The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Devin Miller’s story “A Lie in the Sand” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 4 February 2022. My girlfriend, also a writer, is much more musical than I am, and she has a tendency to get story ideas from songs. This habit seems to be catching, as the seed of this story was Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”. The setting and mood of the story originated in the song, especially drawing on the lines, “Far …
J.A. Prentice’s story “Shades of the Sea” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 28 January 2022. “Shades of the Sea,” at its core, is a story about a changeling—even though the word is never used. For centuries, humans have told stories of possessions and changelings. It was the concept of changelings that particularly stuck with me: the child that isn’t a child but rather an inhuman creature. Many scholars believe these stories were told originally …
J.S. DiStefano’s story “Silo” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 21 January 2022. The main science fiction concepts in this story were inspired by the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Liu Cixin. I tried to keep the story short and the language concise to emulate my favorite writing. During the development of the story I was reading a lot, authors like Emily St. John Mandel, Colson Whitehead, George Saunders, Pierce Brown, and others. I …
David Cleden’s story “In the House of Geometers” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 14 January 2022. The what-if? origin question behind “In The House of Geometers” is easy for me to trace. I’m no mathematician but I did study a lot of maths (yes, I’m British and it’s plural, dammit!) for my physics degree at college. Pre-college, I was fortunate to have several inspiring maths teachers, one of whom introduced me to the mathematical …
Karris Rae’s story “My Synthetic Soul” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 7 January 2022. The unwitting “changeling robot” was constant from the start, but it definitely morphed through the writing process. Originally, I envisioned a romantic companion robot watching television with her male owner, when she sees an ad featuring a celebrity identical to her. Through the story, she’d learn that she was created by a rabid fan in the celebrity’s image. She’d struggle …
Ailsa Bristow’s story “Tides” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 31 December 2021. I wrote the first draft of ”Tides” in 2017. In its first iterations, it was very closely focused on the unnamed protagonist. I’m interested in questions of fate and free will, what we inherit vs. what we choose for ourselves. I wanted to explore a tense relationship between mother and daughter, and explore the urge to rebel against familial duty. And, because …
