Posts filed under ‘Fiction’

Sharp & Sugar Tooth

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Go to: About | Reviews | Goodreads
Released 26 March 2019.

About

Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good is a horror anthology of dark fiction and darker appetites, edited by Octavia Cade. Containing 22 stories of “bad” women, and “good” women who just haven’t been caught yet, it features 22 fearless writers who identify as female, non-binary, or a marginalized sex or gender identity. It’s the third in the Women Up To No Good series, which can be read in any order. It’s forthcoming on 26 March 2019.

Our contributors are based in or hailing from Australia, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Nigeria, Singapore, the UK, and all over the United States. Between them, they have won the Andre Norton, Eugie Foster Memorial, Hugo, Lambda, Locus, Mythopoeic, Nebula, Prix Imaginales, Rhysling, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice, This Is Horror, James Tiptree Jr., and World Fantasy Awards, and been shortlisted for the Bram Stoker, John W. Campbell, and Shirley Jackson Awards!

Table of Contents

  • Kathleen Alcalá, “The Doll’s Eye”
  • Betsy Aoki, “And When We Die They Will Consume Us”
  • Joyce Chng, “Dear Son”
  • Katharine Duckett, “Gimme Sugar”
  • Anahita Eftekhari, “The Fool’s Feast”
  • Chikodili Emelumadu, “Candy Girl” (first published in Apex Magazine, issue 66, November 2014)
  • Amelia Gorman, “She Makes the Deep Boil”
  • Jasmyne J. Harris, “What the Bees Know About Discarded Girlish Organs”
  • A. R. Henle, “Strong Meat”
  • Crystal Lynn Hilbert, “Soul of Soup Bones” (first published in Apex Magazine, issue 61, June 2014)
  • Erin Horáková, “A Year Without the Taste of Meat”
  • Kathryn McMahon, “The Honey Witch”
  • H. Pueyo, “I Eat”
  • D. A. Xiaolin Spires, “Bristling Skim”
  • Rachael Sterling, “Alice Underground”
  • Penny Stirling, “Red, From the Heartwood”
  • Catherynne M. Valente, “The Lily and the Horn” (first published in Fantasy Magazine, issue 59, Queers Destroy Fantasy!, 2015)
  • Sabrina Vourvoulias, “A Fish Tale”
  • Damien Angelica Walters, “A Lie You Give, And Thus I Take” (first published in Lightspeed, issue 55, December 2014)
  • Rem Wigmore, “Who Watches”
  • Alyssa Wong, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” (first published in Nightmare, issue 37, Queers Destroy Horror!, 2015)
  • Caroline M. Yoachim, “The Carnival Was Eaten, All Except the Clown” (first published in Electric Velocipede, issue 27, 2013 and republished at Drabblecast)

Contributors

“The Doll’s Eye” (original) is by Kathleen Alcalá, the author of six books of fiction and nonfiction, from a collection of magical realism called Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist, to The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island.

“And When We Die They Will Consume Us” (original) is by Betsy Aoki. This is her first speculative fiction publication, though her poems have appeared in Uncanny, Southern Humanities Review, Hunger Mountain, and Calyx, among others.

“Dear Son” (original) is by Singaporean Joyce Chng. Her fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing The Future. Joyce also co-edited THE SEA IS OURS: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh. Her alter-ego is J. Damask.

“Gimme Sugar” (original) by Katharine Duckett, whose stories have appeared in Apex and Interzone, and been reprinted in Wilde Stories 2015 and The Best of Apex: Volume I. She works in publishing and lives in Brooklyn with her wife.

“The Fool’s Feast” (original) is by Iranian-Canadian Anahita Eftekhari. She has a background in genetics and half a decade of experience teaching ESL in Asia and Europe.

Chikodili Emelumadu is a Nigerian writer currently residing in Cambridge, MA. Her work has been published in Eclectica, One Throne, Omenana, and various other magazines and anthologies. Her “Candy Girl” first appeared in Apex Magazine and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson prize.

“She Makes the Deep Boil” (original) is by Minnesotan Amelia Gorman. Her other monstrous-themed writing appears in the Lovecraftian anthology She Walks in Shadows, and her poetry in Liminality Magazine, Star*Line, and Eternal Haunted Summer.

“What the Bees Know About Discarded Girlish Organs” (original) is by Jasmyne J. Harris, who lives in Washington, DC. Her work is forthcoming in Bayou Magazine.

“Strong Meat” (original) is by archivist, historian, and librarian A. R. Henle.

Crystal Lynn Hilbert lives in the forgotten backwaters of Western Pennsylvania. Her latest stories appear in Betwixt Magazine. Her “Soul of Soup Bones” was first published in Apex Magazine in June 2014.

“A Year Without the Taste of Meat” (original) is by Erin Horáková, a southern American writer who lives in London. She’s working towards her literature PhD, which focuses on how charm evolves over time.

“The Honey Witch” (original) is by Kathryn McMahon, an American writer living abroad with her British wife and dog. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Baltimore Review, Crack the Spine, and Necessary Fiction, among others.

