Of course it’s not a real rest. I’ll still have to keep promoting and of course writing, but I am looking forward to getting into a less frantic routine. I don’t have any personal appearances scheduled for the rest of the year. In fact, the only thing on the horizon is Montreal WorldCon in 2027—though I don’t even have my membership yet.

I don’t know about you, but I for one am looking forward to some family time over the holidays and taking things a little easier until the next year rolls in. I think we’ve earned it. Until then, though, here’s what’s been going on this past month…

CAN*CON

A couple of weeks ago, I was at Can*Con—Canada’s annual conference for speculative fiction. It was great to be in Ottawa again and see many of my writing pals in meatspace, which I don’t get to do nearly enough.

This time I participated in two panels:

• Constructing Deconstruction: Building a Collapsed Earth (with Gerald Brandt, Mark Robinson, and moderated by Monique Cuillerier)

• Gentle Writing Advice (with Stephen Graham King, Chuck Wendig, and moderated by Liz Westbrook-Trenholm)

I also attended the launch party for Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 4, which includes my Nebula-nominated story “Through the Machine” and lists my novelette “After the Suns Go Down” as one of the best of 2025. There was a great turnout and we even got a group picture with all the authors that were able to make it in person, and of course our fearless leader, editor Stephen Kotowych.

The icing on the cake was the opportunity to participate in a book signing where my collection The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories sold out! Thank you to Bakka-Phoenix Books for providing copies of Astronaut, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl and even my out-of-print novella Lost Cargo—which last I saw they had only one copy left of. Thanks as well to everyone who bought a copy of one or more of my books. I was glad to meet everyone who showed up to get them signed or to just say hi and get some SWAG.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Last Wednesday, my story “Aerial” was published in Gavagai. If you haven’t yet read it, you can find it here. I’m really glad to see this story out in the world. It’s about parents accepting their children for who they are, and I wrote it with my own kids in mind, so in that sense it feels very personal. I hope you like it.

On the same day, StarShipSofa reprinted my dark SF story “Hard Time” in audio. This story was originally published in 2023 in the anthology Darkness Blooms which was long-listed for the Bram Stoker Award. I wanted to include this one in my collection but ultimately couldn’t find a spot for it. This is the first time it’s been available for free. I hope you’ll give it a listen.

And finally, due to a fortuitous error, Trollbreath Magazine Volume One (2024-2025) was published a little earlier than it was originally meant to. This anthology which covers the first two years of Trollbreath, includes my story, “So Many Things to See.” Sales go toward funding the magazine so they can continue publishing great fiction.

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

This past month I sold my first-contact SF story “Dreamers in an Endless Universe” to Longer Worlds, an anthology of stories that are a little too long for most markets, edited by Kyle Aisteach. This will be my second time working with Kyle who previously edited the now defunct zine Departure Mirror Quarterly, the original publication venue for my story “Tabula Rasa,” later reprinted in Polar Borealis.

I also sold my flash “Falling Forever,” originally published in Factor Four and now to be reprinted in the time loop anthology, Opportunity Window.

RECENT INTERVIEWS

If you missed it, author Mary Robinette Kowal invited me to share “My Favorite Bit” of my collection The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories on her website. Here, I talk about feminine strength, disability, and more in the story that closes the book, “The Smell of Sawdust.”

Also, back in April, I spoke with JJ Pionke of Disability in Library and Information Science (DisLis) and that interview came out on October 10. Sadly, I learned that just a couple of weeks earlier, JJ had passed away, well before his time.

When listening to our conversation, it struck me how much we laughed together and what great questions he asked about writing with disability, generative AI, and about my work, including my Nebula-nominated story “Through the Machine” and my novelette Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl. But it wasn’t all about the craft, since JJ and I shared some things in common—a love of LEGO, and tea. He made sure we had time to talk about that too.

I didn’t know JJ well, but it was a delight to speak with him. He was an advocate for disabled people and an educator and he will be greatly missed. You can find his memorial page here if you’d like to learn more.

RECENT REVIEWS

If you’re subscribed to Locus magazine, your November issue should be in your inbox today for digital subscriptions or else your print issue will be coming soon if you don’t already have it. Within this issue’s pages you’ll see a really great review of The Astronaut Among the Flower and Other Stories. I’m thrilled Locus chose to share this wonderful review. For non-subscribers, the review will eventually be available online, but I’m not sure when exactly that’ll happen. While you’re waiting, here’s a brief excerpt, but the reviewer does spend a little time referencing some of the individual stories in the full review, so it’s worth a read if you can access it.

Jay at Tar Vol on took a look back at Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Fiction, Vol. 2 and highlighted some of his favorite stories, including my Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora Award-nominated story, “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont.” Among other things, Jay had this to say:

Bruce H. McCosar recently published a detailed profile on Adventitious, delving deep into their first five issues. For each issue he selects his top three stories, and among them he highlights my novelette “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife” (Issue 1) and my short story “A Game of Go” (Issue 4).

I was delighted to read this profile not just because Bruce refers to me as one of his favorite authors, but also because I think Adventitious deserves all the accolades. They consistently publish top quality fiction, and they’ve become a wonderful market for writers. I’m especially grateful to them for publishing “A Game of Go” after the contract nightmare I went through with Analog’s publisher Must Read Magazines, ultimately resulting in my having to withdraw the story from that magazine.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to Adventitious, I hope you’ll consider it.

MRM IS AT IT AGAIN

Speaking of Must Read Magazines, they seem to have not learned much since their now infamous rights-grab of a contract had the writing community pushing back hard last year, when they first bought three of the top magazines in SFF and two in the Mystery genre.

If you somehow missed it, I wrote about this in my newsletter back when it was initially happening, since I was among the first writers to be sent the contract. You can catch up on that using the below links:

• First Post: August 2025

• Second Post: September 2025 Timeline of events

• Third Post: September 2025 Conclusion

While my seven-month back-and-forth with them did succeed in getting them to make a few changes, I still feel the contract could be a lot better—but that’s for each author to determine for themselves.

Lately, however, they decided to pick a fight with their cover artists, asking for unreasonable rights including the infamous “Moral Rights.” The alarm was first sounded by renowned artists John Picacio and Donato Giancola. You can read about this in Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine where he expresses concern over the future of these publications. The story was also picked up by File 770 and Writer Beware.

I really appreciated John Picacio shouting out Scott Edelman, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and myself for being among the first to push back against MRM’s contracts, all of us ultimately walking away from this publisher. I also appreciated that he publicly shared his response to MRM. The following excerpt resonated with me in particular:

This not only brings up the fact that MRM has a history of giving creatives different contracts depending on how much (or how little) they push back, but it also nails the reason I hung in there for seven months. People have often complimented me on how much patience I had with them. Believe me, it wasn’t patience. The only reason I negotiated for that long was because I wanted a fair boilerplate for all of us, not just me. When it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, only then did I walk.

While I hate that artists like John were dragged into this mess, I think it’s a good thing that MRM picks fights with all the wrong people. John is high profile enough that Publisher’s Weekly reached out to interview him about this situation. The more word gets around about this publisher’s predatory practices, the less chance there is that less-experienced writers and artists will sign a contract they might later regret.

In fact, while MRM initially offered a weak explanation for requesting these rights from artists, after the creative community erupted following the news, MRM put out a statement walking back some of the more aggressive clauses in their artist contract:

This is a good thing for artists that I’m glad to see, but it’s still frustrating that it took a massive industry-wide pushback to get here, when MRM has already been through this for over a year now with authors.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) also sent out a statement to members following this development. For about a year now MRM has mentioned SFWA in many of their statements and while they have worked with the org to make improvements on their contracts, the implication that they had SFWA’s approval rubbed many people the wrong way. So while SFWA acknowledged some positive changes, I was glad to see them clarify that particular point:

It’s always a good idea to read contracts closely, and as per the above statement, if authors have doubts or questions about any contract they receive, they should reach out to SFWA’s Contracts Committee, which is open to all writers whether or not they are members.

FOR YOUR AWARDS CONSIDERATION

Are you reading for awards consideration? If so, you can find my complete 2026 eligibility post here, with story descriptions, word counts, links, and more. Because I know your time is precious, below are the things I most hope you’ll keep in mind.

BYE FELICIA

A little bit of housekeeping. Please note that if you were following me on my P.A. Cornell facebook page, I’ve deleted it to prevent Meta from scraping my content to train their AI. They’ve already stolen enough of my IP. As always, you can find all the ways to keep up with my work here, but subscribing to this newsletter is one of the best, so click the button if you aren’t already receiving this monthly in your inbox.

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RANDOM STORY I LOVE

Each month I choose a story that has stuck with me to share with you. I offer it without comment, leaving it up to you to determine what you think of it. If you enjoy the chosen story, I encourage you to seek out more work by the author.

This month’s story is:

“Bottled Words” by Carol Scheina

*For all stories, see the individual publications for content warnings

Bonus: Listen to Carol Scheina’s interview with the late JJ Pionke for DisLis where she talks about this story.

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “And I Will Read to You About Butterflies”

Spoilers ahead, so read the story before going on.

This story started from a simple idea. I was thinking about the notion that we might one day be able to upload our consciousness into some form of technology—be it an AI-generated construct or something like a robot body, as in this story. But what sparked the idea was the knowledge that this wouldn’t guarantee permanence. Technology can fail as easily and unexpectedly as a biological body can. So that made me think: what happens then?

I started with a child who loses his life due to a terminal illness. At least his life in a biological body. His parents are presented with an offer they can’t resist, and while it’s expensive, they choose to upload the essence of who their child is into an artificial body. They know their child will never grow older, but they won’t have to face losing him forever, and that’s too tempting to pass up.

As with many science fiction stories focused around tech, though, things eventually go wrong. Faced with the prospect of losing their son for a second time, the parents are understandably distraught.

Grief is a very personal thing, and no two people experience it in the same way. In my story the father accepts this new version of their child that’s not quite Pablo, playing along rather than having to face the fact that their son, as they knew him, is gone.

At least that’s how the mother sees things. In her case, her grief won’t let her accept this child with only base programming as her son, even though he physically looks like her Pablo. In her heart, her son has finally completed his long, slow dance with death and is lost to her forever. Seeing her husband interact with the robot only hightens her pain.

In his attempts to connect with the robot, the father shows a side of himself his wife doesn’t even recognize. She doesn’t push pack against any of it though—too hurt to fight, she watches it all with detachment, avoiding the robot as much as possible.

I don’t know from personal experience what it’s like to lose a child, but like my parents before me, I know what it’s like to come close. I know what it is to sit in the NICU with your baby and wonder how you’re going to face whatever comes next. I know what it is to see all the fantasies you had for your family evaporate when reality sets in. And I know the toll it can take, even when the worst is over.

The mother in the story is very clearly depressed—something I also have experience with. Following the near-loss of my own child, I dealt with the emotional fallout for a long time. Many of the descriptions in the story come from that time.

I wanted to give the mother a hopeful ending, though. I wanted her to see Pablo’s death not as an end, but a transition into something new in the same way a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. In the end, I gave her a glimmer that the old Pablo is still with them in some way. Maybe in the years to come, more of him will emerge. But the point is that she will feel joy and love again. She is still a mother, whatever happens.

This seemed like a good story to send to Heartlines Spec, a Canadian magazine that focuses on long-term relationships. I’d say a parent-child relationship qualifies, and thankfully, they agreed.

I later submitted the story for consideration to Year’s Best Arthropod Short Fiction, an anthology created by J.S. Brevik, editor of Hexagon magazine and huge fan of arthropods, including butterflies. I loved the theme of this anthology so much that it didn’t even matter to me what it paid or how widely it might be published, so I sent in my story. I was thrilled when it was selected for their third volume.

“And I Will Read to You About Butterflies” was originally published in July 2025 in Heartlines Spec, Issue 8. In 2026 it was reprinted in Year’s Best Arthropod Short Fiction, Vol. 3.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this latest newsletter. If so, give it a like or share, or just let me know in the comments. And if you’d like to make sure you never miss one, click that subscribe button. Next month I’ll be recapping 2026, so it’s a big one!

P.A. Cornell

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I’m planning to attend Montreal WorldCon next year, so this feels a bit like a rehearsal for that, only I won’t have to worry about anything except enjoying myself. It’s been a while since I took any trip that was just for fun, so I’m really looking forward to it—even if my French is a little rusty.

Also this month, you’ll find me in Ottawa when I attend Can*Con. I believe this is my third time in attendance and this time I’ll be speaking on two panels, will be participating in a signing, and will also be attending the launch party for Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 4, which includes my Nebula-nominated story “Through the Machine.”

I’ll have SWAG for both my books with me to hand out during the signing and I’ll probably leave some on the freebie table as well. Bakka-Phoenix Books is the official Can*Con bookstore and have told me they’ll have copies for sale of both The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl if you haven’t yet purchased your copies.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

My horror story, “The Devil in the Desert,” was officially published in Folklore Horror Short Stories (Flame Tree Publishing). This is the fourth Flame Tree anthology I’ve had a story in, and it also happens to be one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written. “The Devil in the Desert” combines Chilean folklore, history from the California gold rush, and some of my own family lore. I really hope you check out this collection so you can read it.

I also had a science fiction story published in the inaugural issue of Canada’s Tome & Space. This one’s called, “A Vessel to Be Filled; A Fire to Be Kindled,” and is about the caretaker for a deep space shipyard who encounters a small craft in distress, into which a human mind has been uploaded.

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

This past month I made my second sale to Gavagai this year. The story’s called “Aerial” and is about parents accepting their children for who they are, even when that doesn’t match the picture they originally had in mind. This one’s very special to me, and I can’t wait to see it published!

I also made a second sale to StarShipSofa, who will be podcasting my story “Hard Time” (originally published in 2023 by The Dread Machine in their anthology Darkness Blooms). I really love this story and, sadly, wasn’t able to fit it into my collection, so I’m glad to see it reprinted here. I think you’re going to enjoy it.

RECENT INTERVIEWS

Myna Chang published an interview with me about my collection, The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories. We talked about themes, my favorite stories, the cover design, and more. Read it here.

I also spoke with Sley House Presents about my collection. This is one of my favorite interviews I’ve done yet. I even feel like I learned a few things about myself answering some of these questions. You can listen to that interview on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And most recently, I returned to The Fantasy and Sci-Fi Fanatic’s Podcast and spoke with Daniel Coolbaugh about The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories. You can watch that on YouTube or listen wherever podcasts are to be had.

RECENT REVIEWS

Speaking of The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories, A.C. Wise, who writes great reviews, gave it a read and shares her thoughts here.

Andrew Byers also gave my collection top marks. Check out his review here.

Alan K. Dell, who had previously reviewed my collection, also wrote a review for my other book, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl. You can read that one here.

My short story “A Game of Go” also made Turn & Work’s Shortlist this past month, which you can see here.

This same story also landed on Melissa Lingen’s list of short stories she’s enjoyed in the third quarter of the year. See that here.

And finally, Nicole Field reviewed Adventitious issue 1 for Interstellar Flight Magazine and included a review of my novelette “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife.” Adventitious editor Scott Beggs had a little fun with this review as seen in the public apology posted below that he shared on Instagram.

Scott shouldn’t feel too bad, though. I wrote this story and it never occurred to me either. Best I was able to manage was “caraoke.” Oh well. Thanks to Nicole for the laugh, not to mention a great review.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

I get a lot of compliments on the cover of The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories, but as I’ve said before, all the credit goes to Chilean illustrator, Loreto Salinas Retamal.

My publisher Stars and Sabers recently profiled this artist and you can read all about her credentials, process, and see more of her work here.

RANDOM STORY I LOVE

Each month I choose a story that has stuck with me to share with you. I offer it without comment, leaving it up to you to determine what you think of it. If you enjoy the chosen story, I encourage you to seek out more work by the author.

This month’s story is:

“Evan: A Remainder” by Jordan Kurella

*For all stories, see the individual publications for content warnings

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “Falling Forever”

Spoilers ahead, so read the story before going on.

“Falling Forever” may be a short little flash piece but there’s still quite a bit packed in there for me to talk about this month. It’s the kind of story that’s deceptively simple but leaves you with a lot to think about. It’s also somewhat unusual in that it wasn’t written for one of Codex’s flash contests like most of my shorter pieces but rather got its start in a different way.

It all comes down to the title, which is the idea that first inspired this story. Years ago I read a quote by an astronaut—I’m sorry, I can’t recall who—where they talked about what it felt like to be in zero-g. They said it was the sensation of falling, except that you just keep falling. When you’re in orbit of our planet, as they tend to be, they technically are falling toward Earth, around and around.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds awful to me. As much as I love all things space, I don’t think I’d have “the right stuff” to be an astronaut. I don’t even like rollercoasters, and that sensation of falling, even for just a split second, is enough for me to nope out if given a choice. I’ll take my space experiences in my imagination where I can control such things. Especially since that’s the least of what astronauts go through in space, though I won’t get into everything else they endure here.

In addition to the simple premise that inspired it, this particular story incorporates quite a few of what I’d call “hallmarks” of a P.A. Cornell story. For one thing, it plays with time, in this case in the form of a time loop. It also features an unexplained anomaly, malfunctioning tech, and classic human hubris.

It also has a lot of the things I tend to like in stories as a reader:

• It takes place in space.

• It’s about a character who doesn’t really have a way out of their problem and is now contemplating their situation, and all they have to lose.

• It might be about how their particular story ends—or not.

• It doesn’t tie everything up neatly at the end for the reader. That would be too easy.

But beyond all that, it also equates this very real falling sensation with falling in love, and shows how two people can remain connected across literal time and space, even when physically separated, if their bond is strong enough.

I don’t say much about my protagonist in this story. They have no name or gender, nor do we know these things about their partner. We don’t know for how long they’ve been together or whether or not they’re married, for instance. I deliberately chose not to reveal these things. I wanted readers to be able to insert anyone into this situation. Themselves, someone they know, someone imagined.

Ultimately, we don’t need to know these details because it could be anyone, really. Just a person out of options thinking about what matters most to them in what may (or may not) be their final moments.

I like stories in which characters think about stuff in their final moments because I can’t imagine a situation in which we’d be more honest with ourselves than at the end, when we’ve done everything we were ever going to do. When the clock ticks down to nothing.

Of course, in this story the clock keeps restarting, at least over the course of a few hours. This story also plays with the concept of time being a construct, and very much dependent on our point of view.

It also considers the idea that falling in love isn’t a singular act, it’s one that when that love is real, remains continuous. It’s a simplified idea, of course. Relationships require real work, but in a sense we get up each day and decide to keep working on them. You—at least in a sense—choose to keep loving that special person in your life, and in that way keep falling for them. Of course that love changes, and evolves over time. But if it’s important to you, you both follow where it leads, and evolve along with it. You continue to fall in love with each changing iteration of your partner. At least that’s how it goes when it’s going right.

The character in this story has such a relationship. In this situation, faced with the very real possibility of never seeing their partner again, they nevertheless reach out toward them through their thoughts and feelings. They’re together even in their separateness, in the same way that the essence of someone who dies can remain with you.

The story, for me at least, isn’t about whether this character is going to get out of the mess they’re in. After the end, you can imagine that they do. Maybe they get rescued. Maybe they find a way to save themself. Maybe not.

Someone—again, I don’t recall who—once said that post-apocalyptic fiction isn’t so much about what was lost, but what is still worth saving. And while this story isn’t post-apocalyptic, to me it’s the same kind of idea. It’s not about whether or not our hero/heroine survives, it’s about what matters most to them in that moment. And for them, it’s this person they love.

If they don’t make it, maybe the fact that they had the experience of loving this person is enough. Maybe it’s enough to get them through this. If they’re doomed to repeat this for eternity, maybe dwelling on thoughts of someone who feels like home to them is a comfort. A mercy. I could certainly think of worse things.

I’ve always found it interesting that we don’t always appreciate the people we love until we’ve lost them—or are faced with the possibility of losing them. Or at least we don’t always show them how much they mean to us while we still can. It’s so silly to me that the nicest things said about us are often at our funerals. Why do we not tell people what they mean to us when it could make more of a difference?

Maybe you’re the kind of person who does do that, in which case, good for you. The people in your circle are lucky to have you. I don’t really say either way if my protagonist is the kind of person who made sure their partner knew how much they meant to them. I hope so. But I do know they’re thinking of the most important person in their life now. I could’ve chosen to make it someone else. Their child, maybe, or a mentor, perhaps. But I liked the idea of falling in space equating to falling in love.

There’s a certain lack of control when it comes to love too. It can even be a scary thing for some. You can feel helpless, much like my protagonist does in their predicament. It’s all in how you look at it, I guess.

