Quick message to those dudes–always dudes because of course it fucking is–who rail against “forced” diversity in trying to get beyond just straight white dudes in the Table of Contents:

To be an editor means to seek diversity so that readers can see/experience different angles or perspectives or viewpoints (or whatever in the fuck you want to call it) on a specific theme.  To not seek that diversity is to be lazy, at best, and morally repugnant at worst. 

Doesn’t matter if you’re a little nobody outfit with an editor whose time passed right around the time Bill Clinton was first elected or a New York Times bestselling author and an icon of your genre.  If it’s a pale sausage party in your TOC, you flat-out fucked up and you offer nothing new to the readers.

Oh, totally and completely off-topic, here’s an incomplete list I came up with in roughly five minutes for no particular reason:

Damien Angelica Walters. Kristi DeMeester. Rachel Autumn Deering. Erinn Kemper. Sandra Odell.  Stephanie Wytovich. Lucy Snyder. Cat Valente. Gwendolyn Kiste. Linda Addison. Nnedi Okoafor. Ashlee Scheuerman. Jessica McHugh. Livia Llewellyn. Rena Mason. Lisa Mannetti. Mercedes M. Yardley. Althea Kontis. Sarah Langan. Tonya Liburd. Meghan Accuri-Moran. Kelly Link. Gemma Files. Amber Fallon.

There are over twenty names on that very incomplete list.  They’ve all been recognized for their short fiction.  Again, I offer it for no particular reason at all.

Oh. Heya.  Popping in for a few minutes of:

1. …Imma gonna have a new story out!

My story “Wants and Needs” will be in Simon Dewar’s Suspended in Dusk II.  It has wendigos, blizzards, and bereft parents, if that’s your thing.  It’ll be out sometime this summer; click the title to see more info/who else is in the book.

2. New interview!

Curtis Freeman over at Cedar Hollow Horror Reviews asked me a few questions and I answered them and managed to fit in references to ASPCA commercials while still plugging Bones Are Made to be Broken, so there you go.  Click the title to read it, if you so wish.

3. More stories–later this year!

So, right now, I have a total of four stories, two of them novellas, showing up at some point this year, most likely late-summer/fall:

• “Guardian” – Tales from the Lake, Vol. 5 (about pets and the center of existence)
• “How We Broke” (co-written with Bracken MacLeod) – Chiral Mad 4 (a novella about the past and trauma)
• “I Can Give You Life” – Ashes & Entropy (a novella about the 1950s and Virginia State Troopers and Elder Gods)
• “Wants and Needs” – Suspended in Dusk II (I already told you about this one)

I’m actually cleared of deadlines at the moment, so turning back to older projects while stories circulate with the editors who requested them.  See if you can guess where my head’s at:

• “Well, You Asked for a Miracle”
• “To-Do Lists of the Possessed”
• “Every Apocalypse Is Personal”
• “A Collapsing Life, but with Free Rentals”
• “The Simple Lives Offered at Rest Stops”

So, how are things with you guys?