story release: an exchange of hearts

[luninosity]

I’ve got a new (old) short story out now! Well, technically yesterday, but gosh, this semester’s teaching schedule is brutal, and I have very little free time to do things like promo…

“An Exchange of Hearts” is fantasy-romance, a sort of spin on the princess-in-a-tower and glass-mountain fairytale motifs. Except the princess is also a magician, and the prince on the quest is less interesting than his brother, also a magician, who initially just came along to help…except there’s something intriguing about the person who could create such magic, and such a challenge… (I did do some rewriting to clearly have bisexual main characters and a queer-normative world; that was actually always the case in my head, but I made it more overt in this version.) I always liked the idea of them falling in love through magic first – being impressed by each other – and also the light subversion of whose quest it ends up being!

This story, as I mentioned, is both old and new – the oldest version was actually one of my very first pro story sales, maybe a decade ago! That speculative fiction magazine closed, and we got all our rights back and everything. So I figured I’d see if JMS would like it!

The new version is a couple thousand words longer (hey, it’s me: any editing will add more words…) and lightly edited (and retitled) to be a little closer to my current writing style, though the core of the story is the same.

I still like it – in fact, I’ve got a lot of affection for it! – and I hope you do too!

And look at the gorgeous cover! It never had a cover before, just being internal inside the magazine. JMS did a lovely job!

JMS Books link here! (On sale – only $1.87!)

Amazon link here!