Interview with Bernie Mojzes

Bernie Mojzes is a member of my critique community who has some upcoming releases related to fairy tales and folk tales, two things very close to my heart. I’m pleased to invite Bernie to my blog to discuss them and other writerly matters. Welcome, Bernie! Please share something about your approaching releases.

Bernie: Thank you, Gemma. I have two stories coming out right around April Fools’ Day, which I’m sure we all agree shares the honor of being Best Day of the Year with Halloween.

“Hyena Brings Death” is set in North Africa during World War I (1914-18), and draws from two sources. The first is an old Taureg tale of how death came into the world. (Interesting fact that I only became aware of now, but works well for the story—”Taureg” is Arabic for “abandoned by God,” while the nomads’ own name for themselves, “Imohag,” means “free men.”). The second involves the use of airplanes as weapons of war. This was a new technology, and the first time anyone had dropped bombs from above was only a couple years earlier, during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. For the first time—as a soldier, as a civilian in a war zone—you not only had to look out for danger, you had to look up. In this story, Hyena scavenges far across the Sahara, looking for parts to build her own aeroplane, to wage her own war. “Hyena Brings Death” was written a long time ago, and has finally found a home in the dieselpunk anthology, Grease Monkeys.

Gemma: I’ve read the excerpt of that story, and I’m very glad it’s found a home. And your other imminent release?

Bernie: “Three Days of the Cuckoo” appears in Grimm Machinations, an anthology of steampunk interpretations of Grimm Fairytales. This story is a loose mashup of the first two Elves stories in the Grimm collections (“The Shoemaker for Whom They Did Work” and “The Servant Girl Who Stood In as Godmother for Them”), set on a background of an industrializing world where exploitation and brutal poverty was more the rule than the exception, and the legal framework that protect workers did not yet exist. This was fun to write, especially trying to figure out what a steam-powered helicopter might look like.

Gemma: In our critique group, I had the pleasure of reading the first draft. Despite the rather dark circumstances at first, the brilliance and resilience of your heroine really captivated me, and I felt very rewarded at the end.

Gemma: So when are these coming out?

Bernie: Grease Monkeys and Grimm Machinations are both coming out in late March or beginning of April this year. They’re launching April 1 at the Tell-Tale Steampunk Festival in Baltimore, and are also available through the current Kickstarter campaign (along with a bunch of extra bonuses as stretch goals are unlocked!). The Kickstarter ends February 21st, so if you like steampunk, dieselpunk, or Poe, don’t dawdle.

Gemma: Not to mention if you like fairy tale retellings for adults!

Bernie: How can you not? The magic of old folk tales is that the telling changes with the teller. What the Grimm brothers recorded was more of a summary, a template, upon which a storyteller would improvise and elaborate. It was the storyteller’s job to make the story live and breathe.

The folk tales aren’t just entertainment; they serve other functions. They can be cautionary tales (don’t wander into the woods alone, don’t trust strangers, don’t go swimming in the river by yourself) or morality tales (don’t be mean, share your toys, don’t be too greedy). They can be all about the virtue of respecting authority and knowing your station in life, or about resisting authority and overcoming your station in life. The templates of the stories themselves are full of empty spaces crying out to be filled, and as such contain multitudes, at least potentially.

One thing I’ve noticed about them is that there’s often one little fact that, if you think about it, just doesn’t make sense. In “The Goose Girl,” for instance, the princess and her maid are sent travelling to a distant kingdom, where she’s to marry the king, with a wagon full of treasure that is her dowry. Alone. To me, that’s the piece that doesn’t make sense, and that’s the place to dig in to find a version of the story that makes that anomalous fact makes sense. That’s where the real story is.

Gemma: I know what you mean. It may be a case of not making sense on a gut level. When I was younger, I was charmed by the story “Kari Woodengown.” When I read it more recently, I was indignant and incredulous about how the story ended – I really liked Kari, but the choice she made at the end just made zero sense to me. I was moved to write a retelling. Do you remember when you realized – or decided – that you wanted to be a writer? And what moved you to that?

Bernie: Oh, it feels like it’s something I’ve always wanted, ever since I learned that books were written by people, and not just generated ex nihilo by the library. I think discovering the Earthsea books (by Ursula K. Le Guin) cemented it. I was a voracious reader as a child, and loved nothing more than to lose myself in these worlds. More than that, I wanted to discover new worlds myself and wander through their cities and forests, and maybe find a way to bring those worlds to life for other people. And I still can’t think of anything better to spend my life doing, if only it paid the bills.

