iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

because it is in part a story about seasons and cycles & the weather finally feels right for it, I'm resharing the link to The Long Way Home, my story about townies and swan-girls and loving a place you know you will leave. link here: smallbeerpress.com/lcrw/2026/06...

That
was
the
thing
about Traverse.
Every
autumn, the out-of-state kids at TU showed up in
Land's End flannel and too-clean hiking boots,
lugging bags full of expensive ski gear.
EverY
summer, the tourists rolled up to the lake in their
SUVs, glossy boats hooked on trailers behind them.
They stayed for a few months or a few years and
took home the postcard picture version of this
place.
the purple bruise of the mountains against
the too blue sky; the lake in the summer, like a
stretch of smoked glass; Main Street closed off for
the carnival every May, the air thick with the smell
of frying oil and sunscreen. That was fine. They
could take that with them. But when you lived
here
when you grew up here-
-you didn't get to
pick and choose which parts of it mattered to you.
You ended up crying like an idiot in a McDonald's
parking lot, thinking about the hours you'd spent
sitting
on the hood of Lachlan's car, eating
McFlurries until you thought you'd both be sick.
Lachlan teaching you how to drive, Amy in the
backseat, threatening to throw herself out of the car.
That last summer, sitting in the same passenger
seat, a six pack of Yuengling clinking between your
feet. Lying on your backs on the concrete, too late
and too drunk, Lachlan pointing up at a sky blurred
by the distant football stadium's lights, swearing he
could still see the stars.

She pushed her sunglasses down against the
glare, examined him over the edges. Amy, like Caer,
had sworn she'd get out of town the minute she
graduated. More than a year later, she was still here.
What was she waiting for? Perhaps the strange
gravity of this place had swallowed her up as well
"You know what happened, don't you?"
she
pressed
"You know where she is
Lachlan tipped his head back and let the sun
dazzle his vision into blackness. For months now,
he'd clung to the memory of that night with Caer
like a charm. He turned it over again and again in
his mind, remembering the sharp, bitter thrill of
watching her change. It seemed impossible to have
seen something like that and not be changed
himself. Impossible for the world to continue as it
was unaltered. But day by day the summer had
dragged on, the year tipping into autumn as it
always did: slowly at first, with just a hint of a chill
on the morning breeze, then in a sudden bright
blaze, the old oaks circling the lake crowned aflame.
As the days grew shorter, the mornings chillier,
he'd realized that beneath its untroubled surface,
his life had started to rearrange itself, a shifting
current upending everything he knew. At Morgan's

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Colum's The Forge in the Forest! It's an interesting mix of Greek myth, Breton legend, Ulster Cycle stuff, biblical retellings etc. I ended up rambling a bit about it & his take on the City of Ys over here: www.tumblr.com/devoutjunk/8...

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

"All things fall and are built again / And those that build them again are gay.” (New Poems, Yeats, 1938) “We shed as we pick up (…). We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.” (Arcadia, Stoppard, 1993)

Lapis Lazuli!
(For Harry Clifton)
I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin? will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.3
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
On their own feet they came, or on shipboard
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Calimachust
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.

THOMASINA: But instead, the Egyptian noodle made carnal
embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of
Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue.
Oh, Septimus! - can you bear it? All the lost plays of the
Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides - thousands of poems - Aristotle's own library
brought to Egypt by the noodle's ancestors! How can we
sleep for grief?
SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus,
seven from Sopocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You
should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from
your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost
when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who
must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will
be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long
and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is
nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The
missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be
written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases
will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries
glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

new free excerpt up on patreon feat. magical sibling rivalries, a Wood where Something is Wrong, and strange boys appearing to dispense information from trees www.patreon.com/carolineshea...

She had named her Robin for the prince in the legend, of course. Like his namesake he had always seemed to her a creature caught between worlds.
When he’d followed Florian home at fourteen, he’d been a gleaming, gangly young god, his starched uniform collar carelessly askew. He was a scholarship student at Acton, one of the few, and his was a studied carelessness, as Florian’s was, a sort of shield, Ekaterin thought, that they’d both picked up at school. Florian had adopted the rounded southern syllables of his classmates’ accents, too, and for that entire summer holiday when she spoke to her brother she’d felt suddenly, disorientingly, like she spoke to a stranger.
Robin had made no mention of their prior meeting, so she did not speak of it either. But he had snuck her cigarettes from the pack he carried always in his sack coat pocket and took her punting on the river when Florian was too busy with his growing duties as heir. Once or twice she caught him watching her with a strange intensity that made her wonder if perhaps he had not forgotten that day in the woods as thoroughly as he pretended. She had not. She wasn’t sure she could.

It was Miles who finally led her home that long ago summer’s day. But Robin had found her first. She’d been wandering through the Great Wood for some time by then, cycling between fear and fury, her vision blurred by tears as she stumbled on through the tangles of briar and bracken, swiping angrily at her eyes. She was not surprised, really, that Florian and Mickey had abandoned her, but somehow this did not dampen their betrayal. Would serve them right if I never came home, she remembered thinking, with a wronged child’s casual viciousness. For a moment she allowed herself to picture it: Flor and Mickey called into her father’s study, their heads bent as he chided them for their carelessness. The way their defiance would melt away under Roderick Strange’s penetrating gaze. And she would remain in the Wood—free of Gravesend’s rules and rituals, free of its many watching eyes. She’d live in the trees, surviving off of blackberries and acorns, befriending the birds as children did in books. But then she’d shivered, and wanted to take the thought back. The Wood was not a place to make careless wishes.

“Who are you?” she asked again, less certain this time.
His smile faltered.
“They have not given me a name,” he said, a little stiffly. “I do not need one there.”
Ekaterin thought then of the old stories about changelings. Babies vanished from nurseries. Children lost in the woods. About her father saying solemnly, The dead crave life. Before she could think better of it, she clambered up the trunk of the elm to join the boy on his branch.
“That must be lonely,” she said, looking ahead, avoiding looking at his strange shadows head-on. She still watched him from the corner of her eye.
He shrugged, his expression haughty again.
“I am never alone,” he said. “I am their prince, and they love me.”
I thought this was the king’s wood, he’d said before. Which king? she wanted to ask.
“That’s not the same thing,” she said instead. “I am rarely alone, either.”

