Podcasts about mythic delirium

On this West Virginia Morning, Virginia-based writer Mike Allen runs Mythic Delirium. It started out as a sci-fi poetry zine, but now it publishes books. Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams spoke with Allen about sci-fi, fantasy and horror in Appalachia. The post Virginia's Mythic Delirium And Our Song Of The Week On This West Virginia Morning appeared first on West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

The Great Hall of Ahkurst ep.623 The old world may be forgotten, but it is not gone.   Lee Clark Zumpe, an entertainment columnist with Tampa Bay Newspapers, earned his bachelor's in English at the University of South Florida. He began writing poetry and fiction in the early 1990s. His work has regularly appeared in a variety of literary journals and genre magazines over the last two decades. Publication credits include Tiferet, Zillah, The Ugly Tree, Modern Drunkard Magazine, Red Owl, Jones Av., Main Street Rag, Space & Time, Mythic Delirium and Weird Tales. Lee lives on the west coast of Florida with his wife and daughter.   More TTTV stories by Lee Clark Zumpe https://talltaletv.com/tag/lee-clark-zumpe/   ---- Listen Elsewhere ---- YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/c/TallTaleTV Website: http://www.TallTaleTV.com   ---- Story Submission ---- Got a short story you'd like to submit? Submission guidelines can be found at http://www.TallTaleTV.com   ---- About Tall Tale TV ---- Hi there! My name is Chris Herron and I'm an audiobook narrator. In 2015, I suffered from poor Type 1 diabetes control which lead me to become legally blind for almost a year. The doctors didn't give me much hope, predicting an 80% chance that I would never see again. But I refused to give up and changed my lifestyle drastically. Through sheer willpower (and an amazing eye surgeon) I beat the odds and regained my vision. During that difficult time, I couldn't read or write, which was devastating as they had always been a source of comfort for me since childhood. However, my wife took me to the local library where she read out the titles of audiobooks to me. I selected some of my favorite books, such as the Disc World series, Name of the Wind, Harry Potter, and more, and the audiobooks brought these stories to life in a way I had never experienced before. They helped me through the darkest period of my life and I fell in love with audiobooks. Once I regained my vision, I decided to pursue a career as an audiobook narrator instead of a writer. That's why I created Tall Tale TV, to support aspiring authors in the writing communities that I had grown to love before my ordeal. My goal was to help them promote their work by providing a promotional audio short story that showcases their writing skills to readers. They say the strongest form of advertising is word of mouth, so I offer a platform for readers to share these videos and help spread the word about these talented writers. Please consider sharing these stories with your friends and family to support these amazing authors. Thank you!   ---- legal ---- All stories on Tall Tale TV have been submitted in accordance with the terms of service provided on http://www.talltaletv.com or obtained with permission by the author. All images used on Tall Tale TV are either original or Royalty and Attribution free. Most stock images used are provided by http://www.pixabay.com , https://www.canstockphoto.com/ or created using AI. Image attribution will be declared only when required by the copyright owner. Common Affiliates are: Amazon, Smashwords

I invited the amazing C. S. E. Cooney to talk with me about her journey to publication (a journey that lasted 12 years!) for Saint Death’s Daughter. We had a long talk, and she answered a lot of questions from my patrons and subscribers, who had the chance to send in their specific questions ahead of time. Here is the first part of the interview, which you may listen to, or read a transcript below!If you have not already devoured Saint Death’s Daughter in one day, like I did, I encourage you to check it out! It’s available as a printed book, an ebook, and an audiobook, and Claire does her own narration for the audio version!JuliaHello and welcome to the OMG Julia Podcast, where we talk about creative lives and processes. I'm your host, Julia Rios, and with me today is special guest C. S. E. Cooney. Welcome!ClaireThank you Julia! It's lovely to be here.JuliaSo C. S. E. Cooney, also known as Claire, is a wonderful writer of fantasy short fiction, long fiction, and, most recently, the novel Saint Death's Daughter. Claire, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit and tell people a little bit about your writing career as a whole?ClaireI feel like I have been writing fantasy since I was pretty young—fifth or sixth grade, I would go around in circles around the playground with the two friends that I had and just tell them stories that I would then fill notebooks full of. The first ones were like, one was called My World and the sequel was Animal World. And then, in high school, I would name all my friends ridiculous, long, elven names made out of all of the words they liked the best. Like, what's your favorite color? What's your favorite jewel? What's your favorite flower? And then I would Smush them all together and then they'd get names like Erazellalzenarayneraniananamavario. And they'd come from a house and they'd have this backstory, and they all thought that one day I would write this epic trilogy called The Elven Story. But what I guess I was doing is what most people were doing: playing D&D with their friends. But I didn't know about D&D, so I was sort of doing the same thing like with my own imprimatur. It was more like out loud oral storytelling, having adventures or like parallel lives to the lives we were leading as high schoolers. But I think when my father introduced me to the person who became my mentor, I was about 18. I'd, you know, been writing and rewriting two or three different novels throughout high school, and one of the gentlemen who was in my father's congregation—my dad is a director of music and liturgy at St. Anne's church—one of his congregation members was Gene Wolfe, who was a renowned science fiction and fantasy writer. But of course me at 17 or 18, I don't know from Gene Wolfe!Actually, that's not true. You know you’ve got the stack of books your friends lend you, and my friend Lydia had let me one, and it was on the top of my book stack, and I was flying out from Phoenix to see my dad in Chicago as I did periodically summers and winters, and I grabbed the first one off my book stack, read it on the plane, and it happened to be Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe! But at that time I never paid attention to authors because they didn't matter. The stories mattered, and the only time I tried to remember an author's name was if I liked the story enough and wanted to get more of that. Then it was sort of more like a tagging system, you know, but I never thought of them as people…So he introduces me to Gene and we go to dinner with Gene and Rosemary and my dad and my stepmom, and Gene made me feel so comfortable that by the end of the evening I was like, “Can I send you my novel?” Just like you do when you're 17 or 18, and I just remember the look on his face so clearly, which was like this minor hesitation, and then this warm, “How about you send me the first three chapters? And I can't promise I'll have anything to say about it.” Just like very gentle, and it had me back pedaling, like, “Oh, no, I could just send you one chapter!” You know? Or, “You don't have to!” And he's like, “Go ahead, send three chapters.”And then I think he only ended up reading one chapter, but he wrote me a five page letter about it. Or three pages. You know, it was a significant letter, and it was typed and it was it was chock full. And that started a correspondence when I went back to Phoenix, and when I moved to Illinois eventually to go to college, our correspondence kept up. We would go to conventions. He took me to my first convention. He taught me how to write short stories. You know, he's like, “You know, novels are great, but in order to build up your byline, you have to write a lot of short fiction. You have to get some credits to your name, and then you can get an agent.” Like, it was the kind of the old fashioned trajectory that he knew that worked for him that he was teaching me.And it took just about as long as you'd imagine—about 20 years of trial and error. But, you know, in 2015, Mythic Delirium published my first short story collection. Four pieces had been previously published, and one hadn't. It was called Bone Swans, and Gene wrote the introduction for that. And that was maybe I think 15 years after I'd met him, so.I would say maybe the publication of Bone Swans and the fact that it got the World Fantasy Award was the beginning of my career as it is now, though it took 15 years of doing a lot of different stuff to get to that point. Doing a lot of short stories, writing a lot of novellas, just going to college and going to school for writing and figuring all that out, reading a lot, failing a lot, you know. And then that small press success seven years ago. It's hardly like, hardly seems it could be seven years, on both ends, you know? Both too short or too long. But I think having having an award and having a collection was what got me, eventually, an agent who could eventually sell the novel I'd been working on for just about as long as I'd been writing anything else, and which is now Saint Death's Daughter. It wasn't then. It's too late now for Gene to read it. He passed away a few years ago, but he always liked the idea, and at one point several years ago he's like, “That's a good idea. Are you still writing it?” And I'd written a lot of things in the interim, but that one, I think partly because I started writing it as I was still teaching myself to write (which is an ongoing process), but there's a very big difference between you know, 26 and 36, or 40, as I am now.And you could write a book perpetually, but at least I think the final version of Saint Death's Daughter as it is—I just narrated it, so I now know beginning to end what it is, that it exists as a single unit and not as 16,000,000 ongoing fluid units—I thought, “Okay. This was the best I could do in all the years that I gave to it, and it constantly got better, and it's out in the world, and it is a good and