“I Eat” (original) is by H. Pueyo (@hachepueyo on Twitter), an Argentine-Brazilian writer of comics and speculative fiction. Her work has appeared before in print and online venues like Clarkesworld, The Dark, and Broken Metropolis, among others. She currently lives in Brazil with her boyfriend and their interminable piles of work to do.

“Bristling Skim” (original) is by D.A. Xiaolin Spires who stares at skies and wonders what there is to eat out there in the cosmos.

“Alice Underground” (original) is by Rachael Sterling, who lives in sunny Santa Monica, California, teaching music to preschoolers most mornings and writing most afternoons. You can find her talking about books on YouTube under the name Rae Sterling.

“Red, From the Heartwood” (original) is by Penny Stirling, who edits and embroiders in Western Australia. Their speculative fiction and poetry can be found in Lackington’s, Interfictions, Strange Horizons, and other venues.

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Space Opera, the Orphan’s Tales series, and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Eugie Foster Memorial, Hugo, Lambda, Locus, Mythopoeic, Prix Imaginales, Rhysling, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice, and Tiptree awards. Her “The Lily and the Horn” was first published in Fantasy Magazine‘s 2015 Queers Destroy Fantasy! issue.

“A Fish Tale” (original) is by Sabrina Vourvoulias, the author of Ink, which was named to Latinidad’s Best Books of 2012. Her fiction can be found in Uncanny, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Crossed Genres.

Damien Angelica Walters wrote Sing Me Your Scars, Paper Tigers, and Cry Your Way Home. Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award and reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two rescued pit bulls. Her “A Lie You Give, And Thus I Take” was first published in Lightspeed in December 2014.

“Who Watches” (original) is by Wellington-based Rem Wigmore, who also published under Summer Wigmore. Their first novel The Wind City was published in 2013 by Steam Press and they had a short story in the 2016 At the Edge anthology.

Alyssa Wong was a finalist for the 2016 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Locus Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” was first published in the 2015 Queers Destroy Horror! issue of Nightmare, and won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Short Story and the 2016 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction.

Caroline M. Yoachim has written dozens of short stories, appearing in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and her short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories. Her “The Carnival Was Eaten, All Except the Clown” was first published in Electric Velocipede in 2013 and was featured in The Drabblecast.

Editor Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer with a PhD in science communication and a particular interest in science history and marine studies. She has most recently been researching the reproductive strategies of Zostera muelleri seagrass. She has had around 30 short stories published, in places like Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Apex Magazine, amongst others. Her poetry collection on the periodic table, Chemical Letters, was published by Popcorn Press and her novellas have been published by Masque Books, Paper Road Press, and The Book Smugglers. She has been nominated for BSFA and Elgin awards, and has won three Sir Julius Vogels, twice for best novella (The Ghost of Matter and The Convergence of Fairy Tales) and once for best fan writing, for a series of columns on food and horror, which became Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings (Book Smugglers, 2017).

Reviews & Mentions

Mentioned in:

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There are fairy tales, horrible murders, and romances, straight, lesbian and …complicated. Some are sexy, some are disturbing, and some are both. I devoured this collection quickly and eagerly.

—”Sharp and Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good – Book Review,” Jennifer Muirhead, Weekend Notes, 16 June 2019.

I found that after each story I had to put the book aside so that I could process and ponder what I had just read. Even after a few weeks, I find my mind wandering back to an idea, a character, a situation from the stories and I just sit and think. Sometimes its because it was shocking, sometimes because the situation was heart-breaking, other times its the particular twist of a well-known idea or theme that strikes me. There wasn’t a single story that I hated — and most I really liked. Sharp & Sugar Tooth is definitely a book that I am recommending to my friends – it is a very worthwhile read.

