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Lake Lewisia

An ongoing microfiction series about a town, a lake, and a whole lot of weirdness. Updates MWF.

The Sunken Gardens, once finished, refused to stop sinking. Canyons of potting soil and tanbark rose above their beds and knitted into a canopy. Gardeners learned to cultivate glowing mushrooms and rich veins of goldenrod ore within the new Buried Gardens.

*

Accidental libraries developed wherever mislaid books congregated. They formed whispering, fluttering swarms around park benches and in the back rows of cross-city buses. Librarians roamed the city tending to them, relocating them when requested, harvesting the amber knowledge they produced.

Available on tumblr.
Mirror site (dreamwidth.org) here.

“Be Fruitful and Multiply” audio story available

A new entry in the archive of evidence for why Joyce should not be in charge of their own promotion: I forgot to tell you all about the podcast I got to have a story in. Alone in a Room with Invisible People is a writing craft podcast by Holly Lisle and Rebecca Galardo. Normally, it’s advice on how to write fiction happily and professionally. For Halloween, though, they put together a collection of flash fiction by their listeners with spooky flavors of various sorts.

I’m in part one, available here, with the story, “Be Fruitful and Multiply.” (It’s got ghost plants, and I love it.) There are a bunch of fun and creepy stories in the episode, so I encourage you to listen to it all. If you want to jump to my story, though, it hits at 36:00.

I’ve known Holly for years now and been in a number of her writing classes. Having her read my story aloud (a first for me with my original fiction!!!) is one of the greatest professional joys I’ve had to date. I hope you take a listen and enjoy it!

It Happened in a Flash

Book cover art: in the middle of a dry grass field, a green tree is struck by lightning. Cover text: (above) 64 fantastical Flash Stories presented by HOLLY LISLE; (below) It Happened in a Flash

I’m in an anthology~! And it’s free right now~!

Solve a mermaid’s problem …
Step off the edge of a roof …
Dig up a grave at midnight …
Take advice from a fortune cookie …
Visit the last library …
Meet a bridge troll …
And more …

In one instant, like a bolt of lightning, a single impossible event changes a person’s life. And like the trace of lighting in the sky, each is unique and interesting.

These wildly different flash stories delight, astonish, scare, and inspire. Enjoy 64 delightfully eclectic tales. Like your flash fiction intriguing with a twist? Discover the diversity and check out “It Happened in a Flash”.

(*excited whispering* I’M the mermaid story! First story slot! *flail*)

This was put together by the writing community to which I belong, so a bunch of my buddies are in here, as well as a lot of people I’ve never read before. (I…need to actually read all the stories that made it in. This has been in the works for a while, and I have forgotten what’s there. :D )

The ebook version is currently free, and there is a print version available as well.

Magic in the Dark and Dust

Aisha, freelance witch, certainly doesn’t have any work to keep her busy lately. That specter has cast a pall over her normally cheery, if unpredictable, life. The offer of a potluck and a new friend couldn’t come at a better time. Meeting Ben’s art buddy could be just the distraction she needs.

“I don’t need pity jobs. I’m a real witch for hire, not just some kid.” She could find work, someday. More work. Eventually. But most people didn’t need or want a witch to fix their printer, when all it really needed was a properly installed toner cartridge. (Josh at the local copy store got an earful, which might be a good thing, but Aisha wasn’t interested in making a career of that.)

By dessert, Aisha thinks she might make it through this with no intrusive thoughts and only minimal babbling on her part. It’s all fun and mug cakes until the microwave explodes, turning the kitchen into a battlefield.

It had only counted down two seconds when the display fizzled, scrambling the numbers into gibberish. Aisha opened her mouth to ask what it was doing. Before she could, the light within the microwave increased, becoming a hellfire glow.

Something more than packing boxes has started lurking in the corners of the apartment. Something dark just moved in the periphery of Aisha’s vision. Something plans to drive them out and steal a home for itself. And whether this is a paying gig or not, stopping it is going to keep Aisha very busy.

“Something dark,” Charmaine added in time. “I’ve seen—you know how you see something out of the corner of your eye and your caveman brain goes, ‘oh no, a predator’ until you look at it directly?”

Aisha shivered. “Yeah?”

“Only when I look at it, I can still see something moving.” Ben hissed, baring his teeth in a grimace both comical and horrified.

Have Magic, Will Meddle, a story of new friends, old junk, and a whole lot of uninvited housemates, now available for purchase in my shop, on Amazon for Kindle, and on Barnes & Noble for NOOK.

From “The Witch’s Son”

IT CAME AS only a small disappointment and no surprise at all to the witch when her son announced he would set off on an adventure. “I will become a great hero, if only I can find some monsters to defeat,” he said, sixteen and still green as a sapling. “May I please have a lunch for the journey?”

Certain traditions refuse to be set aside lightly. The witch had been careful to pick a suitable location to build a typical cottage. In an oak forest, the trees all draped in moss, the cottage looked like something abandoned and forgotten since its first completed day. Far enough from any village that it took good, honest effort to reach it, the cottage attracted only the truly desperate.

The witch dealt in desperation: the unhappily married and the terminally ill and the ancestrally cursed. The witch maintained a decent reputation for indecent deeds. She got a child by illegitimate means and raised him with the intention of passing along her ways. It was very much the ordinary way of doing things.

Tradition, however, knows well to fear the willfulness of youth, for nothing in all the world has felled it faster than a green and wild dreamer. Despite her best efforts, the witch’s son had no mind for magic. He sooner tried to balance stacks of grimoires on his head than read them. Lessons in the uses of herbs ended with the plants trampled by his ever-running feet. He scared birds and beasts away with his battle cries and waving wooden sword. He refused to see or hear, touch or smell, so busy searching for the world he missed it entirely.

The witch knew he would not be deterred, and he was too proud to take the protections she could offer. While he talked himself breathless about the adventures in store, the witch packed him food for many days, clothing, her best and sharpest knife, flint and tinder: all the things he would need and would not think to bring. In the deepest, most lint-padded corner of the pack, she buried a charm.

“He is a fool,” she whispered over it, voice drown out by her son’s chatter, “but he is mine. Keep him safe. Let him go unnoticed where he may, let those who would do him harm keep their distance, let any who attack him be made weak.” The witch sent her son off with a full belly, a kiss, and that blessing, as much protection as any mother may grant.

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