“Falling Forever” is more vignette than classic story, because the time loop forces that, in a sense, but also because I choose to focus on this one aspect that’s more character and emotion-driven than plot-driven. I’m shining a light on something a plot-driven narrative would only distract from. Here—like the main character—we’re forced to think about just one thing.

I like stories that leave me with questions to answer after the end. In this case: who would you think about in your final moments? Who would come to mind when you’re out of options? Who do you still feel connected to, even when you’re apart? What will you say to them while you still have time?

This story was written early last year and sold just a few months later to Factor Four. This magazine has been on indefinite hiatus this year and I really miss it. I made several sales to them and they were always a great option for some of my weirder flash stories that were more vibes than plot, like this one. I really hope they come back.

“Falling Forever” was originally published in August 2025 in Factor Four, Issue 49.

Thank you for joining me for this month’s newsletter. I’ll see you next month with new updates and more. If you like what you’ve read so far and haven’t yet subscribed, click the button below. Likes and shares are always appreciated as well.

P.A. Cornell

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Reactor, which had previously included it on a list of “Can’t Miss Indie Speculative Fiction for August” also recently put it on their list of “New SFF Crossover Books” so that’s pretty cool too.

Last month (August 22) was the official Toronto launch party for this book, at Bakka-Phoenix Books. There was a good turnout and several people who couldn’t make it, nevertheless ordered the book, so I signed some for them too, and tucked in some SWAG just for fun. If you missed it, I left the store quite a few signed copies, so if you’re in the area, stop by and grab yourself one, and help support a great indie bookstore in the process.

When I arrived at the store, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my publisher Stars and Sabers had sent me flowers, chosen for the colors of my book cover. So very sweet.

Those who attended this event got to hear me read from my title story “The Astronaut Among the Flowers,” one of two stories published for the first time in this collection.

Thank you to everyone who came out for this event braving the heat, humidity, and threat of thunderstorm. It means a lot. And thanks to those who asked such great questions during the Q&A.

The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories has already been getting some great reviews. Here’s a brief excerpt from the latest from Hugh at Turn & Work:

Hugh’s full review is linked on the book’s review page, along with several more quotes from early readers and reviewers. I actually had the pleasure of meeting Hugh in person at my launch, so that was a nice surprise too.

If you’ve also read this book, or my previous book, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, I’d really appreciate it if you could take a moment to review it on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever you review books. It can be as simple as a single line saying you enjoyed it. Social media shares also help immensely.

And please keep in mind that if purchasing my books is not in the cards for you, asking your local library to carry it also helps, without costing you a dime. In fact, I was delighted to learn that one of the books that had been ordered from Bakka-Phoenix Books for me to sign at my launch was from the Toronto Public Library’s Merril Collection, which is a special collection of science fiction and fantasy books. They also have copies of Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, and even my now out-of-print novella, Lost Cargo.

BIG NEWS!

Celebration is in order for Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 3. This anthology series edited by Stephen Kotowych is no stranger to awards, and this year is no exception. Last month, this latest volume won the Aurora Award for Best Related Work. It was also announced that this same book is a current finalist for the World Fantasy Award.

This book includes my AI cautionary tale “Bright Horizons” which was originally published by Flame Tree Publishing in their anthology Learning to Be Human. I’m thrilled for Stephen on this latest win, and for all my fellow TOC-mates as well. It’s nice to see Canadian short fiction getting the recognition it deserves.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Aside from having a new book out, “A Game of Go” is now finally free-to-read at Adventitious. If you’ve been following along, this story has had quite the adventure on its way to publication. With that in mind, I write about that and more in this month’s “Story Behind the Story” further down. Adventitious editor, Scott Beggs, also wrote recently about why he chose the stories for Issue Four, including “A Game of Go” here.

And on August 24, Year’s Best Arthropod Short Fiction, Vol. 3 was published. This book includes my story, “And I Will Read to You About Butterflies,” first published in Heartlines Spec last year. I’m honored that it was selected for this anthology, that has such a fun and unique theme. Also how cool is the cover art by Canadian illustrator Babe&Oak?

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

I recently sold my dystopian short story “Compliance” to Apex Magazine. This will mark my second appearance in Apex and I couldn’t be more thrilled. “Compliance” is one of my newer stories, written earlier this year, so I was thrilled it sold so quickly and to a market I really love. The story plays with consent and body autonomy and will leave readers with a lot to think about.

I also received word that my story “So Many Things to See” will be included in Trollbreath Magazine’s first anthology, encompassing fiction they published in 2024 and 2025. The anthology is scheduled for release in early November.

RECENT INTERVIEWS

With my new book out, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews. The latest ones:

• The Tiny Bookcase podcast – where I read from my collection, as well as from Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl. We also discussed my work in general, and even Lego.

• Writers Drinking Coffee podcast – Short but sweet conversation about my collection The Astronaut Among the Flowers, which the podcast host Jeannie Warner loved.

• Strange Speculations – A.P. Thayer takes a deep dive into my horror stories “The Devil in the Desert” and “From the Ice and the Darkness.” We also discuss folklore, religion, my new books, and more. This is a great interview. Give it a read.

• Paul Semel – Paul and I talk about my new collection, my other books, some influences and more.

Aside from those, I also recorded an interview with the podcast Sley House Presents. Host Trevor Williamson also loved my collection and was kind enough to write a wonderful review. This interview should be out soon, and when it is, I’ll link it on my socials.

And I also completed a written interview for Myna Chang’s MicroVerse, and that one should be out around September 10th.

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO

Codex’s “Flash Savior of the Universe” contest is officially over for this year. I managed to write a flash piece for all three weeks, which I’m taking as a win, though I feel like at least two of those stories could use a little work. But considering it’s been tough for me to write this year for several reasons, gotta take the wins where you can get ’em.

Nevertheless, I ended up in the top three scorers for my division, which came as a surprise, but a welcome one.

I’ve also been busy reading the finalist stories for Dream Foundry’s Emerging Writers Contest. It’s been a real honor for me—along with my co-judge R.S.A. Garcia—to read these stories and select our top ones. It certainly wasn’t an easy decision. The ten finalists were announced in this Bluesky thread, along with the finalists for the art portion of the contest. And the announcement for the winning stories and art can be found here.

RANDOM STORY I LOVE

Each month I choose a story that has stuck with me to share with you. I offer it without comment, leaving it up to you to determine what you think of it. If you enjoy the chosen story, I encourage you to seek out more work by the author.

This month’s story is:

“Logistics” by A.J. Fitzwater

*For all stories, see the individual publications for content warnings

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “A Game of Go”

Spoilers ahead, so read the story before you continue.

I’ve always been curious about the game GO. If you’re not familiar, it’s a board game that’s along the lines of chess or checkers, but much more difficult than either of these. Boards come in different sizes, with the smallest being beginner boards, and increasing in size and difficulty as players develop their skills.

A few years back, my husband and I decided to buy a set so we could learn the game together. We haven’t made a lot of progress, but I do enjoy the game and would like to continue working on it so I can get better at it.

In the meantime, though, it inspired this story you just read. If it’s not obvious, I use elements of GO strategy as a framework for the story, but it also serves as a metaphor for the challenge faced by Christopher, the boy in the story.

I’ve published a couple of AI cautionary tales lately (“Bright Horizons” and “Through the Machine”) and I wanted to write something with a more positive spin on AI. This was how I came up with Ava, the AI that runs the SmartHome in which Christopher has spent his whole life.

My collection includes a story called “Everything That I Am” which is about an AI mother, and similarly, Ava is also a take on this. She’s the only mother Christopher has ever known, and simultaneously she has served as his whole world for fifteen years. This story, like others I’ve written, is about the lengths a parent will go to for their child. It also touches on death and grief, despite not being about the death of a biological person.

I think it’s natural for parents to worry about what will happen if they pass away while their children still depend entirely on them. My husband and I made sure we had wills outlining what we wanted. My own parents made similar preparations when my brother and I were young. And I’ve seen other parents do the same or heard them talk about their fears should the worst occur.

It might seem morbid to think about these things, but it’s also practical. If you can’t be there to care for your child, then who will? This is essentially the dilemma Ava is faced with. She also has to deal with the fact that in protecting Christopher, she has also isolated him from his own kind, which makes things difficult for her now that she is quickly deteriorating and Christopher is running out of time.

No parent is perfect. We’re all new at this—and yes, it’s a different experience with each child—and we’re all doing our best. Sometimes, we look back and in hindsight see where we might have done things differently. Unfortunately, you only get one shot.

The story also serves as food for thought as we become increasingly dependent on technology. To what point is this good for us? What are we left with should this technology fail? There are other themes throughout as well, though I’ll let you figure those out for yourself.

If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, or follow me on social media, you probably know this story had quite an adventure on its road to publication. It was actually first accepted last year by Analog magazine. A legacy science fiction magazine that had long been a dream market for me.

After ten years of submitting, I’d finally sent them something they felt fit, and I could not have been more thrilled. But that joy was short-lived. Unfortunately, my acceptance had come just after this magazine (and four others) were sold to a new publisher. That meant a new contract, and that’s where the problems began.

I was one of the first writers to receive this new contract and quickly discovered that it was anything but standard for what I was used to in this industry. It was more akin to the kind of contract you might see in the entertainment industry, only the entertainment industry tends to compensate people better for their trouble than short fiction publishing does.

At the time, there were some pretty concerning clauses in that contract that I wrote about in past newsletters and won’t rehash here. But if you google Must Read Magazines, you’ll likely come across the various articles that were written about this contract and the authors who ultimately walked away from their sales to this and their other magazines.

I was one of those, unfortunately. After seven months of attempting to negotiate a contract more in line with what’s expected in short fiction publishing—and working with other colleagues in SFWA and elsewhere—it finally became clear they were unwilling to change their contract enough for me. I was left with no choice but to withdraw my story.

The whole ordeal couldn’t have come at a worse time. It was immensely stressful for me in and of itself, but while this was going on I was also in the process of helping my elderly parents transition to a retirement home. This involved downsizing their belongings significantly, and selling their apartment, none of which they were in any condition to help with. It was mostly on me alone, since I was the only one close enough and with a flexible enough work schedule to be there as often as was needed.

Add to this the fact that around the same time, my dad ended up in the hospital and received a very difficult diagnosis. If that’s not enough, I was dealing with some health concerns of my own, on top of other things I won’t get into here. Suffice it to say, it was a lot, and all at once.

And all during the same time that I was fighting for a fair contract for not just myself, but all my fellow writers, particularly those with less experience who might end up signing a contract with clauses they didn’t fully understand.

So I’m not exaggerating when I say 2025 was a really rough year for me. I came out of it feeling drained and depressed, and couldn’t write anything new for months, which is part of the reason I consider the three flash pieces I wrote for this year’s FSoTU contest a victory just for being written. I’m still recovering. Still healing.

But one thing this situation didn’t do was cause me to doubt my own work. I knew “A Game of Go” was a good story. I knew that even if I had to pull it from Analog, and walk away from a dream market, it would still sell eventually.

At the time, Adventitious didn’t yet exist. After the whole thing with MRM happened, Scott Beggs, editor of Adventitious, wanted to do things differently. He went straight to the source and started by asking authors what qualities their dream market would have. I was among the many authors who chimed in with suggestions like a strong stance against AI-generated fiction and art, pro-level payment, and above all, a fair contract.

When Scott first launched the website ahead of opening to submissions for the inaugural issue, I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of the stories listed as an example of the kind of thing he wanted for his new magazine, was my own “Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont.” I later joked that I would submit something and receive a form rejection, despite this.

As it turned out, I was wrong, and instead Scott sent me an acceptance for my novelette “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife,” a story that’s very special to me and that I’m extremely proud of. Scott liked it so much that he built the rest of Issue One around it, for which I’m so honored.

My second acceptance would come a little later with “A Game of Go,” now included in Issue Four. Scott evidently saw in it what Analog editor Trevor Quachri did and decided it was the kind of thing he wanted for Adventitious.

It’s almost ironic to me that I went from a contract that was so problematic to me that I had to walk away from a sale, to one that was made from an author wish list. Having worked with Adventitious before, I knew what to expect and was delighted with this acceptance.

I also liked that after a brief exclusivity for their subscribers, Adventitious makes their stories free-to-read. Analog has a decent readership, being such a prestigious market, but being online for anyone to read is a definite plus for me. After all, the main reason I even attempt to publish my work at all is so I can share it with as many readers as possible.

That’s why I’m thrilled this story is now freely available for everyone. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you found the journey it took to get here worth it. If you have thoughts about it, I’d love to hear from you in the comments for this newsletter, or you can contact me here. And if you enjoyed it, I appreciate any shares so others can find their way to it as well.

“A Game of Go” was originally published in August 2026 in Adventitious, Issue 4.

Thanks, as always, for reading. And once again, thank you to those who came to my book launch to show their support in person.

P.A. Cornell

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Read the introduction from New York Times bestselling author, Jonathan Maberry.

Read what early readers and reviewers are saying.

Read about the cover created by Chilean artist Loreto Salinas Retamal.

I’m so excited to finally share this book that represents my first decade as a published speculative fiction writer with all of you. I hope you enjoy the stories. If you do, please leave a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or wherever you review books. Social media shares and word-of-mouth are also great. And if paying out-of-pocket isn’t in the stars for you, remember you can ask your local library to carry it and that works for me too.

Cheers!

P.A. Cornell

In fact, pre-orders are super important when it comes to the success of a book. They tell booksellers that this is a book they should stock, or in the case of sites like Amazon, that it’s in demand. They tell my publisher that readers are interested in what I’m writing. And they help generate more buzz so people who might not have come across it are more likely to.

That said, if money’s tight right now, I get it. You can still help out by spreading the word about this book. You can also ask your local library to carry it. And if you’re on Goodreads, you can add it to your “Want to Read” list which helps bring it to the attention of other Goodreads users, and will serve as a reminder for you.

And as always, reviews are also super helpful, so if you read this or any of my books, please remember to review on Goodreads, Amazon, or wherever you review books. Reviews don’t have to be long or in-depth. You can even copy/paste the same one in multiple places. A minute of your time could mean all the difference to me.

Speaking of reviews, this book just got a glowing review from Alan K. Dell. Among other things, Alan had this to say:

Stars and Sabers recently revealed the cover of this collection and shared it here. This includes some information about the artist, Loreto Salinas Retamal. I also wrote a little thing about Loreto:

The cover was completed almost a year ago and I have to say it’s been really hard to keep it under wraps because I love it so much. The art is based on some of my descriptions in the title story for my collection “The Astronaut Among the Flowers,” a brand new science fiction piece that means a lot to me. I can’t wait for you to read it.

I also recently shared the introduction from New York Times Bestselling Author, Jonathan Maberry. I’m honored that Jonathan took the time to read my work and write this piece for my collection, and I’m incredibly moved by what he had to say.

If you missed it, Reactor Magazine recently listed The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories as a “Can’t Miss” indie title for August. You can read the entire article here, but here’s what they had to say about my book:

Hmm…is there another collection from me already in the works? Time will tell. In the meantime, there’s this one, and you can order your copy today!

Pre-Order My Book

Aside from my collection, I also have a couple of pieces of short fiction coming out this month that I’m especially excited to see published.

I’ve spoken a lot about “A Game of Go” — the story I was forced to pull from Analog and that now appears in the August issue (Issue 4) of Adventitious. I have to say, I love the covers Adventitious sources. I mean, check out this art for Issue 4 by artist Kevin McKie:

How cool is this? As usual with this magazine, the issue will at first be exclusive to Adventitious’ Patreon subscribers (and yes, it’s very worth subscribing). Eventually, though, my story will be made free-to-read, and when that happens, I’ll announce it on my socials.

In the meantime, this issue has already been reviewed by Jay of Tar Vol on, who highlights my story as one of the ones that stood out for him. See what he had to say here.

The other story I’m excited about is “The Devil in the Desert,” which will be out on August 25 in Flame Tree Publishing’s Folklore Horror anthology. This one won’t be free-to-read but I really hope you’ll consider purchasing this anthology. Flame Tree puts out high quality books filled with equally good stories from both contemporary and classic authors. I’m especially happy with how this one turned out. It’s a horror story that incorporates elements of Chilean lore, with a little family lore, and some history about the California gold rush. You won’t want to miss this book!

And I haven’t forgotten about my other book, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, which came out earlier this year. This one recently got a lovely review from Turn & Work. Check it out!

RECENT FICTION SALES

My sff story “Tanya Gathers Pebbles” was just accepted for publication by the Missed-Fits anthology from publisher Calendar of Fools. This story involves mysterious invisible portals that appear around the world, and the one woman who can sense where they are. I look forward to sharing it with you soon.

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

RECENT INTERVIEWS

If you missed it, a while back I spoke with Daniel Coolbaugh of The Fantasy and Sci-Fi Fanatics Podcast and that episode came out on July 5. We talked about my books, my short fiction, and lots more. It was a great interview. Watch it on YouTube or listen here:

RSS.com

Spotify

Or wherever you get your podcasts.

Daniel and I enjoyed our chat so much, in fact, that we plan to talk again this very month. We’ll likely focus a bit more on my collection, since it’ll be my latest release, but I’m sure that won’t be all. I’m looking forward to this conversation, since Daniel always asks great questions. I’ll share the link once it goes live.

I also recently talked to Alan K. Dell about my approach to fiction-writing. You can read that interview here.

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO

As many of you know, I occasionally participate in flash fiction writing contests run by the Codex writers group. Last month marked the start of Flash Savior of the Universe 2026, and that continues into August.

So far I’ve written two new flash pieces and hope to write a third before the contest is over.

For those who may not know, the contest is for “bragging rights” because the main idea is to motivate participants into writing. The real reward is to come out of it with some new stories, which you’ll hopefully sell later.

I skipped this particular contest in 2021, but otherwise have participated annually since 2019, and during that time it has led to seven sales for me. Those stories are:

• Shiny Things (Things With Feathers: Stories of Hope)

• So Many Things to See (Trollbreath) *More on this one later

• Tabula Rasa (Departure Mirror Quarterly - Reprinted in Polar Borealis)

• Hard Times at The Four Pines Motel (Short Circuit)

• Side Effects May Vary (Winner of the Unicorn Mech Suit Short Story Contest)

• The Space Between Us (Lightspeed)

• Twelve Things that Will Occur Immediately Following Your Invention of Teleportation (Factor Four)

And now for something a little different: C.J. Tavares has been up to some pretty cool stuff of her own. She created this really great self-insert TTRPG designed to get players reading more fiction. Several authors donated stories, including me. Give her game a try when you get a chance!

WHERE TO FIND ME NEXT

August 22 at 2pm, I’ll be in Toronto for the launch of my new book The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories. This event will take place at Bakka-Phoenix Books. If you’re in the area, come by and say hi. I’m told there will be snacks and I’ll also have some SWAG to give away.

RSVP & Reserve Your Book

RANDOM STORY I LOVE

Each month I choose a story that has stuck with me to share with you. I offer it without comment, leaving it up to you to determine what you think of it. If you enjoy the chosen story, I encourage you to seek out more work by the author.

This month’s story is:

“The Stories We Tell Each Other” by Matt Krizan

*For all stories, see the individual publications for content warnings

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “So Many Things to See”

Spoilers ahead, so read the story before going on.

Earlier, I mentioned that my first time participating in the Flash Savior of the Universe contest was back in 2019. It was during that particular iteration of the contest that I wrote “So Many Things to See” though during the contest it went by the title “Imagine the Possibilities.”

The story was very well received by the other contest participants that year, landing me in first place in my division for the week—the first time I’d scored that well during a Codex contest.

I’d previously had an idea about writing a story that involved a pair of sisters walking through a post-apocalyptic setting. I knew one of them would be blind, but I didn’t really know where the story was going, beyond that.

So in the third round of that year’s contest, I saw the prompt: “Think about the themes/styles that tend to show up frequently in your work and pick one. Now take that story element and subvert it or use it in some other unexpected way.”

One thing I write a lot about are human relationships of all kinds. I especially like writing about siblings, but up until that point I’d mostly written about sibling relationships that weren’t so great. I thought I’d subvert it by depicting one that was positive, for a change.

For me, the story is really about the love these two sisters have for each other. It’s not so much about their world, or even the fact that Elke is blind. These of course factor in, but my focus was on the fact that whatever happens, they’re there for each other.

When I first wrote the story, it was a bit longer than the 1000-word limit the contest has. I had to trim it considerably, and though it scored well, comments repeatedly said it would be even better longer. I agreed, so it was a version closer to the original that I ultimately sent out on submission.

