The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Christine Lucas’s story “Via Dolorosa” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 8 November 2019. “Via Dolorosa” is a story in a series of stories dealing with the Unseen. In my worldview, the Unseen includes elements from the speculatively obvious, that most people cannot see (ghosts, undead, mythic creatures) along with everything a lot of people choose not to see, like abuse. It also draws a lot from personal experience, from growing up in a household …
Jack Neel Waddell’s story “Rooks on Sundays” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 1 November 2019. The impetus of this story was Heinlein’s “ ’—All You Zombies—’ ”, although they have little obvious in common. While Heinlein’s masterpiece is a gutwrenching puzzle, it laid bare one element I wanted to meditate upon — how manipulating people isn’t always about the control you have over them, but can be about struggling against the ever-diminishing influence in your environment …
Yume Kitasei’s story “Super” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 25 October 2019. Confession: once, when I was a teenager babysitting a toddler, I decided to try to tire him out by making him climb twelve flights of stairs. We’d been playing all morning, and I was hoping by the time we got to the top, he’d be all ready to nap until his parents came home. Mind you, this was a big baby. Big …
Lisa Short’s story “The Season of Withering” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 18 October 2019. I have the (probably peculiar) lifelong habit of making up bedtime stories and telling them to myself when I’m having trouble getting to sleep at night. A lot of the stories I end up writing have this exercise as their inspirational mechanism, and this particular one definitely originated as a “bedtime story.” I didn’t get much past the opening …
Erik Goldsmith’s story “Misalignment” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 11 October 2019. I started thinking about the idea of moral certainty, and what would be a way that I could know I was a good person. Some plaque or certificate or neural implant, something that would allow me to put all my fears to rest. So, I imagined a story where someone was constantly worrying about their own potential for harm; someone who would …
Kathryn Weaver’s story “Darling” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 4 October 2019. “Darling” is part of a sprawling, shared-world/co-writing project that my wife Emily and I have been developing for a number of years. The Child in the House, as we call it – after Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits – is a series of stories about two generations of magicians and mediums. “Slip Stitch” – from the October 2019 issue of Timeworn Lit – …