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

mapping out connections between some current interests/preoccupations

An open note book has a web of notes connected by arrows. Mary Butts is connected to Aleister Crowley by an arrow that is labeled Golden Dawn/collaborators. And arrow off of that connects Crowley and Yeats; Yeats is connected to his sisters who are then connected to William Morris and the Pre Raphaelites etc

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I caught up with Mabel and Madeline of Mandylion Press to talk about their brilliantly designed editions of forgotten classics, the appeal of nineteenth century work to contemporary readers, and what's next for Mandylion. Read our conversation here: www.patreon.com/carolineshea...

A graphic with a white background. Layers of documents seem to overlay the corners, and a quote is centered in brown text reading: ....so much that seems today to have been inevitable was still in flux in the nineteenth century, and (...) there are many strange alternatives and roads not taken when you start to dig beyond the canon in the period. It gives me hope that there are alternative presents available in addition to alternative histories.”

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

"He’d been afraid in that brief instant before she’d banished him, afraid not with the unreasoning fear of a child but with the grim terror she’d sensed before in the souls of former soldiers: a kind of fatalistic certainty that whatever lay over the next rise would consume them." #WIP

“You never answered my letters,” he said after a moment, in the same chiding tone that had always riled her when they’d been children.
But she heard his hurt buried beneath the teasing, though she thought she probably had not been meant to, so she swallowed her first sharp retort. She hadn’t meant to hurt him when she’d broken their engagement. In truth, she had not thought she could. He had always seemed blithely unaffected by the world’s slings and arrows, and the match had been arranged by their parents when they were quite young. It had seemed to matter no more to him than his Cricket blue or his first in Classics—it was just another accomplishment for him to tally, a task to check off his list. If half the stories she’d heard of his Acton days were true, it had certainly not stopped him from stepping out while he’d been up at school.
“I’m sorry, Eddie,” she said, examining him more closely now. “There didn’t seem much point.”
“Much point?” he said incredulously, a flash of anger visible now beneath his placid manner. “I would’ve still married you, Kat. You were young and you made a mistake, but I dare say you know better now. We could’ve weathered the scandal.”
“I would’ve made you miserable, Eddie,” she’d said tiredly. “And it wasn’t a mistake.”

His expression hardened, his mouth working.
“You can’t mean to play the pet medium to your aunt forever. It’s, well—frankly, Kat, it’s a disgrace. You should hear the things they say you get up to at the club—”
“I’ve never been to your club,” she said mildly. “Although given what I hear your crowd get up to at the Thelema, I’m rather flattered they think me so beastly.”
“Damn it, Kat, you know what I meant,” Eddie bit out, two flags of color now burning on his pale cheeks.
She did know, just as she knew Eddie did not say what he did to hurt her or to score points. That had always been more Florian’s game. It just did not occur to Eddie that she could want any life other than the one they’d both been born to. In his mind, her resistance to his suit could not spring from genuine opposition but only her own lack of understanding. She saw a vision then of what their marriage would’ve been—an endless series of circular arguments, their battles fought over a neatly set breakfast table while the footmen pretended not to hear. They would seem small at first, the concessions she made: an agreement not to go to the theatre alone—it didn’t quite look right, you know—or a promise to bite her tongue when his Foreign Office friends came round. But Ekaterin had watched her mother

surrender herself bit by bit over the years of her childhood, eroded by those same small concessions, and she knew in herself an immoderate longing for a home of a her own that frightened her more than any external threat to her independence. If promised a place that was truly hers, a place where she was neither prisoner nor guest; where she could never be cast out or forced to earn her keep, she knew she would cave to the allure of that safe hearth as her mother had. She would sell her soul for a simple room to call her own.
And Eddie had struck true in one regard, even if the blow had landed blindly. She did hate the summonings she held for her aunt; she hated the rich men and women who descended on the townhouse each weekend in their glittering jet beads and crepe arm-bands and stared awe-struck as she sketched the traditional gestures over Miranda’s sitting room table. She hated the questions they forced her to put to the dead and the way their greedy eyes clung to her skin like a sheen of oil. She hated their tears, afterwards, and their gratitude which lay thick as choking incense in the air. I cannot do this anymore, she found herself thinking after each summoning had come to an end. But Miranda had taken her in when no one else would. She had given her the gift of her education and more than that, her freedom. That was a debt she could never repay.
Suddenly tired, she shouldered past Eddie into the passing stream of clerks and secretaries and shop boys headed for the evening train.

“You’re still a Strange,” he called after her, with a sudden astuteness. “Even if you want to play at being a Bright Young Thing. You’ll have to admit that eventually.”
She’d ignored him and bent to grab her abandoned sack, letting the crowd split around her like a current. The bottle of milk had shattered and spilled, drying stickily across the pavement; the fresh clementines—a rare treat, now, with rationing—had all been trampled or snatched by passersby. She’d swept the glass into the gutter with a careful booted foot and had gone home. She had fallen asleep still thinking of the spirit she’d banished. And of Eddie’s voice saying with a knowing smugness: You’re still a Strange.
If you’d asked her six months earlier if it were better for a soul to pass on beyond the Veil or to linger, searching for a body it could borrow or steal, she’d have said the former without question. A half-life, condemned to haunt the world but unable to truly touch it, had never appealed. It was right that souls should pass on, that life should end and the world continue. But so many of the things she’d been sure of had fallen away in the wake of the war and Miles’ death. No one living knew what lay beyond the Veil. No one but the Keepers who passed in between. Perhaps death was the shining, smoke-filled kingdom she’d dreamed of as a child, an Elysian retreat. Or perhaps the country beyond the cliffs was as brutal and as cruel as the life that preceded it; not a respite or salvation but just another war.
Don’t make me go, the boy’s spirit had begged with his father’s lips. He’d been afraid in that brief instant before she’d banished him, afraid not with the unreasoning fear of a child but with the grim terror she’d sensed before in the souls of former soldiers: a kind of fatalistic certainty that whatever lay over the next rise would consume them.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

New newsletter! I emerge from my revisions cave with some thoughts on writing and finishing a novel, some other exciting publishing news & new writing, and a new series for paid subscribers. Free link here: www.patreon.com/carolineshea...

