by Mike Allen
“Tsurara was half snow-woman, half human, and that was how she managed to find her way out of the mountain and see the world for herself; only I didn’t know she was such a special girl while I was writing this story.”
* * *
A.C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal and currently lives in the Philadelphia area. Her work can be found in publications such as Clarkesworld, Apex, Lightspeed, and The Best Horror of the Year Volume 4, among others. In addition to her writing, she co-edits The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, an online publication devoted to fiction and art about bugs. You can find the author online at www.acwise.net.
About “Lesser Creek: A Love Story, A Ghost Story,” she writes, “With most stories, I have a very clear and specific genesis, something I can point to as an origin. This story is much more fluid. I had a vague idea of wanting to play with folk stories and urban legends and the concept of hungry ghosts and devils. I also wanted to play with the idea of gender roles—a female ghost vs. male devil. Beyond that, the story grew out of a particular creek that I know, and wanting to mess around with language. What else can I say?”
* * *
Marie Brennan is the author of the Onyx Court series of London-based historical faerie fantasies: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and With Fate Conspire, and the urban fantasy Lies and Prophecy. Her most recent novel, the adventure fantasy A Natural History of Dragons, came out in February 2013 from Tor Books. She has published more than forty short stories in venues such as On Spec and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
She describes the origins of “What Still Abides” this way: “True story: one day I’m driving along listening to a new CD, and suddenly I notice the singer (Heather Alexander) cheerfully belting out ‘and we shall drink his blood!’ Utterly confused, I restart the track, and realize what I’m listening to is an English folksong called ‘John Barleycorn,’ which is basically an extended metaphor about turning barley into beer (the ‘blood’ of the final line). Okay, it all makes sense.
“A few years later, I’m walking around London doing research for one of the Onyx Court books, and the song comes up again on my iPod. And out of nowhere, I think, ‘what if it weren’t a metaphor?’
“This story took a long time to get written because my subconscious latched onto the notion of doing it entirely in Anglish, aka English sans all non-Germanic-derived words. I owe a great debt of thanks to Sara Bryan, my Old English language consultant, who not only caught places where I’d slipped up, but made many useful suggestions regarding sentence structure and more.”
* * *
Alisa Alering was born and raised in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania and now lives in the somewhat flatter environs of southern Indiana. She is a 2011 graduate of Clarion West and a 2012 winner of the Writers of the Future contest. Her fiction is forthcoming from Flash Fiction Online and Aqueduct Press. She contributes the “Writer’s Room” column to Waylines magazine. For more, visit http://www.alering.com, or follow her on Twitter @alering.
About “The Wanderer King,” she writes, “I wrote this story in my final week at Clarion West. I was bruised and abused, wrung dry of every story idea I had ever had, and wondering how on earth I was going to come up with another idea—and write it—in just five more days. I was sleeping in 35-minute snatches during the day and writing through the night. I walked miles around Seattle’s U district, caffienating heavily and listening to music on headphones, hoping that I’d figure things out.
“In my delirium, I got stuck on a couple of lines from the Iron and Wine song ‘Woman King’: One day we may see/a woman king/sword in hand/swing at some evil. Those lines gave me the feeling that became the story: mythical, majestic, foretold—yet somehow off-kilter. And, of course, a similar image does appear in the story. The song led me to a mood and a landscape, but the engine for bringing it all together was Chool’s voice. Once she started talking, it became her story, and the rest fell into place.”
* * *
Tanith Lee was born in 1947, in London, England. After non-education at a couple of schools, followed by actual good education at another, she received wonderful education at the Prendergast Grammar School until the age of seventeen. She then worked (inefficiently) at many jobs, including library assistant, shop assistant, waitress, and clerk, also taking a year off to attend art school at age twenty-five. In 1974 (curious reversal of her birthdate) DAW Books of America accepted three of her fantasy/SF novels (published in 1975-6), and thereafter twenty-three of her books, so breaking her chains and allowing her to be the only thing she effectively could: a full-time writer.
Since then she has written seventy-seven novels, fourteen collections, and almost three hundred short stories, plus four radio plays (broadcast by the BBC) and two scripts for the British TV cult SF series Blake’s 7. Her work, which has been translated into over seventeen languages, ranges through fantasy, horror, SF, gothic, YA, and children’s books, and contemporary, historical, and detective novels. In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious title of Grand Master of Horror. She has also won major awards for several of her books/stories, including the August Derleth Award for Death’s Master, the second book in the Flat Earth series.
Speaking of Flat Earth, Norilana Books has been reprinting the entire Flat Earth opus plus two new volumes in the series, as well as the Birthgrave series and the Vis trilogy—with one new novel that links both these stories together. Lee also has several contemporary (though very bizarre) novels either out, or about to be out, from Immanion Press, UK.
She lives near the southeast coast of England with her husband, writer-photographer-artist John Kaiine, and two tuxedo cats of many charms, whose main creative occupations involve eating, revamping the carpets, and meowperatics.
