The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Jason Baltazar’s story “The Questioning Bell” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 26 May 2017. Most of my stories start with an image, in this case a boy looking down onto a narrow, abandoned city street. It seemed so lonely. I started to explore the idea– who was this, what kept them at the window, why were the streets empty? I’d recently read about the yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia in 1793, and so the …
Karolina Fedyk’s story “The Early History of the Moon” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 19 May 2017. Growing up in Poland, I couldn’t shake off the impression that we’re sort of guests and strangers in our own home—a place lost and regained over and over again. I am, of course, hardly the first to write about where such feelings come from; but in the national narrative, the history of partitions and the Duchy of …
L. Chan’s story “Heartwood” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 5 May 2017. There were two important pieces to this story. The first is a line that appears nearer to the end: the woman has a bear trap heart. I did mean it figuratively when I thought it up but it became quite literal in the story. The second is that I’ve written a fair bit (in the science fiction side of the house) about …
Steve Rodgers’s story “Canoes of Hava’iki” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 28 April 2017. I’ve always loved to read historical speculative fiction, and that love has translated to writing as well. I have written (and sold) speculative fiction pieces set among the 16th century Mexica (Aztecs), and the Saxons of 9th century Germany. This particular tale is set among the ancient Polynesians, who spread out from their ancestral homeland to carry their stories and …
Beth Goder’s story “To the Eggplant Cannon” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 21 April 2017. I wrote the first draft of “To the Eggplant Cannon” for a flash fiction contest run by my writing group. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the prompt that sparked this story, but I had just visited Gilroy Gardens, an amusement park that was the inspiration for the setting. (They have people dressed in garlic suits, and a spectacular train that …
Ian Rennie’s story “Angels at the Border” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 14 April 2017. Fiction surrounding the technological singularity has always bothered me, even leaving aside the questions that scientists and futurists raise about whether it will actually happen at all. We have this idea that when some form of global digital consciousness happens it will happen everywhere, for everyone. This misses two fundamental things about humanity. The first is that not everyone …
