Moggies of Mars and Writing for Raconteur Press: An Interview with Urna Semper

Phew! What a week… and what a month! For those of you who don’t know, I’m a co-leader for my writing group here in South Bay/Long Beach (a region of Los Angeles), which used to be a municipal group in the NaNoWriMo organization. We left the org at the tailend of 2023, when things were just popping off, and began running our own programming and writing camps. My job is largely the programming end—making worksheets, calendars, prompts, freewrites—and running writing sprints. A lot of writing sprints. :) 

This month, we ran Short Story September. I’ve been on a campaign this year to encourage my fellow writers (and myself) to write more short stories toward calls for submission and to submit to small presses, as an exercise in getting pieces done and writing to a prompt and audience. Since I have to lead from the front (and because I apparently hate myself), I set myself a rough task this month: complete four pieces of short fiction, two novelettes and two shorts, with three of those pieces intended for submission to various presses. That has largely equaled out to one short story a week, though this last week has been particularly spicy as I’ve slid into home base with the last two. Part of the challenge is reading the genre requested and trying to hit the tone, not just the subgenre conventions, and working outside one’s comfort zone. Two of the short stories I wrote this month fell well outside my comfort zone in terms of length and tone, but now I’m done drafting and one of them is off to the press in question for judging, I am supremely proud of the achievement. 

And tired. Very, very tired.

I’ve recently been encouraging my fellow Penguins (our regional mascot with NaNo was Kate the Penguin) to consider short story submissions for Raconteur Press. They’re trying to bring back pulp fiction and stuff heavily inflected by genre, fun science fiction and gritty fairytales and creature features, raypunk and dime detectives, Barsoom and barbarians. Reading their stuff has been a real hoot, just pure, unadulterated fun… and after years of grad school slowly draining the fun out of reading books, and being a little bit of a dude at heart, I honestly appreciate it. The advantage to our writers is obvious: even if they don’t get into every or any of these anthologies, the prompts and the homework encourage all of us to widen our horizons, try different styles, and deeply consider the needs and wants of an audience, which is good practice for any author. Such stories also help build out your world, if you have one, and your overall repertoire of short material—pieces you can send folks as a taster, before persuading them they might like to read your novel.

When I think about an author who’s managed to take prompts from Raconteur and use them to build out a fantastic world, I think about Urna Semper. My fellow weirdo from Tender and Tempting Tales and all-around solid, calm, positive presence with a long perspective, Urna was kind enough to do an interview with me again for the blog. They are in a large number of Raconteur anthologies, with their latest being “Prince of the Red Ridges” in Moggies of Mars, which I’ll be reviewing once I scrape my face off the floor. In the meantime, please enjoy Urna’s perspective on writing for Raconteur Press, and remember… always do your homework!

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Q: “Prince of the Red Ridges” was a good time—I love that it’s an adventuresome chivalric romance on a faraway world. Can you tell folks a little more about your story and the original anthology call, and how you approached it to create something that fit? For instance, which pieces in the “homework” did you model yourself after or take inspiration from?

A: It is connected to two other stories, one only on Substack, and one coming out in an anthology in November. Although Iphigenia’s my first interest, I became aware of “invaders from Earth” and had to write their story and how they were repelled. Then I wrote a barbarian story about the descendants of the invaders on another remote world. “The Prince of the Red Ridges” follows on from that story.  It is just a necessary A to B to C flow. I don’t know just where all these things emerged from, but the Red Ridges story was confined to a certain vision, because it had to look like Barsoom and feel like Barsoom, which wasn’t hard, and have cats. And although strictly speaking it is supposed to be Mars, it is my own world. Mars-esque. I tried hard to follow the vision in the homework, and honestly didn’t expect it to get in. 

The Prince is the son of the Witch Queen, who is at war with the Great Queen. The Prince is tired of war, and has to flee for his life. He ends up fighting for a people he encounters in the deserts—very John Carter. The twist, I suppose, is that John Carter finds a civilized people; Prince Cerot flees civilization and joins barbarians.

