Okay, I confess: the ice cream was only for me. But I had to find some way to get the customer through the door, and now that you’re here, you’ve got to read the entire post. Don’t look at me–I don’t make the rules. (Despite the fact that my name is, very clearly, in the URL. Don’t think too much about it.)

While I may not have ice cream for you (and even if I did, it wouldn’t stay frozen very long on this 75-degree website), I do have the news I promised. It comes in the form of several story sales since my last post.

“The Graveyard Cart” appeared in Flame Tree Publishing’s monthly newsletter, in February of 2023. The theme for the issue was “Graveyard Lovers,” so naturally I wrote a story about a shopping cart. (Trust me, it makes sense. So long as you’re romantically attracted to squeaky and uneven wheels, anyway.)

This is actually one of my favorite horror stories I’ve written, so I’m glad Flame Tree gave it a chance. The newsletter is an email-only affair, but if they should ever put “The Graveyard Cart” on their website some day, I’ll be sure to link it here.

And, of course, the generosity of Flame Tree didn’t end there: they also published “The Tower Calls” in their Lost Atlantis Short Stories anthology. It’s a romantic fantasy-adventure about a sentient skyscraper that somehow learned how to operate a phone. It uses this newfound power to make crank calls and generally annoy the rest of the city’s skyline.

. . . Okay, that’s not what the story’s actually about. But it really is a romantic fantasy-adventure, and at the time I wrote it, it meant more to me than any story I’d ever written before. Some of that significance has since worn off a bit, but I’m still very glad I preserved this period of my life in story form.

In September, Factor Four Magazine published my flash fiction piece “But it Was Not Rain.” If I had to describe the story in one word, I’d say “wet.” (In that way, it’s sort of like melted ice cream. Looks like you’re getting what you came for after all!)

You can read the story here.

Lastly, I recently sold a story called “A Rat, a Root, and a Big Orange Fruit” to Feisty Felines and Other Fantastical Familiars. It’s one of my favorite humor stories to date, largely because I just started typing and let my brain do whatever it wanted. Normally that results in a court order and/or temporary expulsion from the local Pizza Hut, but this time it worked out great!

And that’s all for now. Happy Holidays, friends!

-Z