The first few pages came out in a rush, like they’d been waiting for me. Possibly they had—the novel is inspired by Antigone, and the play has lived in my mind since I first read it at fourteen, an enduring obsession. Over five years and many drafts, much has changed about the novel, but those first few pages remain practically the same.

I filled twelve notebooks, more word docs than I can count (I’m not really joking—I tried and had to give up because I kept finding more), and wrote and rewrote hundreds of thousands of words. I fell in love with handwriting again, and learned how to sustain a longer project than I’d ever written, how to hold a whole world in my head as I remade it again and again.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

I’m already planning to check out some of @gavingrant.bsky.social’s recs from There Will Be Spoilers but I’m excited to dive into to this whole issue. Grateful to be included!

Janice Leadingham
Tammy Komoff
Those of Us That Created Them
Clearance Items at the

Underground Dark Magic Night Market
Matthew Bean
Like Paralda
10
Ash Huang
How to Fill a House
15
Alice St. Stirling
Anorgasmia
21
Santiago Wilson Heredia
Tompkins & Snail
30
Sophie Wereley
Bone Harp Hair
36
Rhian Waller
Mordant
45
Caroline Shea
The Long Way Home
54
Iscream, you scream, we all read LsCReamW 52
Fiction
4
6
Nonfiction
Nicole Kimberling
All Yours
Joanna Buoniconti
Gavin J. Grant
About the Authors of the Unofficial Burn It All Down Handbook
Art
Guilherme Nunes
Dawn Kimberling
"Cactus"
Photos
Cover
13,14
Neither Gavin J. Grant nor Kelly Link have never worked at Art Institute of Pittsburgh, CUNY: John Tav.

13
The Path of Most Resistance
42
There Will Be Spoilers
43

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

My copy got here today and it’s so pretty! If you’ve been thinking of picking up an issue or trying a subscription I definitely recommend it. (It’s the only magazine I know that comes with an option to include chocolate).

The black and white hard copy cover of issue 52 of LCRW

A page of my short story “The Long Way Home” laid out in columns.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Very excited to share that I have a new story in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. It's a loose retelling of "The Dream of Óengus" but its heart is in Central PA and Vermont. I can't wait to read the rest of the issue. I hope you'll pick up a copy: smallbeerpress.com/lcrw/2026/06...

The cover of issue 52 of LCRW. Two figures stand against a tan background. One is a capybara-esque figure with cacti sprouting from its back and neck. The other is a more humanoid figure with a skull-like face and cacti antlers.

She missed her hands the most. The weight of them
at the ends of her wrists-
gripping, grasping
stroking, clawing, pointing, poking. One hand
trailing over the edge of the dented peddle boat, the
lake a cool ripple beneath her sweaty palm. She'd
always wished (secretly, guiltily) for the water to
close over wrist, then elbow, then shoulder-neck-
head, pulling her under, swallowing her up. The
lake was the first and best thing she ever loved. She
couldn't love something without wanting to become
it. Or be consumed by it. It wasn't her fault, Morgan
said once. It was fate. A genetic flaw.
"Which one?" Caer had asked.
Morgan's smile turned bitter.
"What's the
difference?" she said
It was the oldest story in the world, after all
Caer wanted to be something else, something other.
Then she was, and she wanted her beginning back
again, unchanged.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

To borrow publishing’s favorite phrase—I have some news: Hope Springs Creative, a new SFF/spec fic press, is opening for submissions later this summer. hopespringscreative.com If you have a manuscript you think would be a good fit, I hope you’ll send it our way.

Work with us
Have a story you believe in? We want to read it.

We are a progressive, author-centered publishing collective committed to reshaping the way stories are shared. At our heart, we're looking to champion diverse voices and stories across the speculative fiction spectrum.

Text is followed my headshots of the Hope Springs Team

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

decided the cloisters are my office now

A picture of a book, laptop and notebook spread on a table with the Met’s Trie Cloister in the background

One of the cloister gardens. The photo is of a sort of diagonal trellis over a brick walkway

A little room off the gardens with shelves and jars of plants, herbs etc.

A picture of me smiling slightly. I’m wearing a black shirt and glasses and a leather backpack. My hair is brown and is clipped up except for my bangs which are curling onto my face.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

thinking about peter wimsey & roderick alleyn again.

The gentleman detective is both popular mythic figure and reincarnating literary archetype; he's usually a genius loci of his particular London or Britain and the interwar answer to the Byronic or Romantic hero.

He comes from aristocratic wealth—from status and “good stock”—but he has spent most of his life running away from or attempting to atone for this privilege. He knew early on that this holy aspiration was a lost cause and has pursued it anyway, as doggedly and uselessly as Lancelot. A version of this detective—the myth ripping at the seams now—is reincarnated in modern U.S. myths like Law and Order: SVU, where brute force is redeemed by the victims it serves. Where the fantasy is—like in certain versions of the gentleman detective—that the good cop can transform the institution from within. But the original

gentleman detectives of the British golden era of mystery have more conflicted relationships to their own power. Though undoubtably in a position of privilege, the old gentlemen detective is immensely aware of his inherited and positional power, and brings that weight to bear carefully, regretfully, often only when his hand has been forced. But if his position can be used for some good, he won’t hesitate to use it, even if it bloodies his conscience and muddies his battered but still unflagging sense of honor.