—”Review: Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up to No Good,” A Book Geek, 11 July 2018.

~~~

Our Kickstarter was mentioned, promoted, or reviewed in:

26 March 2019

Broad Knowledge

Recommended by the Barnes & Noble Sci-fi & Fantasy Blog: “The lineup of contributing authors include a wide range of new and established horror and speculative fiction writers, including L. Timmel Duchamp, …Nisi Shawl, [and] D.A. Xiaolin Spires”.

Paperback (978-1-937794-85-9):
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Ebook (978-1-937794-86-6):


Go to: About | Reviews | Goodreads
Released 20 November 2018

About

Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good is a feminist anthology of dark fiction and darker knowledge, edited by Joanne Merriam. Containing 35 stories of “bad” women, and “good” women who just haven’t been caught yet, it features 35 fearless writers who identify as female, non-binary, or a marginalized sex or gender identity. It’s the second in the Women Up To No Good series, which can be read in any order. It’s forthcoming on 20 November 2018.

Our contributors are based in or hailing from Australia, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, India, the Philippines, and all over the United States. Between them, they have won the Aeronautilus, Encouragement, Fresh Voices, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Awards, and been shortlisted for the Aurora, Bram Stoker, and Ignotus, as well as numerous others! We also include two stories in translation, one by Argentine author Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría and the other by Galician writer and poet Estíbaliz Espinosa.

Table of Contents

  • Charlotte Ashley, “She Falls”
  • R. S. Benedict, “Clara Vox”
  • Megan Chaudhuri, “First mouse model of Innsmouth Fish-man Syndrome draft 2 USE THIS VERSION – edits by MK.doc”
  • Autumn Christian, “Flowers for Dogman”
  • Vida Cruz, “Blushing Blue”
  • Sarina Dorie, “The Visitations of Seraphim by Biblical Scholar Father Anthony Maguire”
  • L. Timmel Duchamp, “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.” (first published in Pulphouse 8, August 1990, and also available in The Women Who Walk Through Fire, ed. Susanna J. Sturgis, Crossing Press, 1990 and in PDF on Duchamp’s website)
  • Estíbaliz Espinosa, “23 commuter line chromosomes” (first published in Galician in Curiosidade, but original in English, translated by the author)
  • A. T. Greenblatt, “Five Meters Ahead, Two Centuries Away”
  • Claudine Griggs, “The Cold Waters of Europa”
  • Audrey R. Hollis, “Your Life Will Look Perfect from Afar”
  • Joanna Michal Hoyt, “Taking It Back”
  • Rebecca Jones-Howe, “Election Season”
  • Ezzy G. Languzzi, “Viva La Muñeca”
  • Maggie Maxwell, “Like I Need a Hole in the Head”
  • Rati Mehrotra, “Make Pretty”
  • Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría, “Liquid Glass” (trans. Lawrence Schimel)
  • Premee Mohamed, “Below the Kirk, Below the Hill”
  • Wendy Nikel, “Maidens of the Sea”
  • Julie Nováková, “Frankenstein Sonata”
  • Aimee Ogden, “Matched Set”
  • Therese Pieczynski, “Three Days, Two Nights”
  • Laura E. Price, “Mary in the Looking Glass”
  • Clarice Radrick, “The Red”
  • Nisi Shawl, “Street Worm” (first published in Streets of Shadows, Alliteration Ink, 2014; also appeared in Street Magicks, Prime Books, 2016)
  • Tabitha Sin, “The Donor”
  • Angela Slatter, “The Song of Sighs” (first published in Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, 2013; also appeared in New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird, 2015)
  • D.A. Xiaolin Spires, “Sunbasker”
  • Priya Sridhar, “Tidal Bloom”
  • Jae Steinbacher, “Blood Sausage”
  • Sonya Taaffe, “Like Milkweed” (first appeared in Not One of Us #52, ed. John Benson, October 2014)
  • Liz Ulin, “Profanity”
  • Marie Vibbert, “Infinite Boyfriends”
  • Mingzhao Xu, “Think, Baby Turtle”
  • Xin Niu Zhang, “The Ladies in the Moon”

Contributors

Charlotte Ashley is a writer, editor and bookseller living in Toronto, Canada. Her fantasy and science fiction short stories have appeared in F&SF, Clockwork Canada, Luna Station Quarterly, Kaleidotrope, PodCastle, and elsewhere. Her historical fantasy, “La Héron,” was nominated for both the Aurora and Sunburst Awards in 2016. You can find more about her at www.once-and-future.com or on Twitter @CharlotteAshley.

R. S. Benedict grew up in rural New York but spent three years living in China. Her work has appeared in Unicorn Booty and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

A toxicologist by training and a writer by inclination, Megan Chaudhuri lives outside Seattle with one spouse and two cats. Her fiction has appeared in Analog, Crossed Genres, GigaNotoSaurus, and other venues.

Autumn Christian is a fiction writer who lives in the dark woods with poisonous blue flowers in her backyard and a black deer skull on her wall. She is waiting for the day when she hits her head on the cabinet searching for the popcorn bowl and all consensus reality dissolves. She’s been a freelance writer, a game designer, a cheese producer, a haunted house actor, and a video game tester. She considers Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Katie Jane Garside, the southern gothic, and dubstep, as main sources of inspiration.

Vida Cruz is a Filipina born, bred, and based in the Philippines. A 2017 Writers of the Future winner and a 2014 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop, her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Writers of the Future vol. 34, Expanded Horizons, Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, Philippine Speculative Fiction, and the Australian fantasy anthology Phantazein. In her spare time, she draws pretty things, pets all the dogs, and claws at her towering TBR pile. Tweet her at @laviecestmoi. If you’d like to help the rebuilding or rehabilitation efforts for the Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda survivors, this charity is a good place to make inquiries: Save the Children.

 

 

Sarina Dorie has sold about 100 short stories to markets like Daily Science Fiction, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card’s IGMS, Cosmos, and Sword and Laser. Her steampunk romance series, The Memory Thief, and her collections, Fairies, Robots and Unicorns—Oh My! and Ghosts, Werewolves and Zombies—Oh My! are available on Amazon, along with other books. You can find more information about her short stories and novels on her website: sarinadorie.com.

