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

I suppose I should open with my standard apology for taking so long to update this site. But really, at this point, my silence is the norm; it’s not exactly worth commenting on. (Also, if I’m being honest, I’m just not in the mood to apologize right now. And for that, I’m sorry.)

With that out of the way, let’s get to some updates. I’ve actually been writing more over the past few months, because I appear to have found my muse. In a bowl of noodles.

(Is it a metaphor? Are we talking about an actual noodle? Has this guy finally lost it and decided he’s some sort of Spaghetti Whisperer? These are all valid questions. Unfortunately, I won’t be answering them. You’ll just have to live with this macaroni mystery and accept that you’ll never fully know why I started writing again. But my recent bout of motivation is definitely noodular in origin.)

Before I get into the benefits reaped during the Great Noodlization of 2022, I should talk about the story I finished just before that pivotal moment in my Ramen Rebirth. See, several years ago I got a very inspiring rejection letter from then-editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, C.C. Finlay. Charlie had frequently mentioned he liked my cover letters (which were written with the intent of both earning a laugh and ensuring I couldn’t be mistaken for a professional), and asked me to send him a humor story some day. Naturally, my inability to work under pressure kicked in, and I spent the next three and a half years in a blood-feud with a Word document I absolutely hated.

Charlie ended up retiring from his post before I could finish his story, but when the submission window for Unidentified Funny Objects 9 came around, I decided it was time to put my nose to the grindstone. And, once I realized how bad the grindstone smelled, I pulled my face away and got to work on the story.

The result was a piece called “A Crisis of Fate,” which editor Alex Shvartsman was kind enough to buy for his excellent anthology series of humorous SF/F. It’s probably the most “Zach” story I’ve ever written, so if you ever want to know why I’m the way I am, this is the thing to read.

UFO9 came out in November of 2022, and I’m pleased to announce that “A Crisis of Fate” was one of the volume’s four stories to make the Tangent Online 2022 Recommended Reading List. (And with a star by its name, to boot!) I haven’t made the list in years, probably because I haven’t been writing much since the last time I got there (in 2017, with two entries). Of course, now that I’ve had a run-in with a very inspiring noodle, the odds of making the list in the future have increased lexponentially.

Granted, I haven’t yet sold anything that I’ve written in this post-pasta era, but I also haven’t taken many swings yet. A few things are currently on submission; a few more need to be fixed up a bit before they go out again. But all in all, I’m pretty pleased with what I’m producing, which is a rare sensation for me. (This must be what it feels like when a starfleet engineer finally designs a spaceship that doesn’t explode, or an orc forges a sword that’s not pointy on both ends.)

As far as other publications go, I’ve also sold a reprint of my Christmas flash piece “When Friends Come to Call” to Holiday Leftovers. That story hasn’t been available for a long while now, so I’m glad to see it out in the world again.

Lastly, I sold something to an anthology called Merciless Mermaids: Tails From the Deep, which should be available sometime in 2023. My contribution is called “Apex Predators,” and it’s a drabble: a story of exactly 100 words. This is my first-ever drabble sale, which makes me extra proud of it–it feels like I’ve earned a new merit badge. (And I’ll put it right next to my “dribble” merit badge, which I earned for trying to chug a Big Gulp right after having dental surgery.)

And that’s it for today’s updates. If the Noodlemuse keeps doing its work, I’ll hopefully have reason to visit here more often.

Thanks for reading, friends–as always.

-Z

Despite what the lack of recent posts may indicate, I am, in fact, alive. I was definitely not slain in battle with a necromancer and subsequently reanimated to offer you this reassurance, all in the hopes of gaining your trust so that my master might infiltrate your society and spread his dark agenda. Anyone who would make such slanderous accusations is an obvious traitor and/or library-talker.

Even though it’s been a while, this post is going to be rather short–and it’s not because I have decaying, corpselike fingers that make typing difficult. Rather, it’s because I had a new story published today, and in the event that anyone clicks the link in my author bio, I don’t want them to come here and find the website equivalent of a dilapidated barn.

The story in question is “For Love, I Tear,” a flash-fiction piece which I wrote in January of 2018. It’s finally found a loving home at Metastellar, and you can check it out here.