He is a detective because someone has to be. Because (shamefully) the crimes intrigue him-both the puzzle and the danger, the only two vices he's never been able to kick. He's a detective because he's the second son, and he would have no purpose otherwise, and he cannot bear a purposeless life. He must make a mark on the world beyond the fact of his birth and a name in Debrett's.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

I’m fond of this short story about fairytale archetypes and resurrection that I had in @cold-signal.com. cold-signal.com/argent-carol...

Whatever version of the story you start with, the girl’s gotten a raw deal: a life of looking over her shoulder, the devil a few steps behind. Her voice stoppered to save her brothers or her hands lopped off for her father’s sins.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

This is tonight!! Six SFF & Horror writers, eight minutes each. Come join us at 7:30: www.eventbrite.com/o/strong-wom... #SWSWQR

A graphic with six author photos centered on a galaxy background. Text reads: Strong Women, Strange Worlds presents Third Thursday QuickReads of SciFi, Fantasy, and Horror by Renee Coloman, Tara Campbell, Larissa N.N. Davila, E.A. Noble, Jacquelyn Stolos, and Caroline Shea. May 21st, 7:30 PM EDT. Free on Zoom. Preregister now at StrongWomenStrangeWorlds.weebly.com

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

I talked to Jacquelyn Stolos about writing middle grade fiction in an era of censorship, setting as a tool to grapple with climate crisis, and the many roads to publication. You can hear us both read from new work @swsworlds.bsky.social this Thursday. Interview & reading sign-up linked below.

White text on a green background reads:

Writing darkness isn't daunting for me. I'm a writer because I'm fascinated by and in love with every aspect of the human experience. The darker moments are a part of all that.

In the steps after the writing--the publishing, the publicity--I've definitely noticed some adult discomfort with darkness in children's literature. Not from everyone! But the discomfort is unfortunate. Middle grade readers, like adults, deserve access to art that reflects the nuance of human experience

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

I interviewed @taracampbell.bsky.social, author of All the Wayward Angels & Fiction co-editor @barrelhouse.bsky.social. We talked about writing across genre and form & what draws her to hybrid work. You can hear us both read from new work this Thursday @swsworlds.bsky.social. Interview linked below.

A blue background with yellow outline with yellow outlines of flowers. A quote reads: "I love stories that start out a bit quirky, or “off,” but not madcap, and then build from there. Sometimes the silliness ramps up, or veers into serious territory, and either approach can work. But if it starts out trying to shock just to shock, where is there to go from there? Sly, dry, subtle—that’s my kind of humor. [...] Particularly today, the ability to do that without descending into complete nihilism is refreshing."

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

It's four weeks until this amazing SFF & Horror panel with @swsworlds.bsky.social's QuickReads! Preregister now and join us for live readings, giveaways, and a Q&A. #SWSWQR www.eventbrite.com/o/strong-wom...

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Last week I caught up with @caseyscieszka.bsky.social to talk about her incredible new novel The Fountain & the many hats she wears as Head Innkeeper of Spruceton Inn. Our conversation is linked here: www.patreon.com/posts/interv...

Overtop a mirrored image of a mountain range text reads: "The house, the valley, the mountains, the weather, the wet, all those textures are just in my body, and it was so fun to bring that out onto a page and through a different character's perspective."

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

are we damned? are we saved? do we get a say?

They say the woman cursed her husband’s killer, that she damned his whole rotten house. That she spoke that family’s doom into being when she drank her dead love’s blood. They say that of the murderer’s bloodline, she spared only her sister, the killer’s wife. She knew, after all, what it meant to be wedded to death.
I don’t blame her. Or her sister. I have killed and cursed and lapped at what remains; I have loved what would destroy me.
Here’s what I can never quite stomach: she damned the children, too. Her nieces and nephews. Her great-great grands, starved out by empire or fled for kinder shores or rooted stubborn in the earth from which they came.
So what happens to them, the children born in a troubled country? The troubling, troubled children branded neither invader nor invaded; the children cast out or killed, or forced to pick a side? What happens to the children born when the story is already halfway through, the tapestry unraveling, the dark slowly descending on the woods?

Are we damned? Are we saved? Do we get a say?

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

So excited to be part of @swsworlds.bsky.social's stellar line-up of SFF and horror authors next month. Preregister for the virtual reading on May 21st to join us for the reading, Q&A, and special giveaways. #SWSWQR www.eventbrite.com/o/strong-wom...

Several author photos are set against a purple-tinged galaxy background. Text in white and light purple reads: Strong Women Strange Worlds presents Third Thursday QuickReads of Sci Fi, Fantasy, and Horror by Renee Coloman, Tara Campbell, Larissa N.N. Davila, E.A. Noble, Jacquelyn Stolos, Caroline Shea. May 21, 7:30 PM EDT Free on Zoom. Preregister now at StrongWomenStrangeWorlds.weebly.com.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

A Little Gaelic Kingdom, Tim Robinson (in his intro, Brian Gardiner writes: "To map is to name; to name is to mark possession. Robinson’s life work may be seen as a cartographical and cultural return to the pre-1846 [British ordinance survey] Irish land.")

“It is persistently said by local people that the St Georges, who had the lodge at the time, planted the latter copse to spare themselves the sight of the Catholic church being built a little further off in Camas. I have checked: the lodge, the trees and the church are not in a line; the belief is founded on prejudice, that is, faith. As to the picturesque pines on the islet, what I have heard is disillusioning and therefore probably true: far from their being an aesthetic intervention, thew St Georges planted them so all the vermin (i.e. crows and suchlike) would nest there and could be more conveniently killed off.”