One thing that was important to me when writing a disabled character was that I didn’t want her to be completely dependent on other people. Elke was born blind, but she functions as normally in her world as anyone—to the point that Lia doesn’t at first realize her implant has failed completely. In Lia’s mind, her little sister relies on her. But by the end we see that it’s actually Elke who’s been using her imagination to keep her sister’s morale up.

If you know anything about survival in extreme circumstances, one of the key things that can help someone get through the worst of times is a positive mindset. Elke may be young, but she intuitively understands this, and finds a way to make sure both their spirits are lifted.

In the end, Elke dies. I could’ve gone either way with this, but I like to think that she had enough spirit and life in her that this is something that will be carried forward through her sister. Their love, after all, can never die. And it might also have subconsciously had something to do with my grandmother’s sister dying. This time it’s Lia who lives.

Lia has a tough road ahead, going on without her sister, or her parents, but Elke doesn’t leave her alone until she gets her to a good place where she can make a fresh start. In many ways, Elke saves her. Lia thought she was the strong one and now sees that it was always Elke, but she’s learned from her sister, and that’s a strength she’ll carry with her for the rest of her life.

In keeping with the theme of a positive attitude, Lia practices something she learned from her parents: she counts her blessings each day. To be clear, toxic positivity is definitely a thing, and I’m not saying that’s what we need to aspire to. But it doesn’t hurt to stop and look around now and then and take note of any silver linings—while also acknowledging that some things just plain suck. This is something I try to do for myself, and I find it helps me take things for granted a lot less.

While I was still sending this story out on submission, I remember one of the comments I got in a rejection was that the editor wanted to know more about the events leading up to this post-apocalyptic world. Clearly this was not the editor for me, because—as the name of this newsletter says—it’s not really about that. And that’s true for a good portion of my work.

Sure, I could’ve written something more in line with what this editor wanted. I could’ve written about some war maybe or an EMP, or certainly done more than just hint at some catastrophe. But to me, that’s a whole other story. And it might even be a good story. But it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell.

Ultimately, it found its home in Trollbreath magazine with an editor who understood what I was going for. I’m glad I didn’t compromise my vision for it, because I really like the way this one turned out, and many readers do too.

“So Many Things to See” was originally published in May 2025 in Trollbreath, Issue 4.

Thank you for reading my newsletter (not to mention, my fiction). If you haven’t already done so, click the link below to subscribe and never miss an update—or any exclusive subscriber perks! And if you like what you’ve read, feel free to share it elsewhere online.

Cheers!

P.A. Cornell

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This is just a quick, unscheduled message to my loyal subscribers letting you know that my science fiction and fantasy collection, The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories, is now available for pre-order!

From the publisher:

Find out what early readers are saying and order your copy today by clicking the link:

Get this book!

Or ask for it wherever you buy your books!

P.A. Cornell

Last month I talked about having to walk away from a sale to Analog magazine due to being unable to come to a contractual agreement with the publisher, Must Read Magazines. The good news is that this same story, “A Game of Go,” has since sold to Adventitious and will be out in their August issue.

I bring this up again because, relevant to this, David Steffen, who runs The Submission Grinder, recently posted on Bluesky about his decision to keep the five magazines owned by this publisher delisted on his site. In his post, David made it clear that the editors of these magazines have nothing to do with his decision, and also linked to both mine and Scott Edelman’s public statements on our experiences with this publisher.

To make a long story short, David communicated with MRM for quite some time in an attempt to help them come up with a boilerplate contract that would be in keeping with the industry standard. This was done in partnership with SFWA. David made it clear to MRM that if he saw a fair boilerplate from them, he would re-instante the listings for these magazines. MRM, however, continued to send contracts that varied from author to author and that contained non-standard clauses that each individual author had to negotiate on their own. To this date, David has not seen a “boilerplate” contract from MRM and they have not communicated with him in nearly a year.

David felt the need to comment on this after several people asked why the magazines continue to not be listed, despite SFWA saying they’d seen some contract improvements. I can relate as, over the past year, I’ve also had people reach out to tell me they signed the contract and thought it was fine.

Here’s the thing those people may not be aware of:

The contract they’ve seen is not the contract I was sent. I was one of the first authors to receive the new contract after MRM bought the magazines—before even SFWA was involved. My seven-month negotiation with MRM did yield some changes. For one thing, they ended up walking back the most infamous clause; the one that asked authors to waive their moral rights. To be clear though, while the words “moral rights” no longer appear in the contract, the last version of it I saw did include wording that asked for something similar, which I was still not on board with despite SFWA spinning it as an improvement.

Which brings me to my next point: just because one author thinks the current contract is fine, doesn’t mean we all feel that way. What’s a dealbreaker for me, may not be a dealbreaker for you. Even if your agent says the contract’s fine, it’s your signature that goes on it. YOU need to be okay with what you’re signing and that begins with understanding what each clause means.

And finally, it’s not just about the contract. Selling stories is a business. The contract is only part of that business. For me at least, it also matters who I do business with. Ultimately, if a publisher is in breach of a short story contract, writers are unlikely to go after them in court. Lawyers, after all, cost a hell of a lot more than the 8 cents per word (if we’re lucky) we make on a story. So there’s an element of trust there that’s inherent.

When it came down to it, my gut was telling me I couldn’t trust these people with my story. I might be wrong about that. For the sake of my colleagues who have signed, I hope I am wrong. But after the way I was treated, I just didn’t feel these were people I wanted to be in business with. Others may have had very different experiences from mine, and that’s fine. I’m glad for them. What I can’t tolerate is being gaslit by those who look at their situation and assume mine was the same, and that I’ve overreacted.

Because the thing is, there are plenty of people who know my situation intimately and could tell you that’s not the case. One of those people is David Steffen. There are also members of SFWA’s contracts committee. And several more I won’t name.

You see, because I didn’t feel I could trust the people I was negotiating with, I made sure all my communications with them were witnessed by BCC-ing all those people, both named and not. Furthermore, I refused to communicate with them in any form but in writing. I also consulted with several colleagues throughout my negotiatiations, to make sure that I was interpreting the clauses correctly and asking for changes that were reasonable and standard. Each time I asked for changes this was run by SFWA, by David, and by many other people who helped along the way.

So it was almost amusing to me when this past month at the Nebula conference I was approached by a reliable source who told me MRM had been—in their words—“trashing” me to SFWA, saying I “wasn’t even capable of articulating what I wanted from this contract.” Of course SFWA knew exactly what I’d asked for and how I’d asked for it. They’d read the same emails. In fact, they’d advised me on a lot of it, and read over everything before I ever sent it to MRM.

You might think it bothers me to learn they were saying these things about me. It doesn’t. Because the thing is, I kind of expected this. That’s why I made sure to get everything in writing. It also confirms to me that I made the right decision when I walked away from that sale. These are clearly not the caliber of people I’m used to doing business with. The person I talked to also mentioned some concessions MRM made for other writers, but not for me. They told me, “They just didn’t know who you were.” All I could think was: damn right they didn’t. They had no idea who they were dealing with. All along they thought I’d just cave for a chance to see my story in Analog. I did see it, by the way. We made it as far as the layout and I was sent the galleys for it. I still have them. But the one thing I don’t have are regrets.

In the end, it wasn’t just about me. The whole reason I consulted with so many colleagues was so we’d hopefully see a boilerplate contract we’d all be happy with. I’m glad at least some improvements came out of that. That said, I also think David Steffen is absolutely right not to relist these magazines. How can he even do that when he hasn’t been sent a current boilerplate? (Assuming there is one) He can’t very well tell authors all is well if he can’t be sure.

It came as a breath of fresh air when last year Scott Beggs, editor of Adventitious, reached out to authors and asked what we’d like to see in a new magazine. Not just the contract (though that was part of it) but everything. We all chimed in with our wishlist not even thinking we’d see him incorporate everything we were asking for. And yet, I can tell you that he did, and working with this magazine has been a joy and probably one of the most author-friendly experiences I’ve ever had. Which is why I’m so glad that even though I had to pull “A Game of Go” from Analog, I will be able to see it in Adventitious next month. I can’t wait for you all to read it. I think you’re really going to like it. But don’t take my word for it, take it from the man who ultimately left me no choice but to walk away from the original acceptance:

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

My latest publication is a horror short called “From the Ice and the Darkness” that came out June 16 in the Stars and Sabers anthology, Of Dread, Decay, and Doom. This book features work by top writers from around the world, including Eugen Bacon, Renan Bernardo, Dennis K. Crosby, Somto Ihezue, Pedro Iniguez, Ai Jiang, Eugenia Triantafyllou, and many more. Horror lovers are sure to find plenty to enjoy here.

If you missed it, my story “440 Broad Street, Apartment 4C” was recently reprinted in StarShipSofa. This story originally came out in print in Frivolous Comma, back in January of 2023, so it’s great to see it out again and in audio for the first time.

June also saw my Nebula-nominated short story, “Through the Machine,” reprinted, this time in Nebula Awards Showcase 61 (the anthology SFWA publishes with all the short form prose and poetry finalists).

RECENT FICTION SALES

Speaking of contracts, I recently sold my science fiction short story “A Vessel to Be Filled; A Fire to Be Kindled” to Canadian magazine, Tome & Space. This story features a sentient spaceship and a deep space shipyard operator who has a hard time relating to other people. I’m excited to share this one with readers.

And in more good news, my story “A World Unto Myself”—originally published in Apex in 2023—will be reprinted once more in the Shacklebound Books anthology Wired Hearts.

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

RECENT INTERVIEWS

If you missed my interview with What Does Star Wars Mean to You? podcast, you can find it here. This was such a fun chat. Normally my interviews are all about writing—and we do talk about writing a bit—but we also had a blast just talking Star Wars, as fans do.

RECENT REVIEWS

A friend came across a really nice review by Sara L. Uckelman of SFF Reviews for my novelette “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife” and sent it my way. Among other things, here’s what Sara said:

Also, Maria Haskins recently reviewed my flash story “Time Management” in the June issue of Locus.

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO

This past month I attended the 61^st Nebula Awards and Conference in Chicago. As a finalist, I had my hands full. There was a reception, an autographing session, and of course the awards ceremony. I was also on a panel.

But I did get several opportunities to just spend time with friends, and meet some new friends as well. Mary Robinette Kowal was kind enough to invite me to meet her cat Elsie. If you’re not familiar with Elsie, she’s pretty Internet famous, as she’s able to communicate with humans using special buttons. I’ve followed her progress learning new words for quite a while now, and as a cat person, I wasn’t going to pass up a chance to meet her.

Elsie asked me for treats while I was there and did some tricks for me. She was a real sweetheart. I also took this opportunity to ask Mary Robinette to sign my copy of her book The Calculating Stars. Not only did she do so, she also included Elsie’s “pawtograph,” making it all the more special.

I was traveling with my husband, and we were also able to sneak away for a morning to visit downtown Chicago. Limited time and uncooperative weather didn’t let us do much tourist stuff, but we were able to check out The Art Institute of Chicago which, as an art lover, had been on my bucket list for a while. I took a million pictures there, but here’s a small sampling:

Also, last month I participated in the first Canada Fiction Fest, which showcases fiction by Canadian authors. I did a reading of an excerpt of my novelette Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl. And later the same day I participated in a panel on Exploring the Unknown in Science Fiction. If you missed them, both were recorded and can be viewed for a limited time on YouTube.

WHERE TO FIND ME NEXT

Next month, I’ll be in Toronto for the launch of my debut short fiction collection, The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories. This event will take place at Bakka-Phoenix Books. There’s no sign-up yet, but save the date for August 22 at 2pm. I’d love to see you there!

RANDOM STORY I LOVE

Each month I choose a story that has stuck with me to share with you. I offer it without comment, leaving it up to you to determine what you think of it. If you enjoy the chosen story, I encourage you to seek out more work by the author.

This month’s story is:

“Blank Slate” by Carol Scheina

*For all stories, see the individual publications for content warnings

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “Feathers”

Spoilers ahead, so read the story before going on.

Like a lot of my flash stories, “Feathers” came out of my participation in Codex’s Weekend Warrior contest. It was actually the result of combining two prompts during the unscored “bonus” first week of the contest. These prompts were: “What are you afraid to know? Are you afraid for yourself, for a friend, or something else? Why?” and “Your character or someone they love has an unusual allergy. What are they allergic to? How does this allergy affect them on an important occasion?”

This got me thinking about fears, specifically the kind of fear parents feel when it comes to the well-being of their children. Caring for your children—their safety and happiness—is generally speaking, a good thing. But sometimes our fears and need to protect our children can become a problem that causes more harm than good.

So it was with this in mind that I started writing this story about a mother who is also a caregiver professionally, and how her attempt to protect her child backfires. The “allergy” part was the inspiration for the physical effect this has on Angie, the daughter.

Angie is beautiful and special, but as a human/angel hybrid—or nephilim—she’s also different. Her mother wants to conceal this so that she doesn’t suffer the pain of being different from the other kids. it’s not mentioned in the story, but in my mind, I saw the mother as someone who’d experienced being bullied in her own childhood and wanted to spare her child that sadness.

But for Angie, having to hide who she is, destroys her self-esteem. She starts to see herself as wrong, somehow, rather than special or beautiful. Her pain begins to present physically, as her feathers essentially decay and fall off.

Although it didn’t receive a score during the contest, this story was fairly well-received and wound up being held for consideration by Worlds of Possibility before the contest was even over. I was very happy when it sold and was subsequently published in Worlds of Possibility, Volume 2.

This past May, editor Julia Rios celebrated a triple birthday (hers, Stephanie Burgis’, and mine) by publishing the story once more in audio, which I love and which also makes it more accessible.

Coincidentally, both mine and Stephanie’s stories happened to include characters with feathers, and both are about accepting differences. This is a theme that’s been important to me, particularly as it pertains to parents accepting their children for who they are, rather than who they imagined they might be.

During a pregnancy or in the early days of parenthood, it’s easy to get caught up in your fantasies for what your child will be, but it’s important for parents to remember that their children are people in and of themselves. As their personalities develop and they grow, they’ll discover who they are, and will make that known. To resist it and attempt to impose your own preferences on your child can cause more harm than good—to both your child and your relationship with your child.

Angie’s mother only partly accepts her at first. She sees Angie as beautiful and unique, but she also forces her to keep that hidden, and raises her to be ashamed of the very thing that makes her who she is. Only when she finally accepts her daughter completely and supports her in shining as her true self, are they both able to heal.

This doesn’t mean their journey will be easy, but it’s one they can take together, and that’s ultimately what children need from their parents.

“Feathers” was originally published in June 2025 in Worlds of Possibility, Volume 2.

Thanks as always for joining me here. If you’re not yet subscribed click the button below. This newsletter’s free for everyone but subscribers do get occasional exclusive perks. And if you like what you’ve read today, click to let me know and feel free to share online.

P.A. Cornell

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RECENT NEWS

On May 28 (My birthday) the table of contents for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2026 was announced. While I didn’t make the final cut, my Nebula-nominated story “Through the Machine” did make the list of Notable Stories. Honored to be among all these great authors and their work.

The Halifax Examiner ran a story on Canadian speculative fiction. It begins with an in-depth look at the brand new TriCon convention, but also highlights Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 3 as their book of the week. My own story, “Bright Horizons” is named here among the standout stories of this volume.

RECENT FICTION SALES

I’ve been itching to share this news for months now and I’m thrilled to finally be able to do it.

First though, some of you may recall that last year I received a short story acceptance from Analog, a market I’d been trying to crack for years. This came just after this magazine—and a few others—were sold to new ownership. That also meant a new contract which was much discussed in the speculative fiction community because a lot of people weren’t happy with it.

As one of the first authors to see this contract, I wasn’t willing to sign it as it was, and spent seven months attempting to negotiate something more writer-friendly (for both myself and other writers), with the assistance of SFWA and other members of the community. Ultimately, unable to come to an agreement, I was left with no choice but to walk away from that sale. If you want more details about this saga, I wrote about it in my newsletter here, here, and here.

Despite having to shut the door on a dream market, I never lost faith in my story. I continued submitting it—though I admit that after what I went through, I was picky about what markets I sent it to. I wanted it to end up in a good home with not just a fair contract, but where people would be able to read it. So it’s with utter delight that I can now say that my story, “A Game of Go” will be included in Adventitious, Issue 4 this August.

This is my second sale to this market. Earlier this year they also published my novelette, “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife.” I can tell you that my experience with Adventitious has been wonderful and that signing their very writer-friendly contract was a joy. Again, if you haven’t subscribed to this publication or joined their patreon, please do. I’d love to see them stick around for a long, long time. They’ve been getting great press for their first few issues, and I know that’ll continue going forward.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

If you missed it, my latest publication was my science fiction story “Expendable Me” on May 19, in Gavagai. This is my first time appearing in this fairly new publication. Find the story here.

And while not exactly a new publication, “Feathers” (Worlds of Possibility 2) is newly available in audio as editor Julia Rios (who shares my birthday) decided to surprise me and Stephanie Burgis (who also shares my birthday) by narrating our stories on—you guessed it—our birthday.

Coincidentally, these stories have a lot in common. They both involve feathered characters, and as Julia Rios put it, both are about: “parents and children and accepting differences and allowing your children to fly”. I love how that worked out so perfectly for this birthday release.

Read or listen to “Feathers” and Stephanie Burgis’ “So, Your Child Turned Out to Be a Phoenix: A Few Words of Advice and Responses to Common Concerns Expressed by Parents, from Dr. V. Goldfinch, PhD” here.

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

I have a couple of publications coming this month. First up is my Nebula-nominated story “Through the Machine” in the Nebula Awards Showcase 61 anthology, out June 9.

And on June 16, Stars and Sabers releases their horror anthology Of Dread, Decay, and Doom, which includes my story “From the Ice and the Darkness.”

RECENT INTERVIEWS

Last month I was a guest on the What Does Star Wars Mean to You? podcast. This was such a fun interview, talking Star Wars with fellow fans and discussing how it’s impacted my life and my writing career. The interview will be out tomorrow, so keep an eye out for that.

RECENT REVIEWS

The Skiffy and Fanty Show’s Trish Matson recently reviewed Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl. Among other things, Trish had this to say:

If you haven’t yet read this book, you can find purchase links here. Heads up to Canadians that some have had trouble getting print copies from Amazon.ca, so you may want to try an alternative vendor for that. Indigo.ca carries it, as does indie bookstore Bakka Phoenix Books (both included through the link)—but any bookstore should be able to get it, and let’s face it, giving your money to an indie is a lot better than giving it to Bezos anyway.

I also came across Jayde Holmes’ look at the current Hugo, Locus, and Nebula finalists for Best Short Story. This includes my story, “Through the Machine,” and Jayde had some really nice things to say about it. Among them, this:

Here’s Jayde’s full write-up.

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO

I recently typed “The End” on draft one of a story that did not come easy. I can’t really talk about this one just yet, but it’s something kind of special that I’m excited to share with everyone when it’s ready.

I also finally get to share that I’m one of the judges (along with the amazing R.S.A. Garcia) for Dream Foundry’s Contest for Emerging Writers. It’s an honor to have been asked to do this and I know I can speak for both my co-judge and myself when I say we’re eager to start reading stories.

The deadline for submissions is June 8, so get those entries in soon!

WHERE TO FIND ME NEXT

If you’re planning on attending the 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference, I plan to be there too. I wasn’t originally on any programming but now I’ll be taking part in the “Worldbuilding in General Short Fiction and Middle Grade Fiction: How Is It Different?” panel. This panel will be taking place June 6 at 1pm Chicago time. Here’s the panel description:

The panel’s followed by a half-hour meet-n-greet. See you there! And, of course, as one of this year’s finalists for the award, I’ll be attending the various finalist events as well. So you might see me at one of the following:

• June 5 - 6pm: Nebula finalist reception

• June 5 - 8pm: Nebula finalists and VIP autographing session

• June 6 - 6pm: Nebula Awards Reception

• June 6 - 7pm: Nebula Awards Banquet Dinner

• June 6 - 8pm: Nebula Awards Ceremony

Find the full program for the weekend here.

There will be a few copies of my latest book Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl available for purchase at the conference thanks to the official bookseller, Women & Children First. I’m not sure I’ll have space in my suitcase to pack a few more copies, but at the very least I’ll try to bring some SWAG and bookplates to hand out. All this will be first come, first served though, so keep that in mind.

If you can’t get to Chicago, maybe you can catch me in Toronto for the launch of my debut short fiction collection, The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories. This event will take place at Bakka-Phoenix Books. There’s no sign-up yet, but save the date for August 22 at 2pm. I hope you can make it!

