Pleased to announce that my story “The Amphisbaena in the Wild” is forthcoming in the third issue of The Pink Hydra, a new online magazine out of South Africa. It comes out the first Friday in September and will be free to read online.
This is a story about a herd of amphisbaena whose two heads are at odds, and the attempts to figure out why, both by the zoologist in charge of their care at a creature sanctuary and the team from a podcast focused on creature mysteries. (Creatures as in mythological creatures, except that in the world of the story they aren’t mythological.) It’s told in the form of a transcript from the podcast – I read the transcripts of a lot of long-form podcasts while drafting this one in order to try to get the tone right – and also features (a) the difficulty of balancing work with parenting! (b) assumptions being made about the competence of women in science! and (c) a podcast host who’s a little too confident in his understanding of the events he’s reporting on!
A little writing history on this one: this story has undergone what I think is the most radical transformation in my writing history between first draft and final piece: while the first draft was in podcast format, and did involve (as a very secondary plot) amphisbaena having internal conflict, it was also 25,000 words long and the “podcast” was focused on a totally different story about the death of a zoologist studying chimaera, allegedly at the hands of poachers, and the attempts of the podcast team to get the real story from one of her research assistants. The climax involved one character attacking another with an electric cattle prod, with the victim saved by a blast of venomous chimaera flame. There was a long section about the methods used by high-tech chimaera poachers. A lot of that material has been put aside for some future story set in the same universe (which is our universe, but if mythological creatures were real).
(The only other story I have that might fight for the crown of “most altered” is Annotated History of the Mikaela Cole Jazz Quintet, which began life 10 years before publication as a piece of literary realism, told in straightforward narrative format, only later to morph into a story about a generation ship told in the form of annotations to songs. It was always about jazz and the tie between memory and music, though.)