Far Fetched Fables

First Story: 

“Steam Girl” by Dylan Horrocks

The first time I see her, she’s standing alone behind the library, looking at the ground. Faded blue dress, scruffy leather jacket, long lace-up boots and black-rimmed glasses. But what really makes me stop and stare is the hat: a weird old leather thing that hangs down over her ears, with big thick goggles strapped to the front.

Turns out she’s in my English class. She sits right next to me, still wearing the jacket and goggles and hat. She smells like a thrift store.

“Weirdo,” says Michael Carmichael.

“Freak,” says Amanda Anderson.

She ignores the laughter, reaching into her bag for a notebook and pencil. She bends low so no-one can see what she’s writing.

Dylan Horrocks is a cartoonist, writer and illustrator who lives in Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of the graphic novels Hicksville, Incomplete Works and Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen, as well as the comic book series Pickle and Atlas. He has written comics for DC and Vertigo, including Batgirl and Hunter: the Age of Magic. His website is at hicksvillecomics.com

Second story:

“Blood Drunk” by Adam Browne

The day I ask Josephine out is the same day the media first mentions the disease. Nothing much, just a curiosity piece in a couple of the papers. It gives us something to chat about on our first dates. I think the story is an urban myth, but she’s not so sure. I press the point – even on a biochemical level it seems unlikely. Are we meant to believe in a disease – a virus is it? a bacterium? – that renders serum fats into glycerine, generates nitrates from urea, then blends the two compounds in the correct ratio?

Jesus. Writing it down here, I wonder how she suffered through those first dates.

Adam Browne, 50, lives in Melbourne, Australia. His story ‘Neverland Blues’ originally appeared in 2008 in Dreaming Again: Thirty-five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of Australian Fiction. It won the 2009 Chronos Award for Best Short Fiction. His first novel, Pyrotechnicon: Being a True Account of the Further Adventures of Cyrano de Bergerac among the States and Empires of the Stars, by Himself (Dec’d), was published by Coeur de Lion in 2012, and is still available as a print-on-demand illustrated hardcover. His collection of short stories, Other Stories, and Other Stories, was recently published by Satalyte, and will be available as an audio book later this year.  Visit http://adambrowne.blogspot.com.au/ for more.

Narrators

Pete Nixon and James Silverstein

Pete is a full-time programmer and full-time student. He is the editor and producer for Green Eggs and Horror, a Dr. Seuss inspired short story anthology. He narrates and writes in his spare time, because he doesn’t believe in normal hobbies.

James is a budding author and role-playing game designer, with credits from the 7th Sea and Stargate RPG lines. He’s working on the upcoming ‘Cairn’ RPG, as well as a series of stories about a 1940’s private eye in a city of the undead. James feels that there are always more amazing stories that need to be told, and he writes, narrates, and runs games to share them with the world. He loves speculative fiction, noir detective tales, and pulp fantasy, and is honored to be a returning reader in the District of Wonders.

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Halloween Story: 

“Riding Shotgun” by Charles de Lint

I wasn’t surprised to learn that my father had died. He would have been seventy-two this winter and he’d always lived hard–I doubted that had changed after I left the farm. What surprised me was that I was in his will. We hadn’t spoken in twenty-five years. I hadn’t thought of him, except in passing, for maybe half that time. If you’d asked me, I would have said he’d leave his estate to a charity like MADD, considering how it was drunk driving that changed all of our lives.

            I missed the funeral. There are a lot of Coes in the phonebook, so it took the lawyers awhile to track me down.