And if you aren’t within reach of either city, you can find me online participating in Canada Fiction Fest. Come join me and a bunch of other Canadian authors for panel discussions and readings—and discover some terrific new reads from The Great White North. On June 22, I’ll be reading an excerpt from Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl. And that same day I’ll be talking about “Exploring the Unknown in Science Fiction: From Dystopian Futures to Outer Space.” Should be a good time, so mark those calendars!

RANDOM STORY I LOVE

Each month I choose a story that has stuck with me to share with you. I offer it without comment as to why I’ve chosen it, leaving it up to you to determine what you think of it. If you enjoy the chosen story, I encourage you to seek out more work by the author.

This month’s story is:

“A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair” by Renan Bernardo

• Audio Version Part One

• Audio Version Part Two

*For all stories, see the individual publications for content warnings

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “The Futility of Warning You”

Spoilers ahead, so read the story before going on.

Long-time subscribers know that almost every year I participate in the Codex writers’ group’s flash contests, as a means to encourage productivity. This particular story got its start early last year during the “Weekend Warrior” contest. The contest has a 750-word limit per entry and takes place over several rounds.

For each round, multiple prompts are provided to help get that creativity flowing. You can choose one, or combine several. One round each year includes what’s known as the “Title Rummage Sale.” Here, titles donated by members can be accessed a few at a time by those participating in the contest. These are randomly arranged, and once you choose one, that’s it. It’s yours to keep and no one else gets it.

As you may have guessed, the title I wound up with was “The Futility of Warning You.” Because I write a lot about time-related stuff, that’s where my brain naturally went as soon as this title came up in my choices.

I combined this with one of the other prompts as well though, which was: “Your character returns home a hero. But what really happened?”

With this in mind, I came up with the idea that my main character would be the first person to successfully achieve time travel to the future. Upon their return, they’d be celebrated for this achievement, and of course the world would be greatly interested in what the future held. As far as the big picture goes, the future looks bright, except it’s not so great for someone the MC cares about.

My main character can’t help trying to fix things. They of course do what they can to warn their loved one, but for various reasons, that person won’t listen. So by the end of the story you realize our protagonist has been through this more than once, in a sense choosing to act out a time loop as they attempt to warn this person again and again, despite how futile it seems.

When you love somebody, sometimes that’s how it can go. You know your words fall on deaf ears but you have to keep trying—just in case. I don’t really say what the relationship is between the two unnamed characters in the story. When I was writing, I imagined them to be romantic partners. In a sense, it doesn’t matter though. I’m sure most of us have been in situations where we clearly see the writing on the wall, and try to help someone else avoid a bad result, only to be ignored.

As the mother of three teenagers, I know this feeling pretty well. I was also once a teenager myself (It’s true, I have photographic evidence!) so I’ve experienced it from both sides.

When you’re the person who can see the future, it’s natural to try to spare someone from making a mistake that will haunt them later. But when you’re the person who’s being asked to take a warning on faith, it’s also easy to assume things might not unfold the way you’re being told they will. It’ll be different this time, you think. Or else: it’ll be different for me.

Some of us, unfortunately, have to learn the hard way.

In the story, I never really get into the details of what exactly happens that the main character is concerned about. We just know it’s not great. For the purposes of this story, it doesn’t really matter. In fact, it’s more relatable to readers because it’s not that specific. This way they can relate to the kind of situation—to the frustration of trying to save someone from themselves, but having your warnings go unheeded.

The end of the story doesn’t tell us if things will work out, either. Will the “you” of the story continue to repeat their mistake? Will the MC keep traveling back in time in an attempt to change their mind? Are they locked in an endless loop of their own making?

In that sense, the story also asks an important question: For how long are you willing to go on trying to help someone you love? Do you continue for as long as it takes, or is there a limit where you finally give up? And if you do give up, how do you live with the consequences of that choice? What will the future bring?

I chose to leave the reader with these questions. I think the best stories are the ones that leave room to think and ponder, rather than spell out every little thing you’re supposed to think and feel. After all, the conclusions you draw might be quite different from mine, so who am I to tell you how to receive this story?

In the end it’s up to you to decide. Is this effort truly futile, like the title says, or is it not?

“The Futility of Warning You” was originally published in July 2025 in Factor Four.

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P.A. Cornell

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Aside from updates on my writing career, I also have a couple of regular features including a “Story Behind the Story” segment that’s been going for a few years now. And just this past month I added a new “Random Story I Love” segment in which I feature a story, not written by me, that I love and would like to share with you.

And the latest tweak I’ve made to my newsletter is its new name. If you’re an OG subscriber, you’re used to just seeing it called “P.A. Cornell’s Newsletter.” Why? Because when I created it I couldn’t think of a good name. But now the name you’ll be seeing in your inbox is “It’s Not Really About That.”

You’re probably wondering why I’ve called it that. Well, like many things I do, it’s a bit of a self-deprecating joke. See, if you know my writing, you know I often like to play with familiar genre tropes—but then give them my own spin. So when describing my stories I often find myself saying something like: “It takes place during an alien invasion—but it’s not really about that.” This example describes my story, “440 Broad Street, Apartment 4C” which on the surface is about an alien invasion, but is really more about people coming together during a time of crisis. (More on this story further down)

So that’s what I mean when I say “It’s not really about that.” There’s always a little something more going on, if you dig a little deeper. It also reflects the fact that once a story’s out in the world, it doesn’t matter so much what I think it’s about because each reader will interpret the story in their own way—and I’m often surprised and delighted by what they take from it. So this seemed to me like a fun and somewhat fitting name for this newsletter. I hope you agree.

APPEARANCES

For various reasons, I’ve been on the fence about attending the 61st Nebula Awards in person, despite being a finalist, but now it’s official, I’ll be in Chicago next month. If you’re planning on going and spot me there, say hi. Keep in mind I’m a little face blind so if we’ve met before or I know you from online, a little context is very much appreciated to help me place you.

RECENT REVIEWS

If you missed it, Emmie Christie recently did a deep-dive into some of my published works. In April she selected her four favorite reads from March, which included my novelette, “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife.”

Abyss & Apex also reviewed my book, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl. Among other things they called it:

There you have it. A beach read just as the weather’s warming up. What more could you ask for? If you haven’t purchased your copy yet, find it here. Don’t have the funds right now? That’s okay—you can also have your local library order it in. All I ask is that if you’ve read and enjoyed my book, you write a brief review on Goodreads, Amazon, or your favorite review site. You can even shout it out on social media. All of this helps spread the word so more readers can find it.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

My flash fantasy “Time Management” was published in Lightspeed’s April issue and just became free-to-read yesterday. You can find it here.

I also have to tell you about a not-so-recent publication. It seems my story “Chief Scavenger’s Log in the Climate Apocalypse” was reprinted in Interstellar Flight Magazine Best of Year 6. This anthology was published on February 2, but no one told me. Yep, that’s right, I only just found out this had come out a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, better late than never, I suppose.

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

As you may know, my short story “Through the Machine” is a current Nebula finalist. As such, it will also be included in the anthology Nebula Awards Showcase 61, which should be out in June, so keep an eye out for that.

I was also recently able to announce a couple of big acceptances. The first is that “Through the Machine” was also selected for inclusion in Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 4. This is my fourth year having a story included in this award-winning series, and I could not be more thrilled.

I also recently had a horror story accepted by Flame Tree Publishing for their Folklore Horror anthology, which comes out this August. This is my fourth time selling a story to a Flame Tree anthology. I’m especially happy for this one because this story is very personal to me and I’m super proud of how it turned out. The story—titled “The Devil in the Desert”—is set primarily in Chile and combines Chilean folklore with history, and even some family lore. I can’t wait for you to read it. This one won’t be available to read for free, but believe me when I tell you these Flame Tree books are worth the cover price. You can see the whole table of contents here.

I have an update about “440 Broad Street, Apartment 4C” as well. This story will be reprinted in StarShipSofa, which will be the first time it appears in podcast form. I think it’ll lend itself really well to audio so I look forward to that one.

And my most recent sale was to Gavagai which will be publishing my science fiction story, “Expendable Me.” This is a fun one and my first sale to this market so I’m pretty stoked about it.

RECENT INTERVIEWS

Adventitious started a new author interview series last month and they asked me to be their first subject. They’re calling it “3.5 Questions With…” and they’re not kidding about that half question.

What I loved most about this interview is that the questions were really different from what I’m used to in that they’re not really so much about writing, but more about who I am as a person and how I view the world.

This interview is available exclusively to their Patreon patrons, and can be found here. If you’re not yet supporting this publication through Patreon or by subscribing, you really should. The first two issues have been getting rave reviews, and they’re one of the few publications that accept novelettes, so it would be great to see them stick around for a long, long time.

I also recently recorded an interview with the Disability in Library and Information Studies (DisLIS) journal. Among other things, they run interviews with disabled authors, which includes invisible disabilities like mine. I had a great time talking with them about my creative process and the challenges of doing the work while also living with disabilities.

And for an interview that’s a little different, freelance journalist Kate M. Gonzales contacted me to discuss my thoughts on generative-AI and its impact on the arts. This comes after I and several of my fellow authors commented on the social media post actress Reese Witherspoon made promoting AI. Kate saw my comment, did a bit of investigation to find out that I’ve been pushing back on AI in the arts for quite a while now, and reached out to get my take on this. I’m really grateful for people like her helping shine a light on the fact that this technology has already caused a great deal of harm and will only cause more if left unchallenged. This is the very reason I wrote “Through the Machine” in the first place.

I’ll share links to those interviews once they go live.

AWARDS NEWS

I was thrilled to learn that Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 3, is a finalist for both the Locus Awards and the Aurora Awards. This particular volume includes my story, “Bright Horizons,” originally published in Flame Tree Publishing’s Learning to Be Human anthology.

If you’re voting for these awards, keep this great anthology of Canadian SFF in mind.

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO

It’s getting closer to the publication of my SFF collection The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories. The cover’s been ready for a while. This past month I approved some edits. Up next, I’ll have to do another proofread once everything is laid out, but basically it’s just about ready for its release on August 18.

In the meantime, my other book, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl is going strong and continuing to receive great reviews.

I recently popped into my local Indigo bookstore to sign some copies. The staff at Indigo were lovely to work with and I’m grateful to them for making this happen so smoothly. Years ago, I worked for Indigo, so it’s a pretty cool full-circle moment going back to one of their stores and seeing my own book there.

In other cool news, StoryADay reached out and asked me to provide a writing prompt for them. My prompt starts their month out today, and you should be able to find it here.

I still can’t talk about most of the other stuff I’ve been doing, but there’s some very cool news on the horizon that I’ll share when I’m allowed to.

READER LOVE

From time to time my readers reach out to tell me they enjoyed one of my stories. The most recent one went a step further. A reader, who is also a Spanish Conversation professor at the University of South Carolina, wrote to tell me she’d used my story “Lost Beyond the Lights” as part of her course. She said her students really enjoyed it and one of them even said it was their favorite class they’d had all year. How great is that?!

RANDOM STORY I LOVE

Each month I choose a story that has stuck with me to share with you. I offer it without comment, leaving it up to you to determine what you think of it. If you enjoy the chosen story, I encourage you to seek out more work by the author.

This month’s story is:

“His Guns Could Not Protect Him” by Sam J. Miller

*For all stories, see the individual publications for content warnings

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “After the Rain”

Spoilers ahead, so read the story first.

I don’t write a lot of solarpunk but I like it. I especially like all the great ideas people have for ways we might create a more sustainable future. You can really go down a research rabbit hole checking out all the innovative ways people have come up with for living in harmony with our environment.

Solarpunk fiction is in many ways an ideal, similar to how utopian fiction is an ideal. It’s aspirational. We wish we could live in a world like this, in which we’re caretakers of our planet—not despoilers—and in return are rewarded with a beautiful life in balance with the natural world.

Reading about all the ideas people have for achieving this really makes you feel hopeful. It’s hard for me to write with such hope though when I look around at the world and see how we actually treat our environment. We routinely overexploit our resources, we pollute, we recklessly use technology that’s detrimental to the environment for often very frivolous aims (I’m looking at you generative-AI).

I could’ve written a story where I focus on the negative side of how we live—and have lived for generations. I’ve certainly written my share of cautionary tales. But for this story I wanted to write something positive and uplifting. I wanted to create a world (or at least a piece of a world) in which people have these things figured out.

With this in mind I imagined a cooperative community in which like-minded people live hand-in-hand with nature, and each other.

Solarpunk living in the real world has long been an interest of mine. I can’t say I live that way myself, but I like reading about it or watching documentaries about some of the things people are doing. One that comes to mind that touches on that subject is the 2018 documentary The Biggest Little Farm, which you may have seen. It focuses on a couple who lived in Los Angeles and just decided one day to buy a farm, having no previous farming experience.

The film takes the viewer on a journey as the couple learn the ropes of farming in harmony with nature over their first eight years. It’s really worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. You get to see how the full circle of life works together, and how solutions to problems when growing our food can often be found in nature itself.

This film was also part of the inspiration for my story. I of course don’t get into the details of the farming practices of my characters in this story, but they also keep nature in mind when growing their food. In their case, they have a food forest—which can largely take care of itself. The role people play often amounts to not taking too much of one thing, thus allowing the forest time to replenish itself. This is something that does play a key role in the story.

Beyond that, the characters also use sustainable energy sources like solar and wind power. They even go as far as to air-condition their interiors using a method inspired by honeybees. Their society revolves around respect and consideration—for nature and for each other. They’re taught this from a young age.

I hint at a past in which things were not like this in the world. Times of struggle and scarcity. I also mention that not all communities are run this way, but this particular place is running very smoothly—that is until outsiders show up and complicate things.

My aim was to create a beautiful place where a diverse set of people get along and their environment is cared for, then have someone come in like a bull in a china shop and upset their status quo. I wondered how these people would react when faced with such a thing. How would they treat the newcomers? What would they do about this problem?

I began the story as a free-writing exercise, initially just aiming to create the world by incorporating some of the things I’ve learned through my interest in solarpunk ideas. Eventually I had the basic plot down, but the initial version was a bit too meandering in the beginning. I think you had to get through something like four pages before anything actually started to happen, which is a bit too much for a story of this size, especially in science fiction where things tend to move a little more quickly than in other genres.

That’s the danger when you have a lot of things you want to include in a story but also have to balance that with the plot itself. A novel might give you more room to build the world gradually and include everything you want, but with a short story it meant I had to go back to my draft and tighten things up. It wasn’t just about cutting things (which I did) it was also about rearranging things. I had to move key plot points around so that the action would start sooner, but also in a way that would maintain the flow and still allow me to include the things about this world that were important to the story.

Many of my stories come easily and the version that ends up published looks very much (if not exactly like) my first draft. This was not the case with “After the Rain.” It’s probably one of the stories I’ve had to rework the most, and the version you read is actually quite different from the original. When I was finally satisfied with what I’d done, I sent it off on submission, and it wound up being my very first sale to Escape Pod—a market I’d long been trying to crack. A very satisfying bingo square indeed.

I really like the world I created here, but if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I’d be cut out to live in it. For one thing, I’m not a vegetarian, which my characters (aside from the newcomers) are. I also think this kind of life would require a lot of work that I don’t necessarily know how to do. So I’d definitely have a lot of learning to do, and I’d likely need to get in better physical shape too.

But now and then, a part of me also thinks about what it would be like to take part in something like this. A couple of years back, Apricot Lane Farms (the farm featured in The Biggest Little Farm) offered an opportunity to go there for a year and learn the ropes from them, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to apply. Of course that would’ve meant putting my life on hold to go work a farm in California while leaving my husband and children behind, among other things. So it wasn’t exactly practical for me to do. But it’s one of those things where you think, in an alternate universe somewhere…

Instead I have to make do with creating such worlds in my imagination, and getting them published so others can visit them too in theirs. But maybe some reader out there with a more flexible lifestyle—likely younger than I am—might find themselves inspired enough to adapt their life even just a little, and make some of this reality.

It’s funny, because I’ve written quite a few dark stories or stories in which I shine a light on how bad things could get should this go on. But in reality, I’m actually a very positive person. I look for silver linings and tend to see the best in people, and often even when I might determine someone not to be be the best of people, I do my best to empathize and try to understand why they behave the way they do.

I’m not naive about it, though. I see what’s happening in the world. I know not everyone has the best intentions—and that having a tough history doesn’t excuse bad behavior. I also don’t think the problems with our world will magically resolve themselves if we do nothing.

But I think it’s my positive side that got to come out and play when writing this story, and I like that about it. I enjoyed the comments at the end of the story from Escape Pod’s host, Mur Lafferty. I wasn’t familiar with Stephen Universe beyond having heard the name, but I think the positivity and empathy Mur describes is pretty similar to what I’m like a lot of the time. It’s definitely what I was going for in this story, because in the end my characters solve their problem through kindness, compassion, empathy, and generosity. Their aim is not punishment, but understanding, and I wish our world had more of that in terms of how we resolve our conflicts.

“After the Rain” was originally published in May 2025 in Escape Pod.

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P.A. Cornell

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Words just can’t convey how exciting it is to receive this honor again. It truly never gets old, and as I’ve said before, it’s particularly special to be recognized by your industry peers. Thank you to everyone who read and nominated this story. The final ballot is now officially open, so SFWA members get those votes in soon! Deadline is April 15.

Likewise, the Aurora Awards are still accepting nominations from CSFFA members until April 5. I’d be honored if Canadians would consider this story for Best Short Story. I also have a few other stories on the eligibility list, including “After the Suns Go Down” which under Aurora rules qualifies as a novelette. CSFFA members can reach out to me for a copy of the novelette, as it’s not free-to-read online.

Find my complete eligibility with descriptions, links, and other relevant information here.

A FICTION DEEP-DIVE

I mentioned in a previous newsletter that author Emmie Christie has been publishing a Writer Spotlight series on her blog. For this series, Emmie is reading several works by an individual author, which she reviews for InkFoundry and analyzes for her spotlight. The spotlight also includes a short interview with the author.

Last month, one of the authors she covered was none other than yours truly. Emmie read and analyzed thirteen of my stories, reviewing ten of them for InkFoundry’s “Why You Should Read” section.

You can find the spotlight she did on me here. I personally found her insights into my work illuminating and fascinating. She found connections between the stories I wouldn’t have thought of. I’m always interested in how other people receive my work. Every reader takes something different from a piece of fiction, so whether or not I intended what they’ve discovered there, it’s so cool to read. At the end, there’s also a brief interview with me that gets into some of my own thoughts about my work.

You can find the reviews Emmie wrote for the individual stories linked below:

• “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife” (Emmie’s favorite)

• “The Space Between Us”

• “Decorative”

• “A World Unto Myself”

• “440 Broad Street, Apartment 4C”

• “Through the Machine”

• “And I Will Read to You About Butterflies”

• “The Body Remembers”

• “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont”

• “Vinyl Wisdom”

RECENT REVIEWS

Aside from Emmie’s reviews, I recently got a lovely review from Maria Haskins for my story, “The Space Between Us” (Lightspeed, Issue 187) in the March issue of Locus.

Another couple of reviews came in for my story, “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife.” The first is from Runalong the Shelves as part of their review for Adventitious, Issue 1. This issue was also covered by Locus reviewer Paula Guran. This review is not yet free-to-read online, but in it, Guran calls my story, “charming.”

I’ve been putting most of the reviews I come across for Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl here and here, but the latest one comes from reviewer Alex Brown who, among other things, had this to say about my book:

If you haven’t yet ordered your copy of this retro-futuristic novelette, you can find links here in both print and digital. You can also order it from your favorite bookstore or ask your library to carry it.

If you’ve already read this book, reviews on Goodreads, Amazon, or the review site of your choice, are greatly appreciated.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

My fantasy flash piece, “Time Management,” is in this month’s Lightspeed. It’s not yet free-to-read, but as soon as it is, I’ll be linking that to the FREE READS page on my website and sharing it on my socials, so keep an eye out for that.

If the title wasn’t enough to clue you in, I’m once again playing with time in this story, which marks my eighth published piece in which time is manipulated in some way.

RECENT FICTION SALES

I’ve had several short fiction acceptances lately that I’m super excited about but unfortunately am not yet allowed to make public, but I promise those announcements are coming soon.

One I can share was just announced yesterday, and that’s my fourth sale to Flame Tree Press. This time around it’s for their Folklore Horror anthology. My story’s called, “The Devil in the Desert.” This one’s special to me because it’s set in my country of birth, Chile. It combines the lore of the Atacama region with history, as well as with some family lore, so I’m really excited to see this one out in the world. You can read the official announcement and see the full TOC here.

