Last February, I submitted a short story entitled HOW LILY AND IVAN THE TERRIBLE’S SON SAVED THE WORLD FROM SHAKESPEARE to Devilfish Review, an online magazine that previously published my short story CHRYSALIS in the fall of 2012. Yes, it has a bit of a Snakes on a Plane feel to it, and that’s intentional.

They were holding The Kraken Awards, a short story contest to celebrate their four years of publishing awesome speculative fiction. A few months later…ba DA DA DUM! — an honorable mention appears!

I’m so grateful to Devilfish Review for picking up a weird short story about a girl with colored hair (wonder where I got that idea from?) who has to protect the world from the things that come out of the colored strands at night. A wee bit Lovecraft, a wee bit absurdist (I was writing this whilst writing STAR-CROSSED, my steampunk zombie novel that is just this side of Daniil Kharms when it comes to surrealism), and a lot of puns.

(True story: a lot of magazines have a list of things they DON’T want you to do and one of them — I kid you not — said NO PUNS. My heart was broken a bit that day, as puns are the bread and butter of my writing process.)

I submitted that story high and low — got the feedback once that it was “too clever”– and thought that out of all of the short stories I’ve written, it would be the toughest sell. Of course, now that I’m back into the sending out and receiving rejections game, I think that another short story of mine, THE JAR TREE, is the toughest because it’s written in southern dialect with a little bit of stream-of-consciousness thrown in for good measure. So, the gladness in my heart of it finding a home — and being good enough to be an honorable mention! — has spurred on some new inspiration and has pushed back the impostor thoughts that so often crowd my worldview.

Amanda Palmer, my personal hero, published a book The Art of Asking, in which she talks about the “fraud police,” or rather, the thoughts that she’s not good enough, not a real artist and that some shorts-wearing, moustached, uniformed officers are going to cart her off to I’M-A-FRAUD-AND-I-DON’T-KNOW-WHAT-I’M-DOING jail. I think all artists — or at least the ones I’ve come into contact with — have this feeling of not being adequate enough, of writing complete and absolute shit, only to figure out that NO ONE knows exactly what they’re doing and that we’re all just swimming along, doing our best. And that, more often than not, that best is actually kind of awesome. So, with this publication — and another one that’s TOP SECRET, but to-be-announced when I can, I’ve pushed those fraud police away just a little further.

So, without further ado:

HOW LILY AND IVAN THE TERRIBLE’S SON SAVED THE WORLD FROM SHAKESPEARE, by yours truly.

Check out all of the other authors that made the Kraken Awards issue and expand your mind!