Charles de Lint is a full-time writer and musician who makes his home in Ottawa, Canada. His many awards include the World Fantasy Award, the Canadian SF/Fantasy Aurora Award, and the White Pine Award, among others. Modern Library’s Top 100 Books of the 20th Century poll (voted on by readers) put eight of de Lint’s books among the top 100. With 37 novels and 18 collections of short fiction published to date, de Lint writes for adults, teens and children. His new middle grade book is Seven Wild Sisters, illustrated by Charles Vess (Little Brown, 2014). His most recent adult novel, The Mystery of Grace (Tor, 2009), is a fantastical ghost story and a heart-wrenching tale of love, passion and faith. His newest young adult novel is Out of This World (Triskell Press, due in the fall of 2014). His latest collection of short fiction is The Very Best of Charles de Lint (Tachyon Publications, 2010). For more information, visit his web site at http://www.charlesdelint.com.

Narrator

Eric Luke

Eric Luke is the screenwriter of the Joe Dante film EXPLORERS, which is currently in development as a remake, the comic books GHOST and WONDER WOMAN, and wrote and directed the NOT QUITE HUMAN films for Disney TV. His current project INTERFERENCE, a meta horror audiobook about an audiobook… that kills, is available free on iTunes and at Quillhammer.com.

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First Story: “Public Safety” by Matthew Johnson

Officier de la Paix Louverture folded Quartidi’s Père Duchesne into thirds, fanning himself against the Thermidor heat. The news inside was all bad, anyway: another theater had closed, leaving the Comedie Francaise the only one open in Nouvelle-Orleans. At least the Duchesne could be counted on to report only what the Corps told them to, that the Figaro had closed for repairs, and not the truth — which was that audiences, frightened by the increasing number of fires and other mishaps at the theaters, had stopped coming. The Minerve was harder to control, but the theater-owners had been persuaded not to talk to their reporters, to avoid a public panic. No matter that these were all clearly accidents: even now, in the year 122, reason was often just a thin layer of ice concealing a pre-Revolutionary sea of irrationality.

Matthew Johnson is a writer and educator who lives in Ottawa with his wife and two children. A collection of his short fiction, Irregular Verbs and Other Stories, was published in 2014 and has received starred reviews in Shelf Awareness and Quill and Quire. His work has been collected in several Year’s Best anthologies and has been translated into Danish, Czech and Russian. While not writing or engaged in full-contact parenting he works as the Director of Education for MediaSmarts, an internationally known non-profit source of digital and media literacy resources where he writes lessons and blogs, designs award-winning educational games and occasionally does pirate voices in both English and French. You can learn more at irregularverbs.ca

Second story: “Mrs. Wilson and the Black Arts of Mrs. Beelzebub from Number Six” by Steven Pirie

Mrs Wilson knew they were not Earthly cats. Mr Wilson had thrown his boot at them to shut them up, for a start, and somehow they’d thrown it back. And it was the way their eyes shone piercing green even in the daylight. At night, in their sepulchral wailing and tireless leaping at the moon, they seemed very much otherworldly. It was a worry.

 In the kitchen, at number eight, Mrs Wilson paused in stacking biscuits on her best crockery. She glanced beyond the window and over the fence into Mrs Beelzebub’s garden next door to where the cats still gathered. In the corner, part hidden behind the rickety wooden shed and the glorious apple tree, the vortices to beyond shimmered blue and green in the morning sunshine.

Mrs Wilson sighed; such a crime to sully a garden with the supernatural.

Steven Pirie lives in Liverpool, England with his wife and son. His fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies around the world. His comic fantasy novel, Digging up Donald, published by Immanion Press in 2004 and again in 2007, has attracted excellent reviews. A second novel, Burying Brian, was published also by Immanion Press in December 2010. Steve’s website is: www.stevenpirie.com

About the Narrators:

Nobilis Reed hosts the longest-running erotica podcast in the known universe, Nobilis Erotica. He is also the creative director of Quiver and Arch LLC, a production company that specializes in erotic audio drama. He’s also an author in his own right, with stories published by Circlet Press, Cleis Press, Forbidden Fiction and Logical Lust, as well as a number of self-published titles. You can find his website at nobiliserotica.com.