Until I’m able to announce the others, you can find a list of my forthcoming short fiction here, and information about the August release of my next book, The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories, here.

RECENT INTERVIEWS

Space Cowboy Books did a mini book spotlight on Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl that you can read here.

I also spoke with Paul Semel about this book, as well as my forthcoming collection, in an interview you’ll find here.

My friend and fellow two-time Nebula nominee in the exact same years, Renan Bernardo, also published an interview with me in his Hyperspace of Words newsletter as part of his “Into the Hyperspace” series.

I also had a great discussion with Tales from the Bridge about my new book, my work in general, and some fun stuff like movies and LEGO. Check this podcast out here.

And finally, I was back on The Halfling and the Spaceman. We had a lot to catch up on. That interview’s here.

RANDOM STORY I LOVE

A couple of those interviews gave me a chance to shout-out some other authors and their work. This is something I try to do on my socials, and in some other spaces, when I can, but I thought I’d start to include this in my newsletter. I also thought it might be a way to draw attention to older stories people may have missed. So behold, this new segment! I won’t be including an analysis of these stories, instead letting you decide what you think for yourselves.

This month, I’ve chosen a story by Jo Miles titled, “A Catalogue of Gifts From a Crow.” Enjoy!

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “The Underlying Cause of Her Insomnia”

(Click the above link and scroll down a bit to read this story. CW: implied violence.)

Spoilers ahead…

I’m writing this in the wee hours of the morning because—you guessed it—I’m an insomniac. I’ve had insomnia my whole life, largely as a side-effect of my anxiety. Last night’s cause, however, was a rather loud wind storm.

Unlike some insomniacs, I don’t have much trouble falling asleep these days. As a kid, that was sometimes an issue, but as an adult in middle age I’m usually sufficiently exhausted by the end of the day to fall asleep within about an hour (certainly never as quickly as my husband does). My problem lies in my inability to remain asleep for long enough. I’m often awake around 3 or 4 am, and then my brain gets going and I’m done.

When this happens, I usually try falling back asleep for a while. Sometimes I get lucky. Usually—like this morning—I don’t. So then I get up figuring that as exhausted as I am, I might as well get something productive done while my family sleeps. I wrote “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” one early morning when I couldn’t sleep, and that got me a Nebula nomination, so maybe insomnia’s not such a bad thing sometimes.

This story, as you might imagine, was inspired in part by my many years as an insomniac. But that was just one element. The other one came along in 2019 while participating in Codex’s “Weekend Warrior” flash fiction contest.

Those who’ve been reading this newsletter for a while will be familiar with Codex (my online writers group) and the fact that they run several contests yearly with the aim of encouraging productivity, among other things. I tend to participate in the two flash fiction contests, primarily. This particular one has a word count limit of 750 words. Several prompts are provided weekly to inspire the stories that—as the name implies—get written over a weekend.

For one of the rounds, the prompts include a choice of donated titles that you can use for story inspiration. Once you claim a title, it’s yours to keep, and you can do with it what you will, including save it for future use. That year, the titles were provided in round four of the contest. Participants were able to look at a few at once, randomly selected by the program we were using at the time. I refreshed the choices a few times, and eventually came across one that read, “The Underlying Cause of Her Insomnia.”

As it happened, I hadn’t slept well the previous night—not to mention several nights before that—so you might say this title spoke to me. As the saying goes: “Write what you know.” It seemed like a good opportunity to poke fun at myself, and I began to devise this little story about a woman driven to extremes by her insomnia.

The story begins with my protagonist, Katherine, already several nights into a particularly rough stretch of insomnia. She’s started to suffer some of the effects of sleep deprivation. Symptoms I’m, sadly, well-acquainted with. Brain fog and difficulty concentrating, memory lapses, irritability, etc. It’s just plain hard to use your brain when you reach that level of exhaustion.

Just writing this has been a struggle for me and I guarantee that by the time you’re reading this, a more well-rested me will have had to do some serious editing to get it anywhere near coherent.

Experiments in sleep deprivation have shown that things can get a lot worse though. Lack of sufficient sleep can be a trigger for mental illness (for me it often triggers anxiety which starts a vicious cycle of further insomnia, greater anxiety, and so on). I’ve never gotten this bad but, if you lose enough sleep you can experience things like hallucinations, tremors, micronaps, and speech problems.

And this doesn’t even touch on long-term health effects like an increased risk of diabetes, cancer, stroke, heart disease, high blood pressure, compromised immunity, etc. Nor does it include accidental injury and death caused by people who are sleep-deprived but still do things like drive or operate power tools.

The symptom I chose for this particular story is that of psychosis. Admittedly one of the most rare effects since it requires extreme lack of sleep. And I, of course, take some creative liberties here, because remember, I’m poking fun at myself with a bit of dark humor.

So Katherine is desperate when we meet her. All she can think about is sleep. She becomes resentful and envious of her neighbor Adam’s ability to sleep. She’s aware that her daily life is being impacted by her inability to rest. She’d kill for an uninterrupted eight hours.

I know, not my most subtle foreshadowing, but it’s not meant to be.

Because she can’t think straight and her reaction time is slow, she ends up agreeing to a date with Adam without realizing it until it’s too late. We’ve all been there. Oh…just me? Okay, well, it happens. Trust me.

Then later, while venting about her troubles to her work friend, her irrational state latches on to the idea that Tina inadvertently plants in her head: that when you can’t sleep, it’s because you’re awake in someone else’s dream.

You may have heard this saying before. I know I have. And with Adam having just that morning told Katherine that he frequently dreams about her (TMI, dude!), this thought nestles into her subconscious mind and makes a home there.

By the time an exhausted Katherine makes it back to her apartment building, the psychosis kicks in and poor Adam ends up having the worst date of his life.

In most stories you have a character, who has a goal, and their aim is to achieve that goal by the end. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they fail. So if you consider the fact that our heroine finally gets her much sought-after sleep, this is a happy ending. Right? Right?

I mean…did we actually see anything happen to Adam on the page? Is that really blood on her or is she hallucinating? I’ll let you decide.

I’ll admit, my sense of humor can get a little dark, sometimes. I suppose I’m not alone though since the good people at The Horror Tree enjoyed this story enough to publish it. It also happens to be one of my husband’s favorites—though I guess he could just be trying to stay on my good side, given my frequent bouts of insomnia.

“The Underlying Cause of Her Insomnia” was originally published in February 2025 as part of The Horror Tree’s Trembling With Fear anthology series.

I hope you enjoyed this month’s newsletter. If you did, feel free to like and share, and if you’re not yet subscribed, click the button below so you never miss an update or a subscriber exclusive!

P.A. Cornell

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I’m once again a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story!

The story that has been nominated is my near-future AI cautionary tale, “Through the Machine.” This story was originally published in Lightspeed, Issue 180, in May of last year. It was also featured by Gizmodo/io9 and has already been selected to appear in a “Best of the Year” anthology to be announced soon.

I’m delighted that this story has resonated with SFWA members. I’ve had several people in the film industry reach out to tell me that it meant a lot to them, but I’m glad it’s something that other artists are responding to as well. The story might be focused on the film industry, but it applies equally across artforms, so I really wrote it for us all.

This is my second Nebula nomination. If you missed it, I was also a finalist for the award in 2024 for my short story, “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” (originally published in Fantasy, Issue 96), making me the first Chilean-born writer to be nominated for this award. I’m excited to say that several of the writers I was nominated alongside that year are also repeat finalists this year. Always a bonus to be in such good company and see friends get recognition for their work.

I’d like to thank the members of SFWA who took the time to read “Through the Machine” and found it worthy of nomination. It’s always extra special to be honored by your peers.

P.A. Cornell

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Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl is officially out in the world. If you missed it, I had a book launch party in Toronto at Bakka-Phoenix Books on February 7. Many thanks to everyone who braved the arctic weather that day to be there.

I also want to take a moment to thank everyone who pre-ordered a copy of the book. Pre-orders are incredibly helpful for authors—especially authors who aren’t big names. Here are some of the ways they help:

• Lets booksellers know whether a book is worth stocking, and how many they should order.

• Helps build buzz about a book (through early reviews) and attracts readers who might otherwise have missed it.

• Increases chances of hitting a bestseller list.

• Helps the book climb the Amazon charts so readers can find it more easily.

• Helps the book earn out its advance faster.

• Allows promotion to start sooner.

• Lets publishers know there’s demand for work by the author, so they’re likely to show more interest in future books.

• Supports the author’s career and encourages them to write more.

When my first book, Lost Cargo, was published back in 2022, there were a number of problems, one of the biggest being that there was an issue getting pre-orders going. In the end, that book didn’t become available to pre-order until the day before publication!

If that’s not enough, there was a technical issue with the ordering link, so people couldn’t actually buy the book for several days after it was officially published. I don’t even want to think about how many sales were lost because of this, and the lack of pre-orders hurt that book for the entire period it was in print. Even the fact that it received exclusively good reviews and was later named one of the best novellas of 2022 by Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, wasn’t enough to help it recover.

So I’m thrilled to see Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl get a much better start in life. Not only was there a great turnout at the launch but this book also became an IngramSpark Bestseller (that’s just for the print edition), and it’s already received many great reviews.

If you weren’t able to get your copy early, you can order Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl through any of the retailers listed here.

Here are a few more ways to help a book (and its author):

• Add it to your Goodreads “Want to Read” shelf. This helps others see it too.

• Write a review on Goodreads and/or Amazon.

• Follow the author on social media and share their posts about their work.

• Recommend the book to people you know.

• Request that your local library carry the book in their catalogue.

That last one is particularly helpful for authors in certain countries, including Canada (the one I happen to live in). The reason for this is that the Canadian government has a program that sends the author a small amount of money for each time their book is signed out of a library anywhere in the country.

I was fortunate that a couple of people requested that their library carry Lost Cargo, which meant that at the end of the year I received a small cheque. Aside from this providing me with a little extra cash that didn’t cost readers a penny, it also let me know that people were reading my book—and that’s priceless. So next time you visit your local library, ask them to carry Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl. It’ll make my day.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Aside from Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, my latest publication is my other novelette, “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife.”

But P.A., didn’t you tell us that one was published in Adventitious, Issue 1 way back in January? You’re right, I did. But back then it was only available to subscribers or those who purchased the issue. Now, however, this story is available to read for FREE!

If you missed it, you can find it right here. And if you were subscribed to this newsletter by January 31, you should also have received the companion playlist inspired by this story.

“The Soundtrack of My Afterlife” has already received some outstanding reviews. Here’s what two of them had to say:

Scroll down a little further to find out what went into the writing of this novelette in this month’s “Story Behind the Story.”

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

FOR YOUR AWARDS CONSIDERATION

Nebula and BSFA nominations have closed, but the Hugos (open through March 28), Locus (open through April 1), Auroras, and others remain open, or will open in the near future.

As always, if you’re reading for any science fiction, fantasy, or horror awards, you can find my complete eligibility list here.

The story I’d most like people to consider is my near-future science fiction short story, “Through the Machine.” Thank you for reading and nominating.

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO

Even though Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl has just come out, Stars and Sabers is already looking to the future. Summer, that is. And with this in mind, final touches have begun in preparation for the publication of my short story collection, The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories.

What does this mean? Well, we already have the cover ready, which I’ve mentioned before—and it’s stunning! So now various people behind the scenes are working on things like proofreading and layout. I’ve submitted all my little contributions. Beyond the actual stories, that means things like the acknowledgments section, story notes, and dedication.

The goal for this next step is the all-important ARC. If you’re new here, that stands for “Advance Reader Copy” or “Advance Review Copy.” As the name suggests, this is what gets sent to early readers for those much-desired early reviews.

It also serves as a sort of final draft for the book that I will then look over (along with other members of my publishing team) to determine if anything still needs fixing. This is that last chance to find typos, to realize you forgot to credit someone who should definitely get credit, to make sure the layout isn’t wonky, or that a whole page is missing or something like that.

Usually, the errors at this stage tend to be on the smaller side though, since the book will already have been read multiple times by multiple people. But this final look is important too if you want to put the best possible product out there (and avoid reader reviews pointing out problems when the book’s already out in the world).

This is an exciting part of the process for me because it means my book’s that much closer to becoming a physical reality. Soon (August 18) it’ll be published and all that will be left for me to do is promote it—the least fun part of the whole journey.

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife”

One of my earliest memories is of a car my dad owned when we first came to Canada. As you might’ve guessed, it was a used 1972 Ford Mustang, color red. Well, mostly. A lot of it was more rust-colored since this was 1976, when vehicles were entirely made of metal and paint technology hadn’t yet been perfected, so cars actually rusted.

I hated that car.

The vinyl upholstery and metal seatbelt buckles burned my skin. It was awkward to get into. And the rust spots were an eyesore.

Just a couple years later, though, on a rainy night—much like the one at the end of this story—my family was involved in a pretty bad car accident. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured, but the Mustang was totalled. Too late, I discovered how much love I actually had for that rust bucket.

You see, in those early days, as new immigrants, there wasn’t much money to spare, so weekend drives were something we could do to pass the time that didn’t cost much. That car had taken us to countless picnics, to the petting zoo, the lake, and more. Sometimes we just drove with no destination in mind. It was all about the journey.

Crashing the Mustang was one of my earliest lessons in loss and in not taking things for granted. I realized I’d been too hard on that car, and that maybe I owed it a second chance in fiction.

“The Soundtrack of My Afterlife” is a tribute to my dad’s old Mustang, but that’s just one element to this story. It’s also about a little girl growing up. And it’s about music, because however far back I look on my life, there’s always been a soundtrack.

Music is a time machine.

How often have you heard a song and found yourself transported back to a specific moment in your life? The association is strong. On my honeymoon, my husband and I booked a tour around Great Britain. The tour guide would play U2’s “It’s a Beautiful Day” every single morning to wake us up, and—she told us—to create an association with that song so whenever we heard it, we’d remember that holiday.

I don’t think there were a lot of U2 fans on that tour. Most of us would groan whenever the song was played. I certainly wouldn’t call it one of my favorites, especially after hearing it multiple days in a row. But sure enough, over twenty years later, whenever I hear it, I’m right back in Great Britain, and can’t help but smile.

Because music has always been a part of my life, I’ve often included it in my stories. You’ll find references to specific songs in “Vinyl Wisdom,” “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont,” “Face the Music,” “Fire & Flight,” “When the Streetlights Go Off,” “What Happened That Night,” and likely others I’m forgetting. Even when songs aren’t specifically mentioned though, music has often been a source of inspiration.

These musical references in some of my other stories, didn’t go far enough for me, though. Aside from wanting to write a tribute to my dad’s Mustang, I’d also long wanted to write something where the music I grew up on was integral. And since a lot of the time I’ve spent listening to music was in a car, it made sense to pair these two. The final element came when I decided this story would be a coming-of-age.

To be clear, “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife” isn’t my coming-of-age story. Allie isn’t me, though some of her experiences come from my life (more on that later). She and some of the other characters are also amalgams of people I’ve known and fictionalized versions of some of their experiences. As much as I have in common with Allie and can recall the time period she’s growing up in, when I look back on the past I’m doing it more from Red’s point of view. I’m older now. I see things differently. I have many more experiences under my belt than I did at Allie’s age.

If you know anything about how GenX grew up, you know we had what I’ll call, “unprecedented freedom.” We were among the first kids to have both parents work outside the home. As a result, we spent a lot of time on our own, fending for ourselves. It was a crash course in being self-sufficient. We had to be resourceful and creative. We had to look out for ourselves and for each other. And we had to learn about life’s dangers in real time, sometimes facing pretty hefty consequences.

I know that to younger generations this may sound horrific. Our Silent and Boomer parents come off as neglectful. Our childhood one of loneliness, fear, and uncertainty. But when you’re a kid, all you know is the life you have. Everyone was living this same way. And while I’m sure some kids had it harder than others, I know a lot of us loved the childhood we had and wouldn’t trade it in for anything. For better or worse, it made us who we are today.

I bring this up not to wax nostalgic or idealize my childhood. My point is, because we were on our own so much and from such an early age, we had a level of freedom and autonomy that kids today (including my own) just don’t. And during that time, one of the ultimate ways to “level up” your freedom was to get your license.

We could go pretty far on our bikes in those days, but it was nothing compared to the places a car could take you. We were itching to turn 16 and head out on all kinds of new adventures.

These days in Ontario, Canada—where I live—we have what’s known as a graduated licensing system, which means that obtaining a driver’s license takes well over a year. First there’s an eye exam and written test. If you pass that, you get your G1. That means you can drive, but you have to do it on certain roads with a licensed driver to teach you. Eventually you take a road test and if you pass that, you get your G2. Now you can drive on your own, but again, not on riskier stretches of road like highways. Finally, there’s another road test and if you pass that one you get your full G license.

My oldest kids are in the process of jumping through all these hoops. This system’s been in place since 1994, which means people my age were among the last to obtain their full license under the old system—with a written test and single road test.

I was one of the first of my friend group to obtain their driver’s license. Unlike Allie, I didn’t have my own car, but my parents were pretty cool about letting me use theirs, which meant I could drive myself to work, visit friends, hit the mall, whatever.

And man, did I love driving.

As a teen and young adult, the car became my happy place (at times, it still is). Just like on all those weekends with my family, I’d often take long drives by myself with no real destination in mind. In every season, day and night, I’d hit the road every chance I got. The car was my place to think. I felt relaxed on those familiar stretches of pavement, and always I’d have music on—probably louder than was good for my ears.

At other times, my friends and I would just hang out in cars. We’d sit in them at the drive-in or in a parking lot eating icecream and complaining about our parents or our shitty part-time jobs. Sometimes we’d lie on top of the cars, since those old metal hoods could take our weight without denting.

So it just made sense to me that when I decided to write about a car, I’d pair this with a coming-of-age story. And with that came a built-in soundtrack I’d been listening to my whole life.

I couldn’t include every song that’s meant something to me in this story. Even a novelette only has so much space, and I had to work with what made the most sense for my characters. But there’s enough in there to transport readers to my formative years—and by extension, Allie’s.

One of the reviewers who read this story compared it to the way Stephen King has written about the time in which he grew up (the 1950s). I wouldn’t say I was consciously going for that, but it makes sense since that’s actually one of the things that’s often appealed to me about many of King’s stories.

When you write about the past though, especially when you’ve racked up a bunch of years like some of us have, you have to figure out what pieces of it you’ll include. It’s (hopefully) not about being some insufferable old who thinks their generation was the best—it’s about mining your experience for something more universal where readers of any age can find something to relate to.

While some of the details of this story place it firmly in a specific time period—the songs, for starters—the story’s still about a kid growing up and finding her path through life, like we all must do.

When planning this story, there were some specific things I wanted to include, but I wanted to give Allie a balance between the good and not-so-great or at least challenging. Life has both kinds of experiences, after all.

One of the things it was important to me to include was an LGBTQ+ character. Sam isn’t modeled after any one person, but rather he represents the queer kids and young adults I knew growing up. As you probably know, the 1980s and into the 90s was not the easiest time period to be queer. We were in the middle of the AIDS crisis. The F-slur was tossed around casually. There were no safe spaces in which to openly explore your sexuality without judgment. Even many of the ways people identify today just didn’t exist as words—so many queer kids grew up not quite knowing where they fit. To come out, even just to a close friend, was an act of extreme bravery and trust.

Throughout my young life I had the honor of being one of the people who was trusted with that very personal truth on more than one occasion. I saw how hard some of my queer friends had it. Even as a kid, I understood that I couldn’t be one of the obstacles in their way. I guess it must’ve shown because time after time I was confided in.

So in my story Sam eventually comes out to Allie. It’s a simple scene without much drama. Some coming-out stories don’t go that way, even today. But as far as these two friends are concerned, they love each other. What they each do in the privacy of their own bedrooms has no bearing on their relationship. I wrote it simply because that’s how it was among me and my friends. You’re gay? Okay cool. Thanks for telling me. What do you feel like doing tonight? It’s acceptance in its purest form, the kind that comes most naturally when you’re young.

There were other things about growing up—particularly in that time period—that I wanted to include. For instance those first awkward yet sweet steps toward romantic love. That worked hand-in-hand with the music element of this story since at the time there was no expression of love more eloquent than the mixtape or burned CD.

In those early days, making a personalized playlist for someone sometimes involved hours if not days recording from the radio, doing your best to get as little of the DJ talking over the song as you could. Even as technology improved though, it took time and dedication, and often the songs that were chosen held a message that conveyed your feelings to the recipient. Corny, I know, but still the epitome of teenage romance.

