sovay | Be there in the nude—I tore into your sweater

And when I got home tonight, the mail had brought me my contributor's copy of Mythic Journeys: Retold Myths and Legends, edited by Paula Guran. The cover looks even better in person.

"A Wolf in Iceland Is the Child of a Lie" was published originally in Not One of Us #45 in 2011, reprinted in Lightspeed Magazine in 2015, and I am honored to find it the closing story of this anthology, all the more so since it is exactly the kind of anthology with which I stocked my shelves when mythic fiction was booming. The ToC is full of people I am equally delighted to appear alongside, including a marvelous fox by Yoon Ha Lee and one of my favorite short stories by Tanith Lee. And the story itself matters to me: it is no longer the only piece of fiction I have drawn from Norse myth, but it was the first and remains to date my only writing of Loki, the god I imprinted on so formatively in second grade—thanks, D'Aulaires—that in some ways that one illustration of him smiling in the fire of his own changing shapes remains the yardstick against which I judge even the Marvel movies. I wrote it while Eyjafjallajökull was erupting. I couldn't not think of Loki twisting under the earth, poison-burnt, making it shake. I wrote the story about some of his children instead. Some of the narrator's details are shared with my family and some are not. I just realized it's probably the closest thing I have written so far to a werewolf story, too.