Veronica “V.” Giguere is a voice artist and author whose work can be heard on a wealth of podcast fiction magazines, fullcasts, and audiobooks across genres such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, and steampunk. She is the narrator and producer, as well as one of four coauthors, of the Secret World Chronicles podcast novel series, currently in its seventh season. Along with Cedric Johnson, she has recently podcast Broken, an inner-city cyberpunk story involving boxing, medical technology, and coffee. When she isn’t bringing the voices in others’ heads to life, V. masquerades as a mild-mannered academic whose specialties include first-year student success, learning strategies, and preparing for the zombie apocalypse.

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First Story: “The Master Miller’s Tale” Part 2 by Ian R. MacLeod

THERE ARE ONLY RUINS left now on Burlish Hill, a rough circle of stones. The track which once curved up from the village of Stagsby in the valley below is little more than an indentation in the grass, and the sails of the mill which once turned there are forgotten. Time has moved on, and lives have moved with it. Only the wind remains.

Once, the Westovers were millers. They belonged to their mill as much as it belonged to them, and Burlish Hill was so strongly associated with their trade that the words mill and hill grew blurred in the local dialect until the two became the same. Hill was mill and mill was hill, and one or other of the Westovers, either father or son, was in charge of those turning sails, and that was all the people of Stagsby, and all the workers in the surrounding farms and smallholdings, cared to know.

Ian R MacLeod has been selling and writing professionally for more than 20 years. His critically acclaimed novels have been widely translated, whilst his short stories have been reprinted in many Best Of anthologies. He has twice won the World Fantasy Award and the Sidewise Award for alternate history, as well as the Arthur C Clarke and John W Campbell Memorial awards. As well as using the same alternate history background of his two novels, The Light Ages and The House of Storms, he cites Keith Roberts and Thomas Hardy as his two major references in writing The Master Miller’s Tale. He lives with his two dogs and one wife in the river town of Bewdley. You can learn more at www.ianrmacleod.com.

Second story: “Show Me Yours” by Robert Reed

She wears a black felt robe long enough to cover her bare knees and pale pink socks pulled over her ankles; her calves are white and freshly shaved and her shins are even whiter and nicked in two places by razor blades. A red belt is cinched tight, making her waist appear narrow and her hips broad. She isn’t a tall woman. By most measures, she is slender, though the body has a roundness that marks five stubborn pounds–pounds sure to grow over time. She isn’t lovely in the traditional ways, but youth and a good complexion help.

Robert David Reed (born in Omaha, Nebraska) is a Hugo Award-winning American science fiction author. He has a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the Nebraska Wesleyan University. He is an extraordinarily prolific genre short-fiction writer with “Alone” being his 200th professional sale. His work regularly appears in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Sci Fiction. He has also published eleven novels.  Mr. Reed lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter.

About the Narrators:

Colin Clewes is a musician and writer, living in UK. He loves music, reading and movies. Although he’s British, he grew up in Africa and still hasn’t managed to do anything cooler than that – despite studying philosophy and learning to play electric guitar.

Nikolle Doolin writes fiction, poetry, and plays. Her work has appeared in the Wilderness House Literary Review, Tales to Terrify, 3:AM Magazine, 365 Tomorrows, Flashshot, and the literary anthology Wilderness House Literary Review – The Best of Volume 3. Additionally, her stage plays have been presented in festivals.
Nikolle is also a voice actor who has performed for various mediums. She produces a podcast called Audio Literature Odyssey in which she narrates classic literature by the likes of Austen, Poe, James, and more. Furthermore, Nikolle has performed contemporary narrations for Tales To Terrify, Crime City Central, The NoSleep Podcast and now Far Fetched Fables.

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First Story: “The Master Miller’s Tale” Part 1 by Ian R. McLeod

THERE ARE ONLY RUINS left now on Burlish Hill, a rough circle of stones. The track which once curved up from the village of Stagsby in the valley below is little more than an indentation in the grass, and the sails of the mill which once turned there are forgotten. Time has moved on, and lives have moved with it. Only the wind remains.

