The Seldom, №16
A down-in-the-dumps second-person antimonopolist walks into a bar
Everyone said you sounded arrogant when you referred to yourself in the third person, so now you’ve begun referring to yourself in the second person.
(Very meta, this one.)
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 you broke causality and signed up for it because you received it.
Ebooks on Itch
I’m no fan of monopolies, and I always knew that I did not want to self-publish exclusively with Amazon. For years I used a distributor to make my ebooks available at Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers, but this distributor recently instituted new fees to encourage small-potatoes authors to get lost.
That is what I did. My three self-published books are no longer sold by most online retailers. I still do not want to give Amazon exclusivity, so I’m now also selling these ebooks through Itch.
This furnishes an opportunity to experiment. Itch offers a pay-what-you-can option, so if you’ve ever wanted to read one of these but been prevented by the cost, I encourage you to grab a copy at whatever price—including, of course, free. Links to each:
Melancholic Parables is a collection of 91 absurd/sad/ironic flash pieces which may body forth how it feels to antiself.
Gyre is a short novel about a mysterious rebirth, and about mothers and daughters and unbreakable patterns.
Váried Parályses is a chapbook of eight short stories. If you’ve read everything else of mine and for some reason want more…
(My high fantasy novel MÆJ is unaffected by all this since tRaum Books does not use my former distributor.)
Other News
Here’s a bit of what’s going on with my writer friends and with me:
Friends
Rachel A. Rosen’s novel Blight (the follow-up to Cascade) was nominated for Best Novel in the Aurora Awards. And her “What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht?” was nominated for Best Short Story. Aaand her podcast Wizards & Spaceships was nominated for Best Fan-Related Work. You can vote in the awards from 6–12 June on the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association website. (If you’re not a CSFFA member, joining costs ten bucks and comes with free books.) Also nominated for Best Novel is Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who was the guest in the Wizards & Spaceships season 2 finale, “In Praise of Difficult Women”. And Rachel herself was the guest in an episode of Work In Progress. She’s also speaking at the Don Mills branch of the Toronto Public Library about dystopian fiction on 3 June; event details here.
Nicole Northwood and Rachel A. Rosen are both going to be at the first TriCon in Halifax, 15–17 May. Hang out with Nicole here:
Friday, May 15 @ 2:30 p.m.: (At) Home in Speculative Fiction
Saturday, May 16 @ 8 a.m.: Social Media Presence, Audience Building and Self Promotion
Saturday, May 16 @ 12:30 p.m.: In the Vendors Room
Sunday, May 17th @ 11 a.m.: Reading
And with Rachel here:
Saturday, May 16 @ 9:30 a.m.: A Marxist Analysis of the Writing Industry
Sunday, May 17 @ 11:30 a.m.: De-Industrialization of the Frontier: Proletariat Themes in Science Fiction
Marynell Autry released the second entry in her Hillbilly Bone series on 25 March. The novel is called Trash Man and is the follow-up to Hillbilly Grit, which you may remember I raved about in the previous Seldom. The ebook is available now, with the paperback soon to follow; I’m holding out for a deadtree copy, so I haven’t read Trash Man yet, but I got a look at much of the material in manuscript, and I already know it’s hardbitten fantastic.
Briar Ripley Page told me he hasn’t got news to share, but I just bought his pay-what-you-can novella Fairyland on Itch, so that’s some Briar-related news from me.
Shawna Lawless’s Daughter of the Otherworld will be out in paperback on the 7th of May in the UK and EU.
Marten Norr is set to release his next novel Oath & Entropy on 11 November 2026. Think gem warfare versus spore warfare in oldtime WW2 dogfights—an adventure tale with a ton of heart, just like Marten’s previous novel Demon Engine, which is a finalist for the Indie Ink awards in five (!!!) categories. Watch out for the awards results this summer, and keep up with Marten on Instagram.
Me
I have made essentially no progress on my science fiction novella Abysm or my literary novelette Parenthesis in quite a while, despite being the beneficiary of copious actionable advice from two fine beta readers. I’ve just been down in the dumps, folks. But a newsletter with no news would not even amount to a letter, so in the spirit of ticking boxes I opened up the Abysm beta notes to fiddle with them a bit before hitting Send on this Seldom. I did it for you, gentle reader—all for you.
Recent reads
Allow me to share some excellent books I’ve read since the last Seldom:
Black Hole Science Is Filled with Apologies by Never Angeline Nørth: A trim collection balancing poetry, prose poetry, and flash vignettes.
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar: A mystical sci-fi novella that exemplifies the kindness and poetics I admire in Samatar’s work.
H by R Merey: The author calls this a “trash novel” but to me it is a gem of multi-faceted ambiguity, piquant and sensitive (okay maybe also trashy).
None of Us Will Be Okay by Liza Costello: A collection of literary stories crafted with maturity and emotional sophistication.
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa: Feels somewhat like a fable from Kafka, but instead of pitch-black humour it offers subtle sorrowfulness.
I’d also like to share some fine short fiction I’ve encountered online:
“The Kleiner-Hussain Spaceport Hotel” by Anna Kahn (in Uncharted): A finely written ghost story in space which gives me that pinch of sadness.
“Bad Habit” by Robert B. Miner (in The Masters Review): Though I never gamble, I can never resist a good gambling story. This one cooks.
“The Corpse Flowers” by Thomas Heise (in The Masters Review): A rumination on loss that subtly provokes complex emotions.
“I Am a Dragon Joss Stick: An Essay” by Yee Heng Yeh (in CRAFT): Sweet, touching, fun, and soaking in Manglish. Skip the editor’s intro and just read the story.
“Infestation” by Anjali Sachdeva (in The Rumpus): There are ghosts whom we cannot get rid of; we must let them in.
“The Martini Fairy” by Peter Kazon (in Electric Literature): How to tell a happy story.
“Notebooks” by Imogen Clarke (in Electric Literature): Antisocial solipsism gets cranked up to eleven in this (uncomfortably familiar) satire.
“Sophy” by Alysandra Dutton (in Electric Literature): A haunting depiction of how a girl reduced to an object in the minds of all others loses any sort of life.
“The Power Couple / Jigsaw / City of Exes / Foiled by Language / A Falling Out” by Matt Leibel (in Electric Literature): Five cleverly incisive flash pieces on varieties of breakup.
“An End” by Claire Kohda (in Electric Literature): Nature looks on in consternation as the order of things is undone, then redone—and which is worse?
“Standard Loneliness Package” by Charles Yu (in Lightspeed Magazine): A spec-fic parable of lonesome emptiness under capitalism’s yawning inequalities.
“Otters at the Zoo” by Christopher Allen (in X-R-A-Y): I do not know what to say about this story. Read it.
“The Tea Witch” by Ashley Burnett (in Necessary Fiction): A witchy story about times when nothing is promised.
“We Can Start This Story” by Tega Oghenechovwen (in Kenyon Review): Poverty and solidarity among a band of children with nothing but each other.
Something old
In case you’re interested, back in 2023, I published a short story called “The Letter A Walks into a Bar” on Medium. Read the story here (gift link).
This story was born from a prompt. Somebody somewhere (who and where? I forget) ran a contest challenging writers to create a flash fiction piece incorporating three words: rutabaga, cryptic, salmon.
My background in teaching English literacy has given me a certain sensitivity to the peculiarities of English spelling. I noticed something about these three words. So I banged out a very short story, hoping that my use of the hoary “walks into a bar” format would land as fun, not cringe. (Why not both.) Then I entered it into the contest. Did it win?
No.
It did not.
But maybe you’ll like it. Here’s that link again.
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