Happy Labor Day to all you hard-working stiffs out there.  This will be a quick blog post to let you know that I have a new story available in the latest issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

“We Mete Justice with Beak and Talon” arose out a challenge to myself to find a way to write a successful story in the second person plural perspective. I find that stories that experiment with point of view tend to sell well to traditional print magazines–the last attempt of an experiment, that time in single second person, was “Wet Fur” and that appeared in Asimov’s and later Escape Pod.  Both deal with animal perspectives, come to think.  How non-human intelligence works is something I apparently like to return to from time to time.

The story went through significant edits working with editor Charlie Finlay.  He was crucial in getting it into shape, and I really appreciate the time he took with it.  Special thanks to my good pal Gord Sellar for taking the time to read not only the original draft, but the revised one.

If you follow the link above, you can order copies of it in paper or find a means of purchasing it electronically. I hope if you like it, you’ll consider subscribing to F&SF.  For the last eighteen years, I have been sporadically submitting stories to F&SF.  It was the first place to start sending me personalized rejections, and for the longest time, their encouragement kept me writing at a time when I had little else to go off other than an over-inflated sense of self-importance.   John Joseph Adams was the assistant editor at the time, and any of you that are fans of my work know that he went on to publish the bulk of my work in his assorted anthologies and magazines.  Making this sale was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my entire life, and it came with no small sense of satisfaction.

What’s next? Well… probably a novel loosely related to this world.  I need to finish up a couple more Dungeonspace stories too. I’m about 5,000 words into the next attempt.  Writing has been especially hard for me these last couple of years, but I’m find myself feeling the desire to build something with my mind and words again.  A novel about teens who shoot down Amazon drones for their material needs, to survive in a kind of post-collapse rural Kansas, has begun to take shape.  We’ll see if it’s something I can actually harvest or another dead-end, but there’s something there that I can’t stop thinking about lately.

Anyway, if you read this latest story and enjoy it, please drop me a note in the comments or online!