A New Collection

10 years after the first!

I'm so excited to share that my short story collection, Is the Sky Falling or Are We Rising Towards the Lord?, will be published by JackLeg Press in February of 2028. JackLeg has published some of my favorite books of recent times, books by writers I admire so much.

It is such an honor to be in their company. I've been in a season of loss in life, of endings, so it's very poignant for me that this book of "endings" has found such a beautiful home.

This book is particularly meaningful to me because I sent it out at a really rough time personally and professionally. My mom had just been diagnosed with cancer, an opportunity I’d been aiming towards at work turned out to be rumor rather than reality, and my literary agent fired me for reasons I still don’t fully understand.

A prior form of this collection had been a finalist in several contests. But in the chaos, I found peace in getting back into this project and digging in. I stopped doing what I was “supposed” to do and did what my instincts told me to do. I played, I frolicked on the pages, I got weird, I got deep.

Losing my agent was quite a blow to my confidence, and before that she had declined to even read my short story collection when we worked together. This isn’t wildly uncommon for literary agents; some are interested in collections, some are not. My focus with her had been on novels, and I’m proud of what we accomplished together on the page. But this was an agent who had sold several collections, including one of my favorite books of all time.

So I was hurt. And I had to sit with myself and ask myself if I believed in the work, even if others did not.

The answer I found within my own work was YES, I believe in this. Even more than the project, I believed in the process. I’m a lifelong reader of short fiction and my process, when I freed myself from internal and external expectation, brought me such joy.

In loving the process, I came to love the project again. I cut out stories and added new ones. I played with previously published work. I released myself from internal pressure. And with great belief I sent the book out to a few publishers who had published books that I’ve read and loved. JackLeg had recently published This Year’s Ghost, a gorgeous collection by my friend Michael Chin, and had a book coming out by one of the finest short fiction writers working today, Chloe Clark (you can buy Every Galaxy a Circle now).

At the same time, I was trying to find a new agent. Agent hunting is soul destroyng even when it goes well. Once again, I was faced with many opportunities to stop believing. Parts of my personal life continued to fall apart at an alarming rate. But I kept going.

I now have a wonderful new agent and I’ll share more on that process in the near future. (She is SO COOL and we found each other through a shared love of monsters). But I was proud to take this collection out alone and for it to be embraced. I had such a beautiful response to it from a number of places, but I knew from the moment I’d gone through JackLeg’s “first round” that I wanted it to be with them. When they made the offer, their enthusiasm was so palpable, and it made me more excited about my own work.

What a gift!

I cannot wait to share more with you in the weeks and months to come. To everyone who believed in these tricky, queer, often-apocalyptic stories - friends, family, classmates, editors, legends, spirits, and strangers - thank you, thank you, thank you.

I’m dusting off the newsletter in hopes to connect with more writers following the death of Writing Twitter. I’m on Bluesky and Instagram and Facebook and all of that, but I’ve yet to find a real online writing home. My hope is to connect with more folks this way, share work, find your work, and build community.

Love,
Mike

PS - So much love to the friends who’ve gotten me through.