The Seldom, №12
Personae-songs, word-swoons, and moiré-murmurs on the otherside
Did you ever hear about the staunch believer in free will who claimed he could break any bad habit through willpower alone? However many years he’d had the habit, he could just turn it off, as if flipping a switch. His girlfriend pointed out he had a short temper; he declared he would switch it off that instant. No sooner did they go for a drive than he was cursing out every idiot on the road. “What happened to willing your mind to change?” she asked. And he answered, “Oh, that? I changed my mind.”
Cough, cough.
In the tradition of periodicals whose names indicate their frequency of publication (Publishers Weekly, The Atlantic Monthly, Lapham’s Quarterly…), I bring you The Seldom. My name is Dale Stromberg, and you’re receiving this newsletter because you signed up for it, or else because Big Newsletter wants you to think you signed up for it.
MÆJ Character Playlists
In the course of drafting my fantasy novel Mæj, I confided in a writer friend that I didn’t feel I really knew my characters. She suggested that I make a playlist of songs which somehow (either lyrically or in terms of vibe) seemed to suit each character.
I tried this for my four principal characters. It wasn’t easy at the start. Precisely because the characters didn’t quite feel real to me, I had trouble connecting them to music. But that is precisely why the process ended up helping a lot. The songs I chose were not necessarily my favourite songs, but they aided me in sounding out the characters’ emotions and personae.
I hadn’t intended to share these playlists publicly, but I’m making them available for my newsletter readers. If you’ve read Mæj, you might like to compare these songs with your impressions of the characters. Even if you haven’t, there may be a song or two to your taste. Some reflect character interiority; others follow plot events. I suggest listening in order, but if you’re on the cheapskate plan (like I am), Spotify might not let you.
Madenhere, a “rightsome” young woman, is deeply concerned about the plight of her people and is willing to run risks to do her part. Hardship has made her kind rather than bitter, and she has not succumbed to cynical pessimism. What motivates her are a strong sense of justice and a love of her home and the people she knows.
Taræntlere, on the other hand, has always had a bit of the devil in her, and beneath her witty and rakish exterior is a deep hot rage at how badly her folk are abused. She shares Madenhere’s devotion to her home and people, but she also has a solipsistic streak when plunged into pursuit of passion, either for justice or for romance.
Ænkenere Gaitmoth is a lonesome romantic who falls hard into the heady elation of a relationship with someone who personifies the alluring danger of an outsider and rebel. It doesn’t turn out well for Ænkenere, who, after suffering the hard buffets of heartbreak, emerges with an altered, more philosophic perspective.
More than those above, Aunhma Cairnhand’s playlist traces the plot of her lifestory. From a young age, she admired and aspired to the grandeur of being a warrior, even a hero, and abandoned young love to go adventuring. We meet her on a battlefield, where she plunges into a near-fatal mêlée. She suffers a bitter injury and, as the shades of those she has killed haunt her, sinks into psychological torment which she flees via alcoholic dissoluteness—she has fallen far from her onetime ideal of heroism. Still, she hopes to go out in glory and die the death she has earned.
News
Here’s a bit of what’s going on with my writer friends and with me:
Friends
Marten Norr’s nautical fantasy novel Demon Engine—which I have read an early copy of, and it’s fantastic!—will be published on 25 May 2025 by tRaum Books, the same publisher who brought out my Mæj. You may recall that Marten drew the map illustration in the Mæj paperback. Get Demon Engine one of two ways: visit tRaum Books to find retailer links, or sign up here for a free review copy.
Rohan O’Duill has made his sci-fi novella Cold Blooded available on Netgalley, a website which allows you to download a free copy in exchange for agreeing to write an honest review. That link is here.
Rachel A. Rosen is so busy that I have to use bullet points:
Rachel’s novel Blight is to be published 15 June 2025. Find retailer links on her publisher’s website. She was interviewed on the Night Beats blog about Blight too.
Rachel and David L. Clink’s Wizards & Spaceships podcast released their season finale in April, joined by Robert J. Sawyer to talk about transhumanism and AI. Find it here.
I got so into it that I listened multiple times and even wrote a little response piece (gift link to that).
Wizards & Spaceships was also nominated for an Aurora Award! Voting opens in June. See the ballot here.
Rachel’s short story “Do You Love the Colour Of the Sky” was in the March 2025 issue of Trollbreath Magazine. Read it here.
And her story “What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht?” is the title story in Antifa Lit Journal Volume 1. Check out the Goodreads page for retailer links.
Emma Berglund, an editor at Lower Decks Press, has alerted me to their forthcoming third anthology. This one’s on a cyberpunk theme. Watch their website for updates and details.