fine work and I'm proud of it. Now, moving on!” So that's my career in a nutshell.JuliaI asked my patrons if they wanted to ask specific questions, if they were curious about specific things. So one of the reasons we're doing this interview is I allow my patrons to vote on the kind of content that I post and also, if I'm doing something like this, ask questions of their own. And when I asked them recently what would they like to see more of, they all said, “We would really like to see more writing process posts, and we'd love to see like you talking to other authors, or giving us your own stuff.” I had done a process post of my own recently, and they were like, “We'd like more stuff like that, and we'd love to hear you talk to other authors.” Well, I had your book pre-ordered, and I listened to it all in one day, and I was like, all right, this is clearly a good one. I'm going to see if Claire is willing to talk to me about Saint Death’s Daughter. I know that it has a long and complicated process leading up to it and this will be really interesting. So, I knew that, personally, but I was like all right, what do my patrons want to know? So one person, who doesn't know you at all, asked how you came up with the title of the novel. I thought that was fascinating because, of course, when I first read the draft of it that I read years ago that is not the final version at all, It was called Miscellaneous Stones: Necromancer [Note, after the fact: I think actually it was called Miscellaneous Stones: Assassin the first time I read a draft], and I don't know how many titles you've had, and I don't know how you landed on this one, but if you want to share the story of how this book came to have its title, I'd love to hear it.ClaireWell, originally it was called Miscellaneous Stones: Assassin, which was meant to be ironic. And the interesting thing I'm learning about ironic titles is that, well, I was never very good at irony anyway, but. I was like trying to be ironic and sophisticated, but you'd have to read the story first to know that it was ironic, and usually a title is part of what gets you to read the story in the first place. So I think that I was going about it a bit backwards in my desire to be more sophisticated and ironic. So, initially, it's the name of the character, Miscellaneous Stones, and the word assassin because she's from a family of assassins. But it's ironic because she's allergic to violence. So she thinks (this is in the early drafts) that she has to grow up and be like the rest of her family, a slick, awesome, sophisticated assassin, but really, she just projectile vomits anytime like somebody swats a fly near her. You know that was the idea like way back in the first draft the NaNoWriMo draft.In the interest of not being so obfuscating, I was like, well she actually is not an assassin and the way that the drafts turned out, everybody knows she's a necromancer from birth because of her allergy, so there's really no chance she'd ever think she'd grow up to be an assassin. So let's just call her what she is. She's a necromancer, Miscellaneous Stones: Necromancer. Of course later as I was researching the word necromancer, the mancy part of mancer is more about prophecy and oracles. And it's like it's prophesying through the dead, like you know some people scry through birds, and some people scry through cards like cartomancy. You know, there's all the mancies and it's really about like trying to tell the future. So necromancy is really about trying to tell the future through the dead, which I think she can do. It's one of her powers. But really, she's like a death magic. But in this world magic is is part of the religion. It's the more you pay attention to the gods, the more they pay attention back at you, and their attention is what magic is. It's what's called the panthauma, the all-marvel, and panthauma’s what makes good stuff happen. So there's like a give and take, so really, a really good magician is a saint, in that sense that they are devoted to their god and the god is super super devoted back. That god's just pleased somebody's paying attention, because a lot of people (like in our world) in that world, are like yeah, the gods. Whatever. We'll pay attention on the holy days, maybe. Mostly dress up and eat good food, but a true saint is as rare as it ever was, or as nonexistent. At least in this world, they actually exist. That they're devoted. It's like vocation. It's almost fanaticism in some ways. All of which to say, the truth is it went out on submission as Miscellaneous Stones: Necromancer, and I never even call her Miscellaneous! I call her Lanie because it's easier, and that was an edit that happened perhaps from my agent. It may have been either my current agent or an earlier agent who'd been looking at it was like, “These are mouthfuls. Why don't you shorten their name?” So really, Miscellaneous Stones, it's only when she's talking to herself or somebody's like being very stern who knows her very well, they might call her Miscellaneous Stones, but mostly she's talking to herself, and to everybody else in the text, she's Lanie. And I know this is a lot. Okay, but so it went out on submission when it was accepted, everybody was super excited, and the editor at the time at Rebellion. Kate Coe, who was a darling and just like would respond to me in all caps in her emails, which was exactly how I think so I was like, “Ooh all caps. We're best friends!” But one of her suggestions was like, “We're super on board. We like the title, but you really have to know what you're reading in order to understand it. Do you have anything else?” And I think that I probably had been prepared in some way, like, I had a notion for years possibly that this wasn't exactly the right title. But maybe I was too lazy, or you get really attached, so I had the title almost right away. Knowing that Lanie is a devotee of the goddess of death, Doédenna, and her nickname is Saint Death, and their relationship is that of like best friends, or acolyte and divine, or mother and daughter.Lanie has a very complicated relationship with mother figures. So. In this grand scheme of the idea of Lanie and her arc that hopefully will have other books in it. But even if it was just this one book, I wanted to give her in this book: she's a daughter. And when you're the daughter of a celebrity, like a god, for example, who you are is defined by who you come from. So it's like, “You’re Saint Death's daughter.” That's how people think of you. That's why you're important.And I feel like, in that sense, it defines her. It's also something to chafe against, like what else is she besides a necromancer? This is one of the questions. You know, who are you when you're not your vocation? But the the whole arc lends itself to the title. Saint Death's Daughter, Saint Death's Herald, Saint Death's Doorway is a progression of character and duties and power, I think, until you become the doorway through which the dead have passage basically into the god. That's her trajectory in my head, even if she never gets there on the page, which I hope she will. At least I know, and it makes sense, and I proposed that as a series of titles for a proposed trilogy and they leapt on it. And so there might have been even more titles out there, but that was the first thing that I thought, “Oh I think they'll like this.” And they did! And I didn't have to think about it anymore.JuliaOkay, so you said you have already future titles planned. Do you actually have book deals for those, or is it something that you're hoping might happen sometime?ClaireI don't have book deals. I think a few things are just up in the air and I kind of talk to my agent about it a little and he's like let's just see what happens, so it's sort of that. Also, Kate, who was the one who acquired Saint Death's Daughter, has since moved on from Rebellion to do her own thing. I think that I'm just going to see where this book goes. If Rebellion doesn't end up wanting it for whatever reason, and I'm not sure, I haven't written them yet, then I probably will still write them because I want to. And thanks to you, Julia, you have taught me of the wonderful wide world of self-publishing, which I have dabbled in mostly because of you. Also I have some really great connections with small presses that maybe if I made really big eyes at them and came like a small mouse skeleton with, you know, shiny, dead, undead eyes and blinked my bony eyelashes… Maybe they'd be like, “Okay, Claire I could just maybe do this for you.” Or at least or at least help me package it somehow. I'd probably hire a team or do a Kickstarter or something you know, um maybe not Kickstarter. Whatever is the least evil at the time. If it comes to that, I feel like I want to tell the story and so… but until I know I'm just going to wait a few months and then I'll ping my agent again see what he thinks. I'm also working on so many other things so it's sort of like, “But I've made a promise in Saint Death's Daughter. I've tried to do two things. 