About “A Little of the Night” she writes, “The basic principle of this tale—the strength within the void—came from my husband, John Kaiine (my work is by now star-littered with such acknowledgements to this so-helpful gentleman.) The dark forest—like a cupboard stuffed with eerie challenges and horrors—is of course a planet-wide obsession in one form or another, and certainly a constant entity in my own mind-library.”
* * *
Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches in the Pacific Northwest. Her 100+ story publications include Asimov’s, Tor.com, and Clarkesworld Magazine. Her work with Fantasy Magazine earned her a spot on the 2011 WFC award ballot, while her first solo collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, was shortlisted for the Endeavour Award. Her most recent book is the SF collection Near + Far, from Hydra House Books.
Asked about “I Come from the Dark Universe,” she says, “I wrote this story in 2005, for Gordon Van Gelder’s week teaching my Clarion West class. Notable things about it: it was my first (but certainly not my last) space opera piece; it’s my 9-11 piece, in response to something Gordon had said in class about drawing on emotion; and its setting, TwiceFar Station, is one I’ve used in several other stories, including ‘Kallakak’s Cousins’ (Asimov’s) and ‘Amid the Words of War’ (Lightspeed), and shares some characters and mercantile establishments with the other stories.”
* * *
Shira Lipkin has managed to convince Apex Magazine, Stone Telling, Chizine, Interfictions 2, Mythic Delirium, and other otherwise-sensible magazines and anthologies to publish her work; two of her stories have been recognized as Million Writers Award Notable Stories, and she has won the Rhysling Award for best short poem. She credits glitter eyeliner, and tenacity. She lives in Boston with her family and the requisite cats, most of whom also write. She also fights crime with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, does six impossible things before breakfast, and would like a nap now.
About “Happy Hour at the Tooth and Claw” she has this tale to share: “When the Kickstarter for this anthology crossed the $10,000 mark, thereby obligating Mike Allen to start a new magazine, I took the opportunity to happily needle him on Twitter. I asked him when he’d be opening submissions for the new magazine, ‘because I have a thin
g about a werewolf and a vampire who fall in love.’ Rose Lemberg suggested that they fall in love with a demon and a witch, that it’s a poly love story. I jumped in with angels and selkies. Obviously we were all joking.
“And then Mike replied, ‘I’m curious if someone could write a story like that I’d actually buy.’
“Challenge accepted.
“I intended to write something completely different for Clockwork Phoenix 4, but this ridiculous unwieldy preposterous thing wouldn’t get out of my way. So I wrote it, with everything but the selkie, but also with a scifi courtesan, several discredited scientific theories, an oracle, and karaoke. And Mike did buy it. And I hope you liked it.”
* * *
Corinne Duyvis lives in Amsterdam, where she writes speculative YA novels, indulges in the occasional short story, and gets her geek on whenever possible. She also sleeps an inordinate amount.
Her debut YA fantasy novel Otherbound is forthcoming in 2014 from Amulet Books, an imprint of Abrams Books. For more about her and her work, find her at www.corinneduyvis.net and @corinneduyvis.
She writes that “Lilo Is” was “the first full story I wrote during my time at Clarion West in the summer of 2011. I arrived armed with a dozen story ideas. When the time came to start writing, I promptly ignored all of them. Something new had started to take form in my mind, something fragile and lovely and slightly freaky. I had an image of a child on a swing: laughter and too many spinning arms and wriggling fingers. ‘Lilo Is’ grew from there.”
She adds, “I am, it should be noted, an arachnophobe.”
* * *
At one time or another, Kenneth Schneyer has joined the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Academy of Legal Studies in Business, the Project Management Institute, the American Association of Variable Star Observers, the American Indoor Archery Association, the Society for Humanistic Judaism, the American Bar Association, the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop, the Alpha Delta Phi Society, Phi Beta Kappa, Ergasterion, Codex Writers, the International Technology Education Association, the American Association of Individual Investors, the Planetary Society, The Heinlein Society, the Working Group on Law, Culture and the Humanities, the Democratic Party, and Mensa. He still belongs to some of these, but can’t remember which ones. A graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, he has sold stories to Analog, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Abyss & Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Bull Spec, Escape Pod, GUD, The Drabblecast, and elsewhere. His story “Lineage” appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 3. Born in Detroit, he now lives in Rhode Island with one singer, one dancer, one actor, and something with fangs that he sometimes glimpses out of the corner of his eye. You can find him on Facebook, on Twitter, and at ken-schneyer.livejournal.com.
About “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer,” he writes, “The voice came first. I love unreliable narrators, indirect voicing, and looking at paintings, so I knew I wanted to write a story in which the only voice was the curator of an art exhibition, and that the narrator would entirely misunderstand the story that was being told by the paintings. The first scene I wrote, which didn’t appear in the final draft, was a painting of the ‘war presidents’ at sunset, looking up mournfully at the White House. Another such painting was a crowd scene at Auschwitz. Ultimately I needed to delete the more overtly political scenes in order to have a coherent character arc, because I although knew very early that this would be a ghost story, I didn’t understand until late in the first (or possibly the second) draft that I was telling a love story too.
