Cover art for "A Quiet Shelter There" by Heather McDougal.Here’s the cover for A QUIET SHELTER THERE, edited by Gerri Leen, from Hadley Rille Books, which will include my flash piece, “The Fisher Queen.” Here’s the description of the anthology:
An estimated four million unwanted dogs and cats are euthanized every year in the United States. Throughout the country, animal shelters, humane societies, and other rescue groups are working to change this by helping homeless animals find forever homes, healing those that are sick or injured, providing training and socialization for those that need it, and working toward a future in which there are no more homeless pets. This anthology directly benefits one of those shelters, Friends of Homeless Animals, which has rescued and placed dogs and cats in the Washington D.C. metro area since 1973. In 2010, even with limited funding due to the downturn in the economy, FOHA found homes for 350 dogs and 150 cats, including hard-to-place FIV positive cats, and they routinely house over 100 dogs and 50 cats at their shelter in rural Northern Virginia. 70 percent of the profits for A Quiet Shelter There will be donated to FOHA–other shelters across the country will be able to buy the book at a discounted price if they want to use it for fundraising.
It’s for a good cause, and I’m happy to be included in the project.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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On Writing Process: A Dissection (of sorts) of "Rappacinni's Crow"
Can a raven be a sociopath?Someone mentioned this as one of their favorite stories of mine, and I wanted, for selfish and egotistical reasons, to use it for the subject of a blog post, but I hope that I can in pulling it apart and explaining some decisions, shed a little light on both my process and writing in general.
And the amount of effort involved in writing the protagonist that appeared to me scared me. Transgendered, Native American, poor, and disabled. How could I write that other without offending someone? Better folks than I have battered themselves against that question. But you can’t do something without trying, so I gave it a shot. I strove to do my best by my protagonist: to explain his background, his history, the way he thought, and his relationship with Jesus. Which is another way my character is unlike me: he is struggling with his Christianity, while I’m Unitarian, a faith that has taught me a great deal, and which I embrace, but which draws on, rather than consists wholly of, Christianity.
I went into that attempt with good intentions, a lot of thought, and some tools provided me by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s excellent little book, Writing the Other. I hope I did justice by my protagonist, and I hope he comes back for another story or two, because I want to know what happens to him, over the mountains. I hope it involves him finding his captain — or some reasonable facsimile — again.
As all of this started to take shape in my head, I invoked my favorite Nathaniel Hawthorne story, “Rappacinni’s Daughter,” and made my antagonist part of the Rappacinni line. In doing so, I had to think about how much I was allowing Hawthorne to influence the story. Did I want to try to retell his? Definitely not, because trying to place that structure over what was already in my head was way too square peg, round hole in its feel. So instead I took enough to make it a nod to Hawthorne, an Easter egg for readers who knew what grew in Hawthorne’s fictional garden. The important thing with anything like that is that for readers unfamiliar with the text being referenced, it cannot get in the way of the story or prevent their understanding of it. Make it a plus for readers who’ve read the other text, but never a penalty for those who haven’t.
I injected some of my fascination with Victorian mental institutions, which led to a fascinating time researching. And I put in a crow, because that was where the story came from in the first place, with this question:
In fiction, we generally think of animals as good-souled, noble, and self-sacrificing. What if you had one that wasn’t? That was, in fact, a bit of a psychopath? For the past year I’ve kept peanuts in my pockets and gotten the crows around here to know me, so I was aware of how smart they are, and how much personality they can display. Mine all seem like pleasant souls, but what if there was one that wasn’t?
And thus Jonah fluttered and squawked his way into existence to squat malignantly on Dr. Rappacinni’s shoulder.
Stories are so often collisions of things, a month’s worth of influences and odd thoughts perhaps bouncing off an old obsession or two. With these kinds of stories, for me all I can do is plunge in and start writing, and watch the story start to coalesce. There’s a point where it’s solid enough that I begin to figure out what it’s about, and gradually that emerged in an unexpected shape. It was, I realized, a story about faith, which is not my usual sort of story.
I’m also fond of this story because I used it in teaching, showing students the original story map and how I blocked it out, as well as a couple of early drafts so they could see how things progressed as I was writing it. I didn’t worry too much about length, and it ended up coming in on the low side of novelette length, which limited the markets. Luckily, I knew Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies might well be interested.
Scott, whose comments are always on the mark, had me rework the ending. And having realized what it was a story about helped me reshape that ending into something that satisfied both of us. I wanted it to be a little bit ambiguous in the ending. Was God’s hand evident there or not? You can read it either way, and I like that ambiguity, a quality that fills our existence, in that moment.
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Round-up of Awards Posts by F&SF Writers, Editors, and Publishers for 2021
It’s that time again! Once again I have created this post for consolidating fantasy and science fiction award eligibility round-ups. If you are an F&SF writer, editor, podcast, or publisher working in comics, fiction or games, I hope you’ll let people know what you have that they should be reading.
Here are the previous such round-up posts from 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
Here are the guidelines that save us both work. It’s best if you e-mail me to add your name and link. I need to know your name, what categories you fit in, and the single URL that lets people find the works. Fair warning: If I have to click through multiple links in order to figure out your name and which category you should be put in, it will slow me down and make me cranky.
I strongly suggest that you do this in a blog post rather than on social media, for multiple reasons, including: it’s hard for people to find stuff on social media sometimes; not everyone has a social media account; it affects search engine optimization; and the fact that it’ll be easier for you to find it yourself later on. I can and do point at Twitter or FB posts if that’s all that people have, but I think they are shortchanging themselves when they do it.
If you tweet yours and tag me, there’s a good chance I’ll miss it somehow. Feel free to remind me in e-mail so I don’t miss it a second time. I also reiterate since we’re in another paragraph that tweeting your award eligibility is, in my opinion, doing yourself a disservice. If you don’t have a blog, I am willing to host your award eligibility post on this one as a guest post. Okay, I’ll stop being so pedantic about this, but I’m not saying it for my own benefit.
Here are the SFWA recommended reading lists. These lists are the suggestions made by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and represent pieces they found particularly read-worthy over the course of the year. Appearance on the list is NOT the same thing as a Nebula nomination.
It’s that time again! Once again I have created this post for consolidating fantasy and science fiction award eligibility round-ups. If you are an F&SF writer, editor, podcast, or publisher working in comics, fiction or games, I hope you’ll let people know what you have that they should be reading. 