“The halfway stone, like the Halfway House, the shebeen in the middle of Roundstone Bog, is as far from one place as it is from the other; it is the embodiment of distance. On a difficult journey one cannot reach the halfway point without some feeling of satisfaction at the part completed, or of disquiet at the distance still to be covered. When I write my treatise on the new science of distemics, the study of topographical sensations, or the phenomenology of fare-off things, I shall have Cloch Leathbealaigh as a frontispiece. But now it is hidden in ranks of Sitka spruce. A huge wedge of forestry has split Criathrach Choirill in two, and not just Criathrach Choirill, which is the heart of it, but the entire extent of more-or-less intact bog stretching uninterruptedly for eight miles westwards from the Scríb-Maam Cross road.
What is lost? The forest walk has its interest and in places its charm, but it lacks the profundity, the vastitude, the awesome silences, of the untrammelled bog. When trees were planted in 1985 the then-Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald came down to unveil a plaque by the main road near the northern end of the forestry track, according to which the forest commemorates Irish emigrants who contributed to the welfare of the USA and of Boston in particular. The planting was partially financed through the Irish American Cultural Foundation by generous individuals, who of course were not responsible for its location. Whether there is even a purely economic justification is doubtful; a local forestry official told me at the time that he took no responsibility for it, because of the difficulties he foresaw in extracting the timber in such difficult terrain. The idea that forestry might be the saving of Connemara in terms of employment has been a commonplace of local politicians since Independence, but fortunately Coillte, the Forestry Board, has realized the fallacy in this and no longer plants on lowland blanket bog; private forestry too is much restricted …

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

The first chapter of my novel is up on my Patreon for subscribers. If you've liked any of the writing and research I've been sharing about fairytales, the gothic, or Antigone you might like this, too. You can read it here: www.patreon.com/posts/excerp...

Black text on a white background. Above a picture of a hand stained with blackberries, text reads: "The night they killed each other, I looked at my brothers and thought: I’ve been here before."
Below the picture, it reads: "Too late, I remembered it all."

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

They killed it all off. Well, Jo said, it came back.

It was thought extinct, you know, Creon said to her, sometime in the small gray
hours of the night. They had thrown the doors of the great hall open so a cool breeze
whistled through the gaps in the stone. High up in the rafters, Jo could hear a sparrow
chattering, darting between the smoke-blackened beams. Nic and Isme were passed out on
the rug before the hearth, Isme's head on Nic's chest, her dark hair glinting red in the light of the fire. Nearby Teo tinkered with the dissected radio, a screwdriver in his hand and an absent smile on his face. What was? Jo had asked. Liverwort, he told her, with a twitch of his lips. They killed it all off. Well, Jo said, it came back. And Creon laughed, eyes bright and shining, his pleasure contagious, a palpable warmth Jo wanted to hoard.
If her mouth tasted briefly of chalk and blood, the sensation passed. This is our
work, she reminded herself. She did not think of the way the water had closed over the
surveyor's head, small ripples smoothing into stillness; she did not see the silvered mirror o the clay pit's surface reflected in Creon's pale blue eyes. This was their work, and their
work was good.

“They should be grateful," Creon said tight-lipped, later on. "They may not realize it
now, but we do our work for their own good."
"They'll understand in time," Teo said. "You'll show them."
Creon had nodded, appeased for the moment, but Jo wasn't so sure. She walked out
by the old mine most mornings, liking to be awake before everyone else. She needed the quiet to piece herself back together; to hear the hum of her own mind uninterrupted by any other. There she watched the plovers rise and fall and rise and fall again, plunging down the sheer cliffs to the churning waves. The pumphouse stood crookedly near the cliff's edge, the roof caved in and one wall already swallowed by the sea, the turf crumbling beneath its foundations. One morning she found a new message graffitied in lurid red across the stone, the paint the color of human blood in the horror movies she and Isme watched in secret. It
read:
Kilmouth lads are fishermen and Kilmouth lads are miners too.
But when the fish and tin are gone, what are the Kilmouth lads to do?
Our work has stolen their own, she thought. But the idea was disloyal and quickly
smothered. How could what served a land not serve its people, too?

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

I wrote about nation, nationalism and the agency of nature in fantasy by Ursula K. Le Guin, Susanna Clarke, Hope Mirrlees, and T.H. White: patreon.com/posts/150679...

Magic, in Clarke’s world, is synonymous or inseparable from the living force of the natural world. It doesn’t seek to refuse reality or deny history. Instead magic functions as a radical rejection of stasis and separateness, a dissolving of borders not just on the level of nations but on the level of individual consciousness. When Drawlight is swallowed up by the enchanted wood, Clarke writes: “The trees, the stones and the earth had taken him inside themselves, but in their shape it was possible still to discern something of the man he had once been.” This is the darker side of Clarke’s vision of interlinkedness, an eco-consciousness that is all-consuming, vengeful even, rather than benevolent. But even this ambiguous force carries with it a kind of hope: Drawlight’s devouring represents a world where humans function as part of nature rather than stand outside of it. He is able to live “inside” the world while still retaining “something of the man he had once been.” In her depiction of magic, Clarke reintegrates the human into the natural.

It seems worth noting, then, that White’s stalwart page in The Once and Future King, is named Thomas for Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte D’Arthur, the medieval text which inspired White’s novel. It’s believed Malory wrote his epic while in prison. Like Arthur, he may have found himself grappling then with the lessons of his life and its inheritances. The closing passage of Le Morte is often quoted, rife as it is with its compelling allusions to the once and future king. Yet what’s not as often referenced is Malory’s own denial of that eventual resurrection. He writes: “…and men say that he shall com agayne, and he shall wynne the Holy Crosse. Yet I woll not say that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde say: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff.”

