SHORT STORIES
I don't write many short stories, but most of the ones I've written have been published in one of the collections below. Only a couple were in periodicals rather than books.
For reviews, more about individual books, and for purchasing links, click on the cover images below.
"Gull Stormbarn: The Thornblade" in Tales From Stolki's Hall, edited by Lou Anders
"Lou Anders’s Norrøngard world anthology Tales from Stolki’s Hall is available in various forms: ebook, hardcover, and special deluxe gamers’ edition here. My story “Gull Stormbarn: The Thornblade,” is in it, along with stories from Ed Greenwood, Jon Sprunk, Chris Willrich, and more. Norrøngard is a TTRPG game world inspired by Viking-era Scandinavia and also the setting for Lou’s middle-grade Thrones and Bones series. The stories in this collection are for adults, though! In “The Thornblade,” you’ll meet Gull Stormbarn, a shipwrecked foundling raised as a thrall on a struggling, ill-fortuned coastal farm, and Finola, a warrior who comes ashore from a foreign ship in search of a lost treasure on her liege-lady’s behalf. Gull (who has never found that the designation of -son or -dottir as their patronymic fits them), dreams of escape and wider horizons, but a sense of duty towards the young heir to the farm, whom they’ve helped raise to be a far better man than his violent drunkard of a father, keeps them bound. How Gull’s story intersects with Finola’s mission you’ll have to read to find out (Lazy Wolf Studios, 2023.)
The Serpent Bride: Stories from Medieval Danish Ballads
My second book. Ten literary fairy tales based on ballads from medieval Denmark. Shapeshifters, dragons, trolls, and true love. (Thistledown Press 1998.)
The Storyteller and Other Tales
"There is a storyteller’s cycle of tales, and they begin like this ..." The title
story is the earliest about Moth and Mikki, set a couple of centuries before
"The Storyteller"
The title story from The Storyteller. Moth and Mikki, whose journey provides the linking thread through all the other tales of Gods of the Caravan Road, set out on their centuries-long travels. Andromeda Spaceways, issue 38, 2009.
"The Inexorable Tide"
Another story from The Storyteller, about Merlin's daughter and the last of Romano-Celtic Britain. Published in Descant, Issue 122, Vol.34 No.3, Fall 2003. Still available as one of the four stories in The Storyteller.
"Swanelille"
A ballad story that wasn't in The Serpent Bride. Appeared in Phantastes, January 2001.
"The Serpent Bride"
From the collection of the same name. This was published in The Leading Edge, Issue 40, September 2000.
"A Choice of Shadows"
A little Ruritanian frivolity? So long ago ... What the Henkell Happened Here anthology, 2000.
"The Wastelands: A Beginning"
Aw, my first published thing, not counting two poems when I was nine or ten. This was a somewhat Glen Cook influenced military fantasy, the first in an otherwise unpublished series of stories which I was developing into a novel. But Torrie came along and I turned out to be a children's writer for a while, and then Blackdog happened, and ... well, there've been a couple of things published this century that are close enough to what I was doing in my "Wastelands" stuff in flavour that I probably won't bother to go back to it now. (Wexler, Brett ... it was in that area.) Appeared in On Spec, Fall 1997.