I’ve been submitting stories to open submission calls from Air and Nothingness Press for years now, because AaN’s anthologies consistently have incredibly cool themes, and I love having a strong theme to work with when I’m working on something new. So I’m delighted to finally say one of my stories made the cut, and in a ridiculously cool book, too: Our Dust Earth!

The anthology is a collection of 19 Dying Earth stories, and, on top of that, an awesome d10 tabletop RPG game created by Todd Sanders, AaN’s illustrious publisher. Having that game’s original setting to work with while writing was fantastic, and my contribution ended up being a story titled The Long Trawl, about a pair of exhausted scavengers trying out a new method to scrounge up some pasttech and keep on making their increasingly tenuous living. If stories of a world slowly burning out intrigue you, you can order a copy of Our Dust Earth directly from Air and Nothingness Press.

This will also be my first publication as just Zoey Hedman, which is super exciting! There are more neat submission calls I’m working on stories for with deadlines in the near future, too, so hopefully there’ll be many more stories published under my shiny new name soon. Stay tuned!

November came and went, and with it went the hope that the United States would reject the moronic, divisive, narcissistic nonsense constantly put forward by a certain twice-impeached, felonious, sexually abusive insurrectionist once and for all. Yep, we’re all going to be saddled with the wannabe dictator again for another four years. Thankfully, those of us who are dreading his looming second administration (and all of the idiocy and harm it’s sure to bring with it) don’t have to stay quiet about it.

Enter Fumptruck, the latest anthology from Written Backwards! It’s one hell of a project, brought together at a blazing pace by its anonymous editor. Its pages contain essays, fiction, poems, songs, letters, and much more; a whirlwind of various works by creative folks bracing to weather the coming storm, with several of its contributors also choosing to remain anonymous. I chose to have my name openly emblazoned on my own contribution: a little sci-fi story called Terran First, exploring how the orange menace might behave as the head of a far-future space-traveling empire. If that, and more, intrigues you, you can pick up Fumptruck right now over on Amazon before the craziness begins anew.

Exactly four years ago, a poem I wrote titled An Uncommon Bounty helped kick off Sundial Magazine, a brand new online magazine of historical fiction. Today, that same poem has just been reprinted in Across the Moors and Tides, the second of Sundial’s themed anthologies! This collection focuses on the United Kingdom, and its reach elsewhere throughout history. My own contribution’s an example of that long reach, as my poem’s about Benjamin Hornigold’s silly, but historically true, piratical antics in 1717, not far from the coast of Honduras. The pirate Republic of Nassau was a notorious thorn in the British Empire’s side, and would fall shortly after the poem’s events.

On a more personal note, having this poem reprinted now also means a lot to my own history, as this will be the first time I’m having something published under the name Ethan Zoey Hedman! It took me some time to settle on a new name which resonated with me, but a while after coming out publicly as a transgender woman back in May, I wanted my whole name to better reflect my identity. I love the name Zoey; I’ve been using it for a while now with friends, family, and of course on my website and social media, so I’m delighted it’s finally being used in publication (and grateful to Sundial’s wonderful editor, Ashley N.E. Murphy, for being so cool about the name change on a poem initially published years ago).

If an anthology of historical fiction covering the wide swaths of impact the UK has had on world history sounds like your cup of tea, you can snag a copy for yourself right now in paperback or Kindle on Amazon!

After a great deal of anticipation, the second issue of In Another Time Magazine has finally arrived! The brand-new issue has a bunch of stories themed around pressure, and I’m super touched to have one of my stories included as its opening segment. I’m always tickled when something of mine winds up right up front in a compilation; the idea that my work is the first thing readers will read is always joyfully intimidating, haha.

My story in the issue, Rationalizations, is a sci-fi piece about a worker and a robotic bartender who’ve both been left behind during the hasty evacuation of a terraformed mining world which will soon be struck by a devastating asteroid. It’s a story I’ve been trying to place for a while; it took some time to find the right home, and I couldn’t be happier with it being part of In Another Time.

If an unleashed flood of pressure-themed stories is up your alley, you can nab a copy of the issue for yourself right now on Amazon, in paperback, Kindle, and yes, even hardcover versions!

It’s been a while since I posted anything on here, and I’m super happy to have some publishing news to share: Rattus Futura, Manawaker Studio’s long awaited sequel to Felis Futura, is finally out! Like its predecessor, CB Droege’s new fiction anthology features a bunch of sci-fi stories; unlike its predecessor, however, Rattus Futura focuses on the unsung tales of rodents rather than those of the beloved friends of tons of writers, cats.

My contribution is a tiny cli-fi flash piece focusing on capybaras, and while my little story is definitely mouse-sized in its word count, capybaras themselves happen to be the largest living rodents on Earth. They’ve gotten pretty iconic in the last few years, between their Argentine class war and the OK I pull up memes. My tale, Your Capybarometer, wonders how they might endure and perhaps evolve alongside us in a future dealing with the effects of unchecked climate change.

If this latest offering of rodent-driven fiction turns out to be up your alley, you can order Rattus Futura in print or in epub and mobi via Manawaker’s own online storefront, or in print or on Kindle via Amazon.

Like so many other writers, I love cats. They’re charming, independent miscreants, staking their territorial claims anywhere from the comfortable homes of their so-called owners to hard-won feral segments of the rough-and-tumble streets. So, when a call for submissions came along requesting speculative stories featuring cats in a variety of future settings, I knew I had to submit, and was delighted when my story got accepted.

