Asakiyume mita

You may remember that I encouraged anyone I knew from my visit to Timor-Leste in 2013 to send in a story to Strange Horizons for their Southeast Asian writers issue. They were specifically looking for submissions from Timor-Leste.

My call on Facebook didn't get much traction--probably because I'm not very active on the site, so it deprioritizes my posts in people's feeds--but one acquaintance reached out to me, a guy called Nando. I remembered his smile super-well. He's just one year older than the healing angel, my youngest kid.

He's not fluent enough in English to write in English, though, so he wrote his story in Tetun, and I translated it--and wrote about what a thrill that was. We submitted it ... but it was rejected.

Of course there are a million possible reasons why a thing is rejected, but I would guess it's because Nando's story is a folktale rather than an invention of his own. It's a story his grandmother told him about his own family. It's a true story, he says, though it's filled with magic. I don't doubt him: the world is filled with magic. But I suspect for these reasons, and for the manner of its telling--and who knows, maybe the manner of my translating--it didn't ping as speculative fiction in the editor's mind.

I thought of trying to submit it elsewhere, but I also thought of the heartbreak that involves (or can involve). And that's not what Nando signed up for: he was submitting to this one magazine's one special issue, which I'd called to his attention. (I did tell him that rejection was a possibility.)

So I thought, why not publish it here on my blog? If **I** publish it, I can include the photos he sent me of the places mentioned in the story. AND, I can include the Tetun version of the story, so people from Timor-Leste can read it too. If I publish both the Tetun and the English, then it can also conceivably be a resource for people, all sorts of people, who are interested in the culture of Timor-Leste and stories from Ainaro. And if I publish it, I can do an interview with him.

I can't afford to pay as much as Strange Horizons would have, but I can afford semipro rates, so I offered, and he accepted. (And doing foreign remittances was an interesting experience, but that's a blog post for another day. Suffice it to say, PayPal doesn't operate in Timor and there's no post office, so I sent money via Western Union.)

I have all the pieces, and over tomorrow and Wednesday, I'll prepare them and put them up. I hope you all enjoy the story, and please, when it comes out, share the link widely! I really want people to know about this story. There is SO LITTLE fiction/folklore from Timor-Leste available for the Anglophone public.