An excerpt: “What’s going to happen after I’m dead?”
“There’s one thing that’s bothered me.” He felt the camera’s gaze and flushed, knowing those at the window would hear. “Maybe I should ask you to excuse me for saying this…” “You will never have to apologize to me for anything.” “What’s going to happen after I’m dead, when John Kosichev keeps giving the Commonwealth hell?” Gloria released his hand and smoothly reached for her dropped pocketbook. “I couldn’t answer you for certain, but I do have a theory—don’t worry about them,” she said when...
Read MoreNew ghost story publication and a Year-End Sale!
I’m excited to announce my short story “Ghostwitch” will be published as a free read on the site of publisher Rooster Republic on a Monday in 2023 – which Monday is yet to be determined, but announcements will be coming out in January and February. And then, you’ll probably want to catch all of the series of Two Thousand Word Terrors, which begins Monday, February 6 and will run for the next 45 weeks. While you wait for next year, there’s also the Smashwords...
Read More“John Kosichev” in Storyteller magazine
As I said in my last post, it turns out that when you send stories regularly in answer to calls for submissions, you sometimes get stories accepted! I’m very excited to break my long publishing silence with a release in a new magazine, Storyteller, with a story that’s been a particular favorite of mine (even when it took a few drafts), “John Kosichev.” This issue of Storyteller includes some gripping and rather timely stories tackling issues of virtual reality,...
Read MoreNew Release: Different Dragons II
“Of the Generation” has been reprinted in WolfSinger Publication’s Different Dragons II, a collection of cliche-busting dragon stories. To celebrate the new release, WolfSinger is offering a 25% discount through Createspace— follow the link and enter discount code TGERED9J at checkout. For those who prefer ebooks, the Smashwords coupon code ED26N will also give you a 25% discount at checkout. Both codes are valid only until October 15, so move...
Read MoreThe Ada Initiative and ‘Citizen Editors’
It might be good for the world, though temporarily stressful for one’s marriage, to edit an anthology together, as Leonard and I discovered when we created and published our speculative fiction anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments together in 2009. Despite the risks, maybe you should become an editor. “Reader” and “writer” and “editor” are tags, not categories. If you love a subject, and you have some money and some time, you can haul under-appreciated work into wider...
Read More“The Witch Hunter’s Account” in Nameless Magazine
Nameless Digest Issue #3 contains, among many other fine stories, my “Witch Hunter’s Account.” Like “The Astrologer’s Telling,” published in Daily Science Fiction last month, “The Witch Hunter’s Account” was inspired by one of Lovecraft’s favorite authors, Arthur Machen, and is also a response to Lovecraftian cosmic horror, again with fewer tentacles and, I like to think, less xenophobia than Lovecraft. Hmm, actually, scratch that bit...
Read More“The Astrologer’s Telling” up at Daily Science Fiction
…charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low.Ever since I first encountered that nightmare image, from H.P. Lovecraft’s prose-poem “Nyarlathotep,” I have wanted to write a story about the stars going out. A morbid urge? Absolutely. But there’s a certain virtue in morbidity; it makes me thoughtful and perhaps compassionate, if that’s a thing a writer of apocalyptic fiction can be. And so “The Astrologer’s...
Read MoreVeterans of Future Wars release
My short story “Ayema’s Fleet” has been reprinted in the Veterans of Future Wars anthology from Martinus Publishing. As with the Battlespace anthology “Ayema’s Fleet” first appeared in, VFW is for a good cause–10% of proceeds from the anthology go to Disabled American Veterans. I’ve done an interview with anthology editor Martin T. Ingham, which can be read here. And the anthology itself is available in print and ebook at Amazon.com and Barnes...
Read MoreReview: Serving Time by Nadine Ducca
For this review, another thank you is in order to the LibraryThing giveaways program, and of course Nadine Ducca herself for offering the first volume of her Timekeepers trilogy. I’m a winner once again! Although I was often confused over what was going on, the original mythological background of Serving Time was strong from the beginning. The author has clearly spent time developing this mythology and shows it by demonstrating her characters’ familiarity with its workings. I...
Read MoreStory up at Perihelion! “Equations in the Mirror”
My science fiction story “Equations in the Mirror” is up at Perihelion Science Fiction. This is one of the few stories that ever required me to whip out a calculator (another is Ayema’s Fleet in the Battlespace Military Science Fiction anthology) and was based on a number of cool medical techniques I’d learned about. Being for a time a Paleolithic history/pre-history fan, I was delighted to learn that obsidian stone blades are still used by surgeons in the modern day....
Read MoreAbout Therese
Therese Arkenberg's first short story was accepted for publication on January 2, 2008, and her second acceptance came a few hours later. Since then they haven't always been in such a rush, yet her work appears in places like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Analog, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Sword & Sorceress XXIV. Aqua Vitae, her science fiction novella, was released by WolfSinger Publications in December 2011.
She works as a freelance editor and writer in Wisconsin, where she returned after a brief but unforgettable time in Washington, D.C. When she isn't reading, writing, or editing (it's true!) she serves on the board of the Plowshare Center of Waukesha, which works for social, economic, and environmental justice.