“Ghostwitch”: two thousand words of terror
This an update I actually should have shared over a month ago, but time got away from me. By which I mean, I misremembered “Ghostwitch’s” publication date in the online Two Thousand Word Terrors anthology as August instead of July, and I also have spent the summer in a fugue of work — editing, of course, and some writing, but also preparing for the 2023 Sustainability Fair in Waukesha County. If you’re in Southeast Wisconsin and looking for a fun and informative,...
Read MoreTwo Thousand Word Terrors TOC announced!
My story “Ghostwitch” is one of the 45 short jolts of horror that will appear weekly on the Rooster Republic website. It’s scheduled to go live July 3rd, but until then, to whet your appetite… Ghostwitch “Mad with grief, it’s said. But I’m not.” She looks up from the cast-iron stove, strangely modern in this tiny valley hamlet. Perhaps her trader husband brought it home from one of his trips to the factory towns. “Tea?”...
Read MoreNew ghost story publication and a Year-End Sale!
I’m excited to announce my short story “Ghostwitch” will be published as a free read on the site of publisher Rooster Republic on a Monday in 2023 – which Monday is yet to be determined, but announcements will be coming out in January and February. And then, you’ll probably want to catch all of the series of Two Thousand Word Terrors, which begins Monday, February 6 and will run for the next 45 weeks. While you wait for next year, there’s also the Smashwords...
Read MoreBook Review: The Great Ordeal by R. Scott Bakker
The Great Ordeal–penultimate volume of the Aspect Emperor No-Longer-A-Trilogy, the conclusion of which, The Unholy Consult, was released yesterday–is not only a compelling novel but also very useful as a physical object. A nine-inch by six-inch by three-inch rectangle with the words THE GREAT ORDEAL across the front in an emphatic font is basically the world’s best portable Demotivator. I read this book at the tail end of 2016. Which was not, by any possible standards, a...
Read More“The Grace of Turning Back” at Beneath Ceaseless Skies
“The Grace of Turning Back,” the final story of the Curse-Strewn World sequence, appears in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #179, which can be read on the BCS website or in the Kindle store. The Tynesi merchants, who traded everything from the silver rice of Timru and perfume leaves from Simrandu to chips of ivory off the Keld’s temples, had a term for a particular sort of improvidence: to throw money, time, or strength into seeing to completion a bargain they had...
Read More“The Astrologer’s Telling” up at Daily Science Fiction
…charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low.Ever since I first encountered that nightmare image, from H.P. Lovecraft’s prose-poem “Nyarlathotep,” I have wanted to write a story about the stars going out. A morbid urge? Absolutely. But there’s a certain virtue in morbidity; it makes me thoughtful and perhaps compassionate, if that’s a thing a writer of apocalyptic fiction can be. And so “The Astrologer’s...
Read MoreReview: Heaven’s Needle by Liane Merciel
You know how I said The White-Luck Warrior became horror a few pages in? The White-Luck Warrior would take one look at one page of Heaven’s Needle and run away crying. Which is why, despite it being marketed as high fantasy, Heaven’s Needle is my review of choice for Hallow’s Eve this year. (That’s a warning, by the way, that the following review will contain disturbing imagery and if you aren’t up for that, especially if you’re currently eating tasty food,...
Read MoreNews: Grim Corps’ Debut Issue and Dell Magazines’ Award Honorable Mention!
Today I am reading my contributor’s copy of Grim Corps’ magazine’s premier issue, which contains a reprint of my psychological horror story and Poe* homage, “Ms Brellin”. Along with of course my own piece (I haven’t yet had the time to read up to the page where it starts yet, so my commentary is on other writer’s stories and thus perfectly unbiased), there’s some quite effective dark fiction here, with chilling lines dropped at just the...
Read MoreAdded: Publications List
If you look to the right of this post, you can now see a link to my Publications List, probably the single most useful page on this blog. It offers links to my stories, roughly organized by length and genre and also by series. There are currently 3 of the latter in progress: A Dark and Wonderful History: Stories of Women and Monsters, is a sort of parallel history in a secondary world that has a share of similarities to our own. Also its share of differences. Gods, ghosts, the shapeshifting...
Read MoreAbout Therese
Therese Arkenberg's first short story was accepted for publication on January 2, 2008, and her second acceptance came a few hours later. Since then they haven't always been in such a rush, yet her work appears in places like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Analog, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Sword & Sorceress XXIV. Aqua Vitae, her science fiction novella, was released by WolfSinger Publications in December 2011.
She works as a freelance editor and writer in Wisconsin, where she returned after a brief but unforgettable time in Washington, D.C. When she isn't reading, writing, or editing (it's true!) she serves on the board of the Plowshare Center of Waukesha, which works for social, economic, and environmental justice.