Ruthanna Emrys's Journal

I haven't posted for a while, have I? *Looks around, dusts off surfaces, surreptitiously wipes hands*

But look what came in the mail today!



I'll come up with clever plans for the rest later, but for now I just want to share my delight at finally having actual books, made of actual matter, with my name on John Jude Palencar's spiffy cover. So here's the deal. Between now and a deadline of Whenever the Baby Goes to Bed tomorrow night, tell me your favorite monster, and something you wish you knew about them. I'll pick an entry at random to receive an ARC.

Fine print: I'm posting to Twitter as well; it's the same ARC and the same contest on both platforms. I'm willing to ship anywhere, but if you're overseas it may arrive on the very slow boat. Or quickly, but very wet and delivered by someone with gills.

"The Litany of Earth" will be reprinted in Paula Guran's New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird, due out in April.  The full table of contents makes for delightful company:

The Same Deep Waters As You, Brian Hodge
Mysterium Tremendum, Laird Barron
The Transition of Elizabeth Haskings, Caitlin R. Kiernan
Bloom, John Langan
At Home With Azathoth, John Shirley
The Litany of Earth, Ruthanna Emrys
Necrotic Cove, Lois H. Gresh
On Ice, Simon Strantzas
The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward, Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
All My Love, A Fishhook, Helen Marshall
The Doom That Came to Devil Reef, Don Webb
Momma Durtt, Michael Shea
They Smell of Thunder, W. H. Pugmire
The Song of Sighs, Angela Slatter
Fishwife, Carrie Vaughn
In the House of the Hummingbirds, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Who Looks Back?, Kyla Ward
Equoid, Charless Stross
The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft, Marc Laidlaw

I'm supposed to be proofing my own story, but keep reading everyone else's instead.  Deep One fans are going to be happy--I count at least three such stories aside from mine, and I haven't finished reading yet.

We were driving along Roosevelt Road, intent on shopping for cat food, when we saw an octopus in the sky. Naturally we abandoned our earlier plans, and turned off onto the side road hoping to find out why. Eventually we found ourselves in a park, where we saw that the octopus was surrounded by dogs and sharks and colorful geometric figures, likewise aloft. What we'd found was a kite-flying demonstration, with something well beyond the diamond-shaped thing I could never get off the ground when I was a kid.

I was very sad not to have a camera with me. Fortunately, the internet will provide. Except that the one we saw was rather more eldritch-colored--and rather more complex. Lower down on the line, where we hadn't been able to see it from Roosevelt, a 50-foot pirahna was fleeing the octopus, along with a 3-foot baby pirahna. A half-moon (the real one, not a kite) was just rising in the sky behind it. When an octopus flies across the moon, you know you've had a good day.