L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of several books, including The Waterdancer’s World and Never at Home. Her five-novel Marq’ssan Cycle series was awarded a Special Honor by the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award jury. In 2004, she founded Aqueduct Press, which now claims the lion’s share of her time and effort and for which she was a finalist for the 2017 World Fantasy Special Award—Professional. She lives in Seattle. Find her at ltimmelduchamp.com. (You can read her story in PDF at her website.)

Estíbaliz Espinosa: She is the author of seven science poetry books, some short stories about scientific women, and also poetry translation. She was awarded the Afundación – PEN Poetry Prize in 2017. In addition to writing, she works as a musician and science journalist. Hispanic philologist, sociologist, and amateur astronomer. Her work has been translated into English, Welsh, Catalan, Hebrew, Japanese, Macedonian, and Italian. Her last poetry book is Curiosidade (Curiosity), in which “23 commuter line chromosomes” first appeared, in Galician. She is from A Coruña, Spain.

A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s well acquainted with all four seasons and is known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and Clarion West 2017. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fireside, as well as other fine places. You can find her online at atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt.

 

 

Claudine Griggs is the Writing Center Director at Rhode Island College, and her publications include three nonfiction books about transsexuals along with a couple dozen articles on writing, teaching, and other topics. She has also begun writing fiction and plans to draft more science fiction, her first-love genre as a teenager. Her fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Escape Pod, Zahir Tales, Leading Edge SF, The Chaffey Review, New Theory, Not a Pipe Publishing, and Baen Books’ Best Military and Adventure Science Fiction (June 2016). Griggs earned her BA and MA in English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Audrey R. Hollis, 2018 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, is a Los Angeles-based writer. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Lunch Ticket, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @audreyrhollis or visit her website www.audreyrhollis.com.

Joanna Michal Hoyt lives with her family on a Catholic Worker farm in upstate NY where she spends her days tending goats, gardens and guests and her evenings reading and writing odd stories. Her fiction has appeared in publications including Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, and Mysterion. She can be found online at joannamichalhoyt.com.

 

 

Rebecca Jones-Howe is the author of the short story collection Vile Men. Her work has been published in [PANK], Punchnel’s, and Pulp Modern, among others. She lives in Kamloops, British Columbia and is currently at work on her first novel. She can be found online at rebeccajoneshowe.com.

Ezzy G. Languzzi is a Latinx writer of speculative short fiction.

Maggie Maxwell has been writing stories that make physicists roll in their graves since 1994. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, a collection of the ghosts of plants she’s killed, and a large number of overworked and underpaid bookshelves. Her work has been published on Daily Science Fiction. She can be found on Twitter as @wanderingquille.

 

 

Born and raised in India, Rati Mehrotra makes her home in Toronto, Canada. Her first book, Markswoman, was published in January 2018 and the sequel, Mahimata, will be published in March 2019. Her stories have appeared in Apex Magazine, AE – The Canadian Science Fiction Review, IGMS, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, and many more. Find her at ratiwrites.com.

Argentine author Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría holds a doctorate in philosophy and is a university professor. Her novelette, Memory, is also available from Upper Rubber Boot Books (in a translation into English by Lawrence Schimel, who also translated “Liquid Glass”), and was a finalist for the Spanish national science fiction award, the Ignotus. Her other titles include a novella, Antumbra, Umbra y Penumbra (Editorial Cerbero, 2018), a short novel, El tren (Café con Leche, 2016), and a collection of stories, Diez varaiaciones sobre el amor (Editorial Cerbero, 2017).

Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction writer based in Canada. Her work has been published by Nightmare Magazine, Martian Migraine Press, Innsmouth Free Press, and many others. She can be found on Twitter at @premeesaurus.

 

 

Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she’s left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published by Daily Science Fiction, Nature: Futures, and is forthcoming from Analog. Her time travel novella series, beginning with The Continuum, is available from World Weaver Press. For more info, visit wendynikel.com.

Julie Nováková is a Czech author and translator of SF, fantasy and detective stories. She has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog, and elsewhere. Her work in Czech includes seven novels, one anthology (Terra Nullius) and over thirty short stories. Some of her works have been also translated into Chinese, Romanian, Estonian, German and Filipino. She received the Encouragement Award of the European science fiction and fantasy society in 2013, and the Aeronautilus award for the best Czech short story of 2014 and 2015, and for the best novel of 2015. Read more at www.julienovakova.com and follow her on Twitter @Julianne_SF.

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her work has also appeared in Shimmer, Apex, and Escape Pod.

Therese Pieczynski has published in Asimov’s, Daily Science Fiction, River City, the anthology Imagination Fully Dilated, and in 2012 with Nancy Kress in New Under The Sun as part of the Stellar Guild series brought out by Arc Manor.

Laura E. Price lives in southwestern Florida with her husband and son. Her work has appeared in On Spec, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, GigaNotoSaurus, Penumbra eMag, Gallery of Curiosities, The Best of Metaphorosis 2017, and Betwixt. She also blogs at seldnei.wordpress.com.

