My WWC Schedule

August 11, 2015 R. Parrish Leave a comment

When Words Collide is this weekend and in addition to launching Scarecrow and Corvidae there, I’m participating in some programming as well. This is where you can find me:

Friday

1pm (Rundle) – Live Action Slush, Early Bird Edition
6pm (Fireside) – Corvidae & Scarecrow launch

Saturday

3pm (Willow Park) – Live Action Slush, Romance
4:00 – 5:30pm (Dealer Room) – Shared Author Table
8pm – Mass Autograph Session

Sunday

11am (Heritage) – Blue Pencil Cafe*
1pm (Willow Park) – Live Action Slush, High Fantasy
4pm (Rundle) Publishers Panel: Short Fiction

I’ll also definitely be at the Absinthe and Scotch tasting with SASS and Tyche Books for reasons which ought to be self-explanatory 😉

I’m super stoked about the launch, of course, but also about the fact I’m doing three Live Action Slush sections. That was my favourite panel last year so I’m excited to do it again. Times three 🙂

I will have several titles available in the Merchant’s Corner:

At the Shared Authors Table

A is for Apocalypse
B is for Broken

At the Tyche Books Table (Thank you!)

Fae
Corvidae
Scarecrow

*My blue pencil cafe session is full but it’s my understanding there’s a waiting list at registration in case someone cancels.

Corvidae, Interview

Corvidae Contributor Interview — Angela Slatter

August 10, 2015 R. Parrish Leave a comment

Over the coming weeks I’d like to share interviews that I (and Magnus) conducted with the contributors to Corvidae and Scarecrow. This week we’ll talk with Angela Slatter. Angela never actually submitted to Corvidae, but when I read her story in another anthology I just knew it would be the perfect way to end mine, so I emailed her and asked if I could reprint it. Happily (for everyone) she said yes 🙂

Interview with Angela Slatter

Please share a short excerpt from your story/stories:

The feathers were tiny and Emer hoped they would stay so.

Indeed, she prayed they would fall out altogether. They were not downy little pins. Small, but determined, their black shafts hardened as soon as they poked through her skin, calcifying under her touch as she stroked them in dreadful fascination.

All day she’d felt something happening beneath the gloves hastily donned after her morning’s escapade. The sight of those ladylike coverings had brought approving nods from both her mother and governess, as if they were a sign she was finally listening to their exhortations. A princess does not run. A princess does not shout or curse. A princess keeps the sun in her voice, but off her fair skin. A princess sits quietly, back straight. A princess smiles at a gentleman’s tasteful jest, but never laughs too loudly. A princess never furrows her brow with thought. A princess does not chew her nails.

Emer had been determined that nothing untoward was occurring; that the healing salve she’d sneaked from her mother’s workroom would put everything to rights.

But that night, when Emer closed her bedchamber door and finally peeled away the doeskin gloves, she found that the wound in her palm was sprouting dark fronds around its ragged edge. They looked like the collar of her mother’s favorite cloak—except those feathers with their vibrant eyes were from the palace peacocks. A great ball of fear threatened to stopper her throat.

What is it about corvids that inspired you to write about them? I think it’s the sheer wealth of lore behind them: they’re thieves; they’re clever and sly; they cross many mythologies; they’re quite lovely-looking (what’s not to love about black feathers?); they can be sinister and clownish at the same time.

If you were a covid, what would you build your nest out of? The pages of books, so I’d be comfy and have something to read.

What’s your favourite ‘shiny’ thing? The various rings I’ve inherited from aunts over the years because (a) shiny-shiny, and (b) they have a family and emotional connection for me. I’ve got an emerald and diamond one of which I’m especially fond.

As you may know, one of Edmonton’s local Twitter personalities is Magnus E. Magpie who haunts Twitter as @YEGMagpie. I invited him to read an advance copy of Corvidae and Scarecrow and offer a short cawmentary on each story from a magpie’s point of view, which he did. When he was finished I asked if there was anything he’d like to ask the contributors. The italicized portions are mine because Magnus didn’t ask straight-forward questions on account of he’s a magpie 🙂

Mr. Yegpie: I also would sure love to know where they got their ideas from! I caught several familiar references from existing books and mythology and fairy tales; I like seeing people riff off stuff. (What inspired your story/poem?) I work a lot with European fairy tales and myths as my base, and “Flight” is a mix of “The Raven” and “White Bride, Black Bride”. I’d tried to write this story years ago when I was doing my MA and failed. I gave it another go when I was asked for a story for Once Upon A Time: New Fairy Tales by Paula Guran. This time I won.

