We’re introducing a new reward!
15 June 2018
A.C. Wise, author of The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again and The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories, will critique one short story for the lucky person to get to it first!
She’ll also shortly be posting an interview with Joanne Merriam and Octavia Cade, the editors of the anthologies, so keep an eye out for that at her website.
Hot. Soft. Fresh from the oven.
Today we’re exploring two stories of recreating a loved one over and over.
In Marie Vibbert’s humorous “Infinite Boyfriends,†the protagonist tries to find an alternate universe version of her boyfriend who isn’t a jerk. Vibbert writes:
My story started with a funny line someone said during conversation at the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. I don’t remember who said “Infinite boyfriends from infinite dimensions” but I wrote it down in my notebook and then, when I had to come up with a story idea for the next week’s workshop, well, there it was. The main character helped me get through writing—I based her entirely on my friend Stacey, and gave her the Green Road Observatory in East Cleveland, Ohio as her mad scientist lair.
Katharine E. K. Duckett’s “Gimme Sugar†(from which we take today’s title) is a dark tale of loss and baked goods. A lonely woman finds herself in a bakery that will recreate her ex-lover again and again as gingerbread with chocolate eyes, syrup-coated lips, braided licorice hair, gumdrop nipples, buttercream tattoos, and the scent of crushed cardamom, cinnamon, oranges, and honey warmed in the sun—but there’s a price to treating a woman you love as a consumable object.
About the Authors
Katharine E. K. Duckett‘s stories have appeared in Apex and Interzone, and have been reprinted in Wilde Stories 2015: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction and The Best of Apex: Volume I. She works in science fiction and fantasy publishing in New York City, and lives in Brooklyn with her wife.
Marie Vibbert’s work regularly appears in Analog and other top markets. Her short story “Keep Talking†won Apex Magazine’s Story of the Year and has been called “everything science fiction should be†by Oxford Culture Review. She has ridden 18% of the roller coasters in North America and played defensive end for the Cleveland Fusion women’s tackle football team.
Entry filed under: Anthology, Fiction, News. Tags: a.c. wise, Katharine E. K. Duckett, Marie Vibbert, women up to no good.