Introducing Felis Futura: An Anthology of Future Cats, CB Droege’s latest Manawaker Studio anthology! It’s a cozy kitten pile of stories, poems, and art from 40 cat-enamored contributors. My story, Auto Motive, is a short near future tale of an encounter between the AI inside a self-driving moving truck and an unexpected, curious guest inside its typically empty cabin. If a book filled with the future of nature’s adorable scoundrels is up your stray-cat-laden alley, you can snag a copy for yourself right now on Amazon.

It’s been a while since I’ve had anything to announce around here, so I’m especially delighted to say that Grandpa’s Deep-Space Diner, Jessica Augustsson’s latest speculative fiction anthology, is out and ready to be devoured! The book is filled to the brim with short food-related stories, containing a whopping full-course menu of 58 different tales.

My contribution, Pancake Peculiarities, is a near future sci-fi piece about a pair of made-to-order AI-driven pancake machines which end up getting unexpectedly creative with the boundaries of their programming. This’ll be the third JayHenge anthology to include my work, and they’re always a blast to read; I can’t wait to dive in and see what everybody else cooked up. You can pull up a chair and dig in, too, by nabbing a copy on Amazon.

I’ve signed a few other contracts lately, as well, so more announcements should be coming before too long. If you’re curious, you can sneak a peek at the titles and genres of those forthcoming works in my bibliography. Until then, bon appétit!

After two Kickstarter campaigns and months of anticipation, Tales From OmniPark has finally been released! It’s the latest short fiction anthology from House Blackwood, and its folds contain 18 strange, wondrous stories from the titular theme park that might’ve been.

The original submissions call for the anthology was accompanied by a link to OmniPark Memories, a wiki which describes the various features and attractions of the mythical park in vivid detail. As a lifelong sci-fi fan I was drawn to the Realm of the Stars, and wrote That Which Skulks Among the Stars, a short sci-fi story with some cosmic vibes set within and behind the walls of OmniPark’s mock space station.

Tales From OmniPark is available in paperback on Amazon (which, for some reason, thinks it was published in January, despite its actual March release). You can snag a copy for yourself right here.

I think we’re all ready to slam the door on 2020, an exhausting experience of a year which consistently dredged up exciting new ways to make us collectively say “oh, for fuck’s sake.” I actually managed to get a lot of writing done, but did a pretty terrible job keeping my website updated; posting anything on here always slipped between the cracks of time spent staying sane by binge-rewatching 90’s Star Trek series, gaming online with friends I’d get together with on Saturdays before the pandemic, and, eventually, looking forward to the weekly spacefaring adventures of The Mandalorian. Since the year’s finally coming to a close, I thought I should finally mention the handful of publications I’ve had in 2020’s second half which never really got a proper shout-out.

In July, I had a short story published within the digital folds of The J.J. Outré Review, an online quarterly journal featuring all sorts of genre fiction. My contribution was a sci-fi piece titled Likeness, a story about an ordinary guy getting a lot more than he bargained for after signing over the use of his likeness in the possible near future of the post-deepfake acting industry. You can read it for yourself here! (UPDATE: The J.J. Outré Review has since vanished from the internet without any hint of what happened to it or communication with the writers who were slated to be published in their upcoming issues.)

Then, in August, I had a pair of drabbles published in Ancients, a dark microfiction anthology published by Black Hare Press. The first, Freedom, is about a gladiator fighting to free himself, and the second, Monumental Mourning, involves the sudden awakening of a certain ancient monument. If tiny tales of ancient myths and civilizations are up your alley, you can snag a copy of Ancients on Amazon.

October offered up a fantastic surprise; I was able to find a perfect home for something I never actually thought would get published, haha. I’d written a poem about a particular moment in piratical history, a day from 1717 which will hopefully be remembered as the charming, odd pinnacle of Benjamin Hornigold’s infamous career. The poem, An Uncommon Bounty, was one of the first pieces published by Sundial Magazine, a new online magazine of historical fiction. You can read the poem here!

Finally, earlier this month, I had a short story published in Sunshine Superhighway, a collection of optimistic sci-fi stories put together by the fine folks at JayHenge Publishing! They previously published my civicspunk story Like Clockwork in their Unrealpolitik anthology, which was also edited by Jessica Augustsson. This time around, my story’s called The Best Thing Since, a sci-fi piece about the simple pleasure of sharing a familiar meal. I’m really glad to end this long year with an upbeat anthology; if you want to dive into some optimistic fiction yourself, the book’s readily available on Amazon.

We’re living in pretty strange times with the shadow of COVID-19 looming over everyday life. As stressful as everything has been lately, with stay-at-home orders and timeline uncertainty, it seems like a great time to revel in fiction. So I’m especially happy to announce the release of Community of Magic Pens, Atthis Arts’ latest short fiction anthology!

Community of Magic Pens is filled with 40 stories which span a bunch of different genres, from fantasy and science fiction to alternate history and magical realism, all focused on the central theme of magical pens. My own little contribution to the collection is a short sci-fi piece about a lone terraformer bringing new life to a barren moon with her trusty stylus. If you think it might be up your alley, you can snag a copy for yourself from Atthis Arts or on Amazon.