Once, the Westovers were millers. They belonged to their mill as much as it belonged to them, and Burlish Hill was so strongly associated with their trade that the words mill and hill grew blurred in the local dialect until the two became the same. Hill was mill and mill was hill, and one or other of the Westovers, either father or son, was in charge of those turning sails, and that was all the people of Stagsby, and all the workers in the surrounding farms and smallholdings, cared to know.

Ian R MacLeod had been selling and writing professionally for more than 20 years. His critically acclaimed novels have been widely translated, whilst his short stories have been reprinted in many Best Of anthologies. He has twice won the World Fantasy Award and the Sidewise Award for alternate history, as well as the Arthur C Clarke and John W Campbell Memorial awards. As well as using the same alternate history background of his two novels, The Light Ages and The House of Storms, he cites Keith Roberts and Thomas Hardy as his two major references in writing The Master Miller’s Tale. He lives with his two dogs and one wife in the river town of Bewdley. You can learn more at ianrmacleod.com.

Second story: “Princesses” by Jeremy Sim

To save a princess you will need three things:

A #2 pencil.

A graphing calculator.

An ally, preferably fearless.

You will need an ally because princesses are notoriously difficult to rescue alone. Your ally should be a family member, a mother or sister who fed you and tied your shoes when the ambit of your life whisked you through blown dandelions and video games. The tying of shoes isn’t important; the feeding is. Bread, water, and the quiet feast of stories, bedtime or otherwise, without which you would not exist. If you lack such an ally, stop reading now and go find one. To rescue a princess you must be absolutely chock full of stories. You must gorge yourself on them.

Jeremy Sim is probably the only Singaporean-American science fiction and fantasy writer currently living in Berlin, Germany. If he’s not, please let him know at www.jeremysim.com or on Twitter @jeremy_sim. This story, “Princesses,” originally appeared in Flash Fiction Online, 2013.

About the Narrators:

Colin Clewes is a musician and writer, living in UK. He loves music, reading and movies. Although he’s British, he grew up in Africa and still hasn’t managed to do anything cooler than that – despite studying philosophy and learning to play electric guitar.

Bob Raudys is a voice actor, musician and marketing/advertising guy. He probably should have figured out that voice acting was in his future when he had to do paragraph reads in grade school. The nuns were none too happy with his need to add accents to the stories. Born and raised in the Southwest Side of Chicago (pron. sout-west syde uv shi-kaw-go) as a first generation Lithuanian, he was fortunate to have his first of several European experiences visiting Lithuania, Moscow and Leningrad (now once again St. Petersburg) in 1976. One of the more memorable moments (aside from being arrested in the summer resort town of Palanga) was when he was being chased by an old, screaming Muscovite. Unfortunately Bob didn’t speak Russian, nor did the old woman speak Lithuanian or English. Bob’s migration into voice acting began 2 years ago, but his roots started in 1967 as a classically trained pianist. To his parent’s chagrin, his musical tastes and time moved into blues and rock ‘n roll (and yes, he was a wedding singer at one time). He currently is the keyboard player with the SouthSide Exiles. Performing was, and continues to be in his blood. Bob currently resides in the Chicago area with his wife, daughter and a cat, who is just waiting for the chance to take over the house. Go take a listen to what he can do at www.wordtomouthstudios.com

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First Story: “Save Me Plz” by David Barr Kirtley

Meg hadn’t heard from Devon in four months, and she realized that she missed him. So on a whim she tossed her sword and scabbard into the back seat of her car and drove over to campus to visit him.
She’d always thought that she and Devon would be one of those couples who really did stay friends afterward. They’d been close for so long, and things hadn’t ended that badly. Actually, the whole incident seemed pretty silly to her now. Still, she’d been telling herself that the split had been for the best — with her working full-time and him still an undergrad. It was like they were in two different worlds. She’d been busy with work, and he’d always been careless about answering email, and now somehow four months had passed without a word.