I remember receiving such mixes and listening to them. Sometimes the feeling was mutual, and sometimes not. But the intention and effort that went into making them was always appreciated, so of course I had to throw that into the…er…mix, when writing this story.

Allie and Jesse’s relationship represents both those baby steps toward our eventual adult relationships, but also how that can evolve into something more mature later in life. I don’t go into their adult relationship much—there wasn’t time for that—but I thought I should at least hint at the fact that they do reconnect and maybe later continued as friends. They might’ve even become more than friends, given the chance.

Allie experiences relationship shifts throughout the story because that’s how it happens in life. One minute you see your friends daily, and the next they (or you) go away to college, or you move to a different town, etc. You date someone, and then you break up—or sometimes your mom does (repeatedly). A lot can happen on your journey to adulthood and during this journey relationships can ebb and flow.

Like Allie, I also took some time after high school to earn tuition money for college and figure out what I wanted to do, so I watched my friends leave while I stayed behind. I know what it’s like to mourn the loss of those relationships that form such strong bonds when you’re young. I know what that transitional period of life means, and change isn’t always easy.

But also like Allie, many of my early friendships remain alive today. I too visited friends at their respective colleges, and when I finally went to one of my own, I was visited in turn. The advent of social media later made it easy to get back in touch with those I’d lost track of. (Facebook used to be good, once upon a time)

Time has a way of changing things, but I’m fortunate to still have close friends that I’ve known since childhood. These days, when we hang out, we might talk about our kids, or our middle-aged aches and pains, but the decades-old inside jokes and old stories remain, and it’s remarkable how much it still feels like we’re kids hanging out in our cars whenever we get together.

I wanted Allie to have that too, so she winds up living with her lifelong bestie, Sam, and reunites with Jesse. Even her mother Shirley eventually settles down and finds a lasting, healthy, relationship of her own. And through it all, Allie has Red.

From the beginning, I knew how things would end up for Allie, but I didn’t want the story to be too dark. Before she meets her end, I make sure she’s surrounded by people she loves, and I’ve given her a career she finds rewarding.

I chose photography specifically because it’s a career I know well. That was the path I chose at her age, after all, and for a few years I was a working photographer.

Perhaps a bit ironically, that ended up not being the right path for me. I even wrote about a dream that helped me decide to leave photography behind in favor of my true love—writing—that was published a few years back by Chicken Soup for the Soul.

But since I was writing Allie’s story, not mine, I decided to give her my former career. In Allie’s case, photography is exactly right. It gives her purpose and a means to self-expression, and allows her to support herself as an adult.

There are little nods in the story to my time taking pictures—and yes, in those days it was on film. I used to drive around photographing unusual mailboxes, for instance. I made a whole study of it. The photograph Allie takes of a tree on a hill was an actual assignment I had to do my first year of college. I even worked for a time for a photographer named Rod.

But photography also fit the story because it’s told as a series of snapshots, if you will, of Allie’s life. If you think about it, that’s how we remember our past. It’s not one long narrative flowing from one stage to the next, it’s standalone moments of significance, recorded by our brains in a similar way to how a camera takes a picture.

By the time we reach the end of the story, Allie’s in a good place. Hers and Red’s story comes to an abrupt and dramatic end, but in the process they save a carload of kids with their whole lives ahead of them. What comes next for Red and Allie is anyone’s guess, but they have no regrets. They simply walk into whatever comes, together, as always—taking the music with them.

“The Soundtrack of My Afterlife” was originally published in January 2026 in Adventitious.

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P.A. Cornell

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That’s right, it’s launch day for my retro-futuristic, noir, love story Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl.

If you’re hearing about this book for the first time, you can find the full description, purchase links, and reviews from early readers here with additional reviews here and here.

Reactor recently called this book a “can’t miss,” so make sure you get your copy today!

And if you’re in or near Toronto, Canada, join me for the official launch party this weekend at Bakka-Phoenix Books. Details here.

Many thanks to everyone who pre-ordered and reviewed this book.

These days I’m meant to be promoting all kinds of things: my awards-eligible work, my latest publications, this month’s publications including the new book coming out on the 3rd (and along with that pre-order links, NetGalley links, the sign-up for the Instagram book tour, and the launch party), then there’s also the collection coming in August, any new sales I might make, and of course, this newsletter.

That’s a lot of posts!

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel kind of gross sharing all of this while mothers are being shot in their cars and five-year-olds are being used for bait, or while atrocities continue in Ukraine and Gaza, and while a certain orange thinly-veiled dictator tries his best to conquer every piece of oil-producing land he can get his greedy little paws on.

I don’t generally get political here, or elsewhere. It’s a rare thing, because I try to keep my online presence on the positive side. But you can’t just act like these things aren’t happening and I wanted to acknowledge that we’re all struggling to promote our work right now, even when it may not seem like it. If you’ve been feeling this too, know that you’re not alone, and hang in there.

UPCOMING APPEARANCE

The book launch for Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl is happening on Saturday, February 7, so if you’re in or near Toronto, come join me at Bakka-Phoenix Books from 2 to 4:30 p.m. There will be snacks!

Click the link to rsvp for this event and reserve your copy of the book so I can sign it for you.

Toronto Book Launch

If you can’t make it to the launch, you still have a couple days left to pre-order this book, which officially publishes on February 3—and which I recently found out is an IngramSpark bestseller under their Fiction and Science Fiction categories and one of the most-requested titles on NetGalley!

Pre-Order Links

This book recently got a glowing review from Helen Whistberry, which you can read on her blog here. Among other things, Helen had this to say about it:

Find more reviews for Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl here.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

My first publication of the year came on January 10 in Argentinian magazine, La Tuerca Andante. This is a Spanish translation of my SF robot story, “A World Unto Myself,” published in Apex in 2023. The new translation is by Argentinian author Cezary Novek and is titled “Un mundo en mi mismo.” If you’re a Spanish reader, leelo aquí.

My latest publication was meant to be today in the inaugural issue of Adventitious, but they surprised everyone by dropping it early on Jan. 19. “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife” is a fantasy novelette about a girl’s bond with her ’72 Mustang and the music that moves them. It’s already got a really nice review from Tar Vol on here.

This story is only available to Adventitious patrons, so click the link to get the issue and help support this brand new publication so they can keep bringing us great fiction far into the future.

Subscribe to Adventitious

Now I said I’d send out a playlist as a companion to my story once it was published, but since the issue dropped early and I’d given people all of January to get in on it, I decided to stick to that. So some time today, those of you who were subscribed to my newsletter by the end of January, will also be receiving (if you haven’t already) your bonus playlist. Keep an eye on your inbox for that.

If you missed out on this subscriber perk, be sure to click the subscribe button so you don’t miss the next one.

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RECENT FICTION SALES

I started the year with my fourth acceptance from Lightspeed magazine, this time for my fantasy flash, “Time Management.” Those of you who’ve been following my work for a while know I often like to play with time, and this story continues that tradition.

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

RECENT INTERVIEWS

I recently spoke with Myna Chang about Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl which she also reviewed as part of her Myna’s Microverse blog series. Myna had some great questions about this book as well as some of my other work, including my forthcoming collection The Astronaut Among the Flowers. Read both the review and the full interview here.

FOR YOUR AWARDS CONSIDERATION

You can find the complete list of my award eligible work here.

If you only have time to read one of my stories, the one that means the most to me is my near-future SF story, “Through the Machine,” which came out May of last year in Lightspeed magazine and was featured by Gizmodo.

And which I just recently found out made the long-list for the 2026 British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards! This is my third year in a row making the list but it never gets old. The complete list can be found here. (BSFA members have until February 19 to cast their votes)

Here’s what the good folks at Gizmodo had to say about it:

Readers—and even the story’s audio narrator, Stefan Rudnicki—have called this AI cautionary tale an “important story.” One reader even wrote to tell me it had completely changed his mind about AI-generated art.

As one of the many writers who had their work stolen to train AI, this is a subject that means a lot to me personally. I hope you’ll give it a read and share it with others if you like it. And if you’re reading for awards, I hope you’ll keep it in mind.

SFWA members nominating for the Nebula Awards have until the end of February to cast their ballots. I hope you’ll consider nominating “Through the Machine” for Best Short Story.

Nebula Ballot

The Locus Poll also opens today! Absolutely anyone can vote for the Locus Awards and you can even write-in your favorite stories, so if you enjoyed my work, please let them know.

NEBULA RECOMMENDED READING LIST

If you’re a SFWA member and you weren’t aware, there’s a new version of the Nebula Reading List now. it’s not in its final form as stories and books that were on the old list are still being added to the new one, but you can help speed that process by suggesting stories.

Before the old list went down my stories “Through the Machine” and “Hard Times at the Four Pines Motel” had both been added to the list. “Through the Machine” appears to be on the new list, and I expect “Hard Times at the Four Pines Motel” will be too at some point.

As I understand it, suggesting stories is a bit like upvoting them these days. So if you enjoyed either of these, I’d be honored if you suggested them to the list. But you don’t have to limit yourself to these two. I published 16 original stories in 2025, so you can suggest any of them and as many as you like.

The new list also allows you to mark eligible work as “read” or “want to read”, and even lets you privately rank them to help you organize what you might later want to nominate for awards.

PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT…

Speaking of stories published last year, my SF flash, “Falling Forever,” published last August by Factor Four, got a shoutout in Íde Hennessy’s list of 2025 Recommended Short Stories.

This story is about an astronaut caught in a time loop while exploring an alternate universe.

Adria Bailton reached further back into my backlist and recommended my post-apocalyptic punk story, “Vinyl Wisdom,” in her January Short Story Round-Up. Originally published in 2019 in the anthology, A Punk Rock Future, this story was later reprinted in Haven Spec in 2022. This one’s an older story but it’s also one of my favorites and was my first professional-paying sale.

And finally, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl was included on Reactor’s list of “Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for January and February 2026”! Find that here.

NEW BLOG SERIES!

Author Emmie Christie has a new blog series called “Author Spotlight.” Each week she’s reading up to 14 stories written by a single writer and then reviewing them. This is an excellent way to give new life to stories from a writer’s backlist and bringing them to the attention of readers who may have missed them on their original publication.

At some point Emmie will be reading some of my work for her series, which I’m really looking forward to and will share the link here when that happens. In the meantime, you can learn more about her blog series and read the reviews she’s already done here.

Somewhat related to this, Emmie’s been doing some work with InkFoundry. I’ve also recently created an author account and have added several more of my own stories. For now, just the ones that are free-to-read online, but since the site has hosting capabilities, I may add other stories in the future that have previously been paywalled. So follow me at InkFoundry for that.

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “Fire & Flight”

As a kid I loved dinosaurs. Super unique, I know. But I honestly really had a fascination with that part of our planet’s history. I read whatever I could about them and watched TV documentaries on them. As I grew older, the interest didn’t wane. Half a century down and I’m still into dinosaurs. Who can blame me? Dinosaurs are cool. But what does this have to do with dragons?

A little bit, as it happens.

Dragon mythology originated in Asia. Many dinosaur bones and fossils have also been found in Asia, and some scholars believe that dragon myths are at least partly-inspired by these prehistoric remains. To me, that makes a lot of sense.

So, like dinosaurs, dragons are pretty cool, because in a way, they’re dinosaurs with wings. (Yes, I’m aware there are flying dinosaurs too.)

Let’s stick with dinosaurs for the moment.

While I was growing up, I was this little dinosaur nerd. I was also a budding writer, so—inspired by my interest in dinosaurs—I started thinking about a story where we somehow brought them back to life. I had this great idea for it too that involved cloning, but I didn’t yet have the science knowledge to really get a handle on how the story would work.

Then one day, in 1990, I was walking past a bookstore and there I saw the cover of a novel by Michael Crichton. The cover was white with a black dinosaur skeleton on it. My eye was irresistibly drawn to it, as was my wallet. I walked right into that store and bought myself a copy of Jurassic Park.

I devoured the book and enjoyed it so much that I wasn’t even mad Michael Crichton had beat me to this story. I’ll be honest, my version would never have been as good, so things probably worked out for the best.

I can’t tell you how thrilled I was when, a few years later, one of my favorite childhood director/producers, Steven Spielberg, turned the book into a movie. At the time, I was still in high school, but the event was important enough that my friends and I played hooky the day it came out so we could be among the first to see it. I’ll never forget what it was like seeing those larger-than-life creatures on the big screen for the first time—all set to a gorgeous John Williams score that still slaps. Because my best friend worked in that movie theater, when the film ended, we slipped right into another theater and watched it a second time for free!

Hey, I said I was really into dinosaurs, didn’t I?

Anyway, over the years that followed my interest in dinosaurs and cloning and that sort of thing remained, even though the Jurassic Park franchise is now a shadow of its former self. And, for me, dragons remained connected to that too.

So a while back, I started thinking about what it might be like to create a dragon from scratch. To actually bring a creature that was mythological and use dinosaur DNA (as well as that of other species) to bring it to life. A science fiction dragon. I imagined an eccentric billionaire putting his vast resources toward this—like so many of them do today to things like immortality.

But I wanted my story to at least sound “sciency.” How would this creature work? They would be designed to look like the dragons we’re used to seeing in books and movies, but how would the flight and fire-breathing happen?

I started to research a number of things that are found in nature, and kind of mix and match actual science and technology to create a fictional result. That result being a sweet, herbivorous creature named “Edie.”

Edie had to have wings, of course. But if you consider the bulk of the dragons we’re familiar with—Tolkien’s “Smaug,” for instance—it’s unlikely a creature of those proportions and bulk could actually achieve flight. Birds, after all, have hollow bones and feathers that assist with this process, so what would Edie have?

I decided to give her a pair of special organs. The first was called the hydrogen electrolysis (or H.E.) organ. The function of this organ was inspired by real science. Pre-flight, Edie would take in water that her body would then direct into the H.E., then using both the electricity in her body and in the environment, the organ would separate the hydrogen contained in the water. This hydrogen would then be transferred to a separate organ known as “the belows” until there was sufficient gas in there to help Edie achieve lift. In a sense, she’d become like a zeppelin with wings. To control descent, Edie would then gradually expel the gas as needed, losing some of that lift and eventually being able to return to the ground.

As you may recall from basic chemistry—or possibly the Hindenburg disaster—hydrogen is highly flammable, so as Edie expels the gas on descent, it reacts with the environment and ignites. We now have a fire-breathing dragon.

Thing is, while Edie’s owner wants her to be this fearsome monster, she’s actually a real softie. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone, she just wants to eat pineapples, listen to music, and maybe one day become a mom.

You might be wondering why I’d choose the music of Édith Piaf, the singer for whom Edie is named, to be her favorite.

I don’t remember the first time I heard Piaf’s music, but I imagine it was probably as a kid with her rendition of “La Vie En Rose” played over a Pepé Le Pew cartoon, or something like that. I recall liking the gravelly quality of her voice, though I had no idea what she was singing about, since I didn’t know a word of French at the time. I also recall my mom telling me what some of the words meant, and that this singer was someone named Édith Piaf.

Over the years, I’d often hear her very recognizable voice in similar ways, and came to love many of her songs. I made Edie’s favorite “Non, je ne regrette rien” (I regret nothing.) Like Édith Piaf, I wanted Edie to have no regrets by the end of the story.

English translation of the chorus:

No, nothing at all
No, I regret nothing
Neither the good that was done to me
Nor the evil, I couldn't care less
No, nothing at all
No, I regret nothing
It's paid for, swept away, forgotten
I don't care about the past

This seemed fitting enough, but the song also contains a line about fire:

With my memories
I lit the fire

So I incorporated that into the story as well.

At the time I wrote it, I mentioned to my daughter that I was working on this story that combined a genetically-engineered dragon with the music of Édith Piaf. She laughed and said that sounded weird and like two things that shouldn’t go together. Maybe, but I was determined to write it and sell it anyway. I knew there had to be an editor out there who would appreciate both my vegetarian dragon and the music of a long-dead French singer.

When a new magazine came on the scene looking for stories from the point-of-view of animals, I asked the editor if that included mythological animals. She was game, so when they opened submissions for their inaugural issue, I sent in my story.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Plott Hound editor, Allison Thai, grew up listening to the music of Édith Piaf. She’d later say that when she read my story, it was like that scene in Ratatouille where the food critic tries the dish and is immediately transported back to their childhood. Like me, Allison had learned about Édith Piaf from her mother, and had come to love her music and associate it with good things. I had found the editor I knew was out there just waiting for my story.

Like me, Edie would also get her wish. In the end, with the help of the scientists that created her, she’s given her freedom—and her chance at a family.

Unlike in Jurassic Park, the selfish billionaire intent on playing god doesn’t get his theme park. Our planet isn’t overrun by dangerous creatures of our own creation. Instead, Edie and her daughter retreat to the mountains where they can live in peace and without regrets.

“Fire & Flight” was originally published in May 2025 in Plott Hound.

Thanks, as always, for reading my newsletter. If you’re enjoying it, let me know by liking, sharing, and commenting. If you’re not yet subscribed, click the link so you never miss an update or a subscriber exclusive!

P.A. Cornell

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I’m pretty good at keeping secrets, and understand why it’s necessary to delay some good news, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. At any rate, be assured that some pretty cool stuff is on the horizon. For the time being, the news I can share at this time follows.

UPCOMING APPEARANCE

The date and location have been set for the official launch of my novelette, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl.

The event will take place at Bakka-Phoenix Books on February 7, at 2 p.m. Here’s the official event page where you can rsvp and reserve your book for signing.

In the meantime, a reminder that you can pre-order this book in both print and digital from several retailers by clicking the button below.

Pre-Order Your Copy!

One of the people looking forward to this book is reviewer Jamedi of JamReads, who recently included Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl on this list of 2026 releases he’s excited about.

HOW (AND WHY) I GATHER MY STATS

Before I get into the latest and forthcoming publications, I’d like to take a moment to share something a little different. This idea comes from Lisa Hislop who commented on my December roundup post and asked how I track everything I share at the end of the year.

I’m naturally a very organized person. I mean, I can be messy, but I tend to know where everything in that mess is—a skill that’s super helpful when writing long-form fiction.

When it comes to tracking all things writing-related, I first have to give a shout-out to The Submission Grinder, a tool that’s become invaluable to me (and many other writers). I even have a Submission Grinder t-shirt! Seriously big fan.

If you haven’t used it, in addition to helping writers find markets for their work, The Grinder helps us log submissions, and whatever comes after those submissions, be they rejections or acceptances. It also allows us to add things like payments, notes, and more. A handy dandy “dashboard” section lets us check stats by story or year. Because I’m diligent about filling in all the information, mine’s always up-to-date. This is a great way to see your progress at a glance.

Another tool I use is my own website, which I’m also diligent about updating. I don’t have to rely on memory for what I published, where, and when—I can just go there to find it all conveniently categorized and linked. The aim is to make it easy for readers to find my work, but it also helps me in the process.

In addition to these, I use Microsoft Excel to track multiple other things. I have a file with markets and relevant information for submissions, organized in order of priority based on the criteria that matters most to me. I have another one tracking my submissions and everything that comes after acceptance, for every story I write. This works as a companion to The Submission Grinder that I don’t need to be online to check. It’s also a backup should The Grinder website go down.

I also track any awards, accolades, reviews, etc. that a story might garner. It might surprise you, but after the initial thrill of such things, it’s easy to forget they even happened when you get busy writing something new, or the next story gets published, so I like to have it all in a place where I can easily find it.

In addition to all that, I keep a handwritten journal that I fill out whenever I do anything writing-related, which then goes into a digital document showing what I’ve accomplished month-to-month. This basically serves as an outline for this newsletter, and also as physical proof to myself that even when I don’t write every day, I’m making progress.

I also enjoy tracking my own personal stats. I have files that analyse each story I’ve written, tracking things like character names (and various traits), POVs, story lengths, how long they take to sell, and more. Do I need to track this? No. But it’s become immensely helpful in understanding my own voice, and recently became a useful tool when planning my lecture for Odyssey.

In terms of the contests I participate in as part of the Codex writers group, there’s usually a post-contest roundup I share with the other participants that includes things like the prompt that inspired the story, what it scored, and anything else about it—which I can later refer to for things like “The Story Behind the Story.”

Finally, I track things like personal goals I might meet throughout the year, and things like interviews or things I’ve been invited to participate in, that I also include in my end-of-year recap.

Now, when Lisa suggested this topic, she also said “you make celebrating yourself look easy.” The point of these roundups is not so much to celebrate myself and my accomplishments, though I do believe it’s important to do your best to celebrate accomplishments (big or small) that stem from our hard work. I share these things in part to keep readers informed, but also to encourage other writers to keep going, and to count all their accomplishments, even if they don’t necessarily share them with the world.