1) I've tried to give a full complete book that stands alone and that, if it leaves you wanting more, it also leaves you satisfied which is a trick, you know. Like, did I pull it off? Did I not? But I feel like I've told a whole story, and left enough threads that, if I never write them, then hopefully there's a team of like fan fiction writers who could take it and run with it. You know? But if I do write it, I've given myself a lot of threads into the future, which, in my head, I have followed out to many different conclusions.JuliaYeah, I mean, I think I definitely felt like the ending did tie everything up that really needed to be tied up, in that there weren't so many burning questions that I had at the end that I was like, “Oh no, and now I'm at the end of the book and there's nothing I can do!” Which I feel like happens when you have books that are a series that end in Cliff hangers a lot of the time. ClaireYeah I don't like cliffhangers because you know many of our beloved fantasy writers have had these long book deals and then life got in the way and people get bitterly bitterly angry. But there's nothing —you can't force somebody to write, and this one took, you know, twelve years. I don't think the other two will take twelve years, but how many more sets of twelve years do I even have, you know? And at what point will this story not be pertinent anymore? You know, as far as the one I need to be telling as a writer.JuliaGreat questions. So, you mentioned that you're working on a lot of other things, and I know that you're always working on a lot of things. Ah, but this is interesting. I don't know how you're going to answer this one. It's another Patron question. They ask, “What do you do when you're low on ideas?” and I was like I don't know that I've ever known Claire to be low on ideas… But do you get low on ideas? And if so, what do you do?ClaireI can answer that because up until 2019, I would say, maybe 2015 to 2019, I don't know if I was low on ideas, but it felt… it was that burnt out, like charcoal in the back of the mouth feeling that writing feels like sharpening your teeth on cement, you know? Like that terrible feeling of, “I don't want to, but if I don't, then all of my life to this point has been wasted.” That’s just a terrible place to write in. You know like the burnt out thing. Um, but once Saint Death's Daughter, which was not Saint Death's Daughter at the time, had been drafted to the fullness of its ability and turned into my agent... So, after eight drafts I sent it to an agent who finally liked it enough to say sure, asked me for two more drafts, took me another year and a half to do… So, that was turned in. And it was also at the end of 2019 when my novella, Desdemona and the Deep, came out. It always ends up that no matter how you try to space them, all your deadlines end up in the same week for projects you've been working on for a decade and a half, or five years, the last three years. It's like it doesn't matter. They just all end up due that same week.And so Desdemona had gone through its rewrites and its copy edits and it was coming out that July, and for a little bit, there was nothing impending on my plate that needed to be done that anybody wanted and that I had been working on for years already. So I was like, “I am not going to write again until I can do it in joy.” And I was seriously, like it had been so long since I'd felt joy or had been allowed to work on a new thing. “Allowed” you know in quotes, right? Because you have to finish what you started or else, again, you've —well this is for me; this is my voice in my head— you've wasted the last twenty years of your life and all of the money you spent on college. But it was a firm like, “I'm not going to sit down every day and try to be disciplined and try to write for the sake of writing. You know? just I don't want to do it. I don't. I don't want to waste my life in that way anymore.” And so I just kind of like didn't for a few weeks. You know, I can't remember how long, but I stared out a lot of windows, and I read romance novels and mysteries. And, you know, I alarmed a lot of my family who are like, “You can't stop writing! What will you do?”And I'm like, “Well, something that makes me happy, hopefully!” And then on the way to an event for Carlos —Carlos is my husband, and it was that was the year Sal and Gabi Break the Universe came out, I think. Either Break or Fix. I think it was Break came out in 2019 and Fix came out in 2020 because it was a pandemic book— it was a Disney event, and it was in the Bronx, it was the Bronx is Reading Book Festival, and I was staring out the window in this car that had been called up for him, very fancy-like, and we were passing rows and rows of houses and the thought came to me. It was a random thought. It was just like, “What if houses were people?” Like just very random, very gentle. And it was that what if moment that I hadn't felt it in so long. I was so surprised by it. I was so delighted. My brain, it was in that feeling of it was so hard to concentrate on anything else with the story that was building almost like a dam behind my eyelids.I went to bed, wide-eyed in the dark that night, fell asleep, woke up. We were getting coffee and tea in the kitchen, and I was like, “And then this happens in the buh buh buh buh…” But I told Carlos the whole story that had just occurred to me in the last twelve hours or so, and he asked me a lot of questions, and then I sat down and I started writing it longhand, which I hadn't done again for years. And took the time I wanted to. Stopped when my hand got tired. And in a few months, I had a whole novella drafted.Then I was like, “I'll type that when I feel like it.” And so was like, again, “I'm not going to write anything till I feel like it.” A few weeks later I had a really cool, funny romcom dream where a girl who was a severe introvert had to go to three different weddings in a single day, and she had to like change into a different bridesmaid outfit for each of them and they were all across town from each other, and I was like, “That would be a really fun plot for a novel if I could manage it.”And of course me being me, I write fantasy more than romance, though I often have romance elements. And so I was like, “Oh, I could set it in the world of Desdemona and the Deep and Dark Breakers! Ooh, but what if it wasn't in the gilded age equivalent that those stories are in? What if it was like in their 1980s? So what if there are like boomboxes and like space travel? But she's a goblin!” And then it just went on, and she's a severe introvert, and goblins are sort of —in that world— have a lot of spider-like attributes. So, it's like what if she's like a brown recluse? But like she's super, super introverted. She'll bite you if you come up on her unexpectedly. She's kind of a computer nerd. She grinds lenses. Like you look through the lenses and each lens does different things. So anyway, I just fell in love with her and I wrote this RomCom. Again, just typed it out. It was supposed to be very light and funny, and I did the first draft, and it was done in like two months or so. And that was 2019.So I guess that what I do now, if I'm feeling low energy —well, then the pandemic happened and a whole different thing happened— but I try to do a couple things, like 1) write when it feels joyful, but 2) since I often want to write but have low energy, what has worked for me lately is making writing dates with other writers to do a silent Zoom together, like a cafe. There are whole cafe kind of —like my friends in Chicago have this virtual cafe where people go and they are kind of like hosting for hour sessions and on the the top of the hour everybody chats for about 15 minutes, then they do a timed sprint for 45 minutes that's quiet, and then they'll do that. Maybe that will last 3 hours. And there's another one that some playwriting friends started, but it starts very rigidly 9:00 every morning and very rigidly closes at noon. And when I need more pressure than I give myself, just like constraint and pressure, I set my alarm for 5 minutes before 9:00, check my email for the link (it comes every day regardless of whether I sign in), and get my butt in the chair so that I'm kind of responsible to somebody. And then I sit and write for that time because those constraints, nobody's making me but the constraints in place, or this kind of social aspect, even though there's not a lot of interaction, have really given me the little energetic boost to get my butt in the chair —sitzfleisch— and to do to do some of that work.JuliaOkay, so I feel like all of this was amazing and fascinating. But if I boil it down to bullet points, what I've got is if you are feeling overwhelmed because everything has become too much and you can't find joy in your writing, the best thing to do is to actively take a break and not write. And then your ideas will start flowing again once you've actually allowed yourself to relax. ClaireThat's the hope, sure. JuliaBut that seems to be what happened for you?ClaireYes.JuliaBecause rest is part of the cycle, I think. I mean, that sort of goes along with the theory of fallow fields and crops. You need to not harvest every single season because if you do your field will just run completely out of rich minerals in the soil.ClaireYes, my father called it fertile boredom.JuliaOkay, so there's that, and then the second thing is: it helps you to have community accountability, and so having friends that are also writing at the same time as you is helpful.ClaireYeah, and that's a recent development. That was a pandemic development. I think it started a little bit before, but I didn't notice. It was when Carlos and I both had drafts due at the same time, and we started working together. So, suddenly to have two people and a deadline, it's almost like being in college where right after college it was really hard to write for a little while because there was no expectation of turning anything in, or a certain page number, but before college I wrote all the time! 8 to 10 hours, just for fun, and it was really hard. Like, how do you do that again? How do you want to do that again?And I never have gotten back to that level of desire and losing myself, except for moments, but like once you have the pressure and the deadline and the expectation. It's really hard to do it just for fun for me. But and with Carlos and I both writing together, it was so pleasurable and so much easier. And I recently learned a friend, not a friend, an acquaintance. A friendly acquaintance, who I was doing a podcast with through Rebellion, was telling me that she has ADHD and that when she sits with her partner and he's working and very focused and she's writing, she suddenly can focus a lot easier, and that her therapist called it body doubling. And I realized that's probably what was happening with me and Carlos. We were body doubling. And it seems to be what has been helping me the most now, in that kind of… this scattered, like, what day is it? What even is time? Who am I? I was like, “Oh. Other writers are in the world! Dee dee dee dee dee!” You know?JuliaThat's really interesting I find it's this is sort of the opposite for me, and I bring this up because I know that people listening to this are wondering about different processes, and I'm just here to tell you there are so many different processes! And the correct trick is just finding whatever works for you, and it might be different from time to time, but like don't feel like anything is how it always works and has to work that way and if it doesn't you're wrong. ClaireYeah.JuliaBut for me, I find that when I try to do group writing type things where it's, you know, 45 minutes of writing and fifteen minutes of chat, whether it's in person or in video or whatever, I am usually way less productive. It's hard hard for me to get into a good zone for work, and I kind of have to do stuff being on my