David Barr Kirtley is the author of several dozen fantasy & science fiction short stories, including “Save Me Plz,” which was featured in the anthology FANTASY: THE BEST OF THE YEAR. He’s also the host of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast on Wired.com, for which he’s interviewed over a hundred guests, including George R. R. Martin, Richard Dawkins, Paul Krugman, Simon Pegg, Margaret Atwood, Philip Pullman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Ursula K. Le Guin. He lives in New York. If you follow the link below you can read what he calls his “favorite fan letter” that he’s ever received. http://www.davidbarrkirtley.com/blog/?p=3273

You can find out more about David and his work at http://www.davidbarrkirtley.com/ and http://geeksguideshow.com/

Second story: “Of Melei, of Ulthar” by Gord Sellar

Haunted went Melei that evening into the streets of Ulthar, haunted by what she had seen in the dream-voyage of the night before; desert fires burning distant across the dark and dusty plain, and an immense black silhouette of some enormous outcropping of rock rising up, upward into the sky to blot out the tiny flickering stars across half of the heavens. In a dream, too, had she heard voices echoing against the stone walls of buildings crammed together along narrow streets, voices laden with care and worry, crying her name out into the blackness of deepening night.

Gord Sellar is a writer, an educator, an avid homebrewer, and occasional musician. His work has appeared in many magazines, anthologies, and journals since 2007, and several of his screenplays have been made into award-winning short films. (See Brutal Rice Productions for more on those.) He was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2009, and attended Clarion West in 2006. Born in Malawi and raised in Canada, and having spent eleven years lecturing in South Korean universities, he is currently living in Vietnam with his wife, while working on a novel. Visit his website at gordsellar.com. Beyond that, it might be perhaps of interest to listeners that I was the screenwriter for the first South Korean Lovecraft film adaptation. We did “The Music of Erich Zann.” Go to http://www.gordsellar.com/ for more.

About the Narrators:

Katherine Inskip weighs galaxies for a living, and builds worlds in her spare time. She is addicted to chocolate and Japanese logic puzzles.

Maria Makis received an MFA in Acting many years ago, but detoured a bit to become a lawyer. She is happily returning to her first and only true calling and is a voice actor in New York City where she lives. She is especially drawn to narration and audiobooks. You can learn more at mariamakisvoiceover.com.

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First Story: “Compartments” by Zoran Živković

I ran as fast as my legs would carry me.

The carriage had just pulled away from the buffer at the end of the track. Even though it was still moving slowly, had I been carrying any luggage, particularly anything heavy, I wouldn’t have made it. Luckily, all I was holding was my coat and hat.

I didn’t know how to get onto a moving carriage. Was I first supposed to jump onto the step on the platform of the last car and then grab hold of the handrail, or the other way around? Who knows what I would have done if the back door hadn’t opened just as I caught up to the car. The conductor came out onto the platform.

“Give me your hand!” he shouted.

Zoran Živković was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, in 1948. In 1973 he graduated from the Department of General Literature with the theory of literature, Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade; he received his master’s degree in 1979 and his doctorate in 1982 from the same school. In 2007, Živković was made a professor in the Faculty of Philology at his alma mater, the University of Belgrade, where he now teaches Creative Writing. The author of twenty books of fiction and eight books of nonfiction, Živković continues to push the boundaries of the strange and surreal. His writing belongs to the middle European fantastika tradition, and shares much in common with such masters as Mikhail Bulgakov, Franz Kafka and Stanislaw Lem. Find out more at http://www.zoranzivkovic.com/

Second story: “In the Nightmare Garden” by Shenoa Carroll-Bradd

The neighbor kids called Lucida Cole a witch, partially because she lived in a creaky old house, but mostly because she had a garden of nightmares. It wasn’t really her fault. The garden had come with the house; she’d just kept it up.