“The writing of the first draft was funded by my Kickstarter project, ‘Are You the Agent or the Controller?’ and I had help on later drafts from artists and museum workers who gave me pointers on what such program notes should look like. Particularly the suggestion to add discussion questions at the end of each section significantly increased my narrative efficiency.”
* * *
Camille Alexa is an American and Canadian author whose stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s and Ellery McQueen’s mystery magazines, Machine of Death, and Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Her book Push of the Sky received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was an Endeavour Award finalist and an official reading selection of Powell’s Books Portland SF Book Club. Her short fiction and poems have sold to nearly a hundred magazines and anthologies and been translated into eight languages, and she co-edited the superhero/supervillain superanthology MASKED MOSAIC: Canadian Super Stories. She currently resides in the Pacific Northwest, making frequent sojourns to such exotic distant lands as Denmark, Grenada, and Texas.
She says, “I wanted to tell ‘Three Times’ backward in a way that didn’t read as if it were backward: the narrative flow revealing what has already happened, what is currently happening, and what might yet happen without any backward tug from past events, only the forward momentum of the unfolding tale. The result makes perfect sense to me; it’s one of the most straightforward pieces I’ve ever written.”
* * *
Benjanun Sriduangkaew spends her free time on words, amateur photography, and the pursuit of colorful, unusual makeup. She loves cities and wishes landlords would let her keep bees for pets. Her fiction has appeared in GigaNotoSaurus, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and several anthologies.
About “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly,” she shared this: “The story let me write out some of my long-term obsessions: technology intertwined with flesh, ideas about what we might do with our bodies if given almost-unlimited options. But I also wanted to ground it in the fierce, complicated love between siblings because my sisters are some of the most important people in my life. Why bees? I wanted to be an apiarist growing up. Sometimes you write not so much what you know but what you’d like to have, like bees and porpoises. Probably wouldn’t keep them in my chest, though.”
* * *
Patricia Russo’s first collection of short stories, Shiny Thing, has been published by Papaveria Press. It even has its own website: www.shiny-thing.com. But not the collection’s author, who asserts, “I don’t have a website and never will.”
Discussing “The Old Woman With No Teeth,” she adds, “I don’t drive, so if I’m ever in a car, it is as a passenger. I tend to look out the window and notice things, especially if the driver keeps exclaiming, ‘Where are we?’ or ‘I don’t know this street,’ or ‘I think I took a wrong turn.’
“So this one time, I was driving with a friend who has a bad sense of direction. (She also has two cockatoos, one of which has tried to kill me several times—but that is another story.) I was looking out the passenger window, and noticed a sign. The sign read: ‘Watch out for elderly people.’
“Watch out for elderly people? I had never seen such a sign before. (Perhaps I lead a sheltered life.) Obviously the intent was to convey something along the lines of ‘Be alert/be aware of elderly people crossing the street’—a warning to drivers that the neighborhood had many elderly residents and therefore the roads shouldn’t be treated as racetracks. But WATCH OUT can have a different meaning, and that was the first meaning that popped into my head—watch out, the elderly people are dangerous. In ‘The Old Woman With No Teeth,’ the elderly people are not dangerous. They are merely unwanted. But that sign was the kernel from which the story grew.”
* * *
Barbara Krasnoff’s short fiction has appeared in a variety of online and print magazines, including Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Space and Time, Electric Velocipede, Doorways, Sybil’s Garage, Behind the Wainscot, Escape Velocity, Weird Tales, Descant, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Amazing Stories. Her work can also be found in a number of anthologies, many with very long names, including Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction, Fat Girls in a Strange Land, Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm, Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring ’20s, Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, Such A Pretty Face: Tales of
Power & Abundance, and Memories and Visions: Women’s Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Barbara is also the author of a non-fiction book for young adults, Robots: Reel to Real, and is currently features and reviews editor for the tech publication Computerworld. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her partner Jim Freund and lots of toy penguins. Her website can be found at brooklynwriter.com.
Here’s how she says “The History of Soul 2065” came to be written: “While doing some research into Jewish culture and mythology (using the wonderful reference book Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism by Howard Schwartz), I came across the legend that, because there were just 600,000 souls present at Mount Sinai when the Torah was given, most people today contain the spark of a soul. (This is only a tiny part of the mythos, of course; there are probably whole volumes of commentary out there dealing with the creation of souls.)
“For many years now, Jim and I have held a seder on the second night of Passover. Soon after I read about the 600,000 souls, the idea for this story came to me as I was sitting around the table and listening to the conversation of friends and family members I’ve known for many years—and hope to know for many more.”
* * *
Mike Allen’s biographical notes need not be nearly so lengthy for this volume as they were for Clockwork Phoenixes past, as this time around he shared all the raisons d’être for the book up front in his introduction.
He lives in Roanoke, VA, with his wife and frequent editing assistant Anita, their dog Loki, and felines Pandora and Persephone. By day he works as the arts columnist for the Roanoke Times.
