What’s New for June 21: Jennifer Stevenson’s ‘Solstice’

She’s looking for the music. She can hear it but she can’t find it. There are candles everywhere. Some parts of the room are low-ceilinged and high-cushioned, just right for kissing and gossip and splitting a bottle. Some parts are ballroom-size. The floor slopes down, away from the stone ceiling. Dawn trips a little, blames the drink. The bass gongs through her blood, a fiddle skirls, the faraway downbeat (alone of a tinny fusillade) cracks two glasses touching, a false blow, ting! Not in this room. Nor the next.  — Jennifer Stevenson’s ‘Solstice’

Delia Sherman, Don Keller and Ellen Kushner were doing a theme anthology called Horns of Elfland. I was invited to write a story for it and did so, which was rejected. So I wrote another story. And they put it first in the anthology.

This story was my first professional sale.

I did something mildly sexy with the literary-ness: I didn’t use certain time-related words at all, so that when I did, it would stick out. (It’s been yonks since I thought about this so I would have to reread it to remember what exactly. At this range I think the word I was trying not to use is “was.” Yeah. Write me a short story without “was” in it!

So her literary offering this time in ‘Solstice’ which Grey reviews for us here: ‘The reader somehow senses that everything Dawn sees, each action she takes, even her name, has a deeper significance. She’s not just playing for a great party, she’s playing to keep a shrinking, fading man alive on the longest night. And if it’s an over-the-top, splendid bash that keeps the sun alive for another year, well, human beings believed that for a very long time. Maybe this story will help us remember some of what we’ve forgotten.’