I’ve also had another story published since my last post, which I would have mentioned if I hadn’t been so busy with perfectly normal mortal affairs that were entirely unrelated to the ancient Bone Scrolls of Kaz’gatahr. It’s a horror piece called “The Sand Knows,” which was inspired by a camping trip to Washington state’s Cape Disappointment. (An obvious misnomer, as anyone who’s visited the park will tell you.) You can find the story in the Cemetery Gates anthology Places We Fear to Tread.

And that’s about it, for updates. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to consume my daily vitality draft from its silver chalice, so that I might command the legions of my dark lord with the strength of a thousand men. (Vitamins are important!)

-Z

P.S. Now that I’ve finished this post and started digging through the ruins of this clearly neglected site, I’ve realized there are a few other announcements I missed during my totally normal and in-no-way-related-to-the-amassing-of-an-undead-army absence. Here’s what you may have missed:

1. In October of 2019 I won my local library’s inaugural “Terrifying Tales” short-story contest, with a flash SF/horror piece called “To the Brim, Old Dark.” It’s currently not available anywhere, unless you happen to be a KCLS librarian who swiped the display copies off the shelf after Halloween.
2. “The Woman With the Long Black Hair,” which originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, has been reprinted at Frozen Wavelets. This is especially significant to today’s post, because I’ve always thought of “For Love, I Tear” as a sort of spiritual successor to “The Woman With the Long Black Hair.” Check out the latter here!
3. “The Final Chapter of Marathon Mandy,” originally published in The Binge-Watching Cure, has been reprinted in one of Flame Tree Publishing’s gorgeous Gothic Fantasy volumes: A Dying Planet.

Yes, it’s been almost a year.  And yes, I continue to be bad at updating this site.  In my defense, though, no one could have known the Glor’thok Invasion would be so time consuming.  My soot-smeared war-spatula tells tales of post-apocalyptic battle:  each jagged nick, a memory of foes vanquished; each black stain, a reminder that I can’t cook an omelette.

In the interests of expedience, I won’t spend this post giving very long descriptions of my accomplishments over the past year.  Instead, I’ll provide a brief list of my publications, punctuated by interesting facts about the Glor’thok Wars.

1.  “Three Ways to Leave Hawaii” was published in Unidentified Funny Objects 7 in September of 2018.  To celebrate my fifth appearance in the UFO anthology series (and my first appearance as a name on the cover!), the Glor’thok used their pigeon-mounted ray-guns to evaporate the entire Columbia River and blame it on Oregon, infuriating Washingtonians along the border.  The Civil War of the Pacific Northwest was short-lived and, truth be told, actually rather friendly.
2. I sold a reprint to Tell-Tale Press’s The Starship Logs, Volume 1: Winter Holidays anthology.  “When Friends Come to Call” originally appeared in Kazka Press’s At Year’s End anthology, which is no longer available; I’m glad readers now have another chance to read it, either for free in their browsers or for a buck on Kindle.  (The Glor’thok prefer the Kindle version, because they like to support new publishers when they’re not busy eroding our natural monuments with air-dropped acid-baths.)
3. “The Great Indoors” has appeared in Flame Tree Publishing’s Haunted House Short Stories anthology.  This marks not only my fourth appearance in one of Flame Tree’s objectively gorgeous Gothic Fantasy volumes, but also my first sale of a straight-up horror story.  (The closest I’d come previously was with “Sweet Dreams, Glycerine,” in Flame Tree’s Science Fiction Short Stories–though that was more like dark SF.)  Oh, and while we’re on the subject of horror stories, does anyone remember when the Glor’thok destroyed huge chunks of our brains with skull-burrowing space-ticks?  Of course you don’t.
4. “No Silver Lining,” my first story to ever appear in a physical book, has been reborn in the (digital) pages of another Tell-Tale Press anthology:  The Spell Books, Volume 2:  Creatures.  As with “When Friends Come to Call,” this one can be found on both the Tell-Tale Press website and in a Kindle e-book.  Alternatively, you could read my story within the muted red darkness of the Glor’thok Slaughterhalls (where they keep all their books), but good luck getting past the guards without an unreasonably large supply of hummus. 

And that’s it for today.  See you all next year, after we’ve been bound in shackles and forced to witness a traditional Glor’thokkian coronation ceremony.  (Don’t forget your towel!)

-Z