Tag: The Temporary Suicides of Goldfish

SFF, Short stories

Year’s Best SF&F 2019

OJ

I have a new story out! Except technically not really new – it’s a reprint. Now I’ve had reprints published before, and it’s always very exciting. (It’s amazing enough when a story sells once, let alone again.) This reprint, though… this one is special.

The first reason it’s special is because it’s the first time I’ve managed to crack this particular market. Getting a story into The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy has been on my writing bucket list for a long time. And of course there’s never any guarantee that an author will sell to any particular market, but let’s face it: there were a lot of absolutely excellent short speculative stories published last year. Choosing what would get into a single anthology must have been enormously difficult, so I was delighted when Rich Horton selected “The Temporary Suicides of Goldfish” for inclusion here. That story, by the way, was originally published by Kaleidotrope.

The second reason it’s special is because of who else is in the anthology. I was lucky enough to attend Clarion West 2016, and one of my classmates, Cadwell Turnbull, also has a story in here. Very happy to be sharing a table of contents with him! We were both very excited… and even more so because in that table of contents was none other than Ursula Le Guin. Reader, I had to take a moment. There is Ursula Le Guin with her final story, published I believe in the Paris Review of all places, and here’s me, in the same book, wittering on about reincarnated goldfish, in what must be one of the most frivolous stories known to man.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m amazed and grateful… but I also had to pinch myself. A lot.

SFF, Short stories

The Temporary Suicides of Goldfish

OJ

I’ve a new story out! “The Temporary Suicides of Goldfish” can be read for free in the new issue of Kaleidotrope.

It’s the follow-up to another Kaleidotrope story of mine, “The Ouroboros Bakery”, although it doesn’t use the same characters. I’m writing an interlocking series of stories, set on the same magical street, because I enjoyed writing “Bakery” so much that I wanted to go back to the same world and play some more in it. I’d had this idea floating around in the back of my head for a while, about a girl reincarnated as a goldfish (don’t ask me where it came from) and the sheer outrageous ridiculousness of it seemed like it would be a good fit for a street that specialised in dodgy transformations.

I’ve sold four of these street stories so far, and another one’s out on sub. I’m hoping to have a collection’s worth by the end of the year, but for now the weird goldfish story will have to entice you. And here’s a teaser for it:

Everyone deserves a last meal. Mine was fish, Syllabub laughing her arse off as she served it up. Not goldfish, because that would have been bad luck—the kind of bad luck that comes from gossip about a last meal getting back to her Ladyship and being taken as insult. Instead a poor skinny muddy thing in a thin soup, flounder I think, or catfish.

“They’re not at all the same,” says Syllabub, critical, but they’re fish, aren’t they?

“I didn’t think there was going to be a test,” I said, and if I’d any room left in me for panic I would have panicked then, because the Lady and her tanks are the only thing between me and a bloody end instead of a scaly one. And if I’m to be examined on fish before I’m allowed to become one, then I might as well offer myself up for gutting now and be done with it…