Mount Orégano

Once again, you curse the gods of literature: Your “short story” turned out to be the first chapter of a novel, and you really wanted a short story. How do you keep things short? Try to limit the number of important characters to two or three. Use one point of view. Keep the conflict simple, the way that postage stamp artwork is memorable but simple. Compress the time frame. Aim for a single effect. Include only the most essential information. If you need a short story idea, here are a few.

• This is a fantasy story in which a gem broker becomes obsessed over a new kind of stone that appears at a roadside market.

• This is young adult story in which a panic-stricken alien learns self-defense from a dog.

• This is a competence p0rn story about an incorrigible lunar pioneer who endangers the settlement by sloppy habits that introduce lunar dust, which has damaging and dangerous sharp edges, into living and working quarters.

Here are some things published in 2025 that you may wish to consider nominating for an award — just a reminder. Some are my own works, some are my translations.

Science fiction and fantasy short stories by me

“To Defeat Water” Short story, 1175 words. If you curse Poseidon, he might curse you, too, time and time again. And life after life, you can fight back. Read it here: The Lorelei Signal, July 2025.

“Journey to Apollodorus” Novelette, 8760 words. In my novel Dual Memory, an AI named Par Augustus discovers a story about robots in the Apollodorus Crater on Mercury. This is the story. It focuses on the humans who struggle to create and maintain a scientific team when a lander sent to Mercury behaves unexpectedly. Success can be as stressful as failure. Oxygen Leaks Magazine, March 2025 (no longer in publication, contact me for a copy).

Novella translation

ChloroPhilia by Cristina Jurado. Translation of a novella, 20,200 words. Would you sacrifice your humanity to save the world? Nominated for Spain’s Ignotus Award, this strange coming-of-age story addresses life after an environmental disaster, collective madness, and sacrifices made for the greater good. Buy it here: Apex Books, January 2025.

Science fiction short story translations

“Trees at Night” by Ramiro Sanchiz. Translation of a short story, 6050 words. A librarian at a hospital-like sanatorium befriends a young patient named Federico for reasons that eventually become clear. Read it here: Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, November 2025.

“Proxima One” by Caryanna Reuven. Translation of a short story, 4020 words. A machine intelligence called Proxima One sends probes into the galaxy on long journeys filled with waiting and yearning in a search for intelligent life. The probes cope with unexpected wonders, loss, and profound changes — but there is always possibility and hope. Read it here: Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, May 2025.

“Bodyhoppers” by Rocío Vega. Translation of a short story, 5290 words. Minds can hop from body to body, but there’s always a problem because the system is designed to create them. One day, you can’t return to your own body because it’s occupied by someone with more money. Now you have no home, and you’re still madly in love. Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, February 2025.

Poetry translation

Liquid Sand / Arena Líquida by Jorge Valdés Díaz-Vélez. Book of poetry translated by Christian Law Palacín and myself. This is the first major bilingual collection of poems by Jorge Valdés Díaz-Vélez, one of Mexico’s most respected contemporary poets. It gathers 42 of his works selected from six previous collections that span more than two decades of writing. Shearsman Books, November 2025.

Volumes Bookcafé is closing its doors. The bookstore in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, owned by two sisters, lost too much business when a Barnes & Noble opened two blocks away. This is the store that hosted all my book launches. Rebecca, one of the owners, has become a friend.

To say goodbye, the Speculative Literature Foundation will host a Deep Dish reading at the store at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, January 3, 1373 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago. Come, enjoy the performances, and buy a book. Volumes has a carefully curated selection.

The readers will be Alex Kingsley, Angeli Primlani, Gordon Dymowski, Harold Holt, James Kennedy, Jennifer Stevenson, Philip Janowski, Reginald Owens II, Richard Chwedyk, Steven Silver, and me.

I’ll be reading two poems, “Petty Love” and “Sonnet from Hell.”

I wrote this piece as a Christmas present for my nephew in 2004.

This is your first Christmas, Sean, and since you’re only eight months old, I know this story might not impress you much, but it seems like the right time to tell it.

Your father was not quite three months old on his first Christmas, and I was ten years old. I knew enough about babies to know they don’t really do much at first, but eventually they grow into real people. That was the exciting puzzle. What was this new baby brother going to be like? We didn’t have many clues, but we watched for them all the time. Who was Louis Peter Burke?

Your Grandmother Burke died well before you were born, so you don’t know much about her. Here is her Christmas tree decorating theory: More is better. In architectural terms, it was rococo baroque.

During Christmas Eve day, we decorated the tree. First the lights went on — big lights, small lights, steady lights, twinkle lights, colored lights, white lights, all the lights we had, and there were plenty. Second, we hung every single ornament we had on the tree, and, again, there were plenty. If one was ugly or beat up, it went way in the inside where it could add color or sparkle without really being visible. The only rule was smaller stuff on top, bigger stuff on the bottom. Finally, we added tinsel and garlands of various types and colors to be sure there was maximum sparkle.

