Nominations are now being accepted for the Nebula Awards and will open shortly for the Hugos. Because I've been focusing on finishing a novel, I have only two stories eligible for award consideration this year. They are:
Monday's Monk
My 8,700 word novelette "Monday's Monk" was published in the March 2013 edition of Asimov's Science Fiction. The story was inspired by my experiences while serving with the U.S. Peace Corps in Thailand, where I had the opportunity to study and work with monks from several Buddhist monasteries, including Wat Pah Nanachat.
The novelette has been well received, with Locus Magazine's Lois Tilton both recommending it and naming this "harrowing account of an individual’s struggle to retain his integrity and religious principles under a genocidal regime" to her year's best list. (Update: Locus Magazine added the story to their 2013 Recommended Reading List, as did Tangent Online , which gave it a top possible score of 3 stars.)
Other reviews include John Sulyok in Tangent Online, who calls the story a "must read," and Sam Tomaino in SFRevu, who says "Monday's Monk" is a "great story."
- To read "Monday's Monk," you can download the story as either a MS Word document, a Rich Text document, a PDF, or as an ePub file.
Paprika
My other story for consideration is my 7,900 word novelette "Paprika," which was published in issue 249 of the British magazine Interzone (Nov./Dec. 2013). As I mentioned in the author's note to the story, "Paprika" was inspired by the life of acclaimed anime director Satoshi Kon, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 46.
Over on Wizzley, my story is called "beautiful ... and a fitting tribute to anime director Satoshi Kon" while Matthew Dent says the story gets the "imagination firing on all neurones."
Because the story is in the current issue of Interzone, I am unable to post it online. If you don't have access to the issue and are a voter for the any of the major genre awards, contact me.