Mr. Yegpie: I think I would like to know what people’s favourite corvid is though; and if it isn’t a magpie, WHYEVER NOT?!? (If they come back with some guff about crows using tools, PLEASE LET ME KNOW AND I WILL SEND THEM A COPY OF MY ROGERS BILL. Pffft, crows.) (What is your favourite corvid?) The raven. It’s got the best name. It guards the Tower of London. It’s cool.

Queensland Writers Fellow Angela Slatter is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, World Fantasy finalist Sourdough and Other Stories, British Fantasy Award-winning “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter,” Aurealis finalist Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa Hannett), as well as The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, Black-Winged Angels, and The Female Factory (also with Lisa L. Hannett). She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, and is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006. She blogs at angelaslatter.com about shiny things that catch her eye.

~ Twitter ~ Facebook ~

Available Direct from the Publisher:
World Weaver Press

Or Find it Online:
Amazon
Goodreads
Kobo

Aphanasian Stories, Books, Sale, Writing

Women in Practical Armor

August 6, 2015 R. Parrish 2 Comments

I have a story in this anthology!!!

Dudes.

I’m so excited I can barely speak in sentences, forget about paragraphs. So. To elaborate:

It’s an Aphanasian story featuring Bayne.

It’s my first pro-rate story.

I’m sharing a table of contents with amazing people.

It’s got that a-freaking-mazing cover.

And it’s edited by Ed Greenwood and Gabrielle Harbowy.

!!!

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Gabrielle before, and she’s awesome and I adore her. And Ed Freaking Greenwood?

Guys. C’mon. That’s just freaking nuts.

Playing D&D in the Forgotten Realms setting has consumed years of my life and Ed Freaking Greenwood read and liked my story.

I could just die.

In the meantime, while I flail and squee you should pop over to the Kickstarter, take a look at the perks and see if there’s anything there that tickles your fancy because I’m 1000% sure this anthology is gonna kick ass.

*flails*

Scarecrow

Scarecrow!

August 4, 2015 R. Parrish Leave a comment

Stuffed full of surprises!

“Rhonda Parrish has assembled a stellar collection that runs the gamut of Urban Fantasy to Weird Fiction. Easily the most consistently satisfying anthology I’ve read in years.”
— K.L. Young, Executive Editor, Strange Aeons Magazine

Hay-men, mommets, tattie bogles, kakashi, tao-tao—whether formed of straw or other materials, the tradition of scarecrows is pervasive in farming cultures around the world. The scarecrow serves as decoy, proxy, and effigy—human but not human. We create them in our image and ask them to protect our crops and by extension our very survival, but we refrain from giving them the things a creation might crave—souls, brains, free-will, love. In Scarecrow, fifteen authors of speculative fiction explore what such creatures might do to gain the things they need or, more dangerously, think they want.

Within these pages, ancient enemies join together to destroy a mad mommet, a scarecrow who is a crow protects solar fields and stores long-lost family secrets, a woman falls in love with a scarecrow, and another becomes one. Encounter scarecrows made of straw, imagination, memory, and robotics while being spirited to Oz, mythological Japan, other planets, and a neighbor’s back garden. After experiencing this book, you’ll never look at a hay-man the same.

Featuring all new work by Jane Yolen, Andrew Bud Adams, Laura Blackwood, Amanda Block, Scott Burtness, Amanda C. Davis, Megan Fennell, Kim Goldberg, Katherine Marzinsky, Craig Pay, Sara Puls, Holly Schofield, Virginia Carraway Stark, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, and Kristina Wojtaszek.

“With fifteen talented writers and a subject that is both evocative and memorable, Rhonda Parrish’s new anthology, Scarecrow, is no straw man. Like any good scarecrow, this anthology is truly outstanding in its field. Don’t be scared to pick this up and give it a read.”
— Steve Vernon, author of Tatterdemon

Available Now!