Gemma: Nor can I. Can you trace some of your writing history?

Bernie: My first potential publication was in high school, when my English teacher submitted a crappy poem (all my poetry is crappy) I wrote to a poetry contest where it apparently placed high enough to win something more than a certificate of participation and was to be published in the newspaper that held it. Sadly, immediately upon notice, said newspaper (The Philadelphia Bulletin) went out of business, and I don’t remember whether my piece ever went to print. Certainly an auspicious beginning.

Gemma: Well, that’s simultaneously encouraging and frustrating. I’m glad you didn’t give up.

Bernie: I wrote constantly in high school and college, but by the time I’d gotten to grad school, the time I had to give to fiction dwindled, as did the brainspace available for the stories to percolate. I didn’t get back to it until the company I worked for was disastrously acquired by another company, and in the aftermath I found myself shell-shocked and unemployed. I decided then to take that time and rediscover how to write. I worked on a novel or three, wrote some short stories, joined some online critique groups.

In 2006 I went to FaerieCon in Philadelphia and just as we were leaving, I saw a vendor with a lovely little anthology called Bad-Ass Faeries, and spent the last $12 dollars in my wallet to buy it as a gift for a crit partner who had sent me a short story of cantankerous leprechauns. She, in turn, posted a review of it in her blog, which the editor saw, and subsequently invited both of us to submit stories to her second anthology. Bad-Ass Faeries 2: Just Plain Bad came out in March 2007, with not one but two of my stories in it, which is probably bad for the ego of any debut author.

Gemma: Sadly, I understand those books are out of print, but Best of Bad-Ass Faeries is still available.

Bernie: True, and as a result, my first published story (which contains a paragraph that embarrassingly has more point-of-view changes than it does sentences) is still in print. Since then I’ve had short stories published in the genres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Adult-rated fiction, and even the dreaded “Mainstream.” I owned/edited the online zine Unlikely Story (which went on hiatus back in 2014-ish due to work/life imbalance and whose website (www.unlikely-story.com) has become weirdly broken and needs some attention), as well as anthologies, including Clowns: The Unlikely Coulrophobia Remix.

Gemma: What are some pieces you’re particularly proud of?

Bernie: I’m usually (though not always, in retrospect) proud of the stories I write, often for very different reasons. I am very interested in playing with narrative, form and style. For example, in “From the Horse’s Mouth,” another Grimm retelling (of “The Goose Girl,” which I mentioned earlier), there are multiple narratives nested inside a framing narrative. The framing narrative is in second person, where the “you” in the story could be one of a number of people, and left to the reader to resolve the ambiguity (or not).

Gemma: And readers who want to ponder that ambiguity can find the story in Gaslight & Grimm.

Bernie: In “Reinventing the Wheel,” neither of the two primary characters of the central plot made for good point-of-view characters, so I needed someone more personable to tell the tale. That ended up being a character I’d planned for something else, Wheel-Leg Malloy, who’s happy to interrupt the plot to… Well, maybe I should just let ‘ol Wheel-Leg himself ‘splain it:

That was what they call a rhetorical question. I heard you just fine the first time. “Who in tarnation is she, Malloy?” Well, first of all, them’s mighty strong words, Mr. Ward, for a boy ain’t had cause to pick up a razor yet. Me? ’Course I cuss like a rabid badger. You earn one cuss word for every gray hair, and I got so many I can clear out a church in five minutes flat and get it struck by lightning to boot.

Second, I’m working up to it, building what you call narrative tension. Storytelling ain’t just a regurgitation of the facts. It’s putting those facts into an order, telling them with the right flow, the right cadence, the right rhythm to build to an emotional impact. It’s character development, and plot, and world-building. And most of all, it’s a-weaving all them things together, careful-like, like a spider, and all’a you my precious little flies.

Gemma: Wheel-Leg Malloy sounds like quite a character! He also seems to have quite a grasp on storytelling; I think I’m caught in his web and I’d read that story just because of him. Which tends to come to you first – plot or character, or…?

