The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Elise Forier Edie’s story “Heard” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 5 February 2016. “Heard” began as an experiment in trying to write shorter fiction. I tend to write long pieces, and it’s really a challenge for me to keep things in the 3,500-word range. For “Heard,” I set the super tight goal of about 1,000 words, and it was very tough going, for quite some time. I kept wanting to delve deeply into character …
Henry Szabranski’s story “In the Belly of the Angel” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 29 January 2016. I’m a visual thinker. The inspiration for “In the Belly of the Angel” came from a single, sudden, unbidden image: of a large orangutan-like ape, squatting atop a pile of human bones, its wispy hair stirred by a strong breeze as it contemplated an opening in the floor of a vast, bird-filled chamber floating far above the …
Rhoads Brazos’s story “… and now He erases” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 15 January 2016. With “and now He erases . . .” I was striving for the ultimate apocalypse, one in which the whole world quite literally crumbles away. It turned out to be a rather bittersweet tale, though still amusing in small parts. The aforementioned “He” is never named, and his demise isn’t explained. The main character, clearly Evel Knievel, isn’t …
Mari Ness’s story “Cat Play” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 8 January 2016. I don’t really remember much about the actual writing of this story, but I suspect that I wrote it in part because although one of the cats that I live with seems convinced that I too am a cat, just a rather overlarge and clumsy one. (The other cat is well aware that I am a deeply inferior creature who can …
Joshua Phillip Johnson’s story “The Demon in the Page” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 1 January 2016. The idea for “The Demon in the Page” showed up at the most inopportune time. My graduate program in English-Literature required me to pass a foreign language translation exam; it consisted of a relatively short passage in your chosen language (German for me), a bilingual dictionary, and a time limit (an hour or so, I think). To …