Amazon: (CA) (UK) (US)

Kobo: (CA) (US)

Direct From the Publisher: World Weaver Press

Corvidae, Interview

Corvidae Contributor Interview — Kat Otis

August 3, 2015 R. Parrish Leave a comment

Over the coming weeks I’d like to share interviews that I (and Magnus) conducted with the contributors to Corvidae and Scarecrow. This week we’ll talk with Kat Otis 🙂

Interview with Kat Otis

Please share a short excerpt from your story/stories:

Humans were never meant to fly.

That thought consumed Morgaine as she stared out the Mosquito’s windscreen at the thickly-falling snow. If humans knew what was good for them, they would be content to fight over earth and leave air to the corvidae, water to the leviathans, and frost to the giants. Unfortunately, humans had never been very good at sharing – among themselves or with the other great species of the world.

Was there one corvid characteristic you wanted to highlight more than others? Do you think you were successful? The characteristic I wanted to highlight the most was corvid intelligence. When I was trying to decide what kind of corvid to write about, I started by browsing bird websites and quickly fell into a research pit of corvid videos where they showed amazing levels of intelligence and tool use. Obviously the only proper response was to elevate the corvidae as a group to be as sentient as humans and… um… leviathans and frost giants. I sure hope I was successful, as the story makes very little sense without it!

If you were a covid, what would you build your nest out of? If I had to live in a nest, it would be a giant bean bag. Actually, sophmore year of college my roommate and I put a bean bag in a corner of our tiny dorm room, for an oft-visiting friend of ours, and called it her nest. So… I guess I sort of already have built a nest out of a bean bag 😉

What’s your favourite ‘shiny’ thing? Shiny new ideas, of course! For example, I was just working on my latest shiny new idea, a steampunk piece with exploding airships, and- OH NEW SHINY NEW IDEA GOTTA GO LATERS!

As you may know, one of Edmonton’s local Twitter personalities is Magnus E. Magpie who haunts Twitter as @YEGMagpie. I invited him to read an advance copy of Corvidae and Scarecrow and offer a short cawmentary on each story from a magpie’s point of view, which he did. When he was finished I asked if there was anything he’d like to ask the contributors. The italicized portions are mine because Magnus didn’t ask straight-forward questions on account of he’s a magpie 🙂

Mr. Yegpie: It would be cool to know where all these stories came from, I mean geographically – like I think I could tell who was from Edmonton and who was from Vancouver! (Where do you live, and did that affect your story/poem at all?) Oh, ye spoiled ones of fixed addresses! In just the last seven years, I’ve lived in twelve places, four time zones, and two countries. I’ve lived at latitudes ranging from 34.2 to 51.7 N, longitudes ranging from 0.1 to 118.1 W, and altitudes ranging from 115 to 2,080 feet. Or, as they say on Facebook, “it’s complicated.” My location has probably only affected my story in the most general ways – I have yet to live somewhere that it doesn’t snow.

Mr. Yegpie: I also would sure love to know where they got their ideas from! I caught several familiar references from existing books and mythology and fairy tales; I like seeing people riff off stuff. (What inspired your story/poem?) Well, I started with World War Two spy pigeons, because, hello, SPY PIGEONS! Who of course immediately morphed into corvidae for the purposes of this anthology. Then I added a pinch of recent personal tragedy, a dash of additional historical research, and a pound of advice on how to crash airplanes from the family pilots. Voila!

Mr. Yegpie: I think I would like to know what people’s favourite corvid is though; and if it isn’t a magpie, WHYEVER NOT?!? (If they come back with some guff about crows using tools, PLEASE LET ME KNOW AND I WILL SEND THEM A COPY OF MY ROGERS BILL. Pffft, crows.) (What is your favourite corvid?) Definitely the ravens of the Tower of London. What other birds have the power to topple an entire empire just by deciding to up stakes (up coops?) and move? But after that, I’ll give you magpies, who are pretty awesome.

Kat Otis lives a peripatetic life with a pair of cats who enjoy riding in the car as long as there’s no country music involved. Her fiction has appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction and Penumbra eMag. She can be found online at www.katotis.com or on Twitter as @kat_otis.