own.ClaireThat's historically been true for me too.JuliaBefore the pandemic, I used to go to my local coffee shop, and I was a regular! The entire staff knew me. They all knew what drinks I liked! Like, I could walk in the door and they'd start making me a drink because they already knew what I wanted. That is how much I was in there. And I would just spend all day.ClaireI Love that.JuliaBut I would do it on my own, and I just kind of let the the roar of people chatting and drinking coffee around me be background, but I wouldn't have to pay attention to any of it. If I'm there with other people who are there for the same purpose, all of my focus goes out the window. And I don't know why. That's just always been the way it is. So like the body doubling thing doesn't—it's like a distraction instead of a.ClaireWell, it's so interesting because historically I never could write in a cafe or a library. Carlos is really good at that. But I look at too many people. It's really like I could do it if I put earphones on and made like ocean sounds and almost a shade over my eyes. It's too much and and generally, historically, I've always written alone, so this new development during the pandemic, like something else was happening that was even bigger than my need to isolate and focus, which was always a big need for me. So the other thing that I do, when I don't want people, is make it beautiful. So, like, light a candle, sometimes I do essential oils, or a smell, or like clear off my desk. Right? Handwrite, use a different ink, you know. Or like just something that makes it different. And make it beautiful. To make it ritual, almost, so that it's a different space. So that it's pleasurable, or sensual, to do the thing rather than drudgery.JuliaThat's really interesting. Do you find that the environment that you create for your writing affects what you put on the page?ClaireI don't know, but I would say that it's harder or easier depending on the environment to write at all. I like having a window to look out of. It's harder for me to pay attention if I'm looking at a wall. So, I would say all of the things that make it easier to get my butt in the chair. It's sort of like if it's attractive to be in the chair, then it's easier. But if it's sort of like, ehhh, I have to settle, and I have to be here, and I have to like shade my eyes and hide my ears, and like not pay attention to all the people around me. You know, I can get stuff done, but historically, I would say it's easier to do nonfiction blogging administrative work in that situation. Like, I can do administrative work at a cafe but fiction really really hard to do. I am audience motivated just like I'm food motivated. So if I know like my mom has heard the last chapter and she's like, “What's going to happen next?” That also motivates me to write because I've always read aloud my work. The instant I've written a sentence, I'm like, “Listen to this, guys!” So that's another thing that works for me, but some people would be… like I think for you, the idea of somebody immediately listening to your first draft would be so horrifying that it would stop you from writing, so that's where we're different, too. JuliaI'm a “not sharer” so I did the recent process post about one of the stories that I had written, and that was a really big step for me, because it was, “Okay, well, you want to know about what I was thinking, and I'm going to share with you things that feel very close and personal about like my process and my life.” ClaireYeah. Yeah.JuliaAnd my first drafts feel that way. I'm like, “What, you want to see… you want to like open up my insides and look at them? I don't think that sounds comfortable.”ClaireAnd for me, it's like, “Look at me! It's all sequins in here!”And that is where we’re leaving off for this episode. Next time we’ll get into how many drafts Claire typically writes for a project, what her agent search was like, how the final version of the book changed over time, and what it was like to narrate the audiobook version. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to have the chance to ask your own questions, or request specific kinds of posts from me, consider joining my patreon which is at patreon.com/juliarios, or my substack, which is at omgjulia.substack.com All patrons and subscribers get early access to every piece of creative work I commission from other creators in my Worlds of Possibility project, and your pledges and subscriber fees go directly to help pay for those stories and poems and things. I just wrapped up my first open submission period for that project, and there are SO MANY cool stories in my second round consideration pile. It’s going to be really hard to choose which ones I can actually accept, and I can’t wait to share them with you!Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you next time. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby is now in the public domain. This gives us the opportunity to dig deeper and fuller into the cultural image of our iconic literary figure. Join the East Side Freedom Library and literary curator Danny Klecko at The University Club in welcoming AJ Odasso in conversation with Maryanne Grossmann! We will also be joined by special guests Doug Green, Kasey Payette, Klecko, Anthony Cebellos and emcee Clarence White. The queering of Gatsby takes form in the new novel, The Pursued and the Pursuing by AJ Odasso. In their tale, Odasso explores what might have been had it left Gatsby with another chance at happiness. Find it he does, although not in the arms of Daisy Buchanan. As Gatsby travels the world with Nick Carraway, his friend and narrator, he sheds wealth, performance, and glamor in favor of honesty, intimacy, and love. A. J. Odasso's poetry has appeared in a variety of publications, including Sybil's Garage, Mythic Delirium, Midnight Echo, Not One of Us, Dreams & Nightmares, Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, Farrago's Wainscot, Liminality, Battersea Review, Barking Sycamores, and New England Review of Books. A.J.'s debut collection, Lost Books (Flipped Eye Publishing), was nominated for the 2010 London New Poetry Award and was also a finalist for the 2010–11 People's Book Prize. Her second collection with Flipped Eye, The Dishonesty of Dreams, was released in 2014; their third collection, Things Being What They Are, was shortlisted for the 2017 Sexton Prize. They hold an MFA in creative writing from Boston University, and works in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico. A.J. has served in the Poetry Department at Strange Horizons since 2012. They live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. View the video here: https://youtu.be/PLBmwyW_jOk

The rarest and wisest characters tell their own tale and create their own mythology. C.S.E. Cooney, Mimi Mondal, and Joshua A.C. Newman bring you characters that refuse to conform. "The Foxgirl Cycle" by C.S.E. Cooney, Read by C.S.E. Cooney, produced by Jeremy Cooney and Stefan Mark Dollak C.S.E. Cooney is the author of World Fantasy Award-winning Bone Swans: Stories. Her short novel The Twice-Drowned Saint is included in Mythic Delirium's anthology The Sinister Quartet. Her forthcoming novel Saint Death's Daughter will be out with Rebellion in Spring of 2022. Other work includes Tor.com novella Desdemona and the Deep, and short fiction and poetry in Jonathan Strahan's anthology Dragons, Ellen Datlow's Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Rich Horton's Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. Aspiring dungeon master, audiobook engineer, podcaster, and musician, Jeremy Cooney draws inspiration from bawdy pirate tales, Irish and American folk music, sword and sorcery fantasy, and gritty science fiction. His projects include Hail the Void (a 5th Edition DnD podcast starring his companion, his brother, his mother, and his friends) and editing and production of the Gown of Harmonies audiobook by Francessca Forrest. ​The early music specialist Stefan Mark Dollak plays lutes, hurdy-gurdy, the pipe & tabor, the bladder-pipe, guitar, mandolin, pennywhistle, ukulele, harmonica, krummhorns, bass guitar, ocarina, and possibly other instruments. In addition to early music on period instruments, Stef has performed traditional folk music, classical, pop, world music, ambient, ritual, trance, and even a few showtunes. "Sailing to the Underworld" by Mimi Mondal with Joshua A.C. Newman, Read by Jose Febus Mimi Mondal is a Dalit writer of speculative fiction and social-justice nonfiction, and the Poetry and Reprints Editor of Uncanny Magazine. Her first anthology, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler, co-edited with Alexandra Pierce, was published by Twelfth Planet Press in 2017. Mimi's writings have also appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Anathema Magazine,The Book Smugglers, Podcastle, Daily Science Fiction, Scroll.in, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship for the Clarion West Writing Workshop in 2015. More about her background, politics, literary tastes and editorial preferences can be found at this interview with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Mimi lives in Manhattan and tweets from @Miminality. Joshua A.C. Newman is a publisher, author, illustrator, game designer, graphic designer, and experimental musician. He lives in Arkham, Massachusetts with no cats and a suspicious pile of electronic components. Jose Febus's credits include the short film " Not Guilty" for which the award of Best Actor was honored at the My Final Shot Production Film Festival. Other films include Attempted Burglary, Plurality and Chicago Boricua. Television credits include The Path, Blindspot, Law & Order, Law & Order Criminal Intent. Web Series - East Willy B. His Off-Off Broadway credits include O'Rex with the G&F Company, The Deep Run at PRTT and Acts of Mercy written by Michael John Garces at The Rattlestick Theater. Regional credits include Ana in the Tropics at the Portland Center Stage, Williamstown Theater and the Hartford Stage Co. jlfebus@hotmail.com

Author : Maria Haskins Narrator : Amy H. Sturgis Host : Amy Brennan Audio Producer : Jeremy Carter Artist : Alexis Goble This story was previously published in Mythic Delirium, April 2018, and in Cast of Wonders Episode 401 in February 2020 Mothers, Watch Over Me by Maria Haskins Even in the dream, Maya knows […] The post Cast of Wonders 442: Staff Picks 2020 – Mothers, Watch Over Me appeared first on Cast of Wonders.

