Short Story: The Institute of Harmony

"Dragon Tree" by Philipp Urlich, Cover art for Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #410, June 27, 2024

Above: “Dragon Tree”, Cover art from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #410, by Philipp Urlich

I’ve recently published my first short story in a fantasy magazine, the amazing Beneath Ceaseless Skies, an award-winning magazine of literary adventure fantasy. Being published there has been a dream of mine since I first learned about it, and I’m so thrilled to have my first published story sharing magazine space with works from some of my favorite authors in the archives.

“The Institute of Harmony” began as one of my first efforts to write short fiction, for an anthology call. It turns out that I’m not the best at writing short fiction. I have a great deal of respect for people who are good at it! Even my short fiction runs longer than many markets look for — “Institute” is just squeaking under the edge of the official short story length with nearly 7500 words, and many places want stories with a 5000 word cap or shorter. I’ve found that my short fiction almost always needs to go longer to be what it needs to be. (One 2000 word short story has been expanded into a 118k novel and it’s really much better that way.)

For the anthology call, I wrote a draft around 4000 words (I think) and it was terrible. I had to give myself permission to expand it, and had a lot of help from early readers, especially KS Walker who read the very unfortunate, very different, very first draft. (So in addition to being published in one of my most admired magazines, “Institute” also has the honor of receiving its first feedback from one of my favorite short-story authors — if you haven’t read Walker’s work, please check it out!)

At any rate, if you are interested in a sapphic fantasy short story about two women with song-based elemental magic struggling against how their magic is used, please read it and let me know how you like it — there’s a comment space on the website! And while the story and all past issues are free to read on Beneath Ceaseless Skies’ website, if you can contribute even a small amount financially, it helps them to continue to nurture this space for new and established writers to develop and share beautiful and moving and unexpected pieces of magic with the world.

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