“The Mother Goose Crisis” in Unsung Stories

Unsung Stories, the UK-based online magazine, published my story, The Mother Goose Crisis.

When a nursery-rhyme virus threatens to take out the internet – and possibly its users too – a creative solution is needed to save the world as we know it. But what, and can the tech team pull it off?

The story is short and light-hearted. I wrote the first draft years ago, in the era when 5 1/4 inch floppies still existed. From time to time, as I do with all my stories, I’d pull it out, revise it and update it. (There is no such thing as a Trunk Story – only one that hasn’t yet found its purpose.)  The floppies in the story became 3 1/2 inches. Then they became thumb drives.  The cast changed a bit. I still found it amusing, but had no idea where to send it.

Recently, on Codex, someone linked to Unsung Stories. Here’s how they describe themselves:

Unsung Stories is a fiction imprint of Red Squirrel Publishing a London-based small press. Unsung Stories publishes genre fiction, most commonly described as science fiction, fantasy and horror. But as useful as those classifications are, we look beyond them, into the potential they contain. We love the fuzzy bits between genres: hard, soft, gooey and fuzzy sci-fi, high, low, top, middle and bottom fantasy, slipstream, alternative history, steampunk, cyberpunk, space opera, weird, dark, comedy, satire, bizarro and anything else that falls somewhere between any or all of those…

So I sent it off, and here it is. I’m delighted.