Quarter 3 Wrap-Up (2023)

Posted on by ephinygale

Happy spring to those in the southern hemisphere / happy autumn to those in the northern!

After a fallow publication period for the first half of this year, I’ve had quite a few stories come out in the ~3 months since I last updated. Actually, Quarter 3 is often when most of my stories get published each year, and I’d love to know if there’s a proper reason behind that.

Regardless, on to the stories:

When the woman wakes up one autumn morning, there is a cat in her house. She does not own a cat.

Their weekly meetings force her to push further, to have backup plans and then backup plans for those plans, as she can’t tell Porsha what she actually intends to do to win. Porsha hears her second-best plans, her second-best thoughts and feelings. The first-best are reserved purely for the competition.

The first thing to know about Nowhere, Australia is that no-one ever comes here. There are no roads, no paths in or out, no tyre tracks. Only a few established wooden buildings, eighty twenty-somethings, the rural dust beneath our feet in shades of ochre, smoke and caramel. I don’t remember any rain ever arriving, either, but from the stretches of sallow grass around us I presume it must fall sometime.

  • Solace in Stupefying Stories

Then there was something skittering near her feet and she flinched automatically, enough to stick Meadow’s soft skin with a sewing needle and draw blood. Enough to open up the wound on Cora’s own left hand, which she’d left uncovered for ease of use, and then she felt so mortified that she fumbled with the needle and managed to mix that tiniest smear of Meadow’s blood with her own.
It had been stupid, as many life-changing events often are.

We married in the winter and lived a comfortable, quiet life together until I passed in my sleep. The last thing I remember of Morgan is her kissing my forehead and saying, “Goodnight, my hound. Good sleep hunting.”
When I awoke, I was ten again.

I also posted a YouTube video about some mistakes I made publishing my short fiction collection “Next Curious Thing”:

On that note, I’ve now started to seriously plan my next short fiction collection, which I’m very excited to tell you more about in the not-too-distant future. It already has a title, a draft cover, a draft table of contents (at least 60,000 words of fiction) and I think it’s going to be a really interesting and beautiful book.

(Lastly, I may also be working very slowly on a fantasy board game. That project still has quite a long way to go, but I will be immensely satisfied once it’s finally out in the world.)

Thanks for reading. Wishing you a wonderful end to 2023!

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