That all said, if I’m truly honest, what all these various tracking systems amount to is a really elaborate, and often time-consuming, mental health strategy I’ve developed over the years. I’ve mentioned before that I live with depression and anxiety. I say “live with” not “suffer from” precisely because I’m high-functioning and much of that is due to the methods I’ve devised for keeping my mental illness in check.

The primary way they affect my day-to-day writing life is in a lack of motivation, and of course, imposter syndrome. So all these things I track are tangible proof that I’m getting somewhere, which helps with motivation. When I’m feeling like I haven’t done enough, I can see that I’m wrong. If I’m feeling like none of it matters because no one likes my stories anyway, I can look at nice things people have said about them, positive reviews, and more. These recaps are as much for me as they are for readers.

In his blog, actor Wil Wheaton likes to say “depression lies.” It does. Thing is, you can know that rationally and still be fooled by your own brain. Tracking all these things isn’t me bragging or stroking my own ego, it’s a survival strategy. One I choose to share at the end of each year. I don’t share every little thing. Some things are private. I also don’t share all the negative things because the goal for me is not to dwell on those. But that’s why I always begin with the disclaimer that these are the highlights only. The last thing I want is for someone to feel like they’re not good enough because they’re comparing themselves to my highlight reel.

So there you have it. I hope this answers your question, Lisa, and I hope it shines a light on how—and why—I do these yearly recaps, and also part of the reason behind these monthly updates.

If you’re like Lisa, and have other topics you’d like to see covered in my newsletter, feel free to comment and let me know.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

“The Space between Us” was published last month in Lightspeed’s December issue, and on Christmas Day became free-to-read online.

This story is about a couple from two different worlds (literally) trying to make their relationship work. If you missed it, you can read it here.

Also, on New Year’s Eve, the Worlds of Possibility Volume 2 anthology came out. This one reprints my story, “Feathers,” published this past June. The entire anthology (with all 85 stories) can be downloaded for free here. Get yours today!

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

My very next publication comes in just a few days on January 10 when the Spanish translation of “A World Unto Myself” comes out in the Argentinian zine, La Tuerca Andante. Translated by Argentinian author, Cezary Novek, the story’s Spanish title is “Un mundo en mí mismo.”

I’m really excited for this translation because much of my family are native Spanish-speakers, so it’ll be a lot easier for them to read this story than my English publications have been. So I’m looking forward to seeing this one out in the world.

Some of you might recall that I was thrilled to sell Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl last year in part because novelettes are notoriously tough to sell. Well, it seems I’m on a roll, because my other novelette, “The Soundtrack of My Afterlife,” was accepted just this past month by Adventitious.

This story will be appearing in their inaugural issue on February 1, just two days before the publication of Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl. So I have a lot to look forward to next month.

“The Soundtrack of My Afterlife” is a fantasy story about the bond between a girl and her car, and the music that shaped them both. I hope you’ll subscribe to Adventitious to support this new market and enjoy all the great fiction to come from them. As a special treat, I’ve compiled a playlist of music inspired by this story. That’ll go out to my newsletter subscribers when the story’s out. Subscribe today so you don’t miss out!

OTHER THINGS I’VE BEEN UP TO

If you missed it, the Odyssey Workshop recently shared an excerpt from the Q&A period that followed the lecture I did for them back in November. The students asked some great questions that day. You can read my responses to a couple of them here.

FUN STUFF

As you might recall from previous years, I have a tradition of taking all the year’s cover art from books and magazines that published my work and making mini versions of them that I then put in a Christmas ornament that I hang on my tree. The tradition continued this year with some more great covers.

I also recently received both the print copy of Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl and my contributor copy of Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 3, which officially completed the shelf I have for my own published work.

Now to start a new shelf!

FOR YOUR AWARDS CONSIDERATION

If you’re reading for awards and only have time to read one of my stories, the one I’d most like people to consider is, “Through the Machine,” which came out May of last year in Lightspeed magazine and was featured by Gizmodo.

Here’s what the good folks at Gizmodo had to say about it:

For those with lots of time to read, you can find my full 2025 eligibility post here.

Thank you for keeping my work in mind when nominating and voting.

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “Twelve Things that Will Occur Immediately Following Your Invention of Teleportation”

Just recently my husband and I were talking about the fact that I don’t just write one kind of story. Readers of my work tend to either gravitate toward certain kinds of my stories, or else have as broad a taste for fiction as I do. Some of my work can be quite dark. Some of it gets you right in the feels. While other stories are light, and silly, and just aim to put a smile on your face (and mine). “Twelve Things”—as I call it for short—is an example of the latter.

Technology can be great. I’ve seen a lot of innovation over my lifetime and have witnessed changes that have made vast improvements in how we live our lives. Case in point: being able to listen to the song you want, when you want it, without having to rewind or fast forward. Seriously guys, that used to drive me nuts as a kid. If you skipped that part of history, consider yourself fortunate.

That said, tech isn’t always perfect, especially in those early days after it’s introduced and we’re treated to the joys of bugs no one expected. That’s why now and then I’ll write a silly little piece about tech gone wrong. Stories like “8 Laws I Wound Up Breaking While Attempting to Restore the Timeline” and “Hard Times at the Four Pines Motel.”

Many of my other stories are about tech gone wrong in one way or another too, but these tend to be on the darker or more serious side.

Often, my sillier stories will get their start during one of Codex’s flash fiction contests, so they tend to be on the shorter side. This is what happened with “Twelve Things,” which I wrote during the 2024 Flash Savior of the Universe contest. The prompt was simply to write a story in a non-traditional format. I’d done something similar the previous year with “8 Laws” so I figured I’d do a sequel of sorts with another list story. While “8 Laws” was about time travel mishaps, “Twelve Things” became about the problems with teleportation—and of course, cats.

Now, I’m a cat person. Don’t get me wrong, dogs are fine and I’ve written a dog story or two in my day. But I’ve had cats my whole life, and we just mesh better. I get cats. They get me. That all said, cats have…let’s just say, challenging personalities, at times. Or as I call it, cattitude.

They seem to delight in engaging in play that humans find less enjoyable. Often things we very much do not consider toys, become playthings in a cat’s paws. At times these are things that could even be dangerous for the cat to play with—or worse, mistake for food.

Cats are also clever, and fast, and all it takes is a momentary distraction to find yourself chasing your furry friend around the house while they laugh at you (Internally. Cats can’t physically laugh) and win this latest game of keepaway.

So I came up with this story about a guy who succeeds in creating a teleporter—an invention that if accessible to enough people, would forever change our world (See also “Hard Times at the Four Pines Motel”). Not only does he find a way to make teleportation work, but he also manages to miniaturize the technology. Good on him!

Thing is, writers—much like cats—can make your life interesting in all kinds of ways, and usually at the worst possible time. At least if you happen to be a fictional character.

My main character in this story kind of gets ahead of himself after cracking this invention. He’s already envisioning winning the Nobel, after all. If you think about it, his cat Quark is doing him a favor by ingesting the WTID and in so doing, teaching him a little humility.

In the end, things work out for my poor, hapless inventor, but not before he’s had one hell of a day. Anyone who’s ever lived with a cat, can probably relate on some level. And somehow, we still love them. (I mean, the ancient Egyptians revered them as gods!)

This story fared quite well during the Codex contest that year, coming in second place for my division the week I wrote it, and scoring pretty decently as well. I didn’t immediately send it out on submission, but when I did, it sold very quickly to Factor Four, making it the second story of four that I’ve sold to this market to date.

I really appreciate the variety of stories they publish in Factor Four. There’s something for every kind of reader there, and they offer writers fair contracts, so I’m happy to keep sending them my work.

Following its publication, Myna Chang included this story in her April 2025 Flash Fiction Roundup, saying, “This is a delightful story! I smiled the whole time I was reading it, and appreciated the little burst of happiness.” Exactly what I’d hoped reader reaction would be when I wrote it.

I hope it’s put a smile on your face too.

“Twelve Things that Will Occur Immediately Following Your Invention of Teleportation” was originally published in April 2025 in Factor Four.

Thanks for joining me for another year of monthly updates. Likes and shares are always appreciated, and if you haven’t yet done so, click the link to subscribe.

P.A. Cornell

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First off, the covers of the places I was published this year that had covers (credit to the artists). The blank space is for Lightspeed issue 187, which is out now, because I didn’t have the cover image ahead of time to include here.

AWARDS

“Bright Horizons” (Learning to Be Human) and “The Life You’ve Given Me, Rusty” (Lightspeed) were both long-listed for the 2024 BSFA awards. I’m proud of both these stories so it’s always nice to see that others enjoyed them.

PUBLICATIONS

My work was published 18 times this year (up 3 from 2024), not counting Gizmodo’s publication of “Through the Machine” in the same month it was published in Lightspeed. 15 of my publications were new. 3 were reprints. 2 of those reprints were for the same story, “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” which appeared in Nebula Awards Showcase 59 and The Long List Anthology 9. The Other reprint was for “Bright Horizons” which was published in Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 3.

• “Hard Times at The Four Pines Motel” (Short Circuit)

• “The Underlying Cause of Her Insomnia” (Trembling With Fear)

• “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” (Nebula Awards Showcase 59)

• “Twelve Things that Will Occur Immediately Following Your Invention of Teleportation” (Factor Four)

• “After the Suns Go Down” (The Growers)

• “After the Rain” (Escape Pod)

• “Through the Machine” (Lightspeed) - featured by Gizmodo

• “Fire & Flight” (Plott Hound)

• “So Many Things to See” (Trollbreath)

• “Feathers” (Worlds of Possibility)

• “The Futility of Warning You” (Factor Four)

• “And I Will Read to You About Butterflies” (Heartlines Spec)

• “Falling Forever” (Factor Four)

• “Spells for the Afterlife” (Of Enchantment, Enigma, and the Infinite)

• “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” (The Long List Anthology 9)

• “Bright Horizons” (Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 3)

• “What Happened That Night” (Short Edition / Short Circuit)

• “The Space Between Us” (Lightspeed)

That last publication’s out right now in Lightspeed’s December issue! It should be free-to-read soon and I’ll be sharing that link on social media once it goes live.

Find my complete short fiction bibliography HERE.

2025 Awards Eligibility

This year the story I’m most hoping people will read for awards consideration is “Through the Machine” which had gathered quite a few upvotes on the Nebula Recommended Reading List before the SFWA forums imploded. If you’re a SFWA member who has read and enjoyed this story, a reminder that you can suggest it for the new list that’s being compiled here. Social media shares are also greatly appreciated to help get more eyes on it. Thanks in advance.

In addition to being featured by Gizmodo in May, this story has received praise from both readers and multiple authors I admire. It’s been called “timely,” “a must-read,” and “an important story.” It also got some nice reviews from Infrequent SF Microreviews, Tangent, and made A.P. Howell’s “Things I Enjoyed in 2025” recommended reading list.

WRITING

In 2025 I wrote 15 new pieces of fiction.

In addition to that, I currently have another 4 short stories and 5 longer works on the go. I also started a secret project I can’t yet discuss.

Of the stories written this year, 3 have sold and have already been published:

• “Falling Forever” (Factor Four)

• “Feathers” (Worlds of Possibility)

• “The Futility of Warning You” (Factor Four)

ACCEPTANCES

This year I had 16 acceptances. 12 of them are original pieces of fiction, 3 are reprints. 1 also happens to be my debut short fiction collection which consists of 21 pieces of short sff including 2 never-before-published stories.

• “The Underlying Cause of My Insomnia” (Trembling With Fear)

• “After the Rain” (Escape Pod)

• “So Many Things to See” (Trollbreath)

• “The Monsters We Create” (Tales From the Graveside)

• “A Game of Go” (Analog)*

• The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories (Stars and Sabers)

• “Twelve Things that Will Occur Immediately Following Your Invention of Teleportation” (Factor Four)

• “Fire & Flight” (Plott Hound)

• “From the Ice and the Darkness” (Of Dread, Decay, and Doom)

• “Feathers” (Worlds of Possibility)

• “The Futility of Warning You” (Factor Four)

• “What Happened That Night” (Short Circuit)

• “And I Will Read to You About Butterflies” (Heartlines Spec)

• “Falling Forever” (Factor Four)

• “Bright Horizons” (Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 3)

• “After the Suns Go Down” (Penumbric)

*I’m counting the Analog acceptance here despite the fact that I ended up having to walk away from this sale, the reason being that I’m still thrilled editor Trevor Quachri chose my story for Analog. It’s just a shame I wasn’t able to come to a reasonable contractual agreement with the publisher.

CONTESTS

This year I participated in 2 Codex flash fiction contests, Weekend Warrior 2025 and Flash Savior of the Universe 2025, placing third in my division for the latter.

During WW, I wrote 6 new stories, and during FSoTU I wrote 3 new stories, meaning I wrote a new piece for every round of these contests.

INTERVIEWS

I was interviewed just 4 times over the course of this year, though two of those have yet to come out. The other two were my Lightspeed Author Spotlight interview which ran alongside “Through the Machine” and the Latine Author Roundtable hosted by Frivolous Comma in March.

Catch up on all my interviews HERE.

GUEST LECTURER FOR ODYSSEY

I was approached this year to be a guest lecturer for the Odyssey Workshop’s online series. My session, Writing Short Fiction That Gets Noticed, took place live on November 16. This was a real honor as a graduate of the workshop (2002).

A FEW OTHER THINGS

Each year comes with goals and bingo squares you want to achieve, and sometimes things you hadn’t even thought about happen that you realize you should’ve had a bingo square for. Here are some of the other things that happened this year, some of which surprised me, and some that fulfilled long-time dreams.

• I was invited by Electric Sheep to be their guest author and discuss some of my fiction.

• Got to work with three amazing artists for my upcoming books, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl and The Astronaut Among the Flowers.

• Spent 7 months attempting to negotiate a better contract for authors from Must Read Media (publisher of Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, as well as Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine). While I ultimately ended up walking away from this sale, some of the changes I succeeded in getting them to make for their contracts have gone on to benefit other authors. My going public about this experience also helped many authors make more informed decisions. That all said, there are still problems with the MRM contracts. Most recently Scott Edelman shared his experience of having to withdraw from F&SF after more than 50 years of trying to get published there. My heart goes out to him.

• Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 2 won the Aurora Award. This volume includes my story, “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont,” and as always, it’s an honor to play even a small part in the success of an anthology.

• I was approached by different people and entities for projects I can’t yet discuss, but there are very cool things ahead.

• I managed to crack 2 dream markets this year with acceptances to both Escape Pod and Analog, which is awesome, despite things not turning out quite as planned with Analog.

• My AI in education cautionary tale, “Bright Horizons,” was quoted in this article in The Halifax Examiner.

• “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” gets a shoutout in Adventitious’ submission guidelines as an example of the kinds of stories they’re looking for. A first for me!

• And finally, I’m already seeing some amazing reviews from early readers for my forthcoming novelette, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, which is currently available for pre-order. Grateful to everyone who has taken the time to read and blurb this book.

PAYING IT FORWARD

This year, I’ve continued to contribute to the writing community in various ways, one of which is to trade off critiques with fellow writers—something I did a few times in 2025.

I’ve also read and blurbed two books this year, that I hope you’ll read and review:

• Pedro Iniguez’s collection Echoes and Embers

• Eugen Bacon’s novella The Nga’phandileh Whisperer

And while it’s part of my job to promote my own work, it’s also nice to share the work of others now and then. I’ve enjoyed some great short fiction this year, some of which I’ve shared on social media. I don’t have the space to share every story I’ve liked, but here are 10 you may have missed (in no particular order):

• “A Runaway Bullet Runs Through Our Town” by Sam Pisciotta

• “Jimmy. Fucking. Bang.” by Myna Chang

• “Phantom View” by John Wiswell

• “Train Hoppers of Paradox” by Rachael K. Jones

• “The Drowned” by Ian Li

• “The Unfactory” by Derrick Boden

• “The Matador and the Labyrinth” by C.C. Finlay

• “All These Inscriptions Are for Me” by Carol Scheina

• “Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness” by B. Pladek

• “Echo Syndrome” by Jennifer Hudak

That’s a wrap on 2025! I’ll return to my usual newsletter format, including The Story Behind the Story: “Twelve Things that Will Occur Immediately Following Your Invention of Teleportation” in January. See you next year!

P.A. Cornell

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COVER REVEAL! (and Pre-order links)

My novelette, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, will be out in just a few months. In the meantime, Stars and Sabers did a cover reveal on October 30. If you missed it, here’s the official blog post and the cover image by Kim Herbst below.

Early readers have also been sending in their initial impressions, and I’m thrilled to say the reviews are great!

Here are just a few, but you can see all the latest praise for this book here.

This book is now available for pre-order, and you can also add it to your “Want to Read” list if you’re on Goodreads.

Profile on Cover Artist Kim Herbst

Profile on Interior Illustration Artist Ahmed Raafat

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 3, officially launched last month during Can*Con, the Canadian speculative fiction convention held annually in Ottawa. I wasn’t able to attend this year, but this volume includes my story, “Bright Horizons,” originally published in Flame Tree Publishing’s Learning to Be Human anthology last year. This story is a science fiction cautionary tale about AI in education.

You can order your copy of Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 3 here. This edition has even more great fiction by Canadian authors, and the previous two volumes are both major award winners, so definitely put this one on your holiday wish list!

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

My next—and I believe final—publication of the year is coming in Lightspeed’s December issue. That story is “The Space Between Us,” a science fiction story about two people trying their best to make a romantic relationship work despite literally being from different worlds. I can’t wait for you to read it!

Here’s everything still on deck:

FOR YOUR AWARDS CONSIDERATION (includes new info!)

If you’re reading for awards and only have time to read one of my stories, the one I’d most like people to consider is, “Through the Machine,” which came out earlier this year in Lightspeed magazine and was featured by Gizmodo.

Here’s what the good folks at Gizmodo had to say about it:

If you’re a SFWA member who’s read and enjoyed it, SFWA is now taking suggestions for their new reading list here. This suggestion list also allows you to use tags, and even recommend work that doesn’t yet fit under a Nebula award category.

For those with lots of time to read, you can find my full 2025 eligibility post here.

Thank you for keeping my work in mind when nominating and voting.

LET’S TALK TITLES

Aside from being a writer, I also worked for many years in editing. One of the hallmarks of a good editor, is paying attention to the tiniest details. Maybe some of you reading this newsletter each month also have a keen eye for detail, in which case, you might’ve noticed a recent change in my forthcoming stories. This change being that my upcoming Lightspeed publication, “The Space Between Us,” was in last month’s newsletter titled, “Worlds Apart.”

Titles are tricky. They’re important too. I know editors who are much more likely to be drawn to a story submitted to them if the title is catchy. Readers are no different. But any writer can tell you, the best titles can be tough to come up with—and occasionally a title can change, either because an editor suggests it, or the writer themself comes up with a better one at the last minute.

In this case, I was never completely sold on “Worlds Apart” and during the editing phase, Lightspeed Senior Editor, Wendy N. Wagner, noticed it was also a very commonly used title. So I got to work coming up with other options, ran a couple of them by Wendy, and we landed on “The Space Between Us” as the keeper.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made a last-minute title change. “Vinyl Wisdom” was once called “Punk’s Not Dead.” “Side Effects May Vary” was originally called “Short-Term Side Effects.” And “So Many Things to See” started out as, “Imagine the Possibilities.” In all cases, I think changing the title was the right call.

I used to say titles were my kryptonite. It felt like my creativity vanished when it came to figuring out what to call my stories. I think I’ve gotten better at it though, and I’m less hard on myself for struggling so much with titles in my early career. Now my bibliography includes many titles I love. They range in length from a single word, like “Free,” to very long titles like, “How to Impress a Top Food Critic and Put Your Restaurant on the Galactic Map,” which hits a whopping 15 words! Coming up with titles has become part of the fun of writing for me.

Some stories even get their start as titles, with the story unfolding from them, and making the title a sort of writing prompt. From my own work, “The Bullet in My Pocket Has Your Name on It,” “8 Laws I Wound Up Breaking While Attempting to Restore the Timeline,” and “The Futility of Warning You,” all started as titles with no plot. The rest I figured out later.

How a writer comes up with a title can take many forms. Sometimes it’s a line from the story itself. Sometimes it’s a repurposed song title. Some writers, like Mary Robinette Kowal, suggest basing the title on the story’s main theme. That said, when C.C. Finlay was still editor of F&SF, he felt theme wasn’t enough, and thought that good titles should also connect to a story’s plot. The gist of it is, there’s no set way to title a story. Some titles turn out great. Others are signed off on as “good enough”—usually after the writer has gone through several options without striking gold.