Clarice Radrick’s work can be found in Myriad Lands Volume 1, Havok, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Nightmare Stalkers and Dream Walkers, Spellbound, Haiku of the Dead, Under the Juniper Tree, Inchoate Echoes, and The Brisling Tide. For more information, visit www.clariceradrick.com.

Nisi Shawl is the author of the Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair, co-author of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and co-editor of Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Her story collection Filter House co-won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2009 and was nominated for that year’s World Fantasy Award. She is a co-founder and Steering Committee member of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit supporting the presence of people of color in the fantastic genres, and she also serves on the writing workshop Clarion West’s board of directors.

 

 

Tabitha Sin is a speculative fiction and hybrid memoir-fiction writer. Her science fiction works have been published in Dear Robot: An Anthology of Epistolary Science Fiction and Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction. Her hybrid memoir-fiction pieces can be found in Side B Magazine and Moonroots zine. She is a VONA alum and a mango fiend.

Angela Slatter is the author of the urban fantasy novels Vigil and Corpselight, as well as eight short story collections, including The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories. She has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, and six Aurealis Awards. Vigil was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award 2018. Find her at www.angelaslatter.com.

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Nature, Terraform, Strange Horizons, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Shoreline of Infinity, LONTAR, Mithila Review, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Argot, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Gathering Storm Magazine, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Broad Knowledge, Deep Signal, Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Future Visions, and Battling in All Her Finery. She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter and on her website: daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com.

A 2016 MBA graduate and published author, Priya Sridhar has been writing fantasy and science fiction for fifteen years. She believes that every story is a journey, and that a good tale allows the reader to escape to a new world. She also enjoys reading, biking, movie-watching, and classical music. Priya lives in Miami, Florida with her family and posts monthly at her blog www.priyajsridhar.com.

 

 

Jae Steinbacher is a speculative fiction writer, editor, and wanderer soon to call Seattle home. Her stories have appeared in The Overcast, Terraform, Escape Pod, PodCastle, and other venues. She was a 2017-18 North Carolina Arts Council fellow and a finalist for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s 2017 Diverse Writers and Diverse Worlds grants. Jae is the Workshop Administrator for the Clarion West Writers Workshop and attended in 2014. You can find her on Twitter at @JaeSteinbacher or visit her website, julie-steinbacher.com.

Sonya Taaffe reads dead languages and tells living stories. Her short fiction and poetry have been collected most recently in Forget the Sleepless Shores (Lethe Press) and previously in Singing Innocence and Experience, Postcards from the Province of Hyphens, A Mayse-Bikhl, and Ghost Signs. She lives with her husband and two cats in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she writes about film for Patreon and remains proud of naming a Kuiper belt object.

Liz Ulin was a winner of the Fresh Voices Screenplay Competition, and a finalist in The Canadian Short Script Competition, The Canadian Authors Association Short Story Competition, and The Writers Union of Canada Short Prose Competition. She has also had several short stories adapted and produced at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre.

 

 

Besides selling thirty-odd short stories, a dozen poems and a few comics, Marie Vibbert has been a medieval (SCA) squire, ridden 17% of the roller coasters in the United States and has played O-line and D-line for the Cleveland Fusion women’s tackle football team. Her work has been called “…the embodiment of what science fiction should be…” by The Oxford Culture Review.

Mingzhao Xu immigrated to the United States from China as a child. One of her greatest joys in life is using fiction to highlight the humor, challenges and pathos of her childhood. She currently lives in California.

Xin Niu Zhang was born in Shanghai, grew up in Toronto, and is currently studying at the University of Waterloo. Her ultimate aspiration is to write a book glamorizing the lives of accountants.

 

 

Editor Joanne Merriam has most recently edited How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens, The Museum of All Things Awesome And That Go Boom, and, with H. L. Nelson, Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good.

Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Glaze from Breaking (Stride, 2005), and in dozens of magazines and journals, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Escape Pod, The Fiddlehead, [PANK], and Strange Horizons.

In 2004, she immigrated to the USA from Canada. She has lived in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Kentucky, and New Hampshire, and now resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

She runs Upper Rubber Boot Books, administers Small Press Week, volunteers for Postcards to Voters and More Than Medicine, and runs a surgical fellowship and the lives of four oncologists for a local hospital. You can visit her at www.joannemerriam.com.

 

 

Reviews & Mentions

Mentioned in:

Overall, I have to say that most of the stories were a solid 3-4 stars for me: there were many creative ideas, but only a few stories really shone for me. However, I also didn’t find any stories that I hated, which is always a good thing, and a pretty good achievement with more than 30 stories. . . . As you can see, there really is a variety in the stories – some of them involve mythology or legends, some are sci-fi with robots, and some are realistic/contemporary with a strong woman protagonist. All of the stories go to dark places, although the degree to which they do can also vary a lot.

