Hello, dear friends!
There should be two new releases this month, if all goes according to schedule, and another in December. I have also posted a couple more videos to YouTube (including one in which I sing, of all things.)
Paul Cole is putting the mood music to my podcast of "Claude and the Henry Moores" and plans to have it on air at WRFR and online at Beam Me Up! by the end of the month. For those who can't wait to hear it you can read it on this blog or in my book Finding Creatures & Other Stories. But if you like being read to I suggest you hang on and listen to the podcast.
My story "Invicta" will appear online in the next issue of The Link. I'm excited about this. It is my small contribution to the fight to save the public library system. And my mum will be pleased.
"The Coin", a story about a Haitian streetkid named Likner, has been accepted for this year's issue of the literary journal Lived Experience, brainlovechild of “elder hippy” Van Andruss of Yalakom, BC. Issue 11 of Lived Experience should be out in December. "The Coin" first appeared in Tesseracts 9, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman.
And last but by no means least, one of my latest additions to the readings series I am putting up on YouTube: Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven, about the young Alexander the Great:
The Link magazine will be publishing my short story "Invicta", wherein a love of books carries a woman through all the difficult days of her life.
"Invicta" was inspired by my mother's tales of her thirst for books at a young age and her first visit to a library when she was in her early twenties. She vowed to read every book on the shelves and made a very good go of it.
In light of Toronto mayor Rob Ford's attacks on the public library system, the story is a timely one. (Follow this link to read Margaret Atwood's defense of the library system.)
Below is a poem my mum keeps framed in her room. Something else that kept a woman going through all the years and their trials.
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)
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