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“Down Where the Best Lilies Grow” goes live

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Odette’s maman says she plucked her along with other skinny reeds down by the shallow brackish waters of the Durendal Fen near the water’s tail end where the best mud lilies grow among the beaked sedge and whorl grass.  There the small lilies push up, tiny stars tossed against green and black, blossoming like white prayers to hazy dappled cloudshine, offering themselves like virgins opening legs after wedding vows. . .

My story “Down Where the Best Lilies Grow” is live at 10Flash Magazine.  Available in its entirety at the site.

[moth image  by Kateshortforbob in Public Domain]

Machine of Death in Calgary June 17-19, 2011

Machine of Death, which opens with my story “Flaming Marshmallow and Other Deaths,” will be kickin’ it Canada style this weekend at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo.  Editors Ryan North & David Malki ! will be on hand to sign books and crack jokes.

You can still read “Flaming Marshmallowonline, or listen to it in audio at Escape Pod or the MoD audio feed.

The Girl-Shaped Jar

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Super-short story “The Girl-Shaped Jar” has gone live at Flash Fiction Online :

Sammi’s sister sent her a funny email. A funny, funny email, showing crazy Japanese inventions to make things into other crazy things, other crazy shapes they weren’t. All crazy and stuff stuff, like watermelons grown in tempered glass jars, square right off the vine. . . .

Read the complete story here.

[picture from Wikimedia commons]

“Flaming Marshmallow” in audio…again!

In the latest news from Machine Of Death, “Flaming Marshmallow,” a story which first appeared in PUSH OF THE SKY and in audio at Escape Pod, is in audio . . . again!

From the MoD site:

I’m so freaking excited I can hardly stand it.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow is my birthday, the birthday. The birthday everybody waits and waits for and until you get there you just hate that all your old friends already got theirs and you’re the only one without it yet, and sometimes you think holy-freaking-eff, I’m never going to turn sixteen, but then you do.

This is what I’ve been waiting for all these months. All these years, I guess, though before my friends started getting theirs, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. We were all No-Knows then.

Tomorrow, I’m finally going to feel like I belong.

Tomorrow, I’m going to find out how I die.

 Download the MP3Subscribe on iTunes
Direct podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/machineofpodcast

Reader Colleen AF Venable is a designer, author, and girl who laughs till things come out of her nose. During the day, she designs graphic novels for First Second Books and at night, she writes graphic novels about a not-so-imaginary-anymore hyperactive hamster named Hamisher. The world is a very lovely place.

In the book, “FLAMING MARSHMALLOW” is illustrated by Shannon Wheeler of Too Much Coffee Man!