—”Review: Broad Knowledge,” Alexa, A Thousand Worlds, 15 June 2018

Our Kickstarter was mentioned, promoted, or reviewed in:

Many thanks to Christi Craig for hosting the cover reveal for Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good. We changed covers after the Kickstarter, and the old cover was our Kickstarter exclusive!

20 November 2018

Yaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy

We made our goal!

This otter agrees that you all are wonderful.

I’m so incredibly thankful for all of you. I’m grateful you’re in this with me. Together we’re going to push speculative and horror fiction to be more inclusive. We still have four hours to go, so hopefully we can raise some advertising money for these phenomenal stories!

30 June 2018

Crowd-funding has made the press―and many of our books―possible.

Liz Loves Books posted a guest post with me! Here’s an excerpt:

My journey into publishing started with a job listing in the local paper for an administrative assistant position at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, where I ended up working for five years in the ’90s. I was the office manager, and the volunteer coordinator, and the receptionist, and, well, I basically did everything the Executive Director didn’t do. One of my many tasks was answering questions from the public about how publishing worked, and in the examples I gave, I didn’t want to use the name of a real publishing company and cause any confusion or accidentally defame somebody, so I made up a publishing company which I called Upper Rubber Boot Books, after the Nova Scotian expression for a marginal and probably uncool place (Canadians often name places Upper and Lower Whatever, in reference to a more populous place, so if there were a town named Rubber Boot, then Upper Rubber Boot would be even more remote, you see). If I were American, perhaps I’d have called it Podunk Press. And so, when I decided to start my own company, I continued using the name as a sort of inside joke with myself.

I’m grateful to everybody who has posted about the anthology, which has included our authors, Octavia Cade’s wonderful Twitter explorations of the stories in her anthology (look for more of these today as we move into the last 24 hours of our campaign): “The Doll’s Eye” by Kathleen Alcalá, “And When We Die They Will Consume Us” by Betsy Aoki, “Dear Son” by Joyce Chng, “Gimme Sugar” by Katharine E. K. Duckett, “The Fool’s Feast” by Anahita Eftekhari, “She Makes the Deep Boil” by Amelia Gorman, “What the Bees Know About Discarded Girlish Organs” by Jasmyne J. Harris, “Strong Meat” by A. R. Henle, “A Year Without the Taste of Meat” by Erin Horáková, “The Honey Witch” by Kathryn McMahon, “I Eat” by H. Pueyo, “Bristling Skim” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires, “Alice Underground” by Rachael Sterling, “Red, From the Heartwood” by Penny Stirling, “A Fish Tale” by Sabrina Vourvoulias, and “Who Watches” by Rem Wigmore, and these websites:

Go donate now! The world needs these stories, and these authors need your support. We’re still living in a world where it’s apparently unremarkable that horror anthologies like this one by Stephen King, coming out this September, contain only men (and we hate to call them out, because this is a great publishing company and we love King’s writing, but come on guys), so we need anthologies like the Women Up To No Good series to provide some balance and help readers find the full breadth of excellent horror and dark speculative fiction out there.

Thanks so much for being here with us.

29 June 2018

“The bees died because they know,” she said finally.

Today we have our final feature! We’re sharing a bit about our final two stories, both featuring insects and the body: Maggie Maxwell’s “Like I Need a Hole in the Head” from Broad Knowledge and Jasmyne J. Harris’s “What the Bees Know About Discarded Girlish Organs” (from which today’s title comes).

Maggie Maxwell writes:

Like I Need a Hole in the Head has an interesting but simple backstory: it was written based off a prompt. Every year, a writing forum I’m on runs a event where participants post a prompt and will in turn be randomly given one of those prompts to write a story on. It’s an enjoyable challenge that results in many strange but high-quality works that scatter themselves across the world of publishing over the course of the year. Participants range from complete newbies to Hugo-nominated writers. In 2016’s event, I was given the simple prompt of “a story with cats, dogs, or fish, black holes, and at some point, a llama should spit on somebody.” And thus, Like I Need a Hole in the Head was born.

Over on Twitter, editor Octavia Cade talked about Harris’s story:

Seriously, guys, this story is OUTSTANDING. Nearly every single sentence is a kick in the gut. It, like all the other stories in this antho, is about food and horror.

And consumption, in this story, is the ultimate goal of romantic relationships. In order for two people to merge into a single unit, one partner has to eat the other – and eat them in parts, because the one to be eaten doesn’t disintegrate at once.

Oh, no. It’s cough up a lung lobe here, a quarter of a liver there, and a nice romantic dinner that Hannibal Lecter would be proud to serve at, as the next step to symbiosis continues. But sometimes relationships end…

And suddenly the man you’ve gifted half your internal organs to doesn’t want to be with you anymore. No consequences for him, or very few, but your investment has left you Partial, second-rate in the dating world, and ultimately recyclable in very biological ways.

It is the creepiest, most painful, most terrifying story in this entire anthology, and once award nominations open for next year I will be pushing it HARD.

You’ll want to read these stories! Donate now to pre-order.

 

About the Authors

Jasmyne J. Harris writes from Washington, DC. Her work is forthcoming in Bayou Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @ciaojasmyne.

Maggie Maxwell lives in Durham, North Carolina with her husband and a collection of overworked bookshelves. She has neither pets nor superpowers, so she writes about both to make up for it. Sometimes she puts them in space, just because.

28 June 2018

So much for Plan A. Plan B was more flexible. Okay, less well-formed.