Ultimately, a weak title isn’t going to make or break a writer’s chance of selling a good story, but it certainly helps to have an eye-catching and memorable title. Hopefully the newly re-christened “The Space Between Us” comes closer to filling that bill with readers.

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO

I’ve been keeping busy with a number of things, but unfortunately I can’t talk about most of them yet so you’ll have to forgive my vagueness. I started working on a new secret project. I’ve also recently been approached for a few other things that are very cool and that I look forward to sharing with you. Beyond that, I can’t say much more. But rest assured that things are happening behind the scenes and I’ll hopefully have more detailed information for you in the near future.

Other than that, I’m pleased to say I’ve acquired my ticket for Can*Con 2026, so I’ll be at that convention next year. I hope to see you there. Tickets can be purchased here.

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “The Collective Memories of Dogs and Robots”

This story goes back to my very first Codex Weekend Warrior flash fiction contest in 2019, but it actually got its start a bit before that.

I’d been toying with a vague notion of wanting to write a post-apocalyptic story set after the extinction of humanity. Super light stuff, I know. I was thinking that what would survive us would be our creations—our robots, still running their programs and going on without us. But there wasn’t quite enough there for a story.

When the contest started, I’d already been a Codex member for a few years, but I’d never participated in one of their contests before. That year I decided to start with Weekend Warrior in part because I’d never really written much flash, and I wanted to challenge myself to write shorter pieces.

For those who aren’t aware, when I first started writing for publication, it was with novel-length work (and pretty long novels, at that). Then I came to discover that I actually really enjoyed short fiction, and began selling short stories pretty regularly. Flash, though, was a whole other thing.

Those who aren’t writers may think it’s all the same. Writing is writing, isn’t it? All stories have a beginning, middle, and end. That’s true to a point, but, as with most things, it’s more complicated than that. Structuring a novel is incredibly complex. It’s not just writing more words, it’s keeping multiple characters and plot points in your head, it’s knowing how much time to devote to description, it’s pacing, and many more things.

Short stories can be like that too, but you have to do it all in a tiny percentage of the space. You have to know exactly where to focus your story, and usually you have to center it on one character (or at least fewer characters).

Flash goes beyond that even, challenging you to zoom in on a theme or a character’s experience in even fewer words than a short story. You have to really practice saying a great deal while economizing words. Or sometimes just saying things between the lines with skillfully-incorporated subtext. Flash is also a great length at which to really get experimental with things like format and style.

Since that first contest, I’ve done many more, and flash has become a kind of writing playground for me. It’s allowed me to try out different voices, structures, points of view, characters, themes, and more. I think I might’ve even gotten a little better at writing very short fiction.

I’m not sure if that means I’ll be trying my hand at microficition any time soon. I have written some in the past, but that’s a little too short for my liking. I enjoy reading it. And some people are incredibly talented at telling complete stories in like 100 words. But for me, while I think the challenge of it is good, I personally find the results less satisfying as far as my own work goes. I guess I’m just wordier than that.

If you’d like to check out some microfiction though, it’s recently been getting more love with pro magazines like Apex and Augur running microfiction contests and even a Best Microfiction anthology series. Publishers like Shacklebound Books have also put out their share of tiny stories. And author Catherine Tavares has made it a personal goal to write more microfiction this year, some of which you’ll find here.

But back to my story.

As those who’ve been reading this newsletter for a while know, Weekend Warrior stories are based on weekly prompts, provided by the contest runners. The particular prompt that led to my finally writing “The Collective Memories of Dogs and Robots” was actually a Portuguese proverb:

Writers participating in the contest don’t necessarily need to go off the prompt exactly. It’s just there to inspire something. So as you might’ve guessed, it was the word “dog” that stood out to me here and made me choose this prompt from among the other options. I also liked the spirit of the proverb—the implication of the bond between dogs and people. It got me thinking about the relationship between us and these creatures that started out as wolves, and what that has meant for the evolution of both our species. In many ways, a connection akin to a symbiosis.

This paired—in my mind at least—with the earlier idea I’d had for writing something about robots surviving us. What came to me was a premise based on answering the questions:

• If we’re gone, what remains of us?

• If we’re gone, who remembers us?

The story’s answer to this is our robots, who can’t die and can’t forget. And of course, dogs, who carry genetic memory in their DNA. Who have been our faithful companions for as far back as we can recall. And who, despite our many faults, never judge us too harshly.

In the story, the robots have developed a way to communicate with other species. They’ve been left alone, and are looking for someone to connect with. They discover, rather by accident, that this procedure can work with dogs.

Even today we’re beginning to make some progress with this, and it’s probably just a matter of time before we’re able to communicate much more easily with members of the other species with which we share this world.

Author Mary Robinette Kowal, for instance, uses a system of buttons to communicate with her cat Elsie. You can even follow Elsie on Instagram to see what a conversation with a cat is like. Fascinating stuff, if you ask me—of course, I’m a cat person.

As in my story though, language between different beings isn’t a simple translation. They just don’t communicate the same way we do. In her videos, Mary Robinette often reminds viewers that Elsie is not speaking English. It’s more about conveying an idea than it is conveying specific words. This difference in communication styles is something I find so interesting. It’s likely something we’ll have to address should we ever encounter an alien species capable of communication, something you might recall from the 2016 film Arrival, based on Ted Chiang’s novella, Story of Your Life.

I’d also at some point before writing this story (though don’t ask me when) been reading about the concept of collective memory. Of course, I fictionalize it here, but the idea is that the dogs and robots each have their memories of humanity that are shared among their own kind.

The story brings those two groups of survivors together to bond over a shared experience involving us. Their experiences are different, but similar enough for them to form a connection. The reader (and this writer) can even imagine that the humanoid robots, made in our own image, go on to form a connection with dogs similar to the one we had with them. That together they can not only continue to survive in this world in our absence, but thrive, and take the best of what we gave them as they move forward.

While our species has come to an end in this story, I think of it as a positive tale with a hopeful ending. It says that despite our flaws, there were good things about us too. Can any one of us ask for more when it comes to how we’re remembered after we’re gone?

Ultimately, this story’s about that. Not just what’s left when our species is gone, but also what remains when any one person is gone. It’s about how we remember them. How they helped shape who we are. I’m not referring just to people we lose through death, but also those who come into our lives for just a short time before we ultimately lose touch with them.

Some people believe that everyone who comes into your life, be it for years or for just a moment, has a reason to be there. That you wouldn’t even meet if there wasn’t a purpose to it. I don’t know if that’s true, but I can definitely think of people now gone from my life in one way or another who I still think of on occasion, and who I see glimpses of in myself.

It’s a kind of legacy we all leave, in a sense. You never know the impact you’ve made on someone else. Something they saw you do, or heard you say, that stuck with them. Some kindness you did them. Or some wakeup call you gave them. More often than not, we have no idea when that little bit of magic is happening. But it is happening, and that’s what I was trying to capture in this story.

The reality is that despite billionaires funding research into cheating death these days, the likelihood is that one day our species will be gone. What will we leave behind to show we were once here? Not all of it is great, to be honest (I’m looking at you, microplastics), but there are some good things about us that may in some form survive, I hope.

As recently as this past month, I lost some people from my own life due to illness and old age—but parts of them will forever remain with me. I might even write about them one day. It wouldn’t be the first time.

When a writer leaves this plane of existence, we’re maybe a little luckier than most in that we leave our stories behind for others to read into the future. At least for as long as they remain in publication. Through our stories readers can come to know a little bit about who we were or what themes mattered to us enough to explore through the written word. And through these same stories they might find that if they dig a little deeper, they say something about who we all are, through our collective experiences and memories.

One of the people who left us last month was one of Codex’s own, our friend and fellow author Jon Lasser. To conclude this month’s newsletter, I thought I’d share the work he left behind, which you can find here. I hope you’ll take some time to read a few of his stories.

“The Collective Memories of Dogs and Robots” was originally published in July 2023 in Augur Magazine.

If you’re enjoying my monthly newsletter, please like, share, and subscribe. Thanks for reading!

P.A. Cornell

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Thank you also for all the kind comments on my last post and for everyone who has reached out through other means to show their support for me during a tough situation. This business has its ups and downs. It’s good to have the support of community in either case.

BIG NEWS!

If you missed it, the complete table of contents for Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 3 was announced last month. I’m thrilled to finally be able to say that my story, “Bright Horizons,” has been included in this year’s volume.

This marks my third time appearing in this anthology series. Volume One includes my story, “Into the Frozen Wilds” and lists my novella Lost Cargo among the best of 2022. And Volume Two includes my Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora-nominated story, “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont.” Both these volumes have won Canada’s Aurora Award. Volume One was also a finalist for the World Fantasy Award.

I’m honored that editor, Stephen Kotowych has again selected one of my stories to appear among the best Canada has to offer. I’m certainly in good company.

“Bright Horizons” was originally published by Flame Tree Press in their Learning to Be Human anthology. It’s about AI in education—something that was still near future science fiction when I wrote it, but that’s all-too-quickly becoming a reality these days. Like my story, “Through the Machine,” this is meant as a cautionary tale. It was written to make people think: is this the future we want? It’s not too late to rethink things and make changes so people—especially those as vulnerable as children—are prioritized over profit.

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO

It’s about five months till the publication of my novelette, SHOESHINE BOY & CIGARETTE GIRL. I’ve recently proofread the ARC* for it and can tell you, this one’s going to be really special. Not only will readers get my story, but also an exclusive “Story Behind the Story” that will only be available in this book.

If that’s not enough, I’ve had the privilege of working with not one, but two outstanding artists. The first is Kim Herbst, who did the cover, which won’t yet be included in the ARC but will be revealed later and of course be the cover once the book is officially published. I’ve seen the art though and I’m thrilled. The second artist is Ahmed Raafat who’s created some amazing interior art to run alongside the story that I absolutely love.

Kim is a talented illustrator with an eye-catching style, whose clients include National Geographic, Google, and Tor Books, among others. Stars and Sabers did a profile on her a little while ago. If you missed it, you can find that here.

Ahmed is an equally talented comic book artist who’s had work with Dark Horse Comics, Netflix, and has collaborated with writer/director Kevin Smith.

I’m extremely honored to have my work paired with theirs, and will forever be grateful to Stars and Sabers Publishing for making this possible. I couldn’t be more excited for readers to see the final version of this book that will include their stunning visual art. In the meantime, if you’re on Goodreads, you can join the others who’ve already added my book to their “Want to Read” lists here.

*Advance Reader Copy

RECENT FICTION SALES

Happy to say my story “After the Suns Go Down,” which was published earlier this year in the anthology The Growers, has found a new home online at Penumbric magazine. This is my first sale to Penumbric, but I know they put out quality work in a great-looking publication.

“After the Suns Go Down” is a science fiction story with horror elements about a family that settles on a newly-colonized world and finds that the challenges might be more than they bargained for. I’m excited to see this one get a new opportunity to reach readers.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

The Long List Anthology 9 was published on September 8. This includes my story “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont.” I’m honored that this story was selected to represent Arley Sorg and Christie Yant under the “Best Editor Short Form” category.

Somewhat related, now that Psychopomp publishes Fantasy Magazine (original publication venue for “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont”) they’ve recently updated their back issue listings to include the issues that came out under the former publisher. This includes Issue 96 which, in addition to including my story, also has the Author Spotlight interview that ran along with it. This is one of my favorite interviews, so if you haven’t read it before, it’s a great companion piece to my story.

And while this isn’t a new publication, “Fire & Flight” is now free-to-read at Plott Hound Magazine. This story is about a genetically-engineered dragon who draws strength to overcome her circumstances from the music of Edith Piaf.

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

INDUSTRY NEWS

As some of you may recall, I’m among the authors involved in the class action lawsuits against Meta and Anthropic for illegally using our stolen work to train their LLMs.

There have been some recent updates about the U.S.-based case against Anthropic (There’s a separate Canadian case I’m also involved with). Jason Sandford did a great job of breaking down what’s been happening in his recent Genre Grapevine that explains it far better than I ever could.

The TL;DR of it all though amounts to the fact that only a small percentage of authors will see any monetary compensation for this theft. That amount is also nothing to cheer about. The settlement amounts to a slap on the wrist to Anthropic who will continue to profit from our stolen work, made clear in this article. I tend to agree with the article’s author who ends the piece with:

Even the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit had issues with the way this has gone down; something you can read about here (though he did ultimately approve the settlement.)

One thing’s for sure, authors are learning that the copyright protections they thought they had aren’t necessarily guaranteed. Some are also learning their publishers didn’t always file for copyright on their behalf—despite being contractually obligated to do so. A couple of publishers have offered to compensate those authors for their losses, but the fact is it should never have come to this in the first place.

RESOURCES FOR WRITERS

Since I went public about a less-than-ideal experience with a short story acceptance, several writers have reached out with questions about contract negotiations. I’ll be the first to say I’m no lawyer, and don’t consider myself an expert on the matter, but I have been doing this for a while, and over that time I’ve come across some great resources I’d like to share. These will be of particular interest to those new to the field, but no matter how long you’ve been at this, if there’s anything here that’s new to you, I encourage you to check it out.

• SFWA Contracts Committee & model contracts

• “Negotiating Short Story Contracts” by David Steffen

• “How to Read a Short Story Contract” - Dream Foundry video, featuring David Steffen

• “Negotiating Your Short Fiction Contracts” by Karawynn Long

• Writer Beware (Warnings about industry bad actors)

• Genre Grapevine (Industry news)

But it’s not just about contracts, it’s also about business practices. With that in mind, I’ve come up with a list of red flags to look out for when negotiating any contract:

• Pulls a bait-and-switch on things like payment (for instance promises one amount, only to write a different amount into the contract. Pro tip: always do the math yourself. I’ve seen more than one contract with errors in the payment even from the best-intentioned markets.)

• Ghosting. While this is sadly becoming more common in book publishing, in short fiction good communication is still the norm. Publishers and editors can get busy, but when they outright ignore authors—especially when there’s a serious problem—this can be cause for concern.

• Unprofessional behavior. This can include failing to pay authors, publishing without a contract, treating authors disrespectfully, and more. Basically, listen to what other authors are saying. If this publisher/editor seems like someone you’d rather not work with, trust that instinct.

• Promising that they will follow through on a contract issue but refusing to put that in writing. Unfortunately, if we could just take people at their word, we wouldn’t need contracts.

• Publisher behaves as if what they bring to the negotiation is more valuable than what you bring to the table. This is not the case. If they want your story, the terms must be fair. It doesn’t matter how big the publication is, how short your piece is, or how new you are to the industry.

These are just a few things off the top of my head. Other writers could probably add to this list. My hope is that you won’t have experiences that lead you to add to it too.

If you use The Submission Grinder (which is free, by the way), you’ll notice that David Steffen has included some great features to help protect yourself. This is in addition to posting notes on the pages of delisted or concerning markets, which you should always read before submitting.

One feature I like to use is the ability to create a private note for myself on market listings. This way, when I come across bad experiences other writers have had (or if I have a bad or questionable experience personally), I make a note as a reminder to my future self to proceed with caution or simply avoid this market.

Another great feature is the “Ignore” button on the market page. Click this, and it’ll no longer come up when you run a search.

RESOURCE FOR READERS

I’ve mentioned InkFoundry here before. For those hearing about it for the first time, InkFoundry’s a website that aims to help readers find short curated stories they might otherwise miss. Created by Erin Cairns, this directory has made some really great updates recently to help both readers and writers. Several of my stories can be found on this page, and more will likely be added. If you love short fiction, I encourage you to check InkFoundry out. Try out the search features and find some great fiction you didn’t even know was out there.

FOR YOUR AWARDS CONSIDERATION

If you’re reading for awards and only have time to read one of my stories, the one I’d most like people to consider is, “Through the Machine,” which came out earlier this year in Lightspeed magazine and was featured by Gizmodo.

Here’s what the good folks at Gizmodo had to say about it:

This one’s already been getting some love on the Nebula Reading List, so if you’re a SFWA member who’s read and enjoyed it, feel free to give it an upvote here. The forums have been down for a while, but upvoting still seems to be working (at least for some people).

You can also find my complete 2025 awards eligibility post here.

Thank you for reading.

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: “Chief Scavenger’s Log in the Climate Apocalypse”

As with several of my other shorter pieces, “Chief Scavenger’s Log in the Climate Apocalypse” got its start during the Codex online writers group’s annual “Weekend Warrior” contest. If you’re new to this, Weekend Warrior is a flash fiction contest with a limit of 750 words. The contest runs for several weeks, with a selection of prompts provided for inspiration. The aim is to encourage productivity. Winners get bragging rights. (Though really anyone who manages to write even one story can call that a win.)

This particular story was written for the 2022 iteration of Weekend Warrior. The prompt I chose that week was one where I had to write a story using words selected from a provided list. I no longer recall which words I chose, and didn’t make a note of it at the time, so which ones came from this prompt are lost to history.

But that was just one piece of what inspired this story. I was having trouble coming up with anything that could work, so I did what I sometimes do when the ideas aren’t flowing and went for a walk. It was early in the year, which in Canada (at least the part of it I live in) tends to mean cold and snowy weather.

The Winter chill got me thinking about a climate apocalypse where it’s Winter for most of the year, with a brief respite of a few warmer months that are the only time the survivors of our world can emerge from their bunkers to gather supplies.

However, I’d been thinking about apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fiction for a while, and how it tends to be pretty bleak. I’d written some myself, and even when things ended well for the characters, it tended to be a dark road getting there. So I’d been wanting to attempt a positive spin on that subgenre for some time.

I also often think of the mundane things that make up our lives and how those would look in a post-apocalyptic setting. One of my favorite stories, for instance, is A.J. Fitzwater’s “Logistics,” in which the protagonist’s goal is simply to find tampons in a post-apocalyptic world. That’s just so real to me, and not something you generally see tackled in fiction, but something that would definitely be a concern if that fictional world were our reality.

With that in mind, I’d often thought about what it would be like to date or fall in love in a post-apocalyptic setting. Humans are still humans, and whatever problems an apocalypse might bring with it, they’d still feel attraction and connection, whether they meant to or not.

So I took those thoughts and my Wintery walk and combined them with some words from the provided prompt, then wrote a story that came to somewhere around 750 words. Following the contest it would grow a little to 778 words before going out on submission.

Because of the constraints of the contest’s word limit, I decided to write the story in the form of brief log entries. These entries tell us a bit about the protagonist, and his thoughts as he explores the strange surface world in search of supplies. The challenge was in revealing his world and place in it using very few words, and trusting the reader to read between the lines for the rest.

At first I don’t tell the reader much about the protagonist, not even that his name is Jason. All we know is he was young when people had to take shelter underground. He can remember the way the world once was, but he’s grown up in a shelter. The dangers of this new world have taught him not to trust strangers, so he’s naturally wary when he first spots a woman (Lola) while out scavenging. Nevertheless, he can’t help being curious about her.

Lola’s also cautious at first, but soon the two start leaving things for each other to find. Little gestures of goodwill, in an attempt to reach out to another human being. Something that to me seems natural, and that I hope would continue no matter how dire our circumstances might become.

Jason worries about the safety of the others in his group though, and knows he’s breaking the rules when he reaches out to Lola. He tells himself he’s going to take one for the team and avoid further contact with this woman, but in the next log we see he’s unable to follow through with that.

Emotions, am I right?

Before we know it, Jason’s head-over-heels, and Lola isn’t far behind him. Despite the fact they’re both technically adults, I gave them a really innocent, almost childlike courtship. They were just kids when the world changed. They’ve lived a sheltered life—literally. Their emotional maturity needs a little room to grow. Jason, especially, has had to live surrounded by people either significantly older than himself, like his mentor, Karl, or younger, like the kids he’s now in charge of. A relationship with someone his own age is a bit outside his wheelhouse, so it’s natural they’d take things slow.

I liked the idea of pairing the harshness of post-apocalyptic circumstances with the sweetness of first love. I still do.

Their story isn’t without conflict though. They still have things to worry about, like getting enough supplies to carry them through the long, hard Winter. Jason also feels responsible for the children in his charge—a duty he can’t see himself abandoning, not even for something as powerful as love.

Lucky for him, Lola’s one step ahead of him and love finds a way to make things work in the end. What can I say? I’m a romantic. Now and then I let my characters have their happy ending. Life is hard enough.

“Chief Scavenger’s Log in the Climate Apocalypse” was originally published in July 2024 in Interstellar Flight Magazine.

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P.A. Cornell

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