πόθος

I wrote a zombie story! It’s short, it’s told via (mostly) fake ancient texts and a fake reconstructed folktale, it has Babylonian women writing to one another and fighting zombies and also there are zombie foxes: because I can. It’s called “Selected Sources for the Babylonian Plague of the Dead (572-571 BCE)” and will be published in the anthology Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages from Prime Books, edited by Steve Berman.

One advantage of being an MA student: when you notice a fun historical-themed anthology is imminently closing for submissions, you’ve already done the research. Take a few sources, a few articles, general knowledge from classes and other reading – and add zombies! And zombie foxes! When the story’s published, I’ll post about the most influential sources/articles, but I already mentioned one of them here. It’s a very short story (only 1,400 words), but I put in some of the things that are most important to me: women doing stuff in history, a part of history I love – and foxes. I also had a surprising amount of fun throwing in the typical zombie tropes of holing up in hastily fortified buildings (not malls! funnily enough) and zombies running through the streets of a city and so on.

The anthology will be published in August! I’m looking forward to it.

And… I realised that I never posted about selling “Singing Like a Hundred Dug-up Bones” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies at the end of last year. Well, I sold that! It has burial mounds and ghosts and amateur archaeology and a singing circle and women’s stories – and I love it. It’s one of my favourite things I’ve written.

Thinking about story sales is much more fun than anxiety over PhD applications. Haha. Yes.

/ball of anxiety

Originally published at Alex Dally MacFarlane. You can comment here or there.