The inspirations and origins for our stories.
C.M. Fields’s story “Reach for Your Ocean Heart” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 26 February 2021. I actually wrote the last paragraph of this story first, and then sat on it for months. I wanted a rich, dreamy, post-societal-collapse setting, so then I wrote Olia’s half of the story and sat on that for another long while while I wrestled with the constraints set by the last paragraph. Eventually I realized that what the …
Ted S. Bushman’s story “Endless” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 19 February 2021. My story “Endless” definitely emerged from a seedbed of some of my most fundamental influences, the first being that the setting evokes the far-flung-future science fantasy settings pioneered by Jack Vance’s Dying Earth and Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. The world of “Endless” feels like a fantasy, with a blacksmith and a sword and a wondrous city, but repeatedly …
Chloe Smith’s story “Rock-Adda’s World” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 12 February 2021. The title of this story is a terrible pun on Ursula Le Guin’s first novel, Rocannon’s World. The final product doesn’t share a lot with that piece of early SF, but I began by wanting to evoke some of the same sense of a lone explorer overawed by an alien landscape. As far as where the cetaliths came from, I’m always …
Aaron DaMommio’s story “Vacation Gnomes” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 5 February 2021. “Vacation Gnomes” was originally developed in 2017 for the Codex online writing group’s Weekend Warrior competition, where you have to put together a 750-word story in a weekend. I love how this process crystallizes an idea down to its essentials. Since you want to get something that has the shape and satisfying ending of a whole story in such a tiny …
Damien Krsteski’s story “Esma’s Margaret” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 29 January 2021. “Esma’s Margaret” is a product of my overlapping interests in psychology, (artificial) intelligence, and the dynamics of capitalism in general and between corporations and their outsourced workers in particular. It is set in a fictionalized and near-future version of my hometown — specifically in its poorest neighborhood — with a precocious girl as main character, whose technological talents seem to have …
E.A. Petricone’s story “Not All Rot Is Ruin” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 22 January 2021. A few things were on my mind when I started writing “Not All Rot Is Ruin”: Grief, for one—particularly the type that’s tough to hang a hat on. Grief for the things that you don’t do, or the doors that close as you make choices (or don’t make choices…which is a choice), grief for the things you’ll never …