Bernie: Honestly, I don’t know. Or more accurately, it depends on the story. Stories come from so many places—from dreams, from a fragment of a scene seen almost film-like, from gestures, from a misheard phrase or the feeling a song creates. Like: there’s a gesture, and a sigh, and a frown at someone across a table, and the scrape of a chair as they stand up. Then it becomes my job to figure out who the person is that did these things, and why, and so on. So maybe it’s neither plot nor character, sometimes? One phrase I’ve heard that makes sense to me is that “plot is what characters do,” and I’ve had plots take a hard left turn at Albuquerque because a character has grown into someone who would never do what’s needed to be done to move the plot forward as planned. The story is a thing, for me, to be discovered holistically, building from whatever fragment of it I can get my teeth into first, which maybe throws me off the spectrum entirely.

Gemma: It’s kind of an arbitrary spectrum to begin with. “Plot is what characters do” is an interesting take. Unexpected character growth can be a really excellent outcome.

Bernie: It’s true. Sometimes a character will do or say something that brings the story into a new focus, that really defines the whole meaning of it in a way that you didn’t expect, and then when you go back to make changes to the earlier parts of the manuscript to make it consistent with the new direction, you find that it’s been there all along. It just took that long for the characters to get tired of waiting for you to catch on.

Gemma: Along with characters and all these other influences, are there places that you’ve lived (or visited) that especially affect your writing?

Bernie: Having lived in Philadelphia is certainly an influence. Philly has its own flavor of dysfunctional functionality. I lived in an apartment complex in Mt. Airy that was deeply weird, and was interconnected with what we affectionately called “The David Lynch Memorial Basement.” Lets see, what else? 1980s San Francisco (moreso than its current incarnation). A lonely forest path somewhere in central Minnesota in winter. Novi Sad, back when it was still Yugoslavia, and also Mali Losinj, on the Adriatic Sea. Auschwitz, as a kid, where we found strange stones in the path, and the guard told us those were bone fragments, “more come up every time it rains.” Skopje, a few months after the war, where the pain was written in bullet holes in the walls and half-crumbled homes, still occupied, with the optimism of life pushing up through it as groups of young people walking past it all, excitedly talking about a new band they’d just seen.

Gemma: that is deeply haunting. I can’t even imagine the impact those last two places must have left.

Turning from the past to the future, what is your next project you hope to do?

Bernie: Oh, there are so many in flight. I really should finish one of them. Let’s see:

Ari & the Nicer Gang – Dieselpunk novel set in a world where the Mongol Empire still exists in the early 20th century. This is a sequel to a short story about a mind-control device, “The Power of Her Position.”
As-Yet-Untitled Pirate novel (affectionately called “Untitled Pirate Dreck”) – It’s tempting to say “a post-apocalyptic world,” except the apocalypse is ongoing, as insatiably ravenous demons seep up from fissures in the earth and are carried wherever the wind blows them, and the notorious Captain Deadbeef and his crew fight to save as much of civilization as they can.
Kudzu – an illustrated novel with talking raccoons and a possibly sentient giant kudzu plant. In space. This one is up in its unfinished form at http://spacekudzu.com . Artwork by Linda Saboe.
As-Yet-Untitled Faerie novella – Urban fantasy set during World War II. This one is a sequel to my first ever published story, “Moonshine,” and has the hero and the villain of the earlier story teaming up in unexpected ways to defeat the Nazis.

I think Ari gets my attention first, and then I need to figure out what’s next.

Gemma: Since I’m reading Ari & the Nicer Gang in our critique sessions, and I am on tenterhooks wondering what happens next, that definitely gets my vote. I took a glance at Kudzu – and promptly got sucked into reading more than I intended. The art is excellent, too.

Bernie: Linda’s a wonderful artist. She’s done illustrations for several books, but most of her work is more traditional media. She was also the art director of Unlikely Story, and contributed some of the illustrations there. You can see more of her work at https://croneswood.com/.

Gemma: I just visited her website and wow, that’s some beautiful natural and supernatural art! How can readers connect with you?

Bernie: I’m on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/brni.x (I used to have a Twitter account, but that’s been decommissioned).

There’s also a horribly out-of-date website at http://www.kappamaki.com (like, 8 years out of date). I really need to get that fixed up, if I can remember the password… Or maybe I should just start from scratch. I guess it’s time to re-learn WordPress. And maybe fix the Unlikely Story site while I’m at it.

Gemma: Thanks for joining me on my blog, Bernie. I’m looking forward to reading your new stories!

