I've been busy!
Catch up on upcoming discussions, new stories on the horizon, and more.
March is here and that means Spring is just around the corner. It’s the season of new beginnings, so if you’re new to this newsletter, welcome!
If you’re just joining, you can expect updates about my fiction writing, as well as a monthly look behind-the-scenes of one of my stories. Now and then, subscribers will receive perks casual readers do not, so be sure to subscribe today so you don’t miss these when they happen.
RECENT NEWS
Save the date! March 12 I’ll be taking part in a roundtable discussion with some of my fellow Latine writers. We’ll be discussing what it’s like for us navigating the current state of publishing, as well as our personal relationship with our identity as Latine authors. This should be a good one, so don’t miss it! I’ll share the link on my social media when it’s ready.
I was also recently invited to be a featured guest for the Electric Sheep speculative fiction group, where some of my fiction will be the topic of discussion. That will take place in early May and I’m really looking forward to it. Again, I’ll share the link for that when I have it.
AWARD ELIGIBILITY
Nebula award and BSFA nominations have now closed. Thank you to anyone who nominated my work, as well as those who’ve read or shared it.
Other awards remain open for nominations though, including the Hugos and Locus awards.
As always you can find my complete eligibility list with descriptions and links by clicking the button below.
To nominate for the Hugos you must have a WorldCon membership for this year or last year. Anyone can nominate for the Locus though. You’ll find links for nominating for both below.
If you enjoy any of my stories, social media shares are always appreciated.
RECENT FICTION SALES
There are still a few sales I can’t publicly discuss yet, but in the meantime…
“The Monsters We Create” will be reprinted in Gradeside Stories, an anthology of middle grade horror fiction from Graveside Press. Fun fact: This was my very first fiction sale, and it’s now sold again almost exactly 10 years later.
This story is about a boy who’s relentlessly bullied at school, and how that affects him.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
If you missed it…
“The Underlying Cause of Her Insomnia” was published in Horror Tree’s Trembling with Fear anthology series. Read it here. (CW: implied violence)
It also got a nice shoutout along with some other great stories in Lyndsie Manusos’ newsletter. This is what Lyndsie had to say:
“The Underlying Cause of Her Insomnia” by P.A. Cornell in Horror Tree. Brutal and unsettling. If you’re looking for a knife-quick horror flash to read before you see the movie The Monkey, this is the perfect pairing.
You can read her whole post here.
FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS
WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO
I’ve started the year out with quite a bit of writing despite *gestures broadly at world these days* and other life stuff to deal with. So far, I’ve written 9 new stories. I don’t like to talk about my unpublished work in too much detail, but here’s a small taste of what’s to come:
A sci-fi/fantasy story in which I play with time.
A fantasy about what can happen when parental fears go too far.
A holiday horror.
A fantasy in which I, again, play with time. (kind of a recurring theme with me, if you’re just tuning in)
A sci-fi story involving alternate worlds.
A sci-fi story that explores ethical concerns of cloning.
A sci-fi dystopia relating to the current state of the world.
A sci-fi story involving time travel. (Still not tired of playing with time in my stories)
A sci-fi story about a living spaceship.
Hopefully I’ll be able to share these stories with you in the near future.
I also have several more things on the go, including some longer fiction.
The Weekend Warrior 2025 contest has ended and I managed to write a story for all 6 rounds. For two of those rounds in a row I landed in first place in my division, which has never happened before. In the end, I came in first of the top 3 scorers in my division, fifth place overall, which is pretty awesome. In past years, I’ve been in divisions where my work just didn’t hit but this time I seem to have landed in one where the other participants seemed to like it. You never know.
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “Free”
I first wrote “Free” in 2017 when I was still fairly new to fiction publishing. I ended up submitting it to the Writers of the Future contest, because this was before I knew about the contest’s somewhat controversial connections to the Church of Scientology. Luckily, it didn’t even come close to winning, and I never sent them anything again.
This was also one of the first stories I asked other members of the Codex writing group to critique for me. These days I mostly send stories to friends who’ve been critiquing my work for years, but in those days, I was blindly posting it for whoever wanted to help, and those early critiques helped me a lot.
While my story didn’t make the cut for the WotF contest, I did end up selling it to Bronzeville Books’ short-lived zine, The Bronzeville Bee. Once the Bee was discontinued, it was no longer available to read online, so I was thrilled when Tall Tale TV reprinted it and also gave it new life in audio.
The idea for “Free” was quite simple. A human-alien hybrid escapes the facility they were created in. But what I wanted to explore through that story was not so much the escape itself, but rather what it’s like to be this character. How does she react to seeing the outside world for the first time? How does she interpret things that are so common to us? And how does she feel about her life before her escape?
The challenge for me at the time was in figuring out things like how to describe mundane objects as if the character’s seeing them for the first time, while at the same time making it clear to the reader what that is. Thus, a chain link fence becomes a wall of interwoven metal strands. Barbed wire becomes loops of metallic, predatorial, teeth.
I also wanted to make it clear that my protagonist isn’t human. She looks human enough that the man she meets doesn’t at first see her as anything other than a little lost girl in need of help. But there are clues early on that she’s superhuman. For one thing, when she breaks her ankle, she isn’t concerned because she knows it’ll heal within minutes. She assumes the same will happen when the dog bites her.
We also get glimpses of what her life in the facility was like. She recognizes some things from vocabulary cards she was shown, as well as a story book. She remembers a scientist who was kind to her, but who still wouldn’t help her leave the tiny room she’d spent her life in. We also get another clue about her strength when she talks about knocking an adult woman unconscious, despite being just a child.
Because she has enhanced abilities, I wanted to give her an Achilles heel of sorts. I knew where I wanted the story to end up, and that it wouldn’t all be smooth-sailing for my poor MC. I decided the dog in the story would not only immediately sense the fact that she isn’t human, but that it would attack her in defense of his owner. And I knew that she’d somehow lack the immunity to heal after a dog bite.
Here there’s a girl that essentially has superpowers, but something as simple as a dog bite, which most of us could survive easily enough with proper wound care, is enough to kill her. Her kryptonite, if you will.
She’s part alien, after all, and the things of our world are unnatural to at least half her biology. Similarly, she discovers she can’t process milk. Maybe it’s lactose intolerance, as the man suggests. Maybe it’s a dairy allergy. Or maybe she’s just not used to it because she’s only ever had water. Whatever the reason, she hasn’t been made for this world. She’s an experiment that was never meant to leave the controlled conditions of a lab.
She also feels no real attachment to the dog. To her, it’s just another creature—one that harmed her, at that. Her compassion comes in seeing what the animal and man mean to each other, and she also understands why the dog did what it did, rather than out of malice. While there’s a lot about our world she doesn’t understand, she’s empathetic enough to understand that.
I knew from the start that this story wouldn’t have the happiest of endings. My intent wasn’t for the girl to live happily ever after, but rather give her just a taste of freedom, and to show that sometimes this can be enough.
“Free” was originally published in 2020 in The Bronzeville Bee. It was reprinted in 2024 in Tall Tale TV.
Thanks for reading.
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P.A. Cornell