Here in this world he changed his life. Arthur’s promised resurrection pales in the face of his existence. The king may not come again, but his dream will never die, not while there are those who keep the candle burning. As White turned to Malory in the wake of World War II, as Mirrlees imagined a mirror of London in the aftermath of World War I, I've turned to their work, and to the work of Le Guin and Clarke as the United States continues its descent into rightwing authoritarianism. Each novel reckons in a different way with what a “love of country” unbounded by borders and grounded in a recognition of nonhuman agency could look like.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

“…nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is altered (Dryden) “There’s nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns.”(Butler) “There is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.” (Stoppard)

"For mankind is ever the same and nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is altered."
-JOHN DRYDEN,
"On the Characters in the Canterbury Tales, In Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern

epigraph from Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror

“The epigram she chose for Trickster captures this tension between optimism and pessimism, and the possibility of actually breaking through this psychic impasse into something new, quite wonderfully:
There's nothing new
under the sun,
but there are new suns.
Bow was a place where history wasn't the unhappy curse we were condemned to, a place where the tug-of-war between collective survival and collective insanity might play itself out in another way. On Bow, they can”

From Octavia Butler’s unpublished papers, quoted here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/theres-nothing-new-sun-new-suns-recovering-octavia-e-butlers-lost-parables/

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Very much cheating here but i never said i could count. From the novel WIP

She was drowning again, thinking not yet not yet you can take me
back but not yet—Then Teo was there, crouched beside her, the one fixed
point in the churning world, and he took the small knife from the sheathe
at his ankle and sliced across the vein pulsing in his wrist. He pressed the
wound to her mouth, said “Drink.”
And she did, the salt and copper of it a bright burning balm that
erased all else, drowning the dawning shock that after all these years and
deaths a part of her still wanted to live.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

need a word for a book rec that’s like. mandatory. so I am hereby mandating that you all read IDLE GROUNDS, described (accurately) in the cover copy as a “warped Nancy Drew detective story” and feat. an eldritch woods, a burnt familial seat, and a disastrous birthday party.

A picture of the cover of Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford. The image of a forested landscape is overlaid in the shape of a pine tree on a photo of a group of children.

Frankie frowned.
"Beezy loved children. She had five!"
"But did she want five?" Aunt Maureen and Frankie had for-
gotten about us. To them, we had fed and vanished.
"Oh, Maureen." Frankie laughed, as if this were beside the point. In between bites of ants on a log, we considered for the first time that it was possible to have children you might not want. Anyway, I think that was the first time we considered it. I can concede that some of us may have considered it before.

Travis was too kind to say that if he knew, we wouldn't all be looking like this, like maniacs falling off and under things.
He pulled his lip. The X on his leg had smeared into a red triangle so you would have never known it had been a letter at all. In Travis's room at home there was a string of nautical flags that spelled "Travis Downe Macalaster" if you knew how to read them, which Travis did, explaining that the first flag in the string, up-to-down red, white, and blue stripes, stood for T but also meant keep clear so what I'm saying is that Travis was very comfortable with secret messages. The hair on his legs was weird and bushy because he was twelve, which was a chink in his armor for sure, but you can't love a hero without faults. He was limping slightly.

It had been coming all day, we'd heard it on the tracks. In some ways it had been traveling toward us from the moment we'd stepped out of our cars and now the trees had parted and it was here.
"What time is it, Autumn?" we called. "Time to buy a new watch!"
We started to laugh. The laughter started outside of us, I'm
sure of it, I would really like to say that that's true.
It was silvery and clean. It was polite and spiteful.
"Please," Autumn said aloud.
It was the laugh of people in shade looking at people in the baking sun. Our laughter grew outward and we started, of all things, to applaud.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

"But where does the myth of Oedipus begin? How many generations does it include?" "In the household of a king, vengeance is a dynastic act." from "The Oedipus Complex, Antigone, and Electra: The Woman as Hero and Victim," by Dorothy Willner.

"But where does the myth of Oedipus begin? How many generations does it include?"

"The fate of a mythic hero was part of the fate of a 'house.'" / "Antigone meets death as a hero, not as a victim. (...) But the woman who is hero is not allowed to be wife and mother." / The woman who is wife and mother can be a hero only if she dies. (...) Alive and betrayed, she is no longer a hero." / "...a woman who kills yet (...) does not die. Put aside as a wife, Medea refuses to be a victim. She is not a hero, but she takes revenge..."

"In the household of a king, vengeance is a dynastic act."

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

am assuming if you follow me a book about a bunch of fucked up siblings bound by love and guilt and duty and their generations-long compact with an eldritch bog is naturally of interest to you. but in case you need more convincing, some favorite passages from THE BOG WIFE so far:

After that, for the rest of the night, everyone would be polite in a way that was like a membrane stretched thin across their an-ger, Percy resenting Charlie for not doing the custodian's work that was his firstborn obligation and Charlie resenting Percy for reminding him that he should have been the one doing it, and Eda resenting them both for upsetting their father, and Nora stuck at a silent dinner table, resenting no one, terrified by how fragile were the ties that held them.
With a furtive glance back at her brother, she reached out and grasped the trespassers in her fist and yanked them out by the stems. She felt a heart-hammering little slip of relief as she lifted her hand to her pocket and hid the trespassers there, thinking that the night was spared. Percy would remain in that calm and focused half-dreamy state. He would be able to tell their father he had cleared the swale enough to open the lock that held back the river and flood the bog's thirsty mouth without fear of contaminating it. Charlie would emptily but sincerely offer to help with the bog's flooding, and Percy would tell him it was all right, it wasn't his fault, and he would even mean it. Eda would make something edible for dinner.
But then Percy crouched behind her, and she saw him seeing the torn ends of the stems left in the ground, thin but conspicuous orange shoots that she realized now he could never have missed, and everything was worse than before, because now the trespassers were her fault.
"What is this?" he said.
"I don't know," said Nora blandly, her fingers squeezing around the waxy flesh of the trespassers in her pocket until her hand became a fist.