~ Twitter ~

Available Direct from the Publisher:
World Weaver Press

Or Find it Online:
Amazon
Goodreads
Kobo

B is for Broken, Interview

Fractured Friday: Marge Simon

July 31, 2015 R. Parrish Leave a comment

For the next several weeks I’ve decided to call Fridays ‘Fractured Friday’ and use them to share news, contributor interviews and excerpts from B is for Broken.

B is for Broken is the second title in the Alphabet Anthologies series. It follows A is for Apocalypse and will in turn be followed by C is for Chimera. Each story in the series is associated with a letter of the alphabet and is titled in the letter is for word format. What’s more, just to keep things nice and complicated, the story’s title isn’t shared at the beginning but at the end so that you can guess at what it might be while you read.

On that note, even though the story titles could be considered spoilers because of how the book is formatted, for the sake of simplicity if the author has chosen to post their title publicly somewhere else (their blog, Facebook, wherever) I am going to include it in my posts. If they haven’t revealed that information, though, I’ll list the story titles as Letter is for…

I met Marge way back in 2007. I’m not sure exactly when but it was before September. I know that because September 2007 is then the first issue of Niteblade came out and I’d already been in contact with Marge by then because she did the cover (and every cover since). Marge has been a great friend, encouraged me in my writing, offered support as I found my way as an editor and Niteblade would not be the same without her artwork. It’s a pleasure to work with her and I’m pleased to have been able to do it for both A is for Apocalypse and B is for Broken (in addition to our other projects).

Marge and Michael Fosburg collaborated on a story for B is for Broken.

Interview With Marge Simon

What letter were you assigned? T

Please share a short excerpt from your story:

Hessura motioned Timon inside the bedroom. In her arms, a second child. “This one too, Timon.”

“A demon-son!” Timon gasped, and forked his fingers at the sleeping babe. “’The second chases after the first’ — a bad omen.”

“Aye, “ Hessura nodded. “Cursed by that yellow moon, Japeph would say. He’d have it killed.” She turned her head and spat. “A fishwife’s tale, if I ever heard one—and I’ve heard them all.”

Timon frowned, but he reached his finger to the tiny hand and grinned as the boy clasped it. “We must never let them know of this one,” he said. “Can you handle this, Hessura?”

What is the thing you’ve most regretted breaking? The heart of my first “true love” – but it wasn’t as real for my fickle young self as it was for him.

Have you ever broken something and not been saddened by it? Can you tell us about that? I tore up a photograph of a former boyfriend and me at a dance. Does that count?

If you could break one law and get away with it consequence-free, what would it be? I can’t answer this. I’m too “anal” about the idea of breaking the law. But I do lots of other wicked things.

Do you have any rules for yourself, a code of some sort, which you’d never break? Yes, writing a super trite story with lots of blood and guts and bad language–so poorly contrived that it makes me sick. But if I could write like Jeff Strand (brilliantly humorous), I might break the rule!

Did you struggle with the letter you were assigned, or did the ideas come freely? Ideas came freely!

What was your favourite idea you didn’t use? I wrote one about Lizzie Bordon, but it was pretty hokey, and Michael (Fosburg) had a better idea. I’m glad we went with his. I later rewrote the Lizzie Borden piece and sold it to Max Booth for an anthology (Perpetual Motion Publishing).

Marge Simon‘s works appear in publications such as DailySF Magazine, Pedestal, Urban Fantasist. She edits a column for the HWA Newsletter, “Blood & Spades: Poets of the Dark Side,” and serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees. She won the Strange Horizons Readers Choice Award, 2010, and the SFPA’s Dwarf Stars Award, 2012. She has won three Bram Stoker Awards ® for Superior Work in Poetry and has poetry in HWA’s Simon & Schuster collection, It’s Scary Out There, 2015. Marge also has poems in Darke Phantastique, Qualia Nous collections, and Spectral Realms, 2014. www.margesimon.com

B is for Broken is available now at:
Smashwords
Kobo
Amazon
Barnes and Noble

And add it to your shelves at Goodreads

Cover Reveal, Giveaway, Pictures, Scarecrow

Scarecrow Cover Reveal

July 30, 2015 R. Parrish 1 Comment

Oh.