The breeze carried soft weeping, but she pretended not to hear it at first. Lucida looked up between the branches of the nearest tree and plucked a fruit, squeezing it to test for ripeness. She bit in and felt one of her bottom teeth wiggle. Lucida carefully chewed the tart bite and swallowed, then spat out the tooth and ran a finger along the rest of her teeth, testing for stability. They all seemed sturdy. She tossed the unripe fruit aside and it rolled out of sight beneath a “naked in public” shrub. The tooth she’d spat out slowly melted away as the nightmare’s astringent taste left her tongue.

Shenoa Carroll-Bradd lives in Southern California with her awesome brother and dancing dog. Her short stories have appeared online and in over two dozen anthologies, and she’s also launched an ebook serial of Victorian occult mysteries featuring her amateur detectives Fidgett and Klein. When not writing, she enjoys crocheting, reading, and bingeing on Netflix ’til her eyes bleed. For more information, visit her homepage at www.sbcbfiction.net. Her Kickstarter project is at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/982539034/lightning-lord-and-the-duplex-of-death.

About the Narrators:

Anthony Babington is a voice in the internet’s head. he looks almost, but not quite, exactly how you expect him to. He currently resides in Houston, Texas, but hastens to add that it was not his idea. He can be found on Google Plus

Cheryl Phipps was born in Canada and presently resides there, but has also lived in Jamaica and Maryland. By the time she was 16, she had moved 15 times! She used story telling as a way to fit in whenever she was the “new kid” in town. Cheryl obtained her Honours BA in Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. She spent many years teaching call centre representatives customer service and communication skills. She wrote a book that won second place in an international literary contest. Cheryl has always loved words, grammar, reading, acting and writing. All of these things came together for Cheryl in the form of voice over work, which she loves! You can learn more at www.CherylPhipps.ca

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First Story: “Chasing the Wind” by Elizabeth E. Wein

Martha Bennett sat on her trunk in the middle of Nairobi Airport watching the other passengers disperse. She had been sitting there for two hours, waiting for her father, and reading over and over again the terse telegram she had received the day before she left Philadelphia:

MAY NOT MEET. TAXI WILSON AIRPORT. HART ALDEN FLY KWALE.

She was not good at waiting. It made her nervous and irritable, but Martha could not quite believe her urbane Philadelphian parents would absolutely abandon her to her own devices in the middle of Africa, and she thought there must be a chance that her father would turn up at the last minute.

Elizabeth Wein is the holder of a private pilot’s license and an increasing collection of random World War II ephemera. Her story of the friendship between a female spy and pilot, Code Name Verity, won the Edgar Award for Young Adult fiction in 2013. Her most recent novel is Rose Under Fire, another World War II thriller for teens. Elizabeth lives in Scotland with her husband and two children. Her website is www.elizabethwein.com and she tweets as @ewein2412

Second story: “Surface Tension” by KJ Kabza

I hate it when she does this.

Brianna lies in the bathtub on her back, one knee bent and leaning in, making the lines of her hips twist and beckon. She lies in deep water, her eyes in calculating slits, the exhalations from her nose rippling a tiny current atop the surface.

I refuse to acknowledge this. I flip up the toilet seat and take myself out like nothing’swrong.

Brianna’s mouth rises above the waterline. “What are you doing?”

“This is the bathroom. I’m going to it.”

“This is the bathroom, and I’m taking a bath. Can’t you use the other one?”

“What, like you’ve never seen me — ”

“It’s disgusting, Jess.” She gets onto her elbows and the water laps against the sides of her breasts. “And I’m trying to relax.”

KJ Kabza has sold over 50 stories to venues such as Nature, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He lives in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, where he enjoys being surrounded by thorny cactus instead of thorny people. He invites you to follow him on Twitter @KJKabza and peruse kjkabza.com for links to free fiction and more.

About the Narrators:

Rachel Dee is new to the audio world and excited to step in. She has always enjoyed reading and was the child who read out-loud to her mother, not the other way around. Taking away books was also how she was grounded when she was younger. Currently she lives in the DFW area with her husband, cat, and dog and is pursuing film and television acting.