Q: I was surprised to learn it’s not on Iphigenia, but on another planet (Epsilon Indi). Can you tell folks more about that? (More lore for the wiki gods!)

A: The known systems are three— (Earth/Moon/Mars/Belt)l, Tau Ceti (Iphigenia, Aphrodite, Odysseus, Belt), and Epsilon Indi (Seoribyeol); Epsilon Eridani II is the mystery world, unknown to everyone but itself. The original Tau Ceti starships were three in number; a fourth was supposed to go, but never launched. It was found and used by barbarians in the Sol asteroid belt, launched towards Tau Ceti. There was a skirmish, and they retreated out and evidently ended up around Epsilon Eridani. The civilization there is marginally technical; they view the ship as magic, and the world somewhat resembles Barsoom and in some ways the Hyborian Age, and in some ways general fairy-tale Central Asia.

Q: Have you read other stories in the collection yet? Do you have any favorites?

A: I’m still working on them, but I’ve particularly enjoyed Matthew Kent’s “The Red Fangs of Mars” for its cat-centric humor.

Q: You’ve been in several Raconteur anthologies before now (two about cats!) Can you tell folks a little about your different Raconteur anthology pieces?

A: Big question! Let’s see…. “The Girl from Meheropolis” (Giant Squeeing Robots) is one long story told by one soldier to another during the waning period of the Caballardo, and it involves what I didn’t guess I’d find on Iphigenia—a giant (or very large) robot. It’s a bit of a Saki story. “The Case of the Unnatural Sister” (Pinup Noir) is one of my favorites, because it introduced my detective, Dardana Fenek, and her girl Barsina, and I hardly got it done before I started writing a novel about her. “The Angel of Akroporos” (Wyrd Warfare: Band of Monsters) is an odd one, “The Lost Battalion," plus A Room With a View, plus The Angel of Mons. Another story I didn’t expect to get in. “The Case of the Cat that Called” (Moggie Noir), another Dardana Fenek story, wherein she has to deal with cats, and she does not like cats, nor furry things in general. “Ibrahim and the Ghoul’s Grandmother” (Goblin Souk), a Middle-eastern-style story ironically set in Iphigenia’s far Western hemisphere. It picks up the thread that I suspect existed, of an alien intelligent species around Tau Ceti where none are supposed to be. “The Princess of İnişkent” is the barbarian story, which (should) be in Daggers and Dark Magic, and is the first sword and sorcery story I ever wrote. I was surprised at this one, but I think it has a couple good fight scenes in it!  “The Wreck of the Cal-9” (should be in Corsairs and Cutlasses, also out in November) follows from an unpublished Substack story called “Derelict Run,” which itself follows from the early chapters of The Pearl Crucible. Space pirates preying on almost-pirates. And that is all of them so far. You can see that there are linking threads between most of them.

Q: Thank you so much. I have been slowly hunting down all your stories, so this is a good resource for me. You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want, of course, but did you write for the upcoming pirates anthology, Planks and Plunder? You create an amazing number of great short stories based on and inspired by the calls from Raconteur.

A: Yes, they had to break that one in two (thus Corsairs and Cutlasses), because they had so many great pirate stories.  I’ve learned more about my “universe” by writing about things I would not have thought would fit.

Q: Lol, it happened again! There are so many of these split, doubled anthologies. Speaking of Wyrd Warfare! Was that one of those cases where there were so many amazing submissions to the original call that they decided to do two anthologies? I know they did that with Blades and Black Magic (being, as you noted, Daggers and Dark Magic), and I saw the two Wyrd Warfare books came out close together, so I was wondering. That’s an amazing thing to have happen! (Imagine getting so many stellar submissions at T&TT that we have to release, like, Moonlight and Margaritas along with Bikinis and Bellinis or something.)