The Mermaids Monthly Kickstarter is in its home stretch! We’re almost to 75% funded, and we have 6 days to get all the way there! In this episode of the OMG Julia podcast, I asked one of our awesome contributors, Patty Templeton, to join me and talk a bit about the limited edition art she created, and about her half of an Each to Each collaboration with her partner, Brett Massé.The Each to Each feature series in Mermaids Monthly is going to be a series of collaborative works by creators who have deep personal connections, and also by creators who have never met before. I talked in depth about the whole idea, and how anyone can submit to be part of a collaboration in our latest Kickstarter update, so go over there to read more if you are curious! Patty’s art piece is called “So Alive” and you can get it as a limited edition, numbered linocut print, or you can back us at the sticker level and get it on a sticker. Patty tells us all about her inspiration for the piece, and the process of creating linocut prints. Long story short, the stamp degrades during the printmaking process, so there will never be more than 25 of these original prints! Image description: “So Alive” by Patty Templeton. A black ink print from a linocut of a live, weird mer-creature inspired by the Fiji Mermaid advertised in old side shows. It’s ugly and weird and magnificent, and Patty envisions it as having evolved this way naturally rather than being a sewn-together dead monster. Stickers and limited edition prints are available through the Mermaids Monthly Kickstarter until the 12th of December, 2020.Patty also tells us a bit about the story she’s writing, which I haven’t yet read, so you get to hear my first reaction to it. Spoiler alert: it sounds so fun! I can’t wait to read the whole story! And she talks a bit about collaborating with her partner, Brett, and about the different kinds of art they’ve both made. Here’s a short list of places to find their work:Patty did the cover for the Brimstone Rhine Album, Corbeau Blanc, Corbeau Noir. Brett did the layout and interior design for Mythic Delirium’s novella anthology, A Sinister Quartet. Patty wrote a historical fantasy novel about Sarah Winchester called There Is No Lovely End. Brett did the cover art for C. S. E. Cooney’s The Witch in the Almond Tree. Patty interviewed Zig Zag Claybourne for Black Gate Magazine about finding joy and Zig Zag’s new book, Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe.Brett has a zine called Ghoul, and Patty contributed a story to the first volume!And of course, to get Patty’s art and story, and Brett’s art in response to Patty’s story, back Mermaids Monthly on Kickstarter! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Author : Maria Haskins Narrator : Amy H. Sturgis Host : Katherine Inskip Audio Producer : Jeremy Carter Artist : Alexis Goble This story was previously published in Mythic Delirium, April 2018 The document mentioned in Katherine’s comments, “Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant”, can be […] The post Cast of Wonders 401: Mothers, Watch Over Me appeared first on Cast of Wonders.

We’re in the thick of Women and Aliens month, and we’re keeping it going with an original commissioned story— “The Moving Stars” by Premee Mohamed. Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and specfic auhor based out of Canada. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Pseudopod, Mythic Delirium, Automata Review, and other venues.  Her debut […] The post Drabblecast 402 – The Moving Stars appeared first on The Drabblecast.

Sugar and Spice by Jennifer R. Donohue.  Narrated by J.S. Arquin.  Featuring an afterword written by Jennifer R. Donohue.  #Fantasy #Magic #Witches #Witchcraft  There was a brisk knock at the door and, deaf or no, Lucky was on her feet in an instant with a sharp bark.  Helena sighed and set aside her knitting, the knock coming again before she could reach the door.  The next door neighbor, Mr. Sharp, was on her porch, hatless and without his usual greatcoat. Jennifer R. Donohue grew up at the Jersey Shore and now lives in central New York with her husband and her Doberman.  Though she got a bachelor's degree in psychology, she has always wanted to write.  She currently works at her local public library, where she also facilitates a writing workshop, and she is now a Codexian and an Associate member of the SFWA.  Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Mythic Delirium, Syntax & Salt, Escape Pod, and elsewhere.  She blogs at Authorized Musings, where she shares fiction and the tribulations of the writing life, and tweets @AuthorizedMusin. Please help support The Overcast.  Become A Patron Today! Subscribe at iTunes or Stitcher so you never miss an episode.  While you're there, don't forget to leave a review!  

    Episode 64 is a GLITTERSHIP ORIGINAL and is part of the Spring 2018 issue! Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/     Sabuyashi Flies by Sebastian Strange   Sofie Faucher advertised her solution to the age-old magic problem well. I can still remember the first night I stepped out of Ellen’s dorm building, late, and looked up to see one of Faucher’s billboards; a crisp square of white and silver against the darkest, featuring Faucher’s trim torso and winning smile. Her large dark eyes were fixed on the future, somewhere behind me and much higher up, and her hands clasped a glass pitcher full of shimmering silver. NOBODY HAS TO DIE was written across the bottom. FAUCHER’S SPARK. [Full story after the cut.]   Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 64. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a piece of original fiction, "Sabuyashi Flies" by Sebastian Strange, and a poem, "how to exist in between" by Danny McLaren. Danny McLaren is a queer and non binary writer who uses they/them pronouns. They have been writing short fiction and poetry for as long as they can remember, but only entered the world of publishing this year. They are currently an undergraduate student majoring in gender studies. They often explore themes associated with mental health, gender, identity, and social justice in their work. They are an editor and co-founder of Alien Pub, an arts and culture magazine.     How to exist in between   find a crack in the floorboards where you can hide.this will be your home.don’t worry if you can’t fit now; their words will make you feel small enough to fall through the slats eventually.listen to the footsteps and laughter above,hear how they stomp around with violent intent.know they’d crush you if they knew you were here. teach yourself to be quiet enough that no one pays you any attention.it’s better to go unseen than draw the eye of someone unkind,someone with a word or two for people like you.feel their eyes on you either way,and know that the questions about your hair, your clothes, your voice, are already on their lips.walk faster, so that you’re gone before they can speak. take note of what they say when they think you can’t hear.scribble them all down in the back of your notebook,everything overheard in the back of a lecture hall,or on the bus,or to your mother,save them for a time when you will need to be reminded why you exist,why you continue to exist. ask them to call you by your name.when they don’t, hold your tongue.when they ask if you are a boy or a girl, say no.you do not owe them an answer, least of all to a question for which you have none.remember how they seem to take offence to your pronouns, as if your existence has anything to do with them.know that these people are not worth your time.know that one day you will find ones who are.     Sebastian Strange writes from Ohio but still feels like a New Englander. His fiction has been published in Mythic Delirium and Crossed Genres. Find him trying to figure out Twitter at @MonstrousMor. "Sabuyashi Flies" was narrated by Maria Rose. Maria Rose is a graphic designer, writer, astrologer, classicist. Sometimes saturnine, mostly eccentric. You can hear her audiobook narration work in “Messengers of the Right” from University of Press Audiobooks or at Gallery of Curiosities Podcast.     Sabuyashi Flies by Sebastian Strange   Sofie Faucher advertised her solution to the age-old magic problem well. I can still remember the first night I stepped out of Ellen’s dorm building, late, and looked up to see one of Faucher’s billboards; a crisp square of white and silver against the darkest, featuring Faucher’s trim torso and winning smile. Her large dark eyes were fixed on the future, somewhere behind me and much higher up, and her hands clasped a glass pitcher full of shimmering silver. NOBODY HAS TO DIE was written across the bottom. FAUCHER’S SPARK. Some of the early adverts, I heard, had the outline of a raven by the product name, or sketched on the glass container. The papers went briefly wild over it—she was said to be catering to Galenites, who were a fringe element and shouldn’t be catered to; then everyone printed letters from Galenites who supported Faucher and thought she was bringing in the future, and Galenites who thought she was perverting everything Galen Guntram had stood for and ought to be stopped. How, they didn’t specify; there was no law against taking Galen Guntram’s name in vain. I just thought if you were really a Galenite, you would have to be pretty stupid to write in to a paper, because your letters would probably get seized by the police and used to track you. It wasn’t against the law to be a Galenite (yet) but it was considered unpatriotic and in bad taste. And in these days, those things could get you shot. L’Amérique la belle—that’s what my mother always muttered when she saw another death on the news. She was Japanese, not French, but she learned a little French from my father; said she liked the sarcastic, slippery sound of it. My father came from France, but was Roma by birth; I don’t mention that part to most people; I’m tired of being asked about ‘living on the road’. I don’t know much about how my father lived, but I was born in America, in a slender apartment; number five in building number four in the housing for the magicians America had imported from other countries. Mama told me the walls were so thin everyone heard me crying, and before long the doctor opened the door to a handful of women bearing gifts. They were all from different countries, and only one of them spoke broken French and another knew a few textbook phrases in Japanese, but Mama said they managed to understand each other. Food and smiles and helping hand when it was needed—that was the language of people far from home. The crying child says, there is need, and in return you silently say I will help you, and an equally silent promise is made in return. Mama told me what all the women looked like, so if I ever met them again I could pay them back. I never quite knew what she expected me to do. These days, I could offer them a spell, but back then I had my chubby fingers dipped in ink and four-fifths of my soul signed over to the Massachusetts Department of Magicians before I could write my name. The price for the housing, and the monthly allowance; my father had already used two of his spells when he’d heard about the program, and they’d wanted magicians with more to spare. So he’d thrown in his firstborn child and, amazingly, America shrugged and accepted. L’Amérique la belle!   