"Dad is dying," she said, and the pronouncement of the words wrenched something out of her. She rubbed her bleary eyes with her palm. "What if he's actually not." she said.
"He is," Eda said.
"But if we carry him down too early, what would happen?"
"We won't do that," said Eda. "We'll know when it's time."
Percy was nodding in agreement.
"Dad is dying," Nora conceded. She went on: "We need you for the buriel rites.
"
"It's burial, with an a," said Percy.
"It's not."
"It is," said Charlie, reluctantly.
Nora hated being corrected, but she held back her frustration because she knew if she complained they would leave her to write the letter alone. She scratched out the word buriel and then the entire sentence and began again. The flat of her left hand smudged the crossed-out words into a blur as she maneuvered painstakingly across the paper. "He says, please come as soon as you can," she finished. "Is that spelled right? Is that good enough:" She did not know how to plead with the Wenna that Wenna would have become in ten years. She did not know what that Wenna wanted or believed or loved. She wondered if Wenna still loved her best, or at all.
Eda looked at the ceiling. "She's not going to come because you convinced her, Nor," she said wearily. "She's going to come because she knows there won't be a bog-wife for Charlie if she doesn’t.

Percy stood in the flooded-out bog, feeling the ground dissolve beneath his feet. He twisted the trespassers in his pocket as if the punishment he inflicted on their limp bodies could do anything to rescue the bog from the trespassers' infinite laying-down of roots. Then he went back toward the house.
From their paddock, the goats fixed him with twin pitiless stares as he lit a match and burned the trespassers in the bald circle of land reserved for the purpose. He held his breath so their smoke would not enter him. His fingers black with ash and his clothes still soaked with river water, he went inside. Charlie sat at the table, fidgeting with a spoon and an empty bowl of oatmeal, and pretended not to have watched him.
"You need help out there?" he said emptily, not looking at
Percy.
"I handled it." Only for a moment, Percy thought, I could kill him.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Been thinking a lot lately about Veronica Schanoes' phenomenal story "Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga," especially the two passages below, which have carved themselves into my brain as something like mantras or talismans. Or maybe just a necessary reminder: there is no end, only moments.

I am a Jew and a leftist and, I like to think, a decent human being with more than a shred of conscience, so I fear and abhor fascism, and I am horrified by what the United States is doing and what it has always done. But Marx also said that being determines consciousness, which is to say that my class matters far more than any good intentions or left politics I have. He was probably right, and I am pretty sure that in the event of revolution, Ill end up against the wall as the decadent, white, bourgeois parasite that I am. Razstrellyat.
I know one song, a hopeful song, and I've known it for a long time, that says we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. But I know another song, too, and I've known it for longer, and that song says ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
The revolution will not be kind. Revolutions rarely are. But the present regime is nothing if not cruel.
Where do those who walk away from Omelas go? There's nowhere to go, nowhere moral, nowhere safe, nowhere that does not depend on the suffering of some child. That means you have to stay and fight, and make the revolution as kind as possible.
In the final analysis, 1 probably am not an anarchist. I think one must have far more faith in people than 1 possess to be an anarchist. But I believe in this: you do not achieve freedom by abridging people's rights; you do not create joy by enforcing misery. The means do become the ends, because there is no end.
There are just ongoing moments.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

My Best of 2025 lists are up feat. Susanna Clarke, Premee Mohamed, Natalia Theodoridou, Renee Gladman, and more. Read here: www.patreon.com/posts/best-o...

An image grid of book covers. On a white background over the images, text reads: The Best of 2025

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Were you a Twilight girl or a Spiderwick kid? A Secret Garden-head or a Dragonology fan? Either way, this year's most impractical gift guide has you covered: gifts for yourself or any other annoying millennials in your life based on what they got at the Scholastic Book Fair. Link below.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Heaney found the "poetic go-ahead" for his Burial at Thebes through the Bush admin's "reenactment" of Creon's position in their 'war on terror' & the confluences b/w Antigone & Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, between "the wife traumatized (...) at the hands of the English soldiery... (cont)

“Early in 2003, the situation that pertains in Sophocles’ play was being reenacted in our own world. Just as Creon forced the citizens of Thebes into an either/or situation in relation to Antigone, the Bush administration in the White House was using the same tactic to forward its argument for war on Iraq. Creon puts it to the Chorus in these terms: Either you are a patriot, and a loyal citizen, and regard Antigone as an enemy of the state because she does honour to her traitor brother, or else you yourselves are traitorous because you stand up for a woman who has broken the law and defied my authority. And Bush was using a similar strategy, asking, in effect: Are you in favour of state security or are you not? If you don’t support the eradication of this tyrant in Iraq and the threat he poses to the free world, you are on the wrong side in ‘the war on terror’.

“Theme and tune coalesced. I remembered the opening lines of Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill’s lament, an outburst of grief and anger from a woman whose husband had been cut down and left bleeding on the roadside in County Cork, in much the same way as Polyneices was left outside the walls of Thebes, unburied, desecrated, picked at by the crows. But it was the drive and pitch of the Irish verse that clinched it: in the three-beat line Eibhlín Dhubh’s keen I heard a note that the stricken Antigone might sound in the speedy, haunted opening movement of the play:
(…)
In Frank O’Connor’s translation this goes:
‘My love and my delight
The day I saw you first
Beside the markethouse
I had eyes for nothing else
And love for none but you.
I left my father’s house
And ran away with you,
And that was no bad choice.’

Gradually, then, this voice of a woman in mourning becomes the voice of a woman outraged, as she finds the body of her beloved lying beside a little furze bush, dead, without the last rites, without anyone close except ‘an old, old woman / And her cloak about you’.
Because of the pitch of that voice, however, I made a connection between the wife traumatized by the death of her husband at the hands of the English soldiery in Carriganimma and the sister driven wild by the edict of a tyrant in Thebes; and through that connection I found the metre for the first dialogue between Antigone and Ismene:
“Ismene, quick, come here!
What’s to become of us?”

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

deeply, deeply in love w/ today’s research project: this gorgeous 1920s collection of Irish Fairy Tales illustrated by Rackham (!!). “Fionn got his first training among women. There is no wonder in that, for it is the pup's mother teaches it to fight (…).”

A picture of the title page, illustrated in black and white

Fionn got his first training among women.
There is no wonder in that, for it is the pup's mother teaches it to fight, and women know that fighting is a necessary art although men pretend there are others that are better. These were the women druids,
Bovmall and Lia Luachra.

