, who lived long enough to experience all the effects of aging, including dementia. I’m no stranger to the various stages of life, and how they’re always in motion. So this is really what inspired this story, far more than a simple prompt ever could.
“A Fall Backward Through the Hourglass” was originally published in 2022 in Cossmass Infinities. It is currently slated to be reprinted on Imagitopia podcast.
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P.A. Cornell