"The Lie Misses You" is live at Cast of Wonders!

I've got a Thanksgiving gift for everybody: my short story "The Lie Misses You" is up for free today at Cast of Wonders!

This is a story from the point of view of a lie. The lie wants to help her family; she doesn't remember why her family began telling her, or why they ignore her now. She lingers over the things they can't confront. I circled around this story idea for years before finally grabbing onto it and putting it to paper. It was a protagonist I couldn't leave alone.

You can have the story however you like. Cast of Wonders had posted the full text as well as producing a podcast of the story narrated by Athena Haq.

Want to read?

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They've got you covered. Simply click here.

This is my third story at the Escape Artists network. Previously they ran "Wet" at Podcastle and "Under the Rubble" at Pseudopod. I'm so happy for another of my stories to find its home with them.

Bathroom Monologue: Ghost Culture

I've never enjoyed waking up early. My body just did it to me, as it did a lot of things to me in my childhood, which is why I had to live in the Special Wing. No one else in the bunks was awake, so I sat up and pulled my blanket over my head, turning myself into a human tent. I don't remember when I started doing it, only that from my earliest memories, it felt better than lying in bed. It's like a denial of the day, or at least a stay of execution.

My bunk shifted with as someone else climbed on. I tensed up, afraid an orderly would chastise me for not sleeping, but this girl lifted the foot of my covers. She was no older than I was, with spindly arms and legs and splattered with freckles, and perched there, draping the end of blanket over her head as though mimicking me. Like everything other kids did back then, I thought she was making fun of me, even when she spoke.

"I like playing ghosts, too."

True Story of John: YA Fiction Versus Real Young Adults

I didn’t have much of a YA phase when I was an actual young adult. By my teens I wanted Stephen King and Noam Chomsky and whatever else people my age weren’t supposed to be able to handle, just as I craved R-rated movies and staying up past midnight. I wanted meatier fiction with more robust characters and plots, and for authors to do more with their prose. It’s only in recent years that I’ve tried to acquire a taste, or at least a respect for YA.

Among titles about teens, few excited me as much as Among Others. It stormed the early 2012 awards, and as soon as it was available at my library I seized the peach-colored paperback. I found a folding chair and carried the book down to the lake, away from phones and computer and human distractions. After slathering my Irish self with sun tan lotion, I sat back to read of Jo Walton’s faerie-loving bookworm. “Morwenna,” what an exotic name, and she was so reserved, so sympathetically introverted and brave and well-read and well-meaning and timid and enchanting and wise within her inexperience. She was the archetype of a child, and I could think of no adolescent trait she lacked.

A few dozen pages and a stiff wake shaking the dock later, I looked up from the paperback. Behind me in the woods there was a girl screaming at her wrinkled grandmother. The girl could have been the age I imagined Walton’s protagonist to be, though she behaved nothing like what I’d been imagining as she wriggled in her grandmother’s grip. I also hadn’t imagined Morwenna in a pink bathing suit.

Most of what she screamed was raw noise, not words, since protest is often the chief weapon of children. There were stray phrases about how unfair she was, and how she was mean and she wished she were dead. The grandmother was less audible over the shrieking, but I made out that the girl had been swimming for an hour and they’d be late for something if they didn’t leave now. “But I’m sorry,” I heard as they trekked towards a car in a hail of juvenile wailing.

For several moments afterward it was difficult to look at Among Others, not unlike the difficulty of meeting someone in the eyes after a humiliation. I clucked my tongue at this portrait of a fictional girl and the display of a real one in stereo.

“Realism,” I said. I had to laugh to myself. Fiction is harder to get into when you’re hit with the reasons people mistake it for lies. 

It's since come to my attention that Jo Walton does not consider her novel to be YA.