Alex Weinle writes short fiction for magazines and podcasts, his anthology of shock-comedic-tragic stories The Decapaphiliac is available now and his science fiction novel Border is currently in editing. Long time sofanaut, he has finally got up the courage to narrate. He lives in Fulbourn, England in a cottage that consumes bulbs of unusual wattage. You can find him on Twitter at @alexweinle

New Art

Kirk Quilaquil is a freelance illustrator who lives in Stevenage, Hertfordshire.  You can find him on Facebook or at http://kirkquilaquil.daportfolio.com/

Ferdinand Ladera  is a Fantasy Concept Illustrator who was born in Iligan, the city of majestic waterfalls, situated in the southeastern part of the Philippines.  Have a look at his work at http://ferdinandladera.com/105056/environment-illustration

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First Story:  “Troll’s Night Out” by Jenny Blackford

There was a lot of shrieking and laughing going on at the table behind ours.

“Girls’ night out,” I said, and took a good swig of my glass of red.

David barked out, “What did you say, woman?”

I shouted this time, hoping to penetrate the restaurant sound barrier: “Girls’ night out.”

David snorted. With his impressive snout, that was something.

“Trolls’ night out, more like it,” he said. He bared his long white canines in a toothy grin.

The comment was typical of the David I’d known and hated, before I ran away to Scandinavia. Unfortunately, it’s not considered good form to scream at one’s ex in a good Melbourne restaurant. Instead, I cut off a piece of my salmon cutlet and stuck it in my mouth, fast. The aroma of David’s steak was tormenting me.

Jenny Blackford is an Australian writer and poet whose work has appeared in many places, including Strange Horizons, The Pedestal Magazine, and Penumbra. Pamela Sargent called her historical novella set in classical Athens and Delphi, The Priestess and the Slave, “elegant.” Pitt Street Poetry has recently published an illustrated collection of her cat poems, The Duties of a Cat.
Her website is www.jennyblackford.com, she blogs at jennyblackford.livejournal.com, and she tweets as @dutiesofacat.

Second story: “We Sleep on a Thousand Waves Beneath the Stars” by Brendan Connell

White, hot sand strewn over with shells and then a great sweep of green; an island rich in vegetation, investigation revealing all sorts of tropical fruits, some of which the crew was familiar with, while others none of them had ever seen before – in the shape of stars, swords and crescents. Large brightly-plumed parrots squawked in the trees and small brown-furred monkeys leapt from branch to branch and chattered while, from the depths of huge ferns, the height of a man, came the pleasant scent of land – welcome indeed to those who had been six continual weeks aboard a ship after being thrown off course by a storm.

Brendan Connell was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970. He has had fiction published in numerous places, including McSweeney’s, Adbusters, and the World Fantasy Award winning anthologies Leviathan 3 (The Ministry of Whimsy 2002), and Strange Tales (Tartarus Press 2003). His published books are: The Translation of Father Torturo (Prime Books, 2005), Dr. Black and the Guerrillia (Grafitisk Press, 2005), Metrophilias (Better Non Sequitur, 2010), Unpleasant Tales (Eibonvale Press, 2010), The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children (Chomu Press, 2011), The Architect (PS Publishing, 2012), Lives of Notorious Cooks (Chomu Press, 2012), Miss Homicide Plays the Flute (Eibonvale Press, 2013), The Cutest Girl in Class (Snuggly Books, 2013), The Galaxy Club (Chomu Press, 2014), and The Metanatural Adventures of Dr. Black (PS Publishing, 2014). Find out more at http://brendanconnell.wordpress.com/

About the Narrators:

Catherine Logan had many years of training in theatre and voice in her youth – then many years of teaching acting, drama, writing and English literature as a grown-up. She has taken plenty of workshops and has studio experience in narration, commercial and animation voiceover work. Catherine is now involved in a second career which takes her back to her first love.