February 12, 2023 2

Interview with Laura Selinsky: Whitstead Books

I post this today for those who celebrate Christmas, and who have a little leisure at this busy time – which may be a very select few! But I hope it will be of interest at other times of the year as well.

Back in the depths of last December, I got a lovely little gift-box of a book, Whitstead Christmastide.

More than just a collection of stories on a theme, this is a collaboration between editors and authors to create a small English village, complete with a map and people whose paths cross and intertwine. The book was good for my soul, and warmed and cheered the long winter nights.

The collaboration continues with Whitstead Harvestide (which I quite enjoyed this past this autumn), and Whitstead Summertide, which I’m hoping will come out next summer.

I was intrigued with how this creation came about, and had many questions. So I asked my good friend Laura Selinsky, who has stories residing in all three volumes.

Gemma: How did you find out about Whitstead Christmastide?

Laura: The Whitstead Christmastide idea was proposed by Abigail Falanga, a wonderful speculative fiction author whom I “met” via social media. We share associations with Realmmakers, an organization for Christian speculative fiction authors, and have both written for Havok Publishing, which produces daily flash. Abigail, who became Whitstead’s first editor, suggested developing a Christmas anthology of short stories set in an English village in Dickens’ era. I immediately offered to write a Christmas Carol-inspired piece for Whitstead. I’m a high school British Literature teacher, so that’s a world I enter comfortably.

Gemma: How did you go about becoming one of its authors?

Laura: Waving my arms and shouting “Pick me!” on Facebook was my foremost method of getting into the initial anthology, which is independently published. The project attracted an interesting mix of aspiring prepublication authors and accomplished ones. I volunteered my Christmas Carol for consideration before the first Whitstead book had a title, and I followed up consistently with every hint that the anthology would become a reality. My diligence doesn’t mean that the editors couldn’t have decided to reject my stories. Jane Yolan has 400 books published, but she still gets rejections!

Gemma: How did the collaboration work? For example, how was the map decided on? Did you communicate with other authors, or only the editors?

Laura: The Whitstead collaboration has run largely through a Facebook Group that allows us to share characters and ideas with both the editors and the other authors. That’s where the map developed and where people share information about stories. We also answer each other’s questions about the era, both its social and writing practices. You never know what obscure information you may need for a story or who may have the answers you need. I recently answered questions about the trees in Victorian cemeteries, information I had acquired while preparing to teach Dracula for the umpteenth time.

Gemma: Your stories largely center around Whitwillow Farm. Where is that on the map?

Laura: The map has been -uhm- flexible, as authors and plot lines came and went. Whitwillow Farm has theoretically been at number 26 in Books 1, 2 & 3. Last week, I saw the map for Book 3. On the newest map, my farm remains at number 26 between two other country farms. Keeping Whitwillow Farm outside of the village has been crucial to the plot of all three of my stories.

Gemma: How was the writing, submission, and collaboration different for the second and third books?

Laura: As an author, I felt less terror that my work would be rejected once Book 1 went to print. For Book 3, my rejection terror level has subsided from “hysterical” to “moderate.” One very positive feature of writing a series has been the increase in collaboration and encouragement as the books have continued. In Whitstead Harvestide and the upcoming Whitstead Summertide, I made reference to a character having been lured away by a fossegrim, a Norwegian fiddle-playing demon that is the focus of another author’s stories. The fossegrim is only in my stories with the other author’s permission.

Gemma: Can the books be read in any order?

Laura: Certainly, the Whitstead stories can be read in any order. Our anthologies are planned for stand-alone speculative fiction stories. I wrote characters and subplots that connect from book to book, but reading all three books or reading them in publication order is not essential. When I drafted the third story, my critique group graciously read for consistency and development of character between it and the two previous stories. So if someone read my Whitwillow Farm stories in publication order, they won’t be disappointed.

Gemma: I have read the first two in order, and was delighted to see how many of the stories and characters progressed. (Some stories in the second anthology are independent of the tales in the first book, but still integrally woven into Whitstead.)

Laura: If you are interested in our adventures in Whitstead, my author page links to the first two Whitstead books, and a link for Whitstead Summertide will appear on that page when the book is released! https://www.amazon.com/author/laura-nelson-selinsky

Gemma: thank you for taking part in my blog and answering my questions, Laura!