Today’s feature focuses on two stories of girls with special gifts living on the streets: Rati Mehrotra’s “Make Pretty,” in which an orphaned girl in a post-collapse Toronto makes art for the aliens she empathically connects with, and Nisi Shawl’s “Street Worm” (from which today’s title comes), in which a rebellious teenager who can see things others can’t lives on the street to escape her social worker parents, who think she’s crazy. Both stories are in Broad Knowledge. “Street Worm” was first published in Streets of Shadows, and also appeared in Street Magicks. (You can read its sequel, “Queen of Dirt,” at Apex Magazine.)

 

About the Authors

Born and raised in India, Rati Mehrotra makes her home in Toronto. Her first book, Markswoman, was published in January 2018 and the sequel is scheduled for March 2019. Her stories have been published in Apex Magazine, AE – The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Urban Fantasy Magazine, Podcastle, and many more. Find her at ratiwrites.com.

Nisi Shawl is the author of the Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair, co-author of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and co-editor of Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Her story collection Filter House co-won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2009 and was nominated for that year’s World Fantasy Award. She was Guest of Honor at WisCon 35 in 2011, and at the Science Fiction Research Association’s convention in 2013. She is a co-founder and Steering Committee member of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit supporting the presence of people of color in the fantastic genres, and she also serves on the writing workshop Clarion West’s board of directors.

27 June 2018

I thought you understood about transformation.

Last night, we posted a new cover for Broad Knowledge, after receiving feedback that it didn’t fit its genre. Our donors will choose (in the backer survey sent out after the campaign ends) which of the two covers becomes the actual published version! You can still get whichever cover you like, no matter which one wins; one of the covers will be a Kickstarter exclusive.

In honor of our new cover, both of today’s stories are from Broad Knowledge, and both involve visitations of numinous creatures: Sarina Dorie’s “The Visitations of Seraphim by Biblical Scholar Father Anthony Maguire” and Sonya Taaffe’s “Like Milkweed” (from which today’s cover comes).

Taaffe’s story, a reprint which originally appeared in 2014 in Not One of Us #52, is of a woman, Alicja, talking to a mysterious visiting alien about her ex-girlfriend, who left her after staying with her through her transition, because of the aliens, in a roundabout way. It’s a contemplative and emotionally raw story, gorgeously told.

Of her story, Sarina Dorie writes:

With many of my stories, the premise starts as a question or concept. For The Visitations of Seraphim by Biblical Scholar Father Anthony Maguire, I started off thinking about the questions all of us probably ask about angels. Historically or mythologically they are supposed to be genderless but we always create angels in our image, so what if we wrote about genderless angels or angels that choose their gender? If modern day humans were faced with the divine and it was so beautiful we couldn’t comprehend it, how would we react?

 

About the Authors

Sarina Dorie has sold about 100 short stories to markets like Daily Science Fiction, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card’s IGMS, Cosmos, and Sword and Laser. Her steampunk romance series, The Memory Thief, and her collections, Fairies, Robots and Unicorns—Oh My! and Ghosts, Werewolves and Zombies—Oh My! are available on Amazon, along with other books. You can find more information about her quirky fantasy series or other short stories or novels at sarinadorie.com.

Sonya Taaffe’s short fiction and poetry can be found most recently in the collection Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press) and in the anthologies The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom, Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place, and An Alphabet of Embers: An Anthology of Unclassifiables. She reads dead languages for fun, edits living poets for Strange Horizons, and lives in Somerville, MA with her husband and two cats. She once named a Kuiper belt object.

26 June 2018

Just imagine if people took every word that came out of your mouth as seriously as they take every bullet fired out of a gun.

Today we feature two different takes on the power of your voice.

In R. S. Benedict’s “Clara Vox,” that power is very literal: the main character is saved from suicide by a woman with the dubious gift of possessing a voice that people can’t disobey, which is only fair since she (it’s strongly implied) also caused her to go off her antidepressants by doing an anti-drug PSA. Benedict says:

“Clara Vox” came to me while I was stuck in a low-paying job writing copy without meaningful opportunities to use my talents to their fullest extent. At the time, being able to write felt like having one of those ironic gifts from the gods you read about in Greek mythology: eternal life without eternal youth, the uncontrollable ability to turn everything into gold, perfect prophecies that no one else will believe, that sort of thing.

In L. Timmel Duchamp’s classic science fiction story “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.” (from which today’s title comes), a black female dissident’s words are so inflammatory and radical that the government puts her into quarantine on a military base and passes a law (The Limited Censorship for the Preservation of National Security Act) to systematically and completely obliterate them.

In her quest to meet with Margaret A., the reporter-narrator meets a “Justice Department official assigned to what they call ‘the Margaret A. Desk’—an ‘expert’ who cheerfully admitted to me that he had never heard or read any of Margaret A.’s words himself.” In a story deeply engaged with the power and danger of women’s voices, and women of color’s voices especially, the reader never finds out what Margaret A. advocated for, or indeed her full name, which functions to keep the focus on her silencing, and on what may happen when inevitably the next generation pushes for the law to be overturned.