Then we waited for nightfall, since only a darkened house could do justice to the masterpiece we had created.

Meanwhile, we dressed your father in a red-and-white-striped elf-costume pajama set that an aunt had given him, complete with a pointy cap. He didn’t care for the cap but we made him wear it anyway, at least long enough for a photo, which may still be around somewhere. He looked more silly than elfish. He certainly had no idea about what was going on. He was too little to understand much of anything.

The moment to light the tree arrived. We turned out all the lamps and closed the front curtains to block the streetlight. With a flip of a switch, the tree flashed on, providing enough sparkling light to read by.

Your father’s eyes got big and he couldn’t take them off the tree. He liked it! He liked it a lot! Even when we turned the room lights back on, he continued to stare at the tree, fascinated.

It was a clue, the first clue I remember, about your father’s personality. He liked colorful, beautiful things — at least, we thought the tree was beautiful, and in a rococo way, it certainly was. We lit the tree for him throughout the holidays for the sheer fun of watching him enjoy it.

I don’t remember much else about that Christmas, like what I got as presents, what anyone else got, whether there was snow, or what we had for Christmas dinner. All I remember is the intense look of surprise and delight on your father’s little face, and how merry a Christmas he made it for all of us because we could make him happy, and because we had learned a little bit about him.

Finding out who someone is takes a long time. I’m still learning things about my brother Louis. Fatherhood, for example, has revealed new aspects of his personality and interests. In the same delighted way that I first saw so many years ago, he could not be more curious and excited to learn about you. Who is Sean Patrick Burke?

This is your father’s first Christmas with you. I hope it is merry.

Copyright © 2004 by Sue Burke, all rights assigned to Sean Patrick Burke.

Rejections and fun don’t mix – except this one time.

I wrote a horror story about vampires and started sending it out. The story made the second cut in an anthology but not the final one. Oh, well. I sent it out again right away and got a response of “close, very close” from the editor. Not bad!

Then … the very next magazine rejected it with a note saying that it was “cruel and evil.” Evil? A vampire horror story? Isn’t that the point? I laughed about it with my writer friends, and for a while I was known as “the evil Sue Burke.”

The next magazine rejected it with (this was by snailmail) a preprinted note saying: “We celebrate your achievement!” Although the editors couldn’t take the story, the note said, they wanted me to know how proud they were of me for having written it and taken part in the furtherance of literature. Or something like that. I think they meant it because they dropped a sprinkle of confetti into the envelope — really cool confetti. I used it to decorate my desk lamp.

I kept sending the story out, got rejections both bland and encouraging, and on the 21st try, I found a magazine that loved it and took it. A few years later the story was even reprinted in an anthology. All’s well that ends well.

I learned four things from this adventure:

1. Confetti should accompany all rejections. Or, now that we send most things out via internet, a picture of a cute kitten. How hard would that be?

2. Rejections are about the story, not about the writer, which is too bad because I’d really like to be evil.

3. As we all know, rejections are a necessary step toward publication. We can even make a game out of them. I wish I could remember who I learned this from so I could give her credit: Try to see if you can achieve a certain number of rejections in a single day. She suggested five, so I made that my goal. The most I’ve ever gotten is three.

4. I need more rejections if I’m ever going to win the rejection game, which means I have to get more submissions out there. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go write something, and as a parting gift, here’s a picture of a cute kitten. Celebrate your next rejection with it. We all deserve a little fun.

Pumpkins are squashes, but are squashes pumpkins? Some are. Regarding your holiday pumpkin pie, if the pumpkin comes from a can, it’s at least 95% certain that it is from the Dickinson pumpkin, which is more or less a butternut squash. But as Libby’s Pumpkin insists, the Dickinson is really a pumpkin—and that’s true. Botanically speaking, “pumpkin” is a squishy squashy category.

Anyway, I can attest that a good butternut squash/Dickinson pumpkin is a little more flavorful than the classic pie pumpkin, so don’t feel cheated. And both of those taste better than the variety of pumpkin we carve for Halloween. A jack-o-lantern makes a great addition to the compost heap, not the dinner table.

One more fun fact: Almost all pumpkins for canned pie filling are grown in and around the village of Morton, Illinois, near Peoria. So when you eat your pumpkin pie, think about the Land of Lincoln. In these fraught political times, what can we learn from Honest Abe?

Happy Thanksgiving.

I translated the poems in Liquid Sand / Arena Líquida with my Spanish friend Christian. One of us would draft the translation of a poem, then we would pass it back and forth, debating words, lines, and meaning — the goal of a translation is always to maintain the meaning. We didn’t quibble much. Translation is easiest when the original work is well-written.