Readers: if you are looking for some warm-hearted Christmas reading, or perhaps a very last-minute gift, I recommend Whitstead Christmastide. The e-book is available instantly on Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and you can find Whitstead Harvestide both places as well.

If you’d like to read a bit more from Laura on my blog, here are a couple guest blogs, (one also Christmasy), and a different interview with her.

Wishing a Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and a happy, healthy mid-winter to all.

December 24, 2022 0

Book Review: The Thief Series by Megan Whalen Turner

I fell in love with Gen the Thief nearly twenty years ago. I was a volunteer shelving in the Young Adult area of our local library, my favorite section, and was looking over The Queen of Attolia; the cover and title intrigued me. A young woman, not much older than a young adult herself, said, “That’s a great series! But don’t start with that book. You need to start with The Thief. In fact, try to forget what you read on that cover.” I had a fun conversation with her. And it turned out she was right in every way. I managed to forget most of what I read on The Queen of Attolia’s cover, and as soon as I started The Thief, I was captivated.

Gen, who is hardly more than a boy, brags he can steal anything. An audacious theft lands him chained in the king’s prison. Matters are rather grim. But the king’s scholarly advisor, the magus, has plans to use Gen as a tool for the king’s advantage. Thus begins a twisting adventure, told in Gen’s wry, wily, cranky voice.

And that is only the beginning! There are six books, a grand series told over twenty years in our time, but only a few years (I think) in the world of the book.

These stories at first feel less like high fantasy and more like, as Laini Taylor says, “a secret, discovered history of real but forgotten lands.” There are resemblances to the landscape and culture of Ancient Greece, “if a civilization like theirs had developed another thousand years without the rise of monotheism,” as Megan Whalen Turner wrote in her note at the end of The Thief. Several echoes of Ancient Greece appear over the course of the series. The mythology, largely Turner’s own, is rich and real – more real to some of the people in the books than others. There are myths recounted by characters throughout the books, and they are some of my favorite parts.

Barnes & Noble’s website says that the novels can be read in any order – but good heavens, DON’T do that. It’s true that each book is a complete story in itself – no cliff-hangers sent me rushing to the next book. But there is a larger story told over the course of all the novels. Story threads weave through, intertwine and form greater threads. People in the books grow and evolve and change over time, some of them in remarkable ways. A book will mean so much more if you’ve read all the books that came before it.

So start with The Thief – read the back description if you like, and if it intrigues you, dive in.

I started the final book, The Return of the Thief, with some trepidation and even dread – fearing that some character I’d grown to love would die. And I deeply loved so many of these people. This last book brought tears to my eyes more than once. But the ending was deeply satisfying.

A number of the novels have short stories at the end. I’ve read and treasured them all as little gems, and ways to linger in Gen’s world. The short story at the end of the final book is my favorite of them all.

November 1^st of this year, Moira’s Pen came out. For those who have read the series, it is a coffer of small treasures: short stories old and new, “vignettes and excerpts, poetry and rhymes… and a very special recipe for almond cake,” as the author’s website says.* There are the author’s reflections and memories of places, sculptures, and objects that inspired her. And there are beautiful illustrations and decorations by Deena So’Oteh, including of some of those artworks and objects (if you’ve ever wondered what a fibula pin looks like, now you can see!) Also included is a map. I love a good map in a novel. There have been three maps shown in different books of this series; two of them have small mysteries. One mystery came clear in the last book; the other remained a puzzle, until Moira’s Pen.

The entire series is one of my favorites of all time and I give it 5 stars. Moira’s Pen is a beautiful capstone to the series, for those wanting to spend a bit more time in Gen’s world and to learn more about it.

*Barnes & Noble’s website says Moira’s Pen “is ideal for longtime fans, as well as readers discovering Megan Whalen Turner’s epic and unforgettable world for the first time.” The former I certainly agree with, but new readers should only read it AFTER reading the previous six books. Otherwise you risk spoiling important parts of the whole series. Also: if you want to avoid spoilers, be careful what you read on the author’s own website. It’s a fun place to explore after reading the series, though.

November 29, 2022 0

Some Excellent (Belated) News

A nonfiction project has kept me so busy that I have rather badly neglected my blog. So, without further ado, here is some belated but really fine news.

First of all, my good friend Aud shared something quite exciting: not only did she get a really good review from Kirkus, but that august publication also made her an offer it makes to only a select group of Indie-published authors! Go, check out her blog and find out. My other news can wait.