Duchamp may have been thinking of political prisoners like South African anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela or Myanmar’s pro-democracy politician Aung San Suu Kyi, who were both imprisoned by their respective governments when the story was first published in 1990.

However, the text itself allows for Margaret A. to be an ordinary woman making mundane observations about oppression, who happened to hit the cultural zeitgeist at a particular moment of cultural change, like the one we are living through now with the #metoo movement. The narrator expects to meet “not only the most remarkable woman in history, but probably the most charismatic, charming and possibly lovable person I would ever have the pleasure of knowing,” and is startled to find instead a “a small stout figure in gray cotton shirt and pants” whose interview is a “disappointment.” Many ordinary women have had the experience of pointing out seemingly obvious gender bias and having their words treated (mostly—but sadly not exclusively—by men) as inappropriate and out of line. Margaret A.’s imprisonment is this reflexive patriarchal silencing writ large.

 

About the Authors

R. S. Benedict grew up in rural New York but spent three years living in China. Her work has appeared in Unicorn Booty and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of several books, including The Waterdancer’s World and Never at Home. Her five-novel Marq’ssan Cycle series was awarded a Special Honor by the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award jury. In 2004, she founded Aqueduct Press, which now claims the lion’s share of her time and effort and won her the 2017 World Fantasy Special Award—Professional. She lives in Seattle. Find her at ltimmelduchamp.com. Her “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.” was first published in Pulphouse 8 and has been anthologized in The Women Who Walk Through Fire and Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology.

25 June 2018

There’s a slight green sheen. Not from the lichen or whatever, just normal rot.

About today’s two stories, editor Octavia Cade writes:

Are there limits to the consumptions we’ll perform as a community, as H. Pueyo argues in “I Eat”? When we choose, as ecosystem actors, to act to the detriment of that ecosystem as a whole, is there ever any coming back from that? We tell ourselves stories of single persons and change, but there are times this takes on the sticky-sweet patina of myth, and by framing her question within a post-apocalyptic environment Pueyo questions the choices we can make as part of a learning and adaptive community.

In the absence of that community we lose a culture. In the second post- apocalyptic story of the anthology, Rem Wigmore in “Who Watches” follows the single survivor of a lichen infestation that is so transformative its victims are no longer human. They remain edible, but as Sam navigates the wreck of her old life, eating what was once her own kind, she’s still the last gasp of an old method of consumption. The new has adapted, evolved, and has its own method of eating outsiders, turning them into something else.

 

Also!

We have a little news: Broad Knowledge contributor Rati Mehrotra just had another of her stories longlisted for the Sunburst Awards! (Ursula Pflug, who had a story in our anthology The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom, is also on the list.) Congratulations to all!

We’ve also made the weekly roundup at Paper Cat Press, and at the International Examiner: Seattle’s Asian Pacific Islander nonprofit news source since 1974.

 

About the Authors

H. Pueyo is a South American writer, currently living somewhere in Brazil. She writes short stories and comics of many genres, published both in English and Portuguese. Find her portfolio at querellepueyo.com or follow her on Twitter: @argiopidae.

Rem Wigmore, also published under Summer Wigmore, is a speculative fiction writer based in Wellington. Their first novel The Wind City was published in 2013 by Steam Press and they had a short story in the 2016 At the Edge anthology. They like coffee, snacks, and destroying the patriarchy.

24 June 2018

There is a constant buzz that is very nearly comforting.

Tabitha Sin’s “The Donor,” from Broad Knowledge, and Kathryn McMahon’s “The Honey Witch” (from which today’s title comes), from Sharp & Sugar Tooth, both explore the horrific side of preservation. In both, organs are taken over by something else, something that is supposed to keep them safe from harm or injury, but at what cost?

In “The Donor,” an organ harvester discovers a donor who is supposed to be freshly dead, but who comes alive in an extremely unsettling way:

In “The Honey Witch,” a beekeeper tries to help her ex-lover with honey and beeswax, but the two women discover the danger of the magic she tries without fully understanding what she is letting into her home.

Kathryn McMahon writes:

I get a lot of inspiration from nature shows or articles. I like to take something real and warp it, and when writing horror, I play with it and stretch it out until it’s grotesque. In the case of my story “The Honey Witch” in Sharp & Sugar Tooth, I’d come across an article about a saint’s remains preserved in beeswax. Beeswax and honey are incredible materials that have almost an immortal lifespan as long as they are pure. Archaeologists have discovered honey made by bees in ancient Egypt that is still edible today. And anything preserved in beeswax or honey lasts a long, long time. Honey is also used in the treatment of wounds and has a variety of health benefits. It’s no wonder that it has been viewed as possessing magical, curative properties—but what if that magic was misused?

Donate now to pre-order both anthologies!

 

About the Authors

Kathryn McMahon is an American writer living abroad with her British wife and dog. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Baltimore Review, Crack the Spine, and Necessary Fiction, among others. More of her writing can be found at darkandsparklystories.com. She tweets as @katoscope.

Tabitha Sin is a speculative fiction and hybrid memoir-fiction writer. Her science fiction works have been published in Dear Robot: An Anthology of Epistolary Science Fiction and Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction. Her hybrid memoir-fiction pieces can be found in Side B Magazine and Moonroots zine. She is a VONA alum and a mango fiend.

23 June 2018

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