So it would appear I’ve sold my short story “Exodus Tides” to Edmund Schubert at IGMS. Many thanks to everyone who took a look at it when it was still titled “Siren Song”: it went through VD6, and it was up on OWW for a while, where it was Editor’s choice [1]. People who helped include Pete Aldin, Larry Pinaire, Karen Meisner, Nancy Fulda, Sara Genge, Ruth Nestvold, Ralan Conley, and Stephen Gaskell. And many many thanks to Douglas Cohen, who took a look through my rewrite in record time; and to Edmund for the awesome suggestions.

Contrary to most of my fiction nowadays, it’s set in France, in a nameless Parisian suburb; and it’s got mermen, and the sea and the Abyss. Sort of urban post-apocalyptic fantasy, I guess, if you really want to pigeonhole it…

Mother never spoke about the sea.

She’d been very young at the time of the exodus, Aunt Albane said: a mere smolt, able to swim on her own but not yet ready to mate or bear offspring. Father had dragged her from the depths as the Dark King raged, and they fled together, ahead of twisted, shadowy shapes with harpoons and tridents–never stopping till they reached the safety of the seashore.

“But how did he swim?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine Father–small and portly with a shock of pale white skin, out of breath when he climbed the stairs–as someone who had ever been at ease in the sea-depths.

[1]This is going to be one of those embarrassing posts, because while I distinctly remember putting it up on OWW about a year ago, it appears I forgot to save the crit into a file, with the net result that I have no list of who contributed to improving the story. A thousand apologies if your name isn’t in the list–it reflects on my bad memory and screwy processes more than on anything else…