Faucher’s Spark appeared in my first year of college, and I tried it at the end of my second. My father was dying, of a sickness nobody could quite explain or pinpoint, so I’d started drinking a little to see if it dulled the pain. It didn’t do much, but at the third party I got into, the boy presiding over it all (Jack, English, stupidly rich) produced a bottle of Faucher’s and announced he’d be mixing drinks with it for anyone brave enough to try. Ellen, ignoring my horrified whispers, was the first to swagger forward and offer herself as a test subject. I watched as she swirled the silver liquid into her half-depleted drink, swigged the rest, and grimaced. “It tastes nasty,” she declared, then shuddered. Put her hand out in the air with a look of wonder, more as if she were high than drunk, and snapped her fingers. Feathers materialized, tiny and glittery and perfect. Snap, and they became bubbles before they touched the floor. She snapped again, but nothing happened. Turning around, she thrust her glass out at Jack. “I don’t care how horrible it tastes,” she said. “Fill it up.” I went up somewhere in the second wave, the people who weren’t brave enough to leap forward immediately but didn’t want to feel left out. Jack dripped a tiny amount into my glance, giving me a half-smile. I couldn’t tell if it was cruel or flirtatious; either was equally unwelcome. Faucher’s goes down smooth but sick-tasting, like meat and polluted earth. But in your belly, it sings. It warms you from the inside out, and makes you feel invincible. And when I held out my hands, a rain of jewel-like beetles pattered down into them. They clung tight to me, friendly but not invasive, crawling over my shoulders and tickling inside my shirt collar. They scared away a boy or two who got too near, and I whispered thanks to them. I got drunk enough in the early morning to walk home, wanting to show my father, but by the time I got there they’d dissolved into nothing; leaving a thin, dry layer on my skin, like the aftermath of a soap bubble. My father believed me anyway, listened to my babbled descriptions of their beauty with his hand on my hand. “They sound wonderful, Sabuyashi,” he told me. “I’m sure your mother would have been proud.”   My mother was a beetle enthusiast. Her great-great-grandmother had discovered the sabuyashi beetle, and my mother lived joyously in the shadow of that glory. She died when I was twelve, but almost died before I was born; she stowed away on a ship out of Japan when she was eighteen (having presumably exhausted the store of interesting beetles in Japan) and was found mid-voyage. It was between wars but women have rarely been treated kindly on the sea, especially when they don’t speak the language the sailors know. My mother spoke only a few words of English, the language they tried to address her in, and lost them all in her fright. She only survived because one of the men spoke up for her, pointed out to his fellows that she seemed harmless enough. She never told me that man’s name or what he looked like, and she told me why shortly before she died. “He wanted something from me, Sabuyashi,” she said. “Something I didn’t want to give. It’s not important whether he got it or not; what’s important is that you recognize there are people who will offer help, and not truly mean it. Learn to recognize those who mean it and those who don’t.” I don’t know if I’ve learned to tell the difference yet, but my mother escaped from the man’s clutches when they stopped at their next port. She dove into the winding streets of a city she didn’t know with nothing but her case full of beetle specimens, and somehow survived. That’s always how she put it—somehow, with a little shrug. “How?” I’d ask. I was practical and stubborn as a child; uncertainties bothered me. “Oh, you know—by the grace of God. With magic.” “But you’re not a magician.” She’d always shrug and start humming. After ten minutes of humming and fruitless questions on my part, she’d pick up the story again as if she’d never left it, telling how a sabuyashi beetle had led her to my father. He had met her when he took his mother to the local doctor, and found a strange woman hovering around the doctor’s doorstep, examining beetle nests through a magnifying glass. “And he fell in love,” she proclaimed, “the first moment he saw me.” “I don’t believe you,” I said. I was a rude kid. “Nobody does that.” “He did! He fell in love the moment he saw me. I could see it in his eyes. All because sabuyashi beetles had brought us together. And magic.” Even at nine, I knew how magic worked. “Magic comes from the soul,” I told her, with the patronizing tone only available to ninety-year-old professors and nine-year-old children. “It can’t be produced without sacrifice, and you can only do five spells before you die. Magic doesn’t make people meet.” “It did with us,” she’d say, and start humming again. I thought she was mean, at nine years old. I’d just begun to comprehend that I’d had a chunk of my life signed away before I could hold a pen, and it seemed incredibly unfair. I hated magic and resented my father, and it seemed callous to love them both so obviously in my presence. Now it just seems callous of the world to take her before I could comprehend how brave she was. I used to blame God, but I’m old enough to put two and two together now, and know that God didn’t make her vanish into thin air. I don’t know whether it was some idiot’s grudge held from the second war against anyone with a Japanese face, or a killer who targeted any kind of woman, or a goddamn accident someone decided to cover up in a shallow grave. I only know she’s gone, and magic can’t bring back the dead. Not even Faucher’s can manage that.   “But we’re working on it,” Sofie Faucher told me, during my interview at the Spark store. “I don’t believe in ‘impossible’.” I nodded, awe-stricken. I hadn’t been prepared to meet her; I’d been assigned an interview with the store manager, a thin man called Martin with a Galenite tattoo on his upper arm that had been awkwardly converted from a raven into a constellation in the night sky. But Sofie had slid through the door five minutes past the assigned time, announced brightly that she liked to drop by stores and interview various candidates herself, and taken my resume from my surprised hand. “Nobody has to die,” I quoted, finding my voice. Sofie smiled brilliantly, and my heart flopped from side to side. “You got it! Of course that referred to the old way of doing magic, the…” she gestured, frowning, “…ripping your soul into pieces thing… Honestly, how did that get off the ground? What fifteenth century geniuses discovered you could rip your soul, your God-given life, out of your body and decided it was a good idea?” I shrugged helplessly. My father had called it the most beautiful sacrifice possible. He’d never been a Galenite, but he’d died in a way they all dreamed of; using his last spell in a selfless gesture. “I’m already dying,” he’d said to me, gently, as I screamed. “Don’t get excited.” He somehow made me love and hate him with everything he did. Sofie brought me back to the real world by exclaiming over the front page of my resume, which she’d finally gotten around to reading. “Sabuyashi, like the beetle?” “Yes.” My hands clenched tight on my knees. I’d asked the Department for permission to use a less strange name on job applications, but they’d denied me. I don’t doubt they’d rather see me jobless, surviving only on the magician’s allowance. “I’m descended from the woman who discovered it.” “Never heard of who found it, but that is a wonderful coincidence. What do you think we use to give Faucher’s its silver color?” “The exoskeletons?” “Exactly! Sabuyashi, I do believe this is a coincidence ordained by God.” Sofie held out her hand and I took it, not sure of what she was doing, not sure what to do when she clasped it with both of her own. She looked into my eyes. “You’re not getting the counter job,” she announced. Before my face had time to fall, she continued. “You’re coming with me to where we make Faucher’s. You’re going to help me bring our magic to the whole wide world.” I didn’t believe my mother when she said you could fall in love in a moment. I wasn’t sure I believed my own lips when they said, “That sounds wonderful, Miss Faucher.” The whole meeting with Sofie felt like a dream. But it became easier to believe when I went to the MDM the next day and filed my right-to-move paperwork, and easier yet a week later when I demonstrated, in front of a very annoyed committee, that I could down a bottle of Faucher’s and produce magic without harming my precious soul. “Therefore,” Ellen announced, tapping my paperwork and leveling her best negotiator gaze at the men, “there is no reason for my client to undergo surveillance and live in state-mandated housing. She will be able to produce the two spells she still owes you at any time, with no danger that she’ll use her magic up before then.” They’d argued. Primarily that the formula to Faucher’s Spark was still a company secret, locked down tighter than the Coca-Cola recipe, and it was sure to be discovered to be made out of some unpatriotic material soon, and then where would I be? I finally signed an agreement stating I’d return to them in a hot second when Faucher’s folded, or risk jail time. Then we skipped town before they could figure out I wouldn’t come back if there was a gun to my head, and that Ellen wasn’t formally a lawyer yet. Sofie had already gone ahead, but when Ellen left me at the train station with a kiss to the cheek that made my heart jump, I found myself in the company of three other women on the way to Faucher’s headquarters. They all looked whiter than me, but they were polite enough; one told me stories about her great-grandmother, who was Chinese, and I was forgiving of her ignorance. We pooled our money for a bottle of wine and drank to our beautiful futures in the dining car, too full with thoughts of magic to be hurt by mundane things.   I discovered that while I’d assumed my role would be in managing things behind the scenes, Sofie had something different in mind for me. “You’re going to be one of the faces of Spark,” she told me, positioning me in front of a mirror. “We’ll have you photographed, perhaps painted as well. You’ll do demonstrations at parties. The girl who escaped the old way of magic and embraces the new. You’re perfect for this, Sabuyashi.” Looking at her brilliant eyes in the mirror, I couldn’t tell her no. She lingered even after she’d passed me into the hands of dresses and makeup artists, and I didn’t know whether to be pleased or terrified. She was more than a decade my senior, and looked like a woman accustomed to getting what she wanted, and I doubted what she and I wanted would quite match—women made my heart sing, but nobody ever roused my body. I could understand the appeal of sex in theory, but shied from it in practice. But for the moment I couldn’t help but enjoy her admiring glances, the compliments she offered on every potential dress. I had always dressed plainly, especially during the years in college that I felt lower than I ever had before, but I didn’t dislike pretty things; just couldn’t quite figure out how they worked. It was a strange, disquiet joy to watch myself transform in the mirror from a recognizable slip of a woman to a glittering stranger. They swathed me in silver and white, painted my eyelids with silver dust. “This is made with sabuyashi beetles as well,” the girl on makeup told me; meant kindly, I knew, but it made my stomach churn for a moment. I wasn’t sure why; my mother loved beetles, but nature was far more vicious than man to them. You couldn’t get sad about them dying without being sad every three seconds, and I didn’t want to be sad. I never wanted to be sad again. And finally, they put a glass jug in my hands. I felt myself slip into a dreamlike state again as I was photographed; I felt as if I were looking at myself from the outside, from below that billboard years ago. “We’re working on new slogans now,” I hear Sofie saying distantly, as if I’m underwater. “Something to work with how angelic you look, how you don’t have to be trapped as a state magician anymore. Whole and Free.” “The Sabuyashi flies,” a woman pinning my skirt suggested. “Clever, but I’m not sure if enough people will get it.” “The sabuyashi beetle doesn’t fly when it’s silver,” I heard myself saying. “It’s only after it sheds the silver coat that it flies. It’s brown then, and has three markings—” “That’s nice, sweetheart,” the woman pinning my dress said. “Nobody will know that.” The camera flashed again and again, people cooed and argued, and I swam around the space above myself. I only drifted back down when someone took the jug out of my hands and Sofie put a hand on my shoulder. “I must run now,” she said, “but we’ll see each other soon enough. Get some rest, say some prayers. You look dazed, darling.” Someone else was holding my hand. I turned my head groggily to find a woman wiping off some silver glitter that had stuck to my wrist; she had paused, and was frowning at the paper-thin scar that ran up the inside of it. I pulled my hand away, and said to Sofie, “I’m just tired. Too much of a good thing.” Perhaps that was right. Perhaps that was why alarm bells kept ringing inside my head; I wasn’t used to good things happening, much less so many of them at once. I already knew my brain was slightly broken, had been since I was a child. That shouldn’t stop me from enjoying life.   