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. Some of the Danish ballad retellings are gradually being made available over at my Curious Fictions page, where you can read them and subscribe to support my work.

Cover of The Serpent Bride

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.)

Cover of The Storyteller

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 , during the time that the first of the seven devils escaped his grave. Also included are an unrelated bronze age secondary world fantasy, a story of Merlin’s daughter and the last days of Arthur’s Romano-Celtic kingdom, and a prose-poem on the Battle of Maldon, "Anno Domini Nine Hundred and Ninety-One: Two Voices", which was one of the works discussed in La Ricezione Moderna Della Battaglia di Maldon: Tolkien, Borges e Gli Altri, by Verio Santoro (Aracne 2012). (Sybertooth 2008.)

"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.

Cover of The Storyteller

"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 This was a somewhat Glen Cook influenced military fantasy, the first in an otherwise unpublished series of stories which I was developing into a novel.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.