Blackberry Picking: Accepted

I definitely think the short story markets for speculative fiction are tougher these days. More people writing stories in the aftermath of Covid, perhaps, and the markets themselves are often not immune from difficult economic times. I have actually written a fair few short stories in 2023, but there is a difference between writing something and finding a home for it. So in a good bit of news, I can report that I have sold a short story, Blackberry Picking, to the Nobilis Erotica Podcast: https://nobilis.libsyn.com/



As you might guess from the nature of the market, Blackberry Picking is a 4750-word piece of outright fantasy erotica.











This one was specifically inspired by the Hylas story in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica. A bit of gender-flipping characters, and adding a basic grounding of sexual consent… and one winds up with Classical Myth Porn. As one does. On revision, the story also picked up copious influence from C.S. Lewis’ excellent Till We Have Faces, a retelling of Psyche and Eros. So Blackberry Picking is bona fide erotica in debt to both Apollonius of Rhodes and C.S. Lewis. Classy.



(It’s still not the most outlandish item on my literary bibliography. For all its sexually risqué nature, Blackberry Picking is still intended as mainstream erotica. A Christmas in Bohemia – published in 2019 – is actual Necrophiliac Christmas Porn: https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2019/10/01/a-christmas-in-bohemia-published/ ).