If you haven’t already gone to Aud’s blog, here’s more: she also revealed the cover for her second “Winnie and the Wizard Book.” And I love it even more than the cover to Frama-12! Is that a Frama-scope I spy? And…perhaps even a time-tear??

I’m so tempted to ask Aud if I can post that cover, but I want you to see it for yourself along with her cool Kirkus news. (This is not a spoiler: I’ve read an earlier draft of Hutra even before Frama-12, and that’s where I became so very fond of Winnie and her companions.)

My second (or is it third?) bit of news: the next Enola book is out: Enola Holmes and the Elegant Escapade! (Truth be told, it came out just two days after Aud posted her fun blog; this is an embarrassment of riches.) I loved this latest Enola adventure! Lady Cecily appears for the third time, and I think I enjoyed this book even more than her second appearance. There’s such a wealth of great characters, old and young, and Enola (my favorite as always) is in fine form. Elegant, even. It was a treat to read. (Just don’t read it as your first Enola book. Start at the beginning!)

So, here’s a number of things to celebrate and I’m happy to share them. I urge you to check them both out if you haven’t already.

October 26, 2022 3

Frama-12 Release and Review!

Frama-12 by Aud Supplee steps out into the world today!

Frama 12 Cover Art — Available from fine booksellers now!

I was delighted to be given an Advanced Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review. Full disclosure: anyone who’s read my recent posts will know I can’t claim to be objective in this review – I’ve known this book since it was a kid! But I will do my utmost to be honest.

So, here’s my honest opinion: I just finished Frama-12, and I enjoyed the heck out of it!

Here is a quick summary (from the book cover and the author’s website):

Winnie Harris, following a warrior code in honor of her mother’s fighting spirit, will do whatever it takes to protect her little stepbrother, Mikey. Kip Skyler, charming to everyone but Winnie, impresses her stepbrother with his sleight of hand. Now Mikey wants them to pass through a time tear into Frama-12 and save the inhabitants from an invasion. She’ll be the general and Kip the wizard.

Winnie sees two problems with the mission. Frama-12 is just a fantasy game, right? And Kip is majorly annoying. But she’s only half right. If the incompatible teens can’t work together, an enemy could march through a very real time tear and attack Earth.

To really enjoy a book, I have to like the main characters – mostly, at least. Winnie and Kip are like most teenagers, and most people in general: at times they can be exasperating, and at other times, deeply sympathetic. I came to care about both of them early on. As for Mikey, he’s an adorable little kid who tugged at my heart strings and made me laugh – and sometimes he’s unnervingly mature. But, unlike some other precocious kid characters, Mikey has a very good reason for this. He tells Winnie about it early in the story, but she doesn’t really believe him at first. He’s just her little stepbrother, right…? (Well, yes and no.)

As Winnie soon finds out, Frama-12 is home to a host of new, strange creatures and peoples. Some are alarming, some benign, some funny – and some of them a mix of all of the above. Winnie has to learn which can be trusted and which to beware of. Meanwhile, she’s confronted with a myriad of new sights, sounds, smells and tastes. She gets help in navigating all this from some unexpected sources—if only she can ease up and listen to them.

In trying to live up to her mom’s spiritual courage and determination, sometimes Winnie feels she has to be too independent, too strong. And that can make her downright stubborn at times. But over the course of the book, she learns more about what true courage looks like.

By the end of the book, there are some mysteries and unanswered questions – but I have it on good authority that there will be another book of adventures with Winnie, Kip, and Mikey. Hurrah!

This book is light and a lot of fun, but it also deals with some serious issues, like loss, separation from loved ones, and the challenges of stepfamilies. The story deals with these issues with warmth and heart. I highly recommend it for Young Adults and the Young at Heart looking for a fun contemporary adventure into a rather wacky world. It’s a great summer read.

So if you’re ready for adventure, Frama-12 is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and independent bookstores.

And if you happen to be in southeastern Pennsylvania, you can meet the author and get your book at a signing with her on Saturday, August 6th!

If you’d like to read my interviews with Aud, you can read them here, where we interview each other about anthologies we’re in and other fun stuff, here, where we talk especially about conferences we went to, and here, where Aud talks about earlier publications and her general writing process.

Congratulations, Aud! I’m so pleased Frama-12 is out in the world where readers can enjoy it!

July 13, 2022 5