What did you bury before those hands pulled me from the earth?

[sovay]

My short story "The Creeping Influences" has been accepted by Shimmer. This is the one with the genderqueer narrator and the bog body in 1930's Ireland; it was accepted earlier this year by another market, but the sale fell through about a month later in one of the weirder experiences I have had in publishing. I am very, very glad it has found a new home and I am glad that home is Shimmer. They are a new market for me; publication is slated for early 2017 and I'm looking forward. They do illustrations. The story is my longest successful attempt at historical fiction to date; it takes its title from Seamus Heaney's "Bog Queen," the second of the six poems collected in North (1975) which describe and contemplate Irish and Danish bog bodies. I was scared by one of them as a child. Years later, this sort of thing happens.

Comments

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the rec! The one you linked is absolutely excellent.

[sovay]

The one you linked is absolutely excellent.

This is the one that scared me as a child, when I heard an excerpt performed as part of a one-woman play about peat bogs at the Boston Museum of Science: "The Grauballe Man." I don't think I read "The Tollund Man" till years later. "Punishment" also made an impression on me.