p-h-lee

[p-h-lee]

Empathy: I feel you

Sympathy: I feel for you

Lycanthropy: I feel awoo

[p-h-lee]

from the forward of The Left Hand of Darkness, I believe.

Ursula K. Le Guin

[p-h-lee]

I got to create this piece to accompany "The V*mpire" by P H Lee. It's a short story over on reactor mag. Reactor/TOR have been a dream client for my entire career. So honored to have had the opportunity to work with them! Synopsis 🩸: The vampires aren't even the worst part about being a teenage trans girl on tumblr.

[p-h-lee]

I have a story out today, tumblr. It's called The V*mpire and I wrote it for us.

Please mind the warnings.

[p-h-lee]

Empathy: I feel you

Sympathy: I feel for you

Lycanthropy: I feel awoo

[p-h-lee]

Messy fanart for Asunder by Kerstin Hall, because I am a sap. Might be lightly be spoiler-y?

[p-h-lee]

Karys and Ferain from Asunder by Kerstin Hall, based on Klimt's The Kiss. First: Original colors, Second: Experiment with gradient mapping.

Post-work coffee and some doodling while watching tv - I'm not sure if this is exactly what I wanted it to look like - I like it but may take another run at it at some point in the future, restarting with the sketch phase. I think I had just a little too much fun making all the little marks, lmao.

[p-h-lee]

POV: The price of greatness, featuring Winola from Asunder by Kerstin Hall.

aka a shitpost about being an exceptionally interesting pigeon around someone doing science.

I was working on something else that I ended up scrapping, and wanted something fast and fun to boost my mood, lmao.

[p-h-lee]

This really depends on style and genre. Modern style is to avoid fully omniscient narrators because that's "head-hopping" and thus confusing. But different eras of writing have had different attitudes towards it.

Personally, I think that the anti-omniscient trend is due to the influence of movies and television on media. In movies and television, a voice-over telling you the characters' thoughts is uncomfortably intrusive. And since movies and television are our dominant medium for fiction, writers in other media tend to mimic them.

But prose fiction isn't movies or television. One of the strengths of prose fiction is the degree of internality it can provide for its characters through description of their thoughts and feelings. In movies and television, of course, this is provided by the actors, but prose fiction does not have actors, and without descriptions it can end up coming off as somewhat flat or hard to follow.

(There's a similar thing with the literary writing bias against scene breaks-- scene breaks are dramatic in a visual medium, but incredibly smooth in a written one.)

It may just be my imagination / wishful thinking, but I have noticed that there's been a bit of a resurgence of omniscient narrators in the last few years. That said, MFA programs tend to run ~10 years behind on cultural trends, so you may just need to keep your head down and keep the peace.

people in my MFA really hate writing with omniscient narrators, but I can't come up with a better way to do the thing I'm writing, so I'm trying to collect data on whether this is a real problem or a made up MFA problem. would love if you reblogged this for data reasons!

omniscient narration is when the narrator of a story is a voice from outside of the story who knows what all the characters are thinking and feeling.

[p-h-lee]

Okay okay I wanna play

Spin the wheel for a Shakespeare character!

Reblog for sample size, etc. Would love to hear what you got + reasoning in the tags!

[p-h-lee]

New Story today!

Richard Nixon and the Princess of the Crows

In the final hours before a comet strikes the earth, all-but-certain to wipe out humanity, the disgraced ex-president become entangled with a lost princess of birds.

[p-h-lee]

🎵 so here's two ewes, Mrs. Robinson 🎶

[p-h-lee]

i have once again committed the err of podcasting.

please read this amazing book.

A little book about a girl raised by bears and dragons, written by a woman who lived several Mitfords' worth of adventure during the dawn of modernity.

[p-h-lee]

A Sojourn in the Fifth City

a new story about a dying apprentice on an impossible pilgrimage.

She started to mutter a prayer for forgiveness, but stopped herself again. "Every step a prayer" and so she took a step, and then another, before swallowing the sinful water.

[p-h-lee]

FUCKIT #15 features (get ready 'cause it's a lot): A fairy tale from Sarah Andrew, poetry from B. Malley and David M. Briggs, a brand new installment of the Megabot Adventures from PH Lee, an essay from Alexis Siemon, stories within stories from Laura E. Price, and a double review of the new Genesis Owusu and Daði Freyr albums (highly recommended for anyone dancing their way through an existential crisis.)

Sidenote: It is neither Genesis Owusu or Daði Freyr, but I somehow happened to time things so I finished up posting the zine right at the opening horn blast from "Limuzīns Uz Krīta," and that felt fortuitous.

[p-h-lee]

I have a signed contract for a novel that will be published by a small indie press in 2024. Can/should I mention that in a query letter to an agent? How about an upcoming short story publication? Thanks!

You can mention both, or either, or neither.

If the novel is in the same genre/category you are querying, and it's a reputable small indie press, I see no reason not to mention it, and in fact I think you SHOULD. This will tell the agent, hey, I know how to write a book, other people like my work too, I'm familiar with this category/genre, I'm new but I'm not THAT new, etc.

If the short story is in the same genre/category, and going to be published in a reputable magazine/journal/anthology or whatever, I see no reason not to mention it. Same reasons as above. I mean you don't have to go on and on about it, but by all means mention. These mentions can go in your bio.

"I'm Meadowlark Limoncello, and I live in a cottage in the woods outside the village of Seattle. When I'm not dreaming up magical worlds, I spend most of my time cleaning up after my demonic cat Grumpus. I have a YA fantasy novel under contract at GreatSmallPress that is tentatively scheduled for Fall 2024, and a short story about a talking parakeet who hosts a true-crime podcast that will be in the December issue of The New Yorker."

If the novel or short story are a totally different category/genre that has nothing to do with what you are querying, OR you have any reason to feel "iffy" about the quality of the place that is publishing them, just mention as a total aside.

"I'm Tamson Leafhopper, and I live in the bustling metropolis of Cornstalk, Kansas, where I spend most of my time looking at spreadsheets and shucking our namesake fruit. (Yes, corn is a fruit. And a grain. And a vegetable, kinda. Weird, right?) I've got a small-press SF novel for adults forthcoming and a short story under contract; AW, SHUCKS is my first Middle Grade novel."

Or, if you just feel like the other works truly have NO bearing on this work whatsoever, and you don't want to mention, and you haven't even said anything on social media, and you are superstitious or something, you don't have to mention in the query -- but it would be weird to not at least bring it up if you have a call. We want to know your history and what you've got cooking, and it would be strange to sign somebody and then find out they have a book already coming out???

[p-h-lee]

Toad Words

            Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

            It used to be a problem.

            There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up with parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.

            So I got frogs. It happens.

            “You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”

            I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.

            Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.

            Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.

I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening.  I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.

            Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.

            Toads are masters of it.

            I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.

            When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.

            I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.

            I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.

            But I can make more.

            I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.

            Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.  

            It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.

            I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)

            The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.

            My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.

            I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.

Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…