A: Yes, the Wyrd Warfare book had an overrun of good stories, and one anthology had trouble filling a quorum, so they put it aside and doubled up on Wyrd War.

Q: That’s awesome—I want to read it. Any favorite experiences being in an anthology with Raconteur, or favorite stories you’ve submitted? Why were they your favorites?

A: I have an affection for the Dardana Fenek stories. One wasn’t picked up but two were, so that excites me. “The Wreck of the Cal-9” I like because it really challenged me to depict close-quarters combat on what are really sort of fragile ships. “Ibrahim” was tough too, getting that fairy-tale vibe but rooting it in visible reality—if you know Iphigenia.

Q: I know you might not want to answer this question, but any favorite editors? I’m sure you love all of them, but feel free to give someone a shoutout. 🙂

A: TC Ross for giving me my first break; Cedar Sanderson; Chris DiNote for getting me into Wyrd Warfare. I love them all, actually, but those three really were critically important stories for me.

Q: The author community at Raconteur seems tight, and there definitely seems to be a bench of staunch regulars (among whom you appear to rank). I know this is a model we’re seeking to follow at T&TT—creating a community of like-minded indie authors through the anthologies. Would you say you’ve made friends with some of them? What would you say about the community at Raconteur, and what can we learn from them?

A: I have good relations with them. Internet-friends is hard to quantify, because so many of them are very far away, but it is a community I strongly trust and respect. Rac Press and its authors are just the tops really. We all communicate on a Discord and through Substack, so it’s the communication and the vibe that really seem to make it work. We just mesh, have a common sense of humor, and a certain self-deprecation for the most part.

Q: I had heard there was an author Discord (I’ve suggested T&TT/WWH could use one, and I moderate a bunch of communities there already, so might as well). Has it been useful community-building and networking so far? What have you learned from it? What would you replicate?

A: I’m more of a generation that remembers the old Bulletin-Board style of the internet, and it feels a lot like that. It’s useful in that we have the same pond to swim in, and it allows info to flow freely around. I don’t know enough about other Discords to know how comparable they are, or how you would catch lightning in a bottle and create a community. There’s probably 250+ people connected with Rac Press, so it probably takes a certain critical mass. (I’d say we have only a couple-score “heavy users.”)

Q: Have you been approached to potentially edit an anthology yourself someday at Raconteur? If you did, what sort of anthology would you most want to put together? What would your call look like? Tell us the elevator pitch or what you would put in the homework.

A: Wow, I have not really thought about it. It’s a daunting task. Recent calls have gotten as many as 110-120 subs. I might suggest some sort of Arctic/Antarctic theme? Dunno. They tend to hash these out at their retreats. I can’t imagine reading 100 stories in probably not more than a month!! 

Q: That’s fair; I found that number daunting as well, when they mentioned it recently. I’ve noticed Raconteur Press has a philosophy of serving a need for a certain kind of fiction (pulp sci-fi, swords and sorcery, men’s literature, boy’s books, serials) which is still wanted and needed, but not currently super available in the mainstream. Would you agree with that assessment? 

A: Yes, that is exactly the market they are aiming for. It is quite under-served, and Rac Press brings a high degree of openness and professionalism, which they can do because of their large (under- or unpaid) staff. Many of the people connected to them are experts in their fields, and they have connections to Golden Age Sci-fi people, those that still linger here on this side of the sea!

Q: Why do you think there is a huge desire for this kind of material, and yet so few presses are serving it? I wonder this about a lot of subgenres and categories, to be honest, but particularly here! I have a toddler, for instance, and I was excited that Rac has boys’ books, because it looks like something to get my son when he’s older. Then it occurred to me there’s not a lot like those books in the bookstore. Obviously there are tons of fun-looking books, but boys’ adventure books are not super common anymore at B&N.

