Writing Update: June 2025
A slew of new fiction debuted from yours truly in June, so I'd be honored if you added these short stories to your summer reading list.
June was a big publication month for me , bringing my grand total of 2025 publications to 20 with an additional 6 waiting in the wings.
What was published in June:
We’ve got three literary fiction pieces and two speculative on deck for June!
Once Upon A Time, Husbands Kept Their Wives’ Diagnoses to Themselves - Nonbinary Review
Read time: <15 minutes (2,000 words)
Genre: Speculative fiction
What She Would Give - foofaraw
Read time: <10 minutes (1,000 words)
Genre: Speculative fiction
This Is Not A Eulogy - National Flash Fiction Day Anthology
Read time: <2 minutes (250 words)
Genre: Literary fiction
How I Imagine Two People I Know From Instagram Met - F(r)iction Literary
Read time: <5 minutes (500 words)
A note on this one: it won their Fall 2024 Flash Fiction Competition!
Genre: Literary fiction
Mozart once said, “Women are like this” - Brilliant Flash Fiction
Read time: <10 minutes (1,000 words)
Genre: Literary fiction
My favorite reads of June:
With a bit of time off between jobs, I spent early June crushing through my reading list and was lucky enough to stumble on a few reads that could be done in a day due both to length and compelling narration. Fiction made its way back into my heart with a stunning 2025 publication by Kitamura and a find from the early 2000s on the walk to Trader Joe’s took my top nonfiction read of the month. Honorable mentions were AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell The Difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor as well as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
Audition by Katie Kitamura
Told in two parts about two potential futures of the same renowned actress - one with a child and one without, Audition is an analysis of relationships between people. Like many books of its genre, the tension is not necessarily in plot twists or in sudden reveals, but in the small moments of miscommunication and projection that fill the lives of everyday people. Kitamura does a great job in honing in on insecurity and how we place our own fears and concerns and worries onto other people, to the point where we even invent their motivations and lives. There is a meta-ness to the book: it’s about an actress and the lives it speaks of seem consistently involved in performance or audition (personally and professionally). It’s even more apparent when a role she feels buoyed by turns destructive and creates an effective analogy for how people act in relation to one another and themselves over time.
King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes
This is not a read for the faint of heart and openly discusses sexual assault as well as sex work in matter-of-fact detail and colorful language. Self-billed as originating from the movement of post-punk feminism in France, this collection of essays written in the early 2000s is part-memoir and part-gender studies text. It is a rage against misogyny and seeks to challenge baroque stigmas around sex work and the gendered expectations of men and women’s experiences of sex, pulling directly from the author’s lived experiences.
A look ahead:
I’ll be taking a memoir writing class next weekend with Grub Street. In the interim, I’ll be trying to re-establish a consistent writing practice again, one I fell off of after completing the fourth draft of my novel back in April. It happens and, I try to remind myself that there were a good two years in recent history where I did absolutely no writing at all, so any bit, even this, counts.
Stats for the year so far:
Pay to date: $0.037 per word
Acceptance rate: 8.3%
Outstanding submissions: 25