There’s no way I can say that my sadness broke after my father died without seeming heartless. But it did; it broke like a storm, or a sudden overflowing of tears after several hard weeks—transforming from a continual, dull ache of depression into the rich depths of grief. I wept more than I ever had before, and after a while my tears dried. I could get out of bed again. I felt hungry, I could picture tomorrow in my head. Not next week or next month, but tomorrow was a victory in itself. My greatest fear was that I hadn’t really escaped the cloud that had hung over me for so long; that this was only a temporary lift, a hill rising out of the darkness, and before long I’d be going down again. I’d barely survived it last time. My greatest hope was that I could keep it at bay, because I had a theory and so far it had worked. When I was a teenager, just before I’d entered college, the Department had demanded one of the spells I owed them. I’d been transported from my front door to a helicopter to a slimy bank over a rapidly flooding town, pointed at a broken dam and told to fix it. I didn’t remember the next few hours; my father told me, later when he was bringing me tea in bed, that I’d mended the dam and replaced all the water where it had come from, then screamed and collapsed. I still don’t remember how I’d ripped a piece of my own soul out. Nobody could explain how it happened; some could do it and some couldn’t, like the ability to raise a single eyebrow or curl your tongue a certain way. But afterward I’d gone to college, and started to barely make it to my classes, and started to stay in bed longer each day and find it harder to eat and wash my hair and do all the little things that make up staying alive. I needed the spell to be the reason that it had happened. Because if that was true, I’d be OK. With Faucher’s Spark, I’d never have to damage my soul again. And even if I had only dubious faith in God, I did value whatever intangible thing lived inside me; if I had to sell Spark to keep it whole, I’d do it gladly. I tried to make myself stop wondering what it was made of, other than sabuyashi wings.   Drinking had never quite worked for me; I didn’t have the tolerance for alcoholism. But magic—that I could get drunk on. I went to parties and met polite, shriveled old men who I’d later learn held some government office I had never heard of. Occasionally I’d get something familiar, like a mayor, which was refreshing. Once the government personage was a stunning red-haired woman, her eyes bruised with lack of sleep. I poured her and I small glasses of Faucher’s and showed her how to make little butterflies appear from her cupped hands. Her smile stayed imprinted on my mind for weeks, shadowing me at other parties, making me smile when there was nothing to smile about. Most people didn’t want to touch Faucher’s themselves, not yet, despite its popularity among the richer parts of the new generation. So I’d swig a bottle in as genteel a manner as possible, trying not to grimace over its taste, and do requests. After Sofie put a blanket ban on anyone asking for ‘adult material’, things got more fun. I’d pull coins out of people’s ears, produce tame snakes out of lady’s hats. I’d move on to bigger things, folding napkins between my hands and shaking birds out of the folds; making a rainstorm briefly appear around the house, when the weather was favorable. When the weather wasn’t, I spent fifteen minutes explaining clouds to belligerent guests, internally bemused over how much they wanted rain. It had rained at my father’s funeral. I made myself a living cloak of sabuyashi beetles, and enjoyed the way people cringed away or looked at me with fascinated eyes. I spent half an evening showing an adventurous girl how to make sparks appear when she snapped her fingers, and left the party dizzy, with the taste of the wine she’d been drinking on my lips. I made a barren rosebush bloom in three different colors. I discovered the first small, caustic burns around my lips and eyes three weeks in. Sofie spaced my performances out after that, murmured something reassuring about Spark being mildly irritating to the body in excess, but not truly dangerous at all. The burns faded, but I began to dream; not nightmares, but strange dreams. That I was going to a corner store in a part of town that I’d never been to, that I was hurrying home through a side street where all the signs were in Spanish but I could read them easily. That I was standing over a man with a gun in my hands, and I was trying to remember something I’d read in a book about disposing of bodies. “What is Faucher’s Spark made of?” I asked Sofie, once. She gave me an odd, gentle look. “Honey, ask when you really want to know.” I didn’t ask again.   Blood was the one thing I couldn’t forget. My father had never been a Galenite, but he’d admired their spirit. I understood that better after he’d died; and that answered another question, why he’d chosen the path of a magician for me before I could choose for myself. He was confident that I’d find the same beauty in it, no matter how I was restricted. Galen Guntram had been a state magician, after all; but he’d used his magic impulsively, for love and healing and and other selfish things, until they cast him aside in disgust. Then he’d died young, saving some other lives with his last spell, and so got martyred when he might have only been a failure. I’d never been a Galenite, and when I was younger I couldn’t imagine tomorrow, much less finding beauty in a life that had already been signed away. Still, I can’t remember exactly what prompted the night I’d called a nurse to come see my father in the morning, locked myself in the bathroom, and opened a medical textbook to the section on veins. I still can’t remember the pain, or my father’s voice; just the slow, mesmerizing drip of blood from my body, and how it had finally stopped when my father closed his hands over my wrists.   Blood was, clearly, what Faucher’s was made of. “It’s more complicated than that,” Sofie said. We were sitting in her office; I’d pulled myself away from party preparation, already dripping silver and white, to sit in the chair across from her and point out the obvious. “It’s the essence, the soul it carries—and people donate it freely, you know.” “What people?” I could already guess; like I’d known about the blood for a long time, while turning my eyes away from it. “Criminals, darling.” “Prisoners.” Sofie smiled. “Same thing, isn’t it? They’re even compensated for it—not much, but more than they deserve. But it might cause upset, you know? People wouldn’t like to think of themselves—” “Drinking blood.” L’Amérique la belle. “Exactly. But it’s not like some people don’t know. I tell the people I do business with; they come around to it all right.” I looked down at my hands. “So instead of damaging your own soul, it’s outsourced to dozens of other people. That doesn’t seem right.” “Sabuyashi,” Sofie said, putting down her pen. “These are people with previously damaged souls—thieves and liars and killers. Not people like us.” “Good people.” “That’s right, honey.” She paused, and a note of regret entered her voice. “But if it’s too much of a problem for you, we could let you go. You’re perfect for this, but we can always find another girl who’s perfect for it, if you don’t want—” “I do want,” I said, and I knew she could hear the truth in my voice. “I want to keep doing this. I want the magic.” She touched my chin, smiled at me. “Then I’ll see you tonight.”   I did want the magic. Faucher’s Spark was how magic should work, I felt. A potion you could drink, that anyone could drink. Snap and you can make a little rainstorm. Snap and you can make a beetle that sang like a lark. Snap and you could kiss a girl without feeling quite so terrified. Good little magics, not the complex set-pieces and dramatic gestures of soul spells. No pain, just the unquiet dreams left behind in the blood, in the silver threads of soul woven through it. I stood at the heart of the group, my lips sticky with glowing paint and my eyes dusted with sabuyashi silver, and smiled at a man I vaguely recalled worked with the President. I held the bottle of Faucher’s before me and I asked, as I had asked a dozen times before: “Do you want to see some magic?” My mother had spoken of magic like a force beyond our control, and I had called it sacrifice. Maybe we were both right; I felt like I was watching from outside of my own body as I opened my hand and let the bottle fall to the floor, to shatter in wet pieces on the hardwood. But I was inside myself, fully and painfully, when I met Sofie’s betrayed eyes across the room and called on my own soul. Nobody would recognize the beetles as sabuyashi beetles, I knew, because they were brown instead of silver. I saw a camera flash as I scattered into a million pieces, and I wondered if I’d make the front page. I had to laugh at myself for my own self-absorption. Then I was lost, whirling in a million directions. I was on the doorframe and crawling over a senator’s shoes and buzzing in Sofie’s snarling face, and a hundred or so of me were escaping out the window. Twelve or so of me started wondering if beetles had souls, and a dozen others were crushed and killed, but that left more than enough to get the job done. Sofie didn’t fear me because no matter what I did, I was one girl. And she might not know whether to fear me as a thousand or so beetles. She should. A thousand or so beetles can whisper a secret to a thousand or so people, and they’ll pass it on to more, and yet more— In my wanderings, maybe I’ll meet the women who greeted my birth with gifts. I think, in return for their kindness, I’ll give them a story. It’s about how I lived because of my mother and my father and the grace of God, and magic. It’s about how I’m trying to change the world by the smallest fraction, so others can change it further. It’s about how the sabuyashi beetle gathers small particles of silver and plasters them into its exoskeleton, and nobody yet knows why. Some of them are crushed under the weight, and some of them shed that layer and fly. END     “how to exist in between” is copyright Danny McLaren 2018. “Sabuyashi Flies” is copyright Sebastian Strange 2018. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. You can also pick up a free audio book by going to www.audibletrial.com/glittership or buying your own copy of the Spring 2018 issue at www.glittership.com/buy Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “A Memory of Wind” by Susan Jane Bigelow.    