A: You should check out their Giant Counting Robots book by Spearman Burke. The modern publishing world is either atomized through self-publishing or insularized in the remaining large presses, which have become, I would suggest, hyperfocused on niche markets.

Q: I think that’s right, in that I think there’s a lot of “chasing” what’s successful—in an attempt to make all the money—with very little humble willingness to serve an underserved niche and make just some of the money. So it’s romantasy books with sprayed edges all the way down right now, but I worry it leaves whole sections of readers remarkably underserved. That makes me glad Rac Press exists. Do you have any funny, weird, or wild experiences with Raconteur Press that particularly come to mind? What about during your drafting of “Prince of the Red Ridges”? (I forgot to ask you if you have a cat. I did indeed read the story to my cat; she likes the rhythm of your storytelling and stayed for the whole thing. Four paws way up.)

A: Oh, “Red Ridges” was a bit of a slog—they all have their hard bits—but it wasn’t remarkable. I do have a funny story though. I dragged my kids to Kansas City ComicCon, because Raconteur was going to be there. We dropped by their booth, and they didn’t know me from Adam. I asked what kinds of stories they had, and got very particular about my requests, drilling down towards exactly what “The Girl from Meheropolis” was about, until they realized, wait a second, this jerk is one of our authors!

Q: Actually laughing out loud right now. That’s amazing. I mean, to be fair to them, you don’t walk around with an Italian fresco around your face, so it must be pretty hard. 

A: Definitely.

Q: Do your kids read the kids’ literature from Raconteur? I don’t know their current ages, but I am curious if they read it and like it, or if you have sought it out for them.

A: I have got some for my son, and he seems to like it; he’s 14. My daughter is 17, and her universe is filled already with everything else she has to do. Neither of them has shown much interest in what I write, but then that’s fine. My writing has a certain reputation around the house anyway.

Q: Reputation, eh? What sort of reputation? What do your kids think of you being a writer? I wonder about this with my own kid—if having a writer for a mom will be cool or tiresome. My niece seems to think it’s cool, but she was born when I was nineteen, making me firmly “the cool aunt.” I think it’s different when it’s your mom always industriously clacking away. How do they feel about it?

A: It’s a funny story, actually. I initially started writing erotica, because I knew that there was a market on Amazon, and some people make a lot of money doing it. Of course, when my wife found out, my marriage instantly imploded. So I write smut, my daughter says (sarcastically), and it certainly made things quite interesting around here for a while.

Q: Your marriage imploded because you wrote erotica? That’s… wow. I’m so sorry. I would be super proud of my partner if he got out there and wrote something, even (maybe especially) if it was erotica and intended to help with the finances. Of course, he deals with a partner who writes smut, as you know, among other things. Do your kids blame your writing for all that? (Obviously you don’t have to answer that, but smut writers unite!)

A: I don’t think so. It’s a complicated situation, and that was the spark, not the fuse. But it sure set it off. They seem fine with me writing. My daughter has read a couple of Rac Press stories. It doesn’t seem to have shredded my credit with them.

Q: That’s good to hear! I would hate it if they blamed your writing for all that. I think they would like “Prince of the Red Ridges.” It’s not smut, and it has a cat! Also “The Nine Lives of Pouncequick” by Ross Hathaway, which was killer. Hathaway can turn a simile. Which stories of yours has your daughter read? What are her recommendations from your oeuvre?

A: She read an unpublished one, and then “The Girl from Meheropolis,” and I think “The Case of the Unnatural Sister.” But she has so much school work! My son read, or tried to read, “Girl” but it’s written in dialect, so it sort of defeated him.

Q: I have Pinup Noir on my wishlist, for “The Case of the Unnatural Sister”—want to get some more Dardana, naturally. Speaking of… you have a novel coming soon. Any release date on The Pearl Crucible? (She asked totally without ulterior motive.)

A: No date yet; it might leak into early October. I have the first pass done, and I’m working on the second, but I am also keeping up on all other things!

