So this is good news in an otherwise difficult week: Circlet Press is going to release a print anthology of the best of their digital library in honor of their 20th anniversary (yay Circlet!), and my 1001 Nights retelling in space, “Catch and 
Release”, has made the shortlist. The final ToC of the anthology will be decided both by Circlet’s editors and by a reader poll. So if you read “Catch and Release” and you’d like to see it in print, you can go here and vote for it, as well as up to four other stories. And you should - there are some fantastic stories and equally fantastic authors on that list.
Circlet’s made a business of putting out not only top-notch erotica but also top-notch writing, period – I’ve been continually impressed by the quality of work that I’ve seen them put out, and it’s been an honor to be a part of the anthologies in which they’ve included me. They were actually my very first publication ever and I’ll always be grateful to them. Congrats, Circlet. Here’s to many more years of SFnal porny goodness.
I’m including a lengthy and NSFW excerpt of “Catch and Release” below the cut.
honor of a release I have today: Jane Litte’s (of 
cold, (apparently) dead thing that it is today. I immediately thought “hey, I could do that,” and stupidly set out to try to do so. The result has–so far–been sort of like The Martian Chronicles by way of The Road, a story of the last survivors of a colonization attempt by an alien species, an attempt that, predictably, went horribly awry. The last generation of survivors–most of them, anyway–carry no clear memory of their homeworld, or of how they lived before their colony disintegrated into infighting and starvation. What they do carry are “ghosts”, the fragmentary memories and personalities of the people they have killed and eaten in a highly complex cannibalistic ritual referred to as “communion”. My idea is that this ritual arose as a way to combat the combined losses of culture, community, resources, and meaningful ties to the past. It does interesting things to the meaning of death on this version of Mars (called “Hadeva” by its inhabitants)–anyone may be killed and eaten at any time, for any reason, and people have very little cause to trust one another, though small isolated settlements still exist. But by the same token, slaughter and consumption are deeply meaningful, even respectful, and communities share their dead together. When someone is attacked and killed, they often take comfort in the fact that their killer will commune them and carry their memory. To die uneaten is the worst possible fate.
