You might have noticed that my last post about short fiction was a bit all over the place. I had thoughts in my head and wasn’t able to corral them as well as I would have liked. That happens to me sometimes, whether it’s a blog post or a story. I hope it was at least halfway coherent.

Part of the reason I was thinking about short stories was because one of mine was recently accepted into an anthology!

Flame Tree Publishing is a UK company that puts out several anthologies every year in various genres. Each one is a mix of new and classic authors. The anthologies themselves are hardcover works of art.

I am incredibly pleased to be able to announce that my short story She’s Gone will be included in Flame Tree’s upcoming Supernatural Horror anthology alongside stories by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, John Polidori (I’m ridiculously pleased about this one, especially), & H.G. Wells. Not to mention the other modern day writers I’m proud to be sharing space with!

Check out the blog post over at Flame Tree for a full list of authors included in both the Supernatural Horror anthology and the Lost Worlds anthology.

She’s Gone was an interesting piece for me.  I wrote it for a prompt in the writer’s group I mentioned last week, though I can’t remember what the exact prompt was now. But I do remember I was wracking my brain for an idea that month, and the image of a pretty young woman in a sundress sitting at the bar in a little dive, looking drunk, sad, and out of place, came to me. Sitting beside her was an old man in a rumpled suit who looked like death warmed over. Only he was smiling.

It was very vivid and reminded me a bit of that Hopper painting Nighthawks, but way more depressing.

Once I had that image in my head, the rest of the story flowed from it. It went through a revision or two, of course, but the story didn’t change fundamentally from what that first image showed me.

Anyway, I was pretty happy with how it ended up, and I guess the folks over at Flame Tree were too!

There’s no official release date for the anthology yet, as far as I know. But it will be out sometime this year. I’ll keep you posted as more news comes in. Until then, check out their blog and maybe browse their catalog. They’ve got other anthologies out you might be interested in. And did I mention how gorgeous they are? Because seriously. Damn.

Anyway, that’s all. I’m going to go continue doing my little happy dance that a story I wrote is in an anthology with John Polidori!

~xxxM