Sword & Sorceress

I have three stories queued up to submit to the next Sword & Sorceress anthology. The plan is to send the first one; if they reject before the submissions period is over, then the next, and so on. Last time they held "Coldsnap" for final consideration and then ultimately rejected it; hoping for better luck this time!

Lightning Strikes (about 5900 words): When her city is attacked by centaur barbarians, augur Diyesari begs for a sign from the gods to find her sister - and is given an unusual gift. This story is actually set in the same world as "Chatter Me Timbers," (Afterburn SF) maybe 4-5 hundred years later. "Chatter" was in a pseudo-classical Greece setting; "Lightning" is a bit closer to Rome. I don't write fights as well as I would like; I think "Lightning" contains some of the best swordplay I've written to date.

In These Shoes (about 3300 words): Assassin Rosh takes "just another job" in her home region - and finds it is anything but. There is a metaphorical thread in this story about her "kill shoes," which represent her life as an assassin and break down as she does. I'm really hoping I can think of a better title for the story, as even though there's no trace of it in the work, uh ... this went through my head when I started writing about footware and I had to use it for a working title: http://www.kirstymaccoll.com/music/lyrics/in_these_shoes.htm. This story was initially an exercise to write about an article of clothing that had history; I cut about half of the original exercise, but the core remains.

The Winter Queen (about 3400 words): Sardian, a Sword of the Realm, travels to the snow-bound realm of the winter queen in search of her beloved. But it will take more than a blade to solve this problem, and she may lose what she came to find. This story was initially a self-designed exercise where I took a list of words and had to involve one word every hundred words. In editing, I probably removed some of them and invalidated the order, but it was good inspiration.