Last publication for the year: notes on "The Berry Girl"


When it rains, it pours. Or something like that.

 My last story for 2014 came out this week (same week as "Congress of Dragons.") This latest one is "The Berry Girl," up at Lakeside Circus. A podcast should be coming out soon. It was released just as summer ends, which is fitting as the story is an ode to summer.
STORY NOTES (possibly mild spoilers below!)








I wrote this story last year, in the thick of summer. The new raspberry bush in our front yard was giving us its first harvest. Every day my youngest daughter checked the bush for ripe berries. It was her greatest delight to pick the berries, bringing them one or two at a time into the house in a little yellow bowl.

 One morning I was in the shower when my little girl entered the bathroom. She slid open my shower door to proudly show me her harvest--her bowl full of ripe berries. And she sang, "I am the Berry Girl! I am the Berry Girl!"

 So I sat down to write a story about a Berry Girl.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On memoir and things I have no experience of—A review of "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan

I know nothing about surfing. I've never stood on a board. I've never even seen surfing done in real life (I've spent most of my life in the American Midwest. And even when I lived in Los Angeles for college, I somehow never met any surfers). Yet it came into my head to write a story that involved surfing. So I read a lot. I was interested in big-wave surfing, so I read Susan Casey's book, "The Wave." I read a lot of journalistic accounts. I watched videos online. And eventually, probably inevitably, I stumbled upon a two-part article in The New Yorker. The article is titled " Playing Doc's Games" by William Finnegan, and it was published in 1992. It is famous among surfers. The surf magazine The Inertia called it " possibly the greatest surf story ever" and a writer at The Surfer described it as "the best written piece (all 39,000 words of it) ever penned about surf culture."  I am not a surfer. Yet Wi
Read more

Short fiction recs! May-June 2023

My short fiction recs from late spring/early summer. Tales of horror and magic, beauty and grief, discovery and wonder and strength. “Sasabonsam” by Tara Campbell in Strange Horizons I sit high in the mahogany tree, my long limbs dangling toward the earth. My eyes, if you could see them, would gleam at you in the moonlight. I am alert, but I let my arms swing idly with the breeze. They look just like the vines drooping from the branches, don’t they?   This is an older story, which I only just discovered thanks to a recommendation online. It’s a tale about a sasbonsam—a monster of West African folklore—and its prey. It’s a tale of curling tension and deliciously dark twists. The sasabonsam eats humans and feeds on their regrets. But in the end, who is the predator and who the prey?   “Lullaby for the Unseen” by Nelly Geraldine Garcia-Rosas in Weird Horror Ariel. It is because of him that I have this scar.   He was my classmate. A very thin kid, shorter than me, with g
Read more

Short fiction recs! Oct-Nov 2023

Some stories that I read and loved, from October through November.    Fantasy “Four Words Written on My Skin” by Jenn Reese in Uncanny Magazine When the Fae stole my wife, I followed them into the dark woods to win her back.   A short but achingly sharp and lovely piece about finding what’s been lost. The Fae stole the narrator’s wife, but the narrator has been losing Jess for a long time, before the Fae ever appeared. What follows is a confrontation with the narrator’s own responsibility for that loss, for the distance that’s grown between them. And, at the end, a glimmer of hope—the decision to choose to love. Beautifully told.     “Six Versions of my Brother Found Under the Bridge,” by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Uncanny Magazine Technically it was built on top of a river that had been dredged and filled in some fifty years ago which made the ground under the bridge degraded and pretty dangerous. But rumor had it—and by rumor Olga meant Maria’s oldest cousin who had be
Read more