My.

Gawd.

I love this cover. Don’t you just love this cover? I feel like this anthology series has been blessed with great covers (thank you Eileen!) but this one is my favourite. Love, love, love, love, love it.

Oh. But wait. There’s more! In addition revealing the cover of Scarecrow I have copies to give away! There are two ways to win (I suggest entering both draws LOL). The first is a Goodreads giveaway. We’re giving a copy of Scarecrow to two lucky winners (US and Canada only, sorry :-/ ). It’s super easy to enter, you can just click here to go to the page on Goodreads or use this:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Scarecrow

by Rhonda Parrish

Giveaway ends August 03, 2015.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

That draw is only open for like 5 days (it closes on August 3rd). Can we get 500 entries in 5 days? I don’t know, but let’s try! 🙂

The other way to enter to win a copy (well, actually ten copies) of Scarecrow is via #ScarecrowSelfies. This one is open to people anywhere in the world. You can check out all the details by clicking here, and in the meantime take a look at the entries that have come in so far:

From me. Not an entry, just playing along 🙂

Awesome. Like that cover. Amirite?

Poetry, Sale

Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing

July 29, 2015 R. Parrish Leave a comment

OMG!

I have been DYING to share this news and now I can–I have a poem in Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing!!

I’m so excited. Firstly to have my work, Hereditary Delusions, included in this collection at all. It means an awful lot to me to share a table of contents with the mind-blowingly talented authors whose work is included here, it means a lot to have my poem chosen for inclusion in any anthology by two awesome editors and possibly most of all, it means a lot to have my poetry under a cover that says ‘Best Canadian Speculative Writing‘*.

I left this announcement off for two days in the hopes I’d be beyond gushing by now and able to post a nice, professional announcement, but it seems that isn’t going to happen–I’m still too full of squee–so just check out this amazing TOC:

Introduction
Margaret Atwood

Bamboozled
Kelley Armstrong

Witch I
Courtney Bates-Hardy

Witch II
Courney Bates-Hardy

The Smut Story
Greg Bechtel

Kafka’s Notebooks
Jocko Benoit

The Full Lazenby
Jeremy Butler

Wendigo Nights
Siobhan Carroll

A Spell for Rebuilding Your Lover Out of Snow
Peter Chiykowski

TÃºshÅ«guÄƒn
Eric Choi

Jelly and the D-Machine
Suzanne Church

The Perfect Library
David Clink

The Colour of Paradox
A.M. Dellamonica

The Man Who Sold the Moon
Cory Doctorow

Brains, Brains, Brains
Puneet Dutt

The Lonely Sea in the Sky
Amal El-Mohtar

A Wish from a Bone
Gemma Files

We Be Naked
Zsuzsi Gartner

The God of Lost Things
Neile Graham

The Lark, The Peat The Star, and Our Time
Neile Graham

Chant for Summer Darkness in Northwest Climes
Neile Graham

The Beat that Billie Bore
Lisa L. Hannett

The Trial of the Beekeeper
Shivaun Hoad

Self-Portrait as Bilbo Baggins
Ada Hoffmann

The Parable of the Supervillain
Ada Hoffmann

The Mermaid at Seaworld
Ada Hoffmann

Left Foot, Right
Nalo Hopkinson

Return to Bear Creek
Louisa Howerow

The Inn of the Seven Blessings
Matthew Hughes

What You Couldn’t Leave Behind
Matthew Johnson

Hollywood North
Michael Libling

Sideshow
Catherine MacLeod

Aversions
Helen Marshall

Death and the Girl from Pi Delta Zeta
Helen Marshall

You’re a Winner
Matt Moore

Man in Blue Overcoat
Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Exorcist: A Love Story
David Nickle

Hereditary Delusions
Rhonda Parrish

The Marotte
Tony Pi

Charlemagne and Florent
Ranylt Richildis

Standard Deviant
Holly Schofield

The Tun
Trevor Shikaze

Demoted
Kate Story

The Snows of Yesteryear
Jean-Louis Trudel

Giants
Peter Watts

From Stone and Bone, From Earth and Sky
A.C. Wise

Outside Heavenly
Rio Youers

Release Date: Aug 18, 2015

Pre-Order Now:

*Again. I had a poem in the first one too

Corvidae, Interview

Corvidae Contributor Interview — Jane Yolen

July 27, 2015 R. Parrish Leave a comment

Over the coming weeks I’d like to share interviews that I (and Magnus) conducted with the contributors to Corvidae and Scarecrow. I’m going to begin with the amazing Jane Yolen because, c’mon, she’s Jane-freaking-Yolen.

