| 2004 Archive | 2003 Archive | 2002 Archive |
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"So far, all I've got of the castle is a shin-high parapet sketching the footprint of walls-to-be; of the dragon, one clawed and gnarled foreleg. By the time the castle's finished and furnished, I hope to have the beast complete."
Some of Rudi Dornemann's fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, The Fortean Bureau and Electric Velocipede; more of it is forthcoming in Flytrap and Realms of Fantasy. He lives in Portland, Maine, where he's working on his first novel.
An avid Arthurian since the distant days of the Carter administration, when he discovered the Howard Pyle's The Story of King Arthur and his Knights way down at the end of the stacks in the children's section of the Wauwatosa Public Library, Rudi still hasn't gotten around to writing his own multi-volume retelling of the Matter of Britain. In the meantime, however, odd things like "Vortigern, on the Art of Rebuilding", occasionally bubble up from his subconscious. |
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"There is only his curiously absent sight and the blood he now sends as a libation to his ancestors."
Jay Lake lives in Portland, OR with his family and their books. In 2004 his stories will appear in over a dozen markets, including Asimov's, Leviathan 4 and Realms of Fantasy. His collection Greetings From Lake Wu was a Locus Recommended book for 2003.
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"Harry was a big man, dim and useful in the manner of big, dim men."
Jay Lake lives in Portland, OR with his family and their books. In 2004 his stories will appear in over a dozen markets, including Asimov's, Leviathan 4 and Realms of Fantasy. His collection Greetings From Lake Wu was a Locus Recommended book for 2003.
June is the month of Juno, known as Regina, Moneta and various other epithets. She is is the goddess of marriage, finannce, and protector of the Roman Empire. Goatskins and figs figure prominently into her worship as well. And of course, what else would a Classical goddess be in a modern era? |
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"The pig tunnels were every bit as dreadful as she'd thought. They ran all over Rome, connecting with the sewers and the subways and half the basements in the Eternal City. And, of course, they were full of pigs."
Jay Lake lives in Portland, OR with his family and their books. In 2004 his stories will appear in over a dozen markets, including Asimov's, Leviathan 4 and Realms of Fantasy. His collection Greetings From Lake Wu was a Locus Recommended book for 2003.
May is the month of Maia Maiestas, or Bona Dea, the goddess of spring. She is a woman's diety, and requires the sacrifice of a pregnant sow to ensure fertility and the growth of crops. And of course, a couple of old friends in this month's piece. |
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"Butterflies dance around him, mobile flowers unmoored from their stems. If the colors of the flowers are quasinouns, the butterflies are all verbs."
Jay Lake lives in Portland, OR with his family and their books. In 2004 his stories will appear in over a dozen markets, including Asimov's, Leviathan 4 and Realms of Fantasy. His collection Greetings From Lake Wu was a Locus Recommended book for 2003.
April is month of opening and the beginning of spring, when the flowers bloom and the birds take wing to build their nests. In Roman tradition, April is the month of opening, aperire, when plants emerge in the spring. This story is about rebirth and its concomitant phenomenon, death, and the echoes of memory which the scents of spring can bring to us all. |
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"This was a big match, their four University of Nova Eboracum hares facing off against the Mohawk-Iroquois Tech varsity hounds."
Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon with his family and their books. In 2004, he will have stories in over twenty different markets, including Asimov's, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Leviathan 4, and Realms of Fantasy.
March is the month of mating, Mars and military affairs. It was hard to resist stacking the meanings into a vision of what college sports would be like if the Athletic Departments were run by really cool steampunkers. |
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"Feral miniature goats no taller than Numa's knees raced down the
walkways, their little kid feet thumping out an arrhythmia that echoed
the beating of his heart."
Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon with his family and their books. In 2004, he will have stories in over twenty different markets, including Asimov's, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Leviathan 4, and Realms of Fantasy.
The next of the Calends series, "February" stems from the root meaning of the name of month. The februa was a Roman festival of purification, celebrated in the second month (of the Gregorian year, at least). February is also the bissextile month, where the leap day is inserted after the 24th of the month, pushing the remaining days back one each. An indiction is a cycle of years, sometimes used to assess taxation or other events and transitions. |
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"Something boomed sharp and loud along the corridors of Geminus High — kids throwing firecrackers in the dumpster behind the cafeteria. Janós heard that almost any other night of the year. This night was different."
Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon with his family and their books. In 2004, he will have stories in over twenty different markets, including Asimov's, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Leviathan 4, and Realms of Fantasy.
This story is the first of the Calends series, taking the etymology of the name of each month of the year and spinning a tale therefrom. January is the month of the Roman god Janus, two-faced god of doorways and transitions. And sometimes, school custodians. |
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Removed at the request of the author.
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"Would you notice if I was replaced by an alien," your girlfriend Heather asks over her Greek salad.
Scott Janssens lives in Seattle where he writes code for a large software company (no, not that one).
"Strange Girlfriend" is his first publication and was inspired by another story written in second person that he heard at a WorldCon reading. |
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"The procedure was simple — an EEG administered during REM sleep — obtain the bitcode, and voila — know when and how you were going to die."
Karen A. Romanko is the editor and publisher of sf/f/h and mystery e-zine Raven Electrick. Her recent and forthcoming credits include poems and stories in Strange Horizons, The Pedestal Magazine, Dreams and Nightmares, EOTU Ezine, Full Unit Hookup and sidereality.