Sabbath Wine A poignant story taking place in the radical Brooklyn twenties of a friendship between a Jewish girl and an African-American boy, centered around a Sabbath dinner. Their parents find common cause in their experiences and losses from prejudices and bigotries. The Author: Barbara Krasnoff has had short stories appear in over 30 print and online publications, including “Sabbath Wine,” which was published in Clockwork Phoenix 5 and was a finalist for the 2016 Nebula Award for short stories. Other publications where you can find her work include Mythic Delirium, Abyss & Apex, Space and Time, and Apex, among others . ​When not producing weird fiction, she earns her living as a freelance tech writer. And just for fun, she investigates what the animals and objects in our world are really thinking in her daily Backstories series on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (#theirbackstories). She is a member of the Tabula Rasa writers group and can be found at BrooklynWriter.com or on Twitter as @BarbK. The Actor: Kim Rogers is an EMC actress that currently resides in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. During the day, she can be found at Samuel French, INC where she has the pleasure of assisting Professional Theatres around the world with all of their theatrical needs. At night, she can be found flitting about the theatre district or anywhere in the West Village that will let her belt out a showtune.

Unleashed Beauty: An artist creates a biological work of art, only to discover that he's playing with forces he doesn't understand. Marriage, love, and ambition all play a role in leading to the catastrophic conclusion of this story. The Author: Nancy Hightower has been published in Joyland, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Sundog Lit, Word Riot, storySouth. Gargoyle, and Cleaver, and has written about politics and religion in HuffPost. From 2014-2016, she reviewed science fiction and fantasy for The Washington Post. She is the author of Elementari Rising (Pink Narcissus Press, 2013) and The Acolyte, (poetry, Port Yonder Press, 2015). She teaches at Hunter College and is working on a book about digital storytelling with Paul D. Miller for Duke University Press, as well as a memoir about growing up in the evangelical South. The Actor: Jose Febus's credits include the short film " Not Guilty" for which the award of Best Actor was honored at the My Final Shot Production Film Festival. Other films include Attempted Burglary, Plurality and Chicago Boricua. Television credits include The Path, Blindspot, Law & Order, Law & Order Criminal Intent. Web Series - East Willy B. His Off-Off Broadway credits include O'Rex with the G&F Company, The Deep Run at PRTT and Acts of Mercy written by Michael John Garces at The Rattlestick Theater. Regional credits include Ana in the Tropics at the Portland Center Stage, Williamstown Theater and the Hartford Stage Co. jlfebus@hotmail.com --------------------------- The Blessed Days: Two and a half years ago, the Blessings began, and everyone on Earth woke up covered in blood. It happens every night in sleep, and no one remembers dreams anymore. But one lucid dreamer's remembered dreams reveal the answer and open the gate to the underworld. The Author: Nebula Award, Shirley Jackson Award and World Fantasy Award finalist Mike Allen is author of the short story collections Unseaming and The Spider Tapestries and the novel The Black Fire Concerto. He’s also the editor and publisher of Mythic Delirium Books, home of Mythic Delirium magazine and the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies. He lives in Roanoke, Virginia, with his wife and co-editor Anita Allen, and two neurotic cats. You can follow his adventures as a writer at descentintolight.com, as a publisher at mythicdelirium.com, and as both on Twitter at @mythicdelirium. The Actor: Kevin Gilligan is an actor/writer/comedian who has been seen on SpikeTV, TVLand, Style Network, Travel Channel, TruTV, and Funny or Die. You may have seen him as Kevin the bisexual on the season premiere of Billy on the Street. He was also in the VisionFest and CineKink award winning film Broken Side of Time. He has written for HEEB Magazine and Geeks OUT, and co-hosts the Geeks OUT Podcast (available on iTunes & Libsyn). He produced and co-wrote his acclaimed web series Gigahoes, the first season of which is now on Amazon Prime, the second season to premiere later in 2018. He's performed at UCB, UCBEast, The Magnet, Gotham Comedy Club, and The PIT. Find more at www.KevinRyssGilligan.com kevinryssgilligan@gmail.com

"Aunt Dissy's Policy Dream Book" by Sheree Renée Thomas -- published in Apex Magazine issue 95, April 2017.   Read it here: http://www.apex-magazine.com/ Sheree Renée Thomas, a native of Memphis, is the author of Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press, August 2016), recently named on the 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Award “Worthy” Long List, Shotgun Lullabies, and the editor of the World Fantasy Award-winning Dark Matter anthologies. Read her short stories and poems in Sycorax’s Daughters, Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, Revise the Psalm, The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, Mojo: Conjure Stories, An Alphabet of Embers, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, Jalada: Afrofuture(s), Callaloo, Obsidian, So Long Been Dreaming: Post-Colonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, Memphis Noir, and Harvard’s Transition. Find her @blackpotmojo or visit www.aqueductpress.com/authors/ShereeThomas.php. This Apex Magazine podcast was performed by Sheree Renée Thomas and produced by Mahvesh Murad. Music used with kind permission of BenSound.com! Apex Magazine Podcast, Copyright Apex Publications. Apex Magazine is a monthly short fiction zine focused on dark science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Find us at http://www.apex-magazine.com.

Amal El-Mohtar is the Nebula-nominated author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of of twenty-eight different kinds of honey. Her work has appeared in multiple venues online and in print, including Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling, and most recently in Lightspeed magazine's "Women Destroy Science Fiction" special issue. She is a member of the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours performance collective, and edits Goblin Fruit, a web quarterly devoted to fantastical poetry. She lives in Glasgow with her fiancé, a harp, and two jellicle cats. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com. Julie Hoverson has made a specialty of having no specialty. She has dabbled extensively in costuming, role-playing, LARPing, art, beadwork, acting, and writing in such disparate genres as horror, , fantasy, urban fantasy, noir, dark social commentary (and whatever else occurs to her). She has spent the last five years writing, producing, and acting in the award-winning podcast audio drama anthology series, 19 Nocturne Boulevard, and is currently recording audiobooks professionally, as well as producing her first full dramatic audio novel. Aliya Tyus-Barnwell is an editor for Hardcore Droid and has published fiction in Sixfold, Expanded Horizons, and forthcoming in Anotherealm, among other places. Look for her on Facebook @AliyaTyus-Barnwell Erika Brito is a wife and mother and an alumna of LaGuardia “Fame” High School. She enjoys participating in local community theater productions. Some productions include “Kiss me Kate” (as Hattie), “Damned Yankees”(as Lola) and “Into the Woods”(as Florinda). She enjoys reading aloud and bringing stories to life especially for her children.