collective realms

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End of Year Round Up

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2021 Fiction, Poetry, & Art

Four of my illustrations from various publications (detailed below).

I’ve never written an End of Year Round Up / Awards Eligibility post before. Writing takes a while to get from a daydream you're trying to wrestle into words and the actual story you hold in your hands. I'm thrilled these stories made their way into the world this year. All these stories (and a poem!) mean the world for me to be able to share with you all. There’s literary, fantasy, science fiction, and pop culture represented—a little something for everyone.

Almost all of these pieces are viewable online but if any nominating readers or editors would like to read my science fiction story “Experiment Ninety-Four” in Collective Realms Magazine*, published Winter 2021 but now out-of-print, I can provide a copy for you if you reach out to me via my Contact page.

Thank you if you consider voting for me, but just as big of thanks if you just take the time to read. More stories will debut in 2022. Meanwhile, I'm busy on two novels (one in its first draft, one in revision). I met my New Year's courage goal of FINALLY submitting a poem (I have five weeks left to sub nonfiction!)

It was a good writing year.

Short Fiction:

  • “A List of Everyone in the World” in Hypertext Magazine’s Winter Issue. A queer, nonbinary love story between a misanthrope and social butterfly.

  • “Experiment Ninety-Four” in Collective Realms Magazine*, January/February 2021. A science fiction short story featuring a boy alone on a space station, who yearns to escape and find his own path in life.

  • “Stitched’ in The Future Fire, July 2021. A feminist re-telling of Little Red Riding Hood for people who typically hate both that particular story and fairytale retellings in general. A queer and neurodivergent myth, it’s an exploration of an outcast driven to confront her own untamed nature. You can read Charles Payseur’s (Quick Sips Review) praise for the story here.

Poetry:

Art:

  • “Dawn Treader Station” in Collective Realms Magazine’s January/February 2021 issue.*

  • “Cara” and “Tethered” in The Future Fire’s July 2021 issue. You can read about the art, especially one of the pieces being an homage to beloved illustrator Trina Schart Hyman, here.

  • The entirety of the online issue for Hypertext Magazine’s Winter 2020/2021 issue, including three pieces which were nominated by the editors for a Best of the Net award in Art.

*Collective Realms shut down in June 2021 and the EIC took the site offline. The story is currently off on submission for a reprint market, but you can read the PDF here until then.

New Story: "Experiment Ninety-Four" in Collective Realms Magazine

“Welcome to Dawn Treader Station” - by Sarah Salcedo, first published in Collective Realms Magazine #006

“Welcome to Dawn Treader Station” - by Sarah Salcedo, first published in Collective Realms Magazine #006

My latest story is out today in Collective Realms Magazine along with artwork I created. UPDATE: The editor-in-chief of the magazine shut down the website without warning in June. There is no online home for the story just now.

This is the first story that I’ve had published from my Fairy Tale Prodigal Project (more about that later). I wrote the first few lines to it in December 2016, “Once upon a time, in a decommissioned space station orbiting a nebula in a remote quadrant of space, there lived a boy named Caspian. He lived alone and unloved, with nothing and no one but new stars to talk to as his station spun through the dark of space. In his heart, Caspian burned as bright as the lights within the nebula. He was an answer to a problem no one had asked him to solve, and his loneliness was a problem with no answer.”

I wouldn’t write the rest of the story until 2018. I knew the beginning, the heart of the story, but I didn’t know the plot. The character roamed the halls of my subconscious for the next year and half before I had a breakthrough, and the story was revised well into 2019. A little less than two years and nineteen rejections later, Caspian is finally ready for the world.

This is story about loneliness, the power of stories to create meaning and purpose, and the strain that parental agendas put on children. Most of all, it’s a story about hope despite darkness. All my stories are, in one way or another.

Thank you to my husband Vasant for reading every draft and being unflaggingly supportive over the last three years. No one in the world supports my writing like Vasant does and it’s a blessing that he isn’t driven crazy by me hovering over him as he reads asking him what part he’s on now over and over and over.

Thanks to Ken Workman for reading this with an engineer’s eye for language that I used to describe certain elements of the story, and to my sister Claire for reading and editing the earliest drafts of this. Thank you to all the other friends and family who read it and begged to get it out there. Caspian is one of my most beloved characters yet and when the publishing road was difficult (one top tier magazine held it on their editorial board’s desk for 322 days before kindly passing with a request to see more from me), it was the fact that my friends and family loved Caspian like I did that convinced me not to be broken by the rejections but to push on.

I hope you enjoy this story.