Q: Of course. No shade! Just looking forward to it. Here’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask: I’ve just recently oozed/bled/struggled my way through attempting to master a new subgenre and vibe based on a Rac call, so I have to ask you which of the calls to which you’ve responded have been the hardest. Which one gave you the most trouble and why? (This is the question I hope someone asks me someday, because boy do I know the answer, after the last couple weeks.)

A: The Miami Vice-themed one (which I didn’t get into) was hard to match tone-wise, and I don’t know how close I came. I feel it was more mid-century noir than 80s, but it’s hard to make Iphigenia feel that way, (though doing it in Calypso, a casino-oriented city, helped.) Anything military has been tough. I’ve done five (!) with that, and the first and third did not make it. It’s the voice that’s difficult. My world has a certain voice, and not all of these calls are precise fits. 

Q: I knew “Case of the Folly Dealer” was for a Rac call! When I saw Vice Noir in the anthology list, I immediately wondered. It’s a very good story! And yes, you have a strong, particular voice, and I actually respect that you don’t compromise on the world’s tone and vibe such that it loses integrity in the face of a call; you seem to have accepted that if it makes it and fits, then it fits, and if it doesn’t, you have a new short story, and yay. What did you do/read to prepare for that call? 

A: I kind of decide what the period is in their history first. I get a feel for what the scene is like; I’ve seen enough movies that the characters morph out of them, and I can hear them talking… and then they tell me what’s up. Sometimes it takes a while before I understand what they are saying. I haven’t read a whole lot for prep work, though they post readings of old, old stuff on their Substack that I take in. If I don’t have it yet, I won’t be able to cough it up now, lol. There’s a lot of things inside, and they are always churning around. Dardana was born out of her voice, and the rest is history, for instance.

Q: (Like any good PhD, I obsessively do the homework, lol.) Rac has a lot of homework, which I think is smart and very cool—it’s hard to make a collection with a unified vibe and tone, even with lots of submissions, and while our schtick is diversity, theirs is collections of material with a united vibe (increasingly so, I think, which is really cool). What do you think of the homework? What have you learned from it? Anything stand out? (My answer would be Strange Company, personally.) A: Probably what I learn most is what the editor is looking for, and most of them mean it. There’s a lot of debate on the Discord about what the tea leaves really mean! Usually the homework is a good guidepost. Me, I take the scenario, read some of the lit, think about what I know, and then let it flow. I try to come as close as I can without swerving out of my world’s tracks, and as close as I can so I am not absolutely wasting their time.

Q: I know you tend to aim for 9000 words a week, and you’re a parent with teenagers with a day job and novels to write and another anthology to edit over in T&TT Land. What is your process for short stories? I’ve been making a push this month personally to get some submissions done and out, averaging one a week, and I have no idea if that’s good or bad or… mid.

A: One a week would be stellar. I have too much going on to divert everything to that, but I have done it. I devote a lot of time to writing, more than I should, but it’s always a bit here and there on more than one thing. I know how long I have, and so I set alerts in Scrivener so I know how much I need to write every day, and then I try to at least tinker with the story every day. 

Q: Plainly I need to get the most recent version of Scrivener; the last time I had it, I don’t remember it having that affordance. I do similar, though mostly I track my progress through writing group “sprints.” Do you write with any of the authors at Rac on the Discord? Our Discord has a bot called Sprinto that helps us with writing sprints, and it’s a very useful addition through the API. I don’t know how much the Rac authors’ Discord server operates that way.

A: I’m a solitary beast. I have written every single day since September of 2023 without fail. I consider that a feat. So I won’t break that streak for anything, and I know I need to write 1k a day, or I really am falling behind. No matter what happens in the world, I push through, and it has gotten me past a lot because I can’t afford to let petty issues like news cycles distract me.

