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I wrote “Latter-day Confederacy of Nations,” and I got paid! Exciting when first it happens. This may only be $25, but it’s $25 more than zero. The short story collection, States of Deseret, will be out this spring.
My first payment for fiction. Nice.
What happens when Eliza Sky, a young historian from the Latter-day Confederacy of Many Nations, leaves Salt Lake City for a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in the United States and finds a document that sheds new light on the Mormon mission to indigenous peoples in 1830? In this alternate timeline, that mission in the most intense year of nineteenth-century Indian removals wasn’t “The First Mission to the Indians,” as it is in our timeline. In her timeline this week-long meeting brought together Haudenosaunee and Mormons who fomented resistance across the continent and led the establishment of a Confederacy indigenous nations from the western desert to the Mississippi River, dividing the United States to the west and east. The new document shakes up the young historian. If this first long meeting between Mormon missionaries and Tonawanda chiefs wasn’t a meeting of equals, what was it?
My first short story will be published in the States of Deseret anthology. I’m so excited to see the table of contents. I look forward to reading all of the stories by the other seven authors.
And, now I can’t let go of my own story. I have to write more. More stories? Novella? Novel? Not sure. I have to explore how this Confederacy formed and what this means for Eliza. Even the first paragraph above tells more about that timeline than is included in the story. Even if it’s fiction, I’m still do research like a plow.
I have written exactly one piece of fiction—flash fiction called “Latter-day Confederacy of Nations,” which soon will be included in an anthology of alt history called States of Deseret. I signed the contract today. Also today, I delivered a scholarly article on Joseph Smith and Handsome Lake for a collection on Mormons and Indians to be published by University of Utah Press. Same subject, two completely different approaches. Making it all up was much more difficult. I spent three months researching a two-page story. I only spent about a year researching and writing the 65 pages that became the article. If you want to know how my renewed interest in writing and publishing goes, comment or send me a message.