A short story of mine, "Mira on the Ice," appears in the January edition of MUSE magazine, published by Cricket Media. Now, this is pretty exciting to me for a couple of reasons:
This is my first short story publication, and follows years of dabbling in short story form while also being quite intimidated by it!
This is my first published story to have some (admittedly light) fantasy world-building elements, which is something I definitely want to explore more of in future stories.
"Mira on the Ice" is about a 12-year-old aspiring scientist who is thrilled to be accompanying her ecologist uncle on a Survey of the Great Ice Sheet that stretches between the lands of Borea and Dornan. As she roams the brilliant blue ice, Mira knows better than to hope to catch a glimpse of the fabled ice lynx. Everyone knows that the lynx is long extinct, along with the rest of the mammals of the Great Ice Sheet. After all, warming temperatures and melting ice have created an extinction event. But then Mira makes a surprising discovery... To read the full story, pick up a copy of the issue here.
And speaking of short stories... My novel MANATEE SUMMER actually started as a short story! I wrote a single scene of two boys spotting a manatee in the canal that ran through their neighborhood, and I thought that was the end of it. Fortunately, I had a wonderful writing advisor at the time who encouraged me to expand the story. I always like to share this with kids when I do school visits: You never know where a short story or small piece of writing might lead you. And who knows? Maybe I'll return to Mira's world someday!