Q: Very true. What motivates you to write? I know in our last interview, you talked about writing through adversity and choosing light through your writing, but you’ve also mentioned wanting to get some traction on Amazon and making some money through Raconteur anthologies. Is it primarily a need to express yourself, wanting a career as a writer, both, or something else? What are you expressing when you write?

A: I wrote hundreds of pages of comics in the 90s for free, so I don’t have much of a drive for profit. As you know, I can’t make a fortune doing anthologies, and my novels have paid out only a few hundred. I’ve invested more in software than I will ever make. The world speaks to me, as sad and dreadful as it is, and so I am its purpose. It’s not mine.

Q: I do know that—even with a whole company and game world we’re running, and lots of buttons for sale, Valkyrie struggles to wash its own face. Buttons do help. So… in other words, you’re writing through not only personal adversity, but your feelings about the world. I do similar; can’t blame you at all for that. What would you say was the story that got you through the hardest moment, and why?

A: That’s hard to answer. The entire process of writing, the prompts, the novels, the short stories, they make a web together, of things that link and support and reveal, and the process is the thing, the learning about what they all mean to each other. The heartbreak of them, and continuity, the change, the mysteries. All these things.

Q: You don’t have a particular moment, like “I hate this news” or “this time in my life sucks” and a story that helped you through it? I respect the process of course—sometimes a ritual itself, and producing art through it, can be cause all on its own.

A: No, I really don’t. I am hyperaware of everything… and hyper-indifferent. I got a Masters in History and so I have kind of a long perspective, and writing about all of these people, a thousand years away, makes you realize how petty and meaningless everything is. I’d say, for an affecting story, that “Flood’s Sister,” which was written for the Alien Family Traditions anthology, was the most painful and sad of them all, but you can’t read too much into it: it is a distant mirror of things, but isn’t “about” anything at all.

Q: Well—I think you do yourself a disservice saying “Flood’s Sister” wasn’t about anything at all, given it features two groups of sapient beings who struggle to understand each other and violence between them, including the attempt at violence toward a child. One would struggle not to find meaning in that, now or at any point in human history. It’s true that I wouldn’t try to allegorize it, but that’s not the venue of mature media critique anyways. How did you feel when it didn’t get selected? I think that collection is a really interesting one, and it’s on my TBR list. That “Flood’s Sister” was written for it is particularly interesting to me, of course.

A: I was fine with that. I probably missed the intent of the editor; it seems it was more about blending traditions than surviving genocidal conflicts. I would have liked to have been in, like I would have liked to be in all of them, but I’ve never been upset. There’s a lot of submissions. It could have been spot-on and fantastic and just not fit with the others to make a good book, or it could have just been 14th best out of a 100, and they have space for 10. Them’s the breaks, move along! (I am far more successful than I should be!)

Q: As someone who likes to respond to calls with genocidal conflicts (and explosions!), I get it; I liked that you wrote about that, and kept true to your world and its narrative interests and needs. What are you looking forward to? What’s happening in the world of Urna Semper next? A: I am closer to the end of Fallen from Stars every week; I’m trying to figure out what happens to Krisa and the Valley of Gold, and Dardana’s got problems in The Thessaly Affair. It’s week to week around here, and I’m already thinking about 2026 anthologies. Always on the edge of missing deadlines!

Q: Lol, I feel that! Again, you don’t have to answer this if you would prefer to be enigmatic and mysterious, but do any of the calls interest you for next year? (Promise, not trying to copy what you’re applying to. Already put the calls I want to try for in my calendar. But I am curious which ones I can ask you about.)

A: I’ll write for 10 of the 12. The Buck Rogers one I am almost certain I can’t, because it’ll write to the IP, and that isn’t me; the alternate history one is nonsensical for me because I am already in an alternate future; my point of departure hasn’t even happened yet, and alternate timelines past are not my bag. But everything else, I think, is a go.