Matthew Frederickson is in his mid-30s, living in Memphis, Tennessee, with a rockstar plastic surgeon wife. He reads and writes and runs in his spare time. He loves to brew beer, and he’d love to make that his career. He will soon start the second season of his podcast, Freddy’s Fan Fiction. You can find him on Twitter as @swami.

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First Story: “The Shooter at the Heartrock Waterhole” by Bill Congreve

The rifle kicked, and one of the creatures — the beautiful one — was dead. But the wyrde, as Dad would have called it, began long before then.  Two days ago, I shot and killed two sparrows, and a rabbit I’d called “Attitude.” Right after, I buried them out in the deep sand away from the water.  At dawn yesterday, I smelled them as I woke. The sun filtered through the needles of a lone desert oak straight into my eyes. I rolled onto my stomach, lifted my head, and there they lay, just outside the tent flyscreen.  The corpses had been dug from their half-meter-deep holes and had been laid out on the orange sand and the leaf litter as neatly as you like, half a meter from where my head lay on the pillow.  I hadn’t heard a thing.

Bill Congreve is an award winning writer, editor and independent publisher (MirrorDanse Books). His stories have appeared in a number of countries in publications such as Faerie Reel, Tenebres, Event Horizon, Terror Australis, Aurealis, Borderlands, Bloodsongs, Crosstown Traffic, Monstres! and The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror. His collection of vampire stories is Epiphanies of Blood. His most recent collection is Souls Along the Meridian (2010). He won the Peter McNamara Achievement Award in 2012 and has acted as judge for the Aurealis Awards on nine occasions.
He works as a technical writer and editor in the emergency services sector. You can learn more here.

Second story: “The Comb” by Marly Youmans

People always say stories are true stories, and I suppose they believe it, often enough; this one, though, is true–true as true can be, as my mother used to say. Cross my heart and hope to die, a child says. They do, in the end, all hope to die. Nobody wants to be the moon’s immortal lover, who lives on, thousands of years beyond his youth, a husk of a man: Tithonus, the grasshopper, who rasps in the weeds when the moonlight touches him. Or perhaps I’m wrong; perhaps most people don’t know that a fate can feel more alien than death.

Novelist Sebastien Doubinsky recently said, “I cannot recommend an author more than Marly Youmans, whose fantastic prose is absolutely gorgeous and haunting.” And now September 1st marks the publication of Marly Youmans’s novel Glimmerglass. Margo Lanagan describes the book as “a series of mirrors and panes that splinter and soften to let you fall deeper into the heart of myth and artistic desire. A resonant, beautiful exploration…” Poet Jeffery Beam says, “Nature, architecture, dread, thrill, sexual dilemma, and murder echo against Youmans’ gorgeous prose and terrifying romance, which glides like a serpent―without a single extraneous or boring word.” Marly’s recent books include the novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, winner of the Ferrol Sams Award and the Silver Award in fiction from the ForeWord Book of the Year competition, as well as several books of poetry–the epic post-apocalyptic poem, Thaliad, and collections The Foliate Head and The Throne of Psyche. You can visit her blog http://www.thepalaceat2.blogspot.de/

About the Narrators:

Eric Luke is the screenwriter of the Joe Dante film EXPLORERS, which is currently in development as a remake, the comic books GHOST and WONDER WOMAN, and wrote and directed the NOT QUITE HUMAN films for Disney TV. His current project INTERFERENCE, a meta horror audiobook about an audiobook… that kills, is available free on iTunes and at Quillhammer.com.

Nicola Seaton-Clark lives in the wilds of (almost) Eastern Europe with her long-suffering husband, phenomenal children and a grumpy cat. Trained as an actress and singer, she has worked in entertainment for over 20 years and currently splits her time between writing speculative fiction, helping her husband run their voice-over company, Offstimme, and voicing everything from commercials and documentaries to public transport announcements.  She also hosts this podcast…

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