Family Values is up at Escape Pod!

Check it out

This is what a couple listeners had to say:

I am glad I get to be the first to comment. What a treat! Be on the lookout for Sara Genge. She is building quite the name for herself. I can see why. This was a fantastic story. Great worldbuiling! Glad to hear it narrated by Alasdair Stuart, He really did it justice

Bookman 12pt

It’s nice that such a short story can still satisfy. The author has a fantastic imagination. A jellyfish alien sex and political intrigue story is a first for me (although I know that there are fetish websites for almost anything)!

kevin.e.a.

Of course, someone caught the blooper (note to self: someone always catches the blooper, the reader is quite right in suggesting authors should not throw around random numbers unless they know what the heck they're talking about).

I enjoyed the story in general, but there's a technical niggle that annoys me:

The teacher transferred (more than) 10,000,000 zettajoules of energy to the senator. To put that into proportion, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated had a fireball 9Km across and a mushroom cloud seven times higher than Mount Everest. It was 2,500 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

It released one forty-billionth as much energy as was transferred between these two beings. (...)

wintermute.

Of course, I could argue that you don't really know what scale this world is in, that it doesn't even have to be in our same Universe, and that it's satire anyway, so the answer to anything is likely to be 42. However, he got it right. I threw a number around and I missed. This amuses me for some reason... I have fun being wrong.

Scroll down that comment thread for this:

I did like the irony of casual and ostensibly anonymous sex saving a politician from a political gaffe. But the story itself was weak soup. Those zettajoules might have been better spent on character development and an emotional arc that didn't feel like a deleted scene from some intergalactic version of "The West Wing."

Schreiber.

Yes! The West Wing was there. I'm glad someone got it.
And I totally did move on to write another alien tentacle sex story, as shreiber suggested further down in the thread. Be on the lookout for "Prayers for an Egg" a rather more serious take on the subject which will soon be published in Asimov's.

Family Values--Cosmos Online

Family Values is up on Cosmos Online .

Here's what the girliejones had to say about the "Family Values" in the Last Short Story project:

Another story I really enjoyed recently was Sara Genge's in COSMOS 16 called "Family Values". The writing is really beautiful and smooth, drawing you in totally to the story. It's a wee bit naughty but you're never really sure if it really *is* naughty because it's never really clear if this is an alien story or a scientific one. I'm not sure if that makes sense but I don't want to ruin it. It's clever and fun and does strong female characterisation. The ending left a big smile on my face and I'd love to see more of this world.

Check it out - I guess you will be able to find it online soon.

And online it is. Enjoy and come back to tell me if/how much you liked it.

Last Short Story and "Family Values"

RandomAlex from the Last Short Story project has put together the list of reading recommendations from the thousands of stories these guys read throughout the year. And guess what? "Family Values" published in Cosmos 16, made it into the list.

Happy happy.

"Family Values" in COSMOS 16

Issue 16 of Cosmos Magazine is out, with my story "Family Values" in it.

Here's the link to a nice reader comment in the Last Short Story project. I'm glad girliejones felt that way. She even called my writing "smooth".
Now, seriously, I'm glad she liked the goofiness of the story. It was fun to write, unlike some of my darker stories which take tons of frustration and rewrites. I want to write more of these.

"Family Values" accepted by COSMOS

Yay!
This story grew out of Liberty Hall Flash. I'm very fond of it because it was a joy to write (unlike some of my more obscure stories which take months of revision) and it sold really fast. I wouldn't define the story as satire, but it does have a strong humor streak.
This is my second pro sale.