Q: Hot damn, 10 of the 12?! You’re a madperson, but that’s amazing. I look forward to peppering you with questions and reviewing some of the anthologies you’re in (and probably getting pushed down the list by dint of competing with you, lol—but that’s how it works!) Which one interests you the most? I love the sound of Pogue, Too personally, just in general.

A: Let me look here… Plasma Pulp: Lost Worlds and The Spy Who Conjured Me are probably my most looked-forward to. I’ll have a little HG Wells in the one, and a little Ian Fleming in the other.

Q: Oooh. Conjuring, eh? Any chance we’ll learn more about the Witch Queen? That was so intriguing. I’m still trying to figure out if your world has magic or just… poisonings and strange tech.

A: I don’t think any of the stories will happen on that world (it’s all tech and poison there, but odd things happen around Tau Ceti.) The Spy story happens in a quarter of Iphigenia I have not visited much yet, Thyrsis Planitia.

Q: Cool! (Wiki article time when you get there.) Lastly—and you knew I had to ask about this—you have a story coming up in the next Tender and Tempting Tales anthology, Midnight, Mischief, and Mistletoe. This one is called “Montara Sierpento Snows,” I believe. What are you willing to tell folks about it? (Including me, so I can market it, lol.)

A: I loved that story, and I loved both of my female characters in it—and the male lead, of course. My main lady is SO self-centered but still so good-hearted, and such a snob. And my servant girl is, as usual, so helpful. It is a story about one obstacle after another, which was sort of accidental. I was going to send her out to the country, but then I said, I don’t want to just write a country estate romance. Let’s keep her from getting there. After that it just wrote itself. Forced proximity, I think, is the motif. Q: Forced Proximity! One of my favorite romance tropes. Gotta make you a trope graphic. ;) I was surprised you didn’t write a sapphic story (it’s Sapphic September, so I gotta ask). You’re quite good at it, and the anthology is always looking for story diversity. Any thoughts on writing one for a future T&TT anthology?

A: I don’t rule it out at all. It just has to be the right situation. I haven’t decided what I am doing for the next, since we really haven’t hammered down the theme, but it seems plausible it might work out for me. Q: (Agreed and agreed—and you know I always write to the theme, which I think makes for a stronger anthology, if at least some of the writers have written around the prompt.) Of course, I always hope for a Dardana Fenek story in T&TT. Just registering my personal interest there, haha. What would you tell folks about your experience editing a romance anthology so far? What stands out? A: It’s a lot of work. You do it for the love of it, and you have to appreciate a lot of styles and tropes. One story I read four times, then finally got it, and liked it a lot better at the end of the process. An open mind is key. 

Q: Four times?! (God, I hope that wasn’t me.) We appreciate your open-mindedness and willing heart as you appreciate the different stories, though.

I have successfully kept you for many pages of an excellent interview, and I should probably think about letting you go. First of all, thank you so much for doing this and joining us again. Second, I like to give folks the last word. What’s something you want to tell readers and fledgling writers out there? 

A: Everything inside of you is stronger than everything outside you, and more important, too. (And be good to each other, please!)

Thank you so much, Urna, once again.

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You can find Urna Semper writing every single day on Substack, at Parrish Baker | Substack. If you’d like to support Urna’s work, the recent Raconteur Press anthology, Moggies of Mars, is available on Amazon. Read yours to your cat, like me!

I hope this insight into writing for a press like Rac has been useful to anyone reading, especially if you’re doing a lot of noveling and want to dip your toe into the submission and publication process. The same is true of Tender and Tempting Tales anthologies, if you’re a romance writer and want to check us out! We have a new one coming out November 3rd, in which my story, “Crimson Bride,” will be published beside Urna’s “Montara Sierpento Snows,” and we’ll be releasing our 2026 calls soon. Join our newsletter to keep track of us, and get a Free Romance Story for your trouble. 

I’m wiped this week, folks. Like Urna said… be good to each other. Lift each other up. Find a way to be kind, everywhere you are and in everything you do. More fun stuff to come.