KINDLING — coming soon!

My first short story collection, Kindling, is going to be published by Small Beer Press! All going well, it should come out this October.

A fabulous debut of folk tales and fantasies by an award winning author and illustrator.

Small fires start in the hearts of Kathleen Jennings’s characters and irresistibly spread to those around them. Journeys are taken, debts repaid, disguises put on, and lessons offered — although not often learned — in these fantastic tales. Jennings’s confident voice lulls readers into stepping off the known paths to find “Undine Love,” “The Heart of Owl Abbas,” and further unexpected places and people.

Small Beer Press

I love love love that line “lessons offered — although not often learned”. Tragedies aside, there is something delightful about characters who don’t succeed in fully learning their lessons.

(Thanks go to many people — not least Small Beer Press! — and, as always, very much to Angela Slatter who helped not only many of the stories but also the collection into existence.)

Cover details to come…

(From the 2021 April calendar pattern)

February 2023 Short Story Reading Post

This post is a roughly tidied version of my February 2023 tweets about short stories. There’s a list of all stories at the very end of the post (linking to where they are first mentioned).

Forthcoming anthology: The Book of Witches

Cover by Alyssa Winans

My proof copy of Jonathan Strahan’s anthology The Book of Witches has arrived! It will be published in August this year.

And in addition to Alyssa’s art — look at this table of contents!

My story is “Catechism for Those Who Would Find Witches” — and I will have more to say about that the closer we get to the pre-order and release dates!

• “Seed of Power”, Linda D. Addison
• “What I Remember of Oresha Moon Dragon Devshrata”, P. Djèli Clark
• “Catechism for Those Who Would Find Witches”, Kathleen Jennings
• “The Luck Thief”, Tade Thompson 
• “Good Spells”, Ken Lin 
• “The Liar”, Darcie Little Badger 
• “Escape Artists”, Andrea Hairston
• “The Witch Is Not the Monster”, Alaya Dawn Johnson 
• “Met Swallow”, Cassandra Khaw 
• “The Nine Jars of Nukulu”, Tobi Ogundiran 
• “In a Cabin, In a Wood”, Kelly Robson 
• “What Dreams May Come”, C. L. Clark 
• “She Who Makes the Rain”, Millie Ho 
• “As Wayward Sisters, Hand in Hand”, Indrapramit Das 
• “Orphanage of the Last Breath”, Saad Z. Hossain
• “The Unexpected Excursion of the Murder Mystery Writing Witches”, Garth Nix 
• “So Spake the Mirrorwitch”, Premee Mohamed 
• “Just a Nudge”, Maureen McHugh 
• “Her Ravenous Waters”, Andrea Stewart
• “Déjà Vue”, Tochi Onyebuchi
• “BOTANICA: A Song in Four Movements”, Sheree Renée Thomas
• “Through the Woods, Due West”,Angela Slatter 
• “Nameless Here for Evermore”, Fonda Lee 
• “Mask of the Nautilus”, Sheree Renée Thomas 
• “Night Riding”, Usman T. Malik 
• “Witchfires”, E. Lily Yu
• “The Academy of Oracular Magic”, Miyuki Jane Pinckard 
• “The Cost of Doing Business”, Emily Y. Teng 
• “John Hollowback and the Witch”, Amal El-Mohtar

January 2023 Short Story Reading Post

This post is a roughly tidied version of my January 2023 tweets about short stories. There’s a list of all stories at the very end of the post (that list links to where they are first mentioned, but there’s often further discussion).

This is fairly short post, but I’ve made up for that with a recent long post on List stories — how they work, what they offer.

Fascinations and encroaching interests this month include:

• how to take parts of a large story in order to make a short one
• how to keep short stories short
• monologues
• shapes that echo themes
• changes in climate change fiction

Background and related posts:

• This project is me studying story structure in real time (and often working my way back to well-known maxims from first principles! See Story Shapes — Three-Mood Stories for detail.
• How I select these stories.
• Each dot point is one possible three-mood shape — one way of reading the shape of the story. I use “mood” very broadly.
• Previous posts are under the short story reading notes category (all the 2022 posts are linked here).

And so, to begin…

List Stories: How they work, what they offer

This post is about short stories written as/around lists. It is based on notes from my short-story reading posts. (For background on the three-mood story structure, see Story Shapes — Three Mood Stories.)

Outline of this post (it should link to the relevant section):

• What is a list story?
• What makes a list into a story?
• A writing activity
• Some things lists can do (to a story)
• Some notes on specific stories
  • Advice stories
  • A numbered list
  • A list with its own structure
  • The metaphor-list
  • Using external structures to modulate distance
  • Fainter list structures
  • Sub-structures
• Some three-mood story shapes
• Patronise the arts

I hope to write a shorter version one day.

November 2022 Short Story Reading Post

This post is a roughly tidied version of my November 2022 tweets about short stories. There’s a list of all stories at the very end of the post (that links to where they are first mentioned, but there’s often further discussion).

A short post this month! I was travelling for most of it, and also preparing and giving a writing workshop on short stories at World Fantasy, and an academic paper at the WIP conference at UQ. However, it is still a relatively long post, so the rest is below the cut…

October 2022 Short Story Reading Post

This post is a roughly tidied version of my October 2022 tweets about short stories. There’s a list of all stories at the very end of the post (that links to where they are first mentioned, but there’s often further discussion). Also, as usual, this post is long, so the rest is below the cut…

(Also, I’ve hurt my arm, so this is even less tidied than usual.)

Short stories: Rites and rituals and structure

As part of this year’s short story reading project, I’ve been noticing the strong structural and structuring pull rite or rituals exert on stories.

Structurally (and that’s how I’m talking about them in this post), rituals can be a way to first summon a story and peel apart a world, and then at the end to stitch through many layers, to mend and make new. And of course ritual brings with it layers of language, formulation, knowledge, history, time, family, the numinous brushing the physical, a way of altering the world or being acknowledged and changed by it, and (rendered bureaucratic) all the ways that can be made soulless.

This post is lengthy… (among other things, after the initial draft I injured myself in a way that made editing very difficult).

September 2022 Short Story Reading Post

This post is a roughly tidied version of my September 2022 tweets about short stories. There’s a list of all stories at the very end of the post. Also, as usual, this post is long, so the rest is below the cut…

August 2022 Short Story Reading Post

This post is a roughly tidied version of my August 2022 tweets about short stories. There’s a list of all stories at the very end of the post. Also, as usual, this post is long, so the rest is below the cut…