Interview with Jane Yolen

Please share a short excerpt from your story/stories:

Part of one of my two poems in the volume:

Postcards from the Abyss
No “Wish you were here,”
no “Having a good time,”
only a sniff of sulfur,
groans from a nearby hummock,
three crows lifting off a limb,
probably laughing at the reader,
but who can tell with corvids.

What is it about corvids that inspired you to write about them? We are a family of birders, and corvids are among the smartest (and sassiest) of birds.

Was there one corvid characteristic you wanted to highlight more than others? Their knowingness.

Do you think you were successful? I can only hope. . . .

If you were a corvid, what would you build your nest out of? Coins and bottlecaps and peacock feathers.

What’s your favourite ‘shiny’ thing? My earring collection.

If you have work in both anthologies, which came first? The corvid or the scarecrow? Corvid first.

As you may know, one of Edmonton’s local Twitter personalities is Magnus E. Magpie who haunts Twitter as @YEGMagpie. I invited him to read an advance copy of Corvidae and Scarecrow and offer a short cawmentary on each story from a magpie’s point of view, which he did. When he was finished I asked if there was anything he’d like to ask the contributors. The italicized portions are mine because Magnus didn’t ask straight-forward questions on account of he’s a magpie 🙂

Massachusetts in the States. Summers in St Andrews, Scotland. Being a birder was more of an influence than where I live.

I love knowing the venereal (collective) names of animals and birds. One of my favorites has always been “ A Murder of Crows.” So that poem came naturally. “Postcards from the Abyss” is one of the many poems I have written to my birder husband, dead these nine years.

Sorry—but it’s crows for me. Though I love the look of magpies strutting across my Scottish lawn.

Jane Yolen, often called “the Hans Christian Andersen of America”(Newsweek) is the author of well over 350 books, including OWL MOON, THE DEVIL’S ARITHMETIC, and HOW DO DINOSAURS SAY GOODNIGHT. Her books and stories have won an assortment of awards–two Nebulas, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic awards, two Christopher Medals, a nomination for the National Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award, among many others. She has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry. She is also the winner (for body of work) of the World Fantasy Assn. Lifetime Achievement Award, Science Fiction Poetry Association Grand Master Award, Catholic Library’s Regina Medal, Kerlan Medal from the University of Minnesota, the du Grummond Medal from Un. of Southern Missisippi, the Smith College Alumnae Medal, and New England Pubic Radio Arts and Humanities Award . Six colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates. Her website is: www.janeyolen.com

~ Twitter ~ Facebook ~

Available Direct from the Publisher:
World Weaver Press

Or Find it Online:
Amazon
Goodreads
Kobo

B is for Broken, Interview

Fractured Friday: Simon Kewin

July 24, 2015 R. Parrish 2 Comments

For the next several weeks I’ve decided to call Fridays ‘Fractured Friday’ and use them to share news, contributor interviews and excerpts from B is for Broken.

B is for Broken is the second title in the Alphabet Anthologies series. It follows A is for Apocalypse and will in turn be followed by C is for Chimera. Each story in the series is associated with a letter of the alphabet and is titled in the letter is for word format. What’s more, just to keep things nice and complicated, the story’s title isn’t shared at the beginning but at the end so that you can guess at what it might be while you read.