In the opening poem, “Nadie / No One,” Ulysses returns to Ithaca to become a specter among his own memories. While there’s no way to summarize a collection of 42 poems, the theme of time occurs often. Time moves, and we move, but in different directions for different reasons, as the poem “Negro Sol / Black Sun” says:

The afternoon weighs heavily

toward its settlement. Ours

is due to a harder sun

and we have had to learn

to walk beneath its burden.

Liquid Sand / Arena Líquida is the first major bilingual collection of poems by Jorge Valdés Díaz-Vélez, one of Mexico’s most respected contemporary poets. Published this month by Shearsman Books and available from most bookstores, it gathers works by Valdés Díaz-Vélez selected from six previous collections that span more than two decades of writing.

Madrid Review Magazine says:

“In these pages, Valdés Díaz-Vélez explores time, memory, and the fragile equilibrium between movement and stillness. His poems evoke the physical and emotional geographies of the Americas while questioning belonging, transformation, and endurance. The English versions retain the clarity and meditative strength of the originals, inviting readers to cross the line between two languages and two sensibilities. To read Liquid Sand / Arena Líquida is to encounter poetry that is precise, reflective, and alert to the unseen rhythms of contemporary life. It is a landmark publication for readers of bilingual and Latin American literature.”

Since it’s Halloween, let me tell you a true story about a ghost. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I want to believe in this one. It happened quite a few years back when I was living in Milwaukee and I went to visit a friend’s house in the Bay View neighborhood.

I didn’t know the house was haunted. I simply said the big, colorful framed poster hanging at the top of the stairs looked lovely, especially in that spot.

“Do you want to know why it’s there?” My friend was eager to tell me. She and her family had moved into the house not long ago, and they had decided that the space at the top of the stairs seemed like a natural place for art, which it was.

So they hung up a picture. It fell down. They put it up again. It fell down the stairs and broke. They tried another picture, carefully securing it to the wall, and it, too, fell down the stairs and broke. They couldn’t figure out what the problem was.

Then one day they were talking with the elderly neighbor who had lived next door all his life. He listened to their story and sighed sadly. Decades earlier, the family in that house had a teenage son who was gay, which in those days was a terrible taboo, so he had committed suicide by throwing himself down the stairs. Ever since then, things fell down the stairs for no reason — or perhaps because the boy was still there in spirit.

My friend and her family decided to try an experiment. They bought the most beautiful gay rights poster they could find, put it in a nice frame, and hung it at the top of the stairs, hoping the boy might understand that things had changed.

“And it’s still there!” she said. “I’m not sure I believe in ghosts, but maybe we helped his spirit rest in peace.”

Now, I knew the neighborhood. The street in front of that house was built over an underground stream, Deer Creek. Maybe, when heavy trucks went past, they made the ground shake and the movement somehow focused on that stairway.

Or maybe there was a troubled spirit in that house, a forlorn teenage boy who had lived there many years ago. And possibly, if he had been born decades later, he could have lived at peace with himself and still be alive.

If you haven’t yet read Usurpation, here’s your chance to buy it at a more economical price. The trade paperback will be released on Tuesday, October 21, available from any bookseller.

This is the third book in the Semiosis trilogy. As you may recall, Stevland, an aggressive, intelligent plant on a distant planet, longs to send his seeds to Earth. In the second book of the trilogy, Interference, he finds a way.

Now Stevland’s descendants grow everywhere, but no one on Earth knows they are intelligent, and humans have fallen into a violent crisis. They need help. But how? Stevland sends advice: “Compassion will give you courage. Love will be ferocious.”

Apples are my favorite fruit — but is it the forbidden fruit? Probably not. The idea seems to have come from a mistranslation or artistic liberty rather than the gospel truth.

The Bible’s Book of Genesis tells the story of the serpent who talks to Eve about a particular fruit that, if she ate it, would cause her to “be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:4, St. James Version). It doesn’t say which fruit, and many different fruits have been proposed. The idea that it’s an apple could come from a confusion between the Latin word “malus” for evil and “malum” for apple. Or the Latin word “pomum” for fruit; in French, it became “pomme” and eventually meant apple. Or the Biblical story became mixed with Greek legends about apples.

In any case, apple trees are a good example of how plants manipulate us. Apple trees grow tasty fruit so that we pick it, eat it, and spread the seeds when we toss away the core. Like many kinds of fruit, some varieties of apples even change color as they ripen to encourage us to eat them. Apple trees now grow all over the planet and enjoy tender loving care. Like every plant, apples want to take over the Earth — or at least conquer every niche they can fit into. Apples have used us humans to achieve world domination.

It’s apple season. Enjoy! And consider the mutualism that brings you this sweet treat. Just because you eat something, you might not be the apex predator. You might be cheap labor.