The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Phil Berry’s story “Sheer” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 10 June 2016. Sheer – the eponymous and seemingly limitless vertical tower of rock, came from a desire to create a distinct ‘secondary’ world. I wanted to show how men and women would adapt to conditions that seem unbearable. Imagine never being able to sit or rest on a solid, horizontal structure. ‘Flat’ becomes myth, and those who tire of life spent on hessian ropes …
Vanessa Fogg’s story “In Dew and Frost and Flame” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 3 June 2016. This story was born from the wreckage of a different, failed story. I’d been trying to write a story about a wizard’s house. In this story, a house has been abandoned for years, is eventually taken over by the county for unpaid taxes, and a housecleaning crew is assigned to clean the place up for sale. Since …
Brad Preslar’s story “A Song Without a Voice” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 13 May 2016. The inspiration for “A Song Without a Voice” came to me one summer at an outdoor concert. In Nashville, everyone’s neighbors are in a band, ours included. Oddly enough, our neighbor’s band is Drew Holcombe and the Neighbors. My wife and I had gone to see them play an amphitheater show with several other bands from out of …
Meryl Stenhouse’s story “Gathering Dust” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 29 April 2016. The beginning of this story came from a prompt from a writing course I did with Cat Rambo. The prompt was a picture of an old woman feeding the pigeons. In my head, the protagonist was a middle-aged man, recently divorced, just lost his job etc. He was watching the old woman as she picked up the pigeons, sprinkled them with …
L. Chan’s story “Whalesong” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 15 April 2016. “Whalesong” started out with a single prompt-like line: the 50 hertz whale is the hero. The 50 hertz whale, also known as the loneliest whale in the world, is a solitary whale who sings at a frequency that other whales can’t hear. The jury is still out on whether there’s truth to that particular factoid, but it formed the kernel of this …
Tony Clavelli’s story “The Sound Barrier” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 8 April 2016. There’s a sort of subgenre in SF that I call “future impossible jobs.” It is fun to imagine what people will be doing for work when new opportunities arise, but even more fun to imagine the kinds of problems those people will face. When I began writing “The Sound Barrier,” my girlfriend had recently acquired an incredibly incompetent coworker. She …