On that note, even though the story titles could be considered spoilers because of how the book is formatted, for the sake of simplicity if the author has chosen to post their title publicly somewhere else (their blog, Facebook, wherever) I am going to include it in my posts. If they haven’t revealed that information, though, I’ll list the story titles as Letter is for…

I don’t remember where I met Simon but it might have been from Write 1 Sub 1. Maybe? I may not be clear on that, but I am clear on this–Simon’s stories are awesome 🙂 I’m proud to include his work in both A is for Apocalypse and B is for Broken 🙂

Interview With Simon Kewin

What letter were you assigned? J

Please share a short excerpt from your story:

“You stayed true, though,” she said. “Those promises we made to each other that day at Hong Kong Station.” A wicked smile crept across her features. “And the ones we whispered the night before in this cramped little hab room. You remember?”

Of course he remembered. “You can’t be here,” he said again. “We’re on a wrecked alien spaceship in the Kuiper Belt, not at Hong Kong station. That was all a long time ago. You’re not Avi. None of this is possible.”

What is the thing you’ve most regretted breaking? When I was, like, four years old I broke my brother’s toy spaceship. Just after he’d received it. On Christmas Day.

Have you ever broken something and not been saddened by it? Can you tell us about that? Fast, every day.

If you could break one law and get away with it consequence-free, what would it be? Something that brings huge financial gain. Then I could spend my days writing. From my Caribbean villa.

Do you have any rules for yourself, a code of some sort, which you’d never break? I’ve been a vegetarian for nearly 30 years, so eating meat would be one.

Never ever? A couple of times in that period I’ve eaten nibbled on some dead creature’s cooked remains, generally to try something new that someone said I should. It didn’t give me a change of heart.

Did you struggle with the letter you were assigned, or did the ideas come freely? The ideas came pretty freely. Although, actually, I posted on my blog asking for ideas, and the inspiration for the story I wrote came from someone’s suggestion.

What was your favourite idea you didn’t use? My contribution to A is for Apocalypse was science fiction, so I quite wanted to do a fantasy story for B is for Broken. Which didn’t work out, but I was playing with the idea of a Jack-in-the-Green story for a time.

What, aside from the anthology’s theme and your letter inspired your story? The image in my head of this vast, weird, alien spaceship floating ghost-like in the void. That and breaking my brother’s toy spaceship when I was four…

Simon Kewin is the author of over 100 published short or flash stories. He lives in England with his wife and their daughters. His cyberpunk novel The Genehunter and his fantasy novels Engn and Hedge Witch were recently published. Find him at simonkewin.co.uk.

~ Twitter ~ Facebook ~ Goodreads ~

B is for Broken is available now at:
Smashwords
Kobo
Amazon
Barnes and Noble

And add it to your shelves at Goodreads

Fae, Sale

FAE is $0.99!

July 22, 2015 R. Parrish Leave a comment

If you haven’t picked up a copy Fae there will never be a better time!

Fae is on sale.

Right now.

For less than a dollar.

What more can I say?

Meet Robin Goodfellow as you’ve never seen him before, watch damsels in distress rescue themselves, get swept away with the selkies and enjoy tales of hobs, green men, pixies and phookas. One thing is for certain, these are not your grandmother’s fairy tales.

Fairies have been both mischievous and malignant creatures throughout history. They’ve dwelt in forests, collected teeth or crafted shoes. Fae is full of stories that honor that rich history while exploring new and interesting takes on the fair folk from castles to computer technologies to modern midwifing, the Old World to Indianapolis.

Fae bridges traditional and modern styles, from the familiar feeling of a good old-fashioned fairy tale to urban fantasy and horror with a fae twist. This anthology covers a vast swath of the fairy story spectrum, making the old new and exploring lush settings with beautiful prose and complex characters.

Available directly from the publisher:

Paperback $11.95
Ebook $0.99

Or find it online:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble (Paperback)
Barnes & Noble (Nook)
Kobo
Books-a-Million

P.S. Fellow Canadians, you know how people say ‘Our book is on sale for $0.99!’ and then you go to the page and you find out it’s $0.99 US and actually because you live in Canada you have to pay $1.24? Well, not today. Fae is on sale for $0.99 CDN if you buy it from Amazon.ca or Kobo (Canada). Because.

Sale ends July 29th.

Interview with Angela Slatter

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Interview with Kat Otis

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Goodreads Book Giveaway

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Interview with Jane Yolen

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I write, I edit and I take a lot of naps.