An inset full color illustration for the wooing of Becfola. Becfola is shown up a tree, fleeing wolves

zoomed in detail of the wolves from previous illo

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

who would win: tragic heroine w/ a hero complex and her dead sister living in her head vs. dying imposter-hero impersonating his dead best friend for revenge/grail quest reasons (trick question, they team up and somehow make their situation worse)

Hic jacet Anna, queen of nothing. Hic jacet Jo, prophecy's whore. Once
sister and wife, once daughter and sister. I can no longer separate my
selves. I did not make this bed, though I lie in it. I did not dig this grave,
though it swallowed me whole.
I do not look away from my end. Not for me the golden pins, the
bloodied eyes; not for me a death offstage, my anger gentled by
translation into grief. No, I walk into the grave upright, unbent, broken by
no sword. I rob you of my murder and gift it to myself: a snake
swallowing its own tail.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said tiredly. Then, his voice hardened. “But on one condition. I want your promise you’ll help me.”
The words landed like stones between us. I could tell he knew the weight of what he was asking. Knew and asked it anyway. Turnabout was fair play, I supposed. It still stung.
“Fine,” I said coldly. “But I’ll have your promise first.”
I waited. His words might not bind him, but I wanted them anyway. He shook his head.
“You’re a mercenary bitch, aren’t you?” he said wonderingly. “You really are all his creatures.”
I flinched, but said nothing.
“I promise,” he said with ill-grace.
I nodded. When I spoke, the words were liquid fire on my tongue.
“Then I promise I’ll find you a cure.”
His eyes widened, and I took a vicious pleasure in his surprise. He had not expected so generous an oath. I could’ve made a weaker promise, could’ve built in protections and escapes. Could’ve given myself an out. We were all adept at crafting our promises carefully, at seeming to s

Despite everything, I wanted to make him smile again, wanted him to look at me as he had when he’d first walked in, admiring and a little hungry. He paused at the door, glancing back. His face was expressionless now, the polite mask he wore around the others. I had not realized until then that he had begun to wear a different face with me.
“You can owe me,” he said, lightly, as if the words cost him nothing.
I flinched. The door shut behind him with a solid sounding click. I rushed forward, using the poker to fish the smoldering shirt from the fire, stamping it out against the stone. Though large patches of the fabric had been singed or burned away, the bloodstain still shone on the sleeve like a constellation, inky and arterial. I shoved it under my arm. Never trust anyone you owe, Creon had said once during some long-ago lesson. Better to make sure they owed you. A debt, he’d taught me, like a limp or a promise, was a weakness. Some lessons you learned whether you wanted to or not.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

November newsletter is up (and free)! I share some publishing news, a round-up of my awards eligible writing, and recs for new and forthcoming titles featuring K.M. Fajardo, Thomas Ha, Nell Stephens, and more. Read it here: www.patreon.com/posts/novemb...

A graphic of a Patreon post showing my awards eligible writing.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

a large percentage of writing is creating problems for your future self, solving those problems by creating more problems, etc. ad nauseum until you give up and/or finish.

a word doc comment that just says: "timeline?"

word doc comments that say, respectively: "weave in material from first draft" and "order? beauty then bloodshed? or bloodshed then beauty?"

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

Luckily she is very small and cute so that’s ok.

The car had grown bored of gothic fantasy and curled up in my lap to purr aggressively. She had very yellow eyes and a white patch on her chest

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

My editing partner this morning is not pulling her own weight.

A black cat sits on my lap, looking at my computer screen where a word doc with lots of comments is pulled up

The same cat looking back at me, demanding to know why I can’t pet her and type at the same time

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

"Something Broken, Something New," in @lunastation.bsky.social: lunastationquarterly.com/issues/062/

You know how this story is meant to end. They follow Dan home.
The girl molts; the boy's eyes dull from brilliant red back to a dull
ordinary blue. His heart eventually stutters, then stops. The chil-
dren never liked this ending.
Instead, they leave death behind. All it costs them is the world.
Most days, they don't miss it.

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

"The Interrogation of Saint Winifred," in @thedeadlands.com: psychopomp.com/deadlands/is...

Who killed you?

a man a man like any other do the dead care

You aren’t dead. Not anymore.

I still speak their tongue

Do you forgive him?

I lack that muscle

Did it hurt?

you always ask that do you think death a picnic
of course it hurt

Dying?

yes but coming back was worse

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

"Argent," in @cold-signal.com: cold-signal.com/argent-carol...

“You can save them,” the witch-devil says. “If you want to.”

The devil always gives her the choice. She hates him for that more than anything else—for making her choose, making her run headlong toward her fate, eyes open. She can’t say no. She can’t walk away or abdicate. That would be a different story, a story she has no idea how to tell. And no matter how many times she loses her brothers, she cannot bring herself to let them go for good. Whether they are turned to deer, or ravens, or swans, whether they are cooked, or killed by robbers, or murdered in their beds, their loss stings each time as if it were new.

It means something, to have someone walk with you through the wood. To have someone’s hand in yours as the trees creep ever closer. Her brothers don’t remember their other lives with her, the years of tugging her braids, skipping stones and dodging blows, the thorny grammar of growing up together in a world where children grow up quickly or not at all.

They don’t remember, but she does.

"Fine," the girl says, "what do I do?"

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Caroline Shea @therealcshea.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

I get to hop on the bandwagon this year and do an awards eligibility post! I had two poems and two short stories published this year. If you're nominating for awards, I'd appreciate your consideration. All work is SFF/speculative except for "Greyhound." Links in replies.

An image formatted like a library card lists each eligible piece by magazine, title, and genre. Pieces listed are : "Greyhound," (Stone Circle Review, Poetry, General/Non-Genre), "Argent," (Cold Signal Magazine, SFF Short Fiction), "The Interrogation of Saint Winifred," (The Deadlands, SFF/Horror Poetry), and "Something Broken, Something New," (Luna Station Quarterly, SFF Short Fiction).

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