Me
Nerdy much? Swoon for wordplay much? Dive headlong down linguistic rabbit holes much? I have a blog post for you. I rarely post to my author blog, but for my inaugural post of 2025, I went S-class dorky over “four-worders”, the rhyming aphorisms (invented in homage to Japanese yoji-jukugo) which pepper the text of Mæj. Read it here, or make the sign of the cross and back away, as your nerd-tolerances dictate.
As for my recent writing, I’m five chapters away from finishing my first draft of Abysm, my undersea sci-fi novel-in-progress. I began work thinking it would be a novella, shorter than 40,000 words or so, but it has swollen to short novel proportions. I’m reminded of the wit who once said, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” If I were better at sticking to the point, I’d write shorter novels.
Recent reads
Allow me to share some excellent books I’ve read since the last Seldom:
The Runaway Restaurant by Tessa Yang: A collection of piquant and well crafted speculative short stories which expertly blend emotional resonance and curio-fiction oddness.
Lupus in Fabula by Briar Ripley Page: Confidently executed stories dwelling on involuntary lethality, on loving and hating one’s own freakishness, on witchy heartbreaks, and on macabre speculative conceits that unsettle but also tantalise.
Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption by Tucker Lieberman: Part memoir of mental illness, part freewheeling atheistic Torah exegesis, part interloping philosophical musing, part raspberry blown at corporate cowardice and absurdity, all couched in inimitable gentle humour and wisdom.
I’d also like to share nine pieces of fine short fiction I’ve encountered online:
“The Veiled One” by Aatif Rashid (in The Adroit Journal): A mysterious historical manuscript in his mother’s papers shows a man there are things from her past he can never unearth.
“By Train Through the Actinic Mountains” by Leigh Loveday (in Uncharted): This story is total madness, pure bonkers enviro-horror with a bracing dash of anti-autocracy. A standout.
“Haunting Beauty” by T.K. Rex (in Uncharted): A noir tale of seedy hotels and tawdry humanity into which an unexpected shaft of sunlight reaches.
“Tiptoe” by Laird Barron (in Electric Literature): The tiptoe game in this superbly written Shirley Jackson-esque tale conceals something indistinct and very dark.
“Dumb Animals” by Alastair Wong (in Electric Literature): A story of queer drama, an abbatoir, and a circus dog, told in an intensely good voice.
“Foragers” by Jennifer Sears (in Electric Literature): A disturbing tale of five anorexic girls and their totalising obsession.
“Treasure” by Aharon Levy (in The Masters Review): A Native American woman’s fierce love for her son stops her from releasing him into the afterlife.
“Good Neighbors” by Rachel Weinhaus (in Necessary Fiction): Acerbic humour, submerged sadness, and dog poop. This story earns its ending.
“The Memoir” by David Lawrence Morse (in Miracle Monocle): The whole world starts telling an ordinary woman’s story. Whose stories deserve the dignity of attention?
Something old
In case you’re interested, back in April 2021 the literary magazine Press Pause published my short story “Murmurs in the Moiré”. It’s a retelling of an old tale; I won’t say which, but you’ll figure it out straight away. Read the story here. (It’s also included in my collection Melancholic Parables.)
The admittedly obscure title (I’ve got a weakness for those) refers not to moire (i.e. watered silk) but to moiré patterns: shimmering optical illusions which appear when geometrically regular patterns overlap at an angle, thus:
I imagine “murmurs in the moiré” to be hints (illusory or not) of something more, hints which emerge within the repetitiousness of a settled life. Many of us dwell in patterns: make the bed, sleep in the bed, make the bed, sleep in the bed… Such repetition accomplishes or builds nothing. What it does is maintain itself; it is negentropic, or attempts to be for as long as is sustainable, which means it is life.
Still, there’s more to a meaningful life than mere metabolism. It can feel piquant, maybe even numinous, when our (necessary but futile) life-patterns body forth a sense of something just otherside the visible. Patterns at play upon patterns, casting ghosts onto the retina.
The aforementioned retelling had been just a stub of an idea collecting dust on my hard drive: the idea was to tell a certain well-known story from the viewpoint of someone who may have known nothing about it—thus, to the narrator, the story is unrevealed. I was led to link this idea to the theme of repetition by a prompt in Ursula K Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, which was to write a story featuring “verbal repetition” and “structural repetition”: to echo specific words in a noticeable way, and to cause events to echo too.
I decided to mash my story stub into this mould. To make the form feel like it had been adopted for a reason, I tried to tie the repetitive nature of “normalcy” to events or knowledge which remains hidden from us—but not entirely hidden.
Maybe you’ll like the story. Here’s that link again.
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