New Story Day: The Price of Manners
Ahoy, friends!
Been quite the week over here. I have a big freelance deadline tomorrow that’s been a blast to work on, and which I can tell you about in ::checks watch:: a year? Something like that. Patience is a virtue and all that stuff!
I wanted to share a new story of mine that’s out today from Lightspeed Magazine. Big shout out to John Joseph Adams and Wendy Wagner for buying and sprucing this story up with me. It’s a quirky little thing, but it’s definitely a Marty story.
Sentient-ish physical object? Check.
People being people aka not thinking especially when there is something they want on the line? Check.
Examination of what happens when you take more than you give and how one small personal imbalance actually imbalances the universe? Check.
Fun, weird, cool worldbuilding ideas that deepen the world but don’t hopefully distract from the narrative? Check.
This story was originally written for a dark academia horror anthology, and while it was rejected from there, the idea stuck with me. See, if there’s a genre I don’t like or don’t know very well or that just makes me go, “eh,” then I sort of dive further into it, like, “okay but WHY doesn’t it appeal to me?”
And for dark academia, I had always struggled with the academia of it all. While a lot of those stories take place in schools and have students working, there was a part of me that thought, “Well, it feels like the work of learning stops being a focus AND when people learn something, they just kind of get to learn it.”
I started becoming interested in costs. Prices. Values. And how institutions brainwash the youthful to put higher values on everything but self, care, health, and more. And then, I thought, “Well, how do the books feel about this?”
And that, as they say, is that.
You can read, “The Price of Manners,” here and if you do, I hope you enjoy it!
NEWS:
I’ll be at the American Library Association show in late June, doing a signing for Audition For The Fox! More details to come, but I’m VERY excited =]