Ceallaigh's Blog
Sometime in December, likely on or around the winter solstice, I'll be releasing a second edition of The Longest Road in the Universe: A Collection of Fantastical Tales. My primary reason for doing this is to change the cover and add a story. I love the current cover and always have; Murky Depths commissioned the art from Nancy Farmer when it bought the titular story from me years ago, and I've always thought it captured an important moment in the narrative. But readers have told me it gives the impression that the collection is comprised of horror stories, and it isn't. (It's a mix of science fiction and fantasy.) So I'm changing the cover and moving the art inside to illuminate the story for which it was commissioned. I'm also adding a story first published in the Stolen Island Review in 2003.
The When Words Collide festival has released its tentative final program, so I thought I'd share my itinerary:
Friday 3 PM - Canmore - Fairytales, Fables and Folklore Remade
C.S. MacCath, Carol Parchewsky, Jim Jackson, Ron Oswald [PM]
Fairytale remakes, historical reimaginings, using themes from the past to create a new story. What is being done in today's Young Adult fiction, and how can past inspiration be made new again?
I've written a short article for the #FolkloreThursday project covering a bit of folklore history, a bit of folklore theory, and a bit of contemporary folklore studies. It's live on the website now, and you can read it at: https://folklorethursday.com/folklore-folklorists/what-is-folklore
Last night I was a guest on CKDU 88.1 community radio's The Witching Hour discussing folkloric aspects of the Satanic Panic, especially as they relate to legend studies. The show is archived in three segments: 7:00-7:30, 7:30-8:00, and 8:00-8:30. You should listen to the whole show, but my contribution begins just after 7:30.
For the fairy enthusiasts among you, here's a story bundle curated by Sandra Kasturi containing the new F is for Fairy anthology, which includes my short story "B is for Burned/Every Broken Creature." Other contributors include Jane Yolen, Gemma Files, Marie Bilodeau, Nancy Springer, and more! You can buy the bundle here.
Behold the F is for Fairy cover! This is the sixth instalment of the Alphabet Anthologies series, and it contains my short story dually titled "B is for Burned / Every Broken Creature." Here's the press release:
Editor Rhonda Parrish has announced the title of the next instalment of the ALPHABET ANTHOLOGIES series, which will be F IS FOR FAIRY. I've known about this for some months and have already started work on my own contribution, which will be set in the north of Iceland in the year 1625. Here's the link to Rhonda's announcement.
Click here for Kindle, Apple, Nook, Kobo, and other purchase options.
Over the years, I've withheld one story from my collections of previously published work. It was originally printed in The Stolen Island Review in 2003, but it wasn't Pagan enough for The Ruin of Beltany Ring, and it wasn't quite mature enough stylistically for The Longest Road in the Universe.
I'm in DC this week and missed participating in the cover reveal for the next Alphabet Anthologies installment, but here it is now. This installment contains my story "D is for Duel/One Who Dies as a God Dies" along with a pile of great fiction by fellow contributors. You can follow the book on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and you can read more about it below.
For the fourth installment of Rhonda Parrish’s Alphabet Anthologies, contributors were challenged to write about dinosaurs. The resulting twenty-six stories contain widely different interpretations of the dinosaur theme and span the spectrum from literal to metaphoric.
Within these pages stories set in alternate histories, far-flung futures and times just around the corner, dinosaurs whimper and waste away, or roar and rage. People can be dinosaurs, as can ideas, fictions and flesh. Knitted dinosaurs share space with ghostly, genetically engineered and even narcotic ones.
Teenagers must embrace their inner dinosaurs in order to find peace and belonging, a dying woman duels a God in a far future city that echoes aspects of our past, an abused wife accompanies her husband on a hunt for an ancient power and finds more than she could ever have imagined and a girl with wonderful magical powers stumbles across the bones of a giant long-dead lizard. And so much more!
Features stories by Alexandra Seidel, Pete Aldin, Beth Cato, Michael Kellar, Cory Cone, Simon Kewin, Samantha Kymmell-Harvey, C.S. MacCath, KV Taylor, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, Michael B. Tager, Gary B. Phillips, Michael M. Jones, L.S. Johnson, Brittany Warman, Hal J. Friesen, Megan Engelhardt, BD Wilson, Michael Fosburg, Jonathan C. Parrish, Suzanne J. Willis, Lynn Hardaker, Amanda C. Davis, Andrew Bourelle, Sara Cleto and Jeanne Kramer-Smyth.
The LibraryThing giveaway for THE LONGEST ROAD IN THE UNIVERSE is live, so if you're a LT user and want to win a copy, check out this link and scroll down the page until you find it.