"Last" began with the stock of 'what if' inspiration, came to a boil with a dollop of today's headlines, and was ready to serve after skimming 200 words. |
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"We have dubbed this heavenly object the Pritchett-Putnam Comet. While it is a somewhat diminutive light for such a cumbersome moniker, we feel that its symbolic value is clear enough. What a wonderful occasion!"
Marissa K. Lingen was the winner of the 1999 Asimov Award and has since published stories in Analog, Future Orbits, Speculon, and other speculative fiction venues.
"Natural Limitations" was inspired by Tim Cooper's "Underground Skyway" and all the things people are able to train themselves not to see. Scientists' personal responses to evidence and their own experiences are...shall we say, not as rigorous as they might be. |
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"Jackson said the road was his middle name, and he gassed up Ol' Blue like he meant it, but I knew better. Once the dry crept up under his fingernails we were rooting in, and he'd been picking at his palms since Saturday."
Most days find A. Leigh Jones answering the phones at a travel agency and collecting dreams of faraway places. Rumor has that she publishes under a non de plume, but is actually one of the fundraising volunteers at Strange Horizons. Her short fiction has most recently appeared at flashquake.
"Turn, Turn, Turn" was inspired by the beliefs of others, by ancestral butterflies, and by the author's husband, an endless source of weirdness. |
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"Missy woke up excited. The Peter Rabbit clock on the wall said it was past the time she normally woke up for school. The wind outside howled and moaned and she thought about the night before when the snowstorm began."
Bill Gauthier was born and lives in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a city that helped inspire Herman Melville to write Moby Dick. He has appeared in, or will be appearing in, The Edge — Tales of Suspense, Burning Sky: Tales of Science Fiction Terror and Night Shopping.
"Snow Day" has gone through several incarnations before this version. The spur came during a snow day in college, when he was nineteen. It took several drafts and rewrites over six years (in between other projects, the birth of his daughter, and surprise sicknesses) before Bill was happy enough with the story to submit it anywhere. |
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"Pretty girl; head full of dreams and smart drugs and the Kabbala and fifth dimensional physics."
James Gilmer is a graduate of Michigan State University and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop for the year 2000. He has worked as a freelance writer and reporter and as a technical writer for several years. James currently lives in Michigan with his fiance and is studying radiology while working in the medical field. He believes, in the words of Harlan Ellison, that the act of writing fiction is the writing of progress reports saying "This is where I am today and this is how I see the world".
"Bleed" came about as a reaction to all those who have the courage to dream and search for something better and brighter, and the fears that keep us from making the leap into chance. It's inspiration also has its roots in Robert Browning's lame boy who couldn't follow his friends to that magical place Hamelin's piper took them. |
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"The cliffs of Fair D'Ellene blush pink in the evening, just as they did when the dragons dropped from them like falling stars, flaming in the last darts of light from the setting sun, falling until they caught the wind in the great sails of their wings."
Sarah Prineas lives in one of the joke states of the USA, Iowa, with her two kids and physicist husband. She has a PhD in English and teaches a class on science fiction and fantasy literature at the University of Iowa. Her stories have appeared online at Ideomancer and at Strange Horizons.
"The Dragons of Fair D'Ellene" was written during the week after September 11, 2001, when she couldn't get the images of flames and falling out of her head — this is an attempt to transform some of those images into something more bearable. |
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"She would repay his love and loyalty with the pleasure of her body. Tonight. Derrick loved to watch their reflections in the mirror, candlelight and shadows twisting in the drafts."
Marsha Sisolak chases five-year olds, drives teenagers thither and yond, passing their insanity onto her husband, and writes stories in her off moments. Her family reports these moments occur more frequently of late, and that she appears fixated with fairy tales.
"Staining Snow" is the result of a personal challenge to twist the reader's perception of a character during a story arc, while requiring the reader to deduce the character's true identity on their own. |
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"The furnace atmosphere sizzled across his face. The heat stole his breath, and his lungs steamed. When he could speak, he called out her name."
Daniel J. Bishop lives in Toronto, Ontario. He is co-owner of Golden City Comics. His work has appeared in Jackhammer, Spellbound, Enlightenment, and Fables. He was Submissions Editor at Cyber Age Adventures, where his first submission won a first-place prize in the Electronic Runes Readers Poll.
"Noldus and Vespa" deals with being consumed by passion (heat), as well as a relationship so damaged that the only repair is lethal. |
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"She. Weed round her bones and flat eel eyes. "Come." You would flee but you're hard-bludgeoned by the fall, the water's crash, and chained by current now. She: throned on wreckage and the ribs of whales. Clawed feet rake bottom muck."
Kyri Freeman, currently a resident of Sunnyvale, California, graduated from UCLA with a MA in History and busies herself subverting those skills in the cause of fiction. She has one completed Civil War-era novel, Tribulation's War, currently under consideration with an agent, and two more novels are under construction.
"The Merrow" is the product of a fevered brain, long fed on Patrick O'Brian novels and a lack of sleep. |
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"Survivors of her cruelty limped on mecha-crutches or skimmed through the streets on castors where legs had once been."
Daniel Paul Eness grew up on a farm in Iowa, which explains a great deal. He honed his craft as a writer at Iowa State University, where he was often told that his works 'lacked literary value' which he mistook to mean that they were therefore 'imbued with great commercial merit.' Inevitably, he was exiled to Minnesota, and now works as a communications manager.
"The Legend of Elizabot Battery" is a peppy little tale of terror, inspired by real acts of drastic courage. |
