PseudoPod

• Author : Shannon Peavey
• Narrator : Tina Connolly
• Host : Wendy N. Wagner
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Galen Dara
• Discuss on Forums

Pseudopod 476: ARTEMIS RISING Women In Horror Showcase: Black Hearts is a PseudoPod original.

Alma carried the worm-fork and Lewis carried the knife. They didn’t speak and had not spoken since the morning, fifteen miles back through dry grass and bare dirt and the click-chatter of insects. Dust rose around their ankles and the sun beat hot on the napes of their necks.

When they dropped over a rise and hit bottom, Lewis stopped and nodded and Alma took the worm-fork in both hands. It was a heavy thing, its grip worn smooth by her palm. She raised it shoulder-high, breathed once, and slammed it down into the ground.

She didn’t know how Lewis decided on a place — what made that stretch of plain any better than the miles they had passed before it. Long miles, leading a horse too laden with jars and bags to ride. They were somewhere south of Nampa, days out of Boise, and she’d been gone from her home for more than a year. The land was different, here. The ground packed so hard she had to lean all her weight on the worm-fork to get it to stick.

They’d been only children at the start of Lewis’s great journey, but no one would call them such anymore.

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by Jessica Amanda Salmonson.

The Toad Witch originally appeared in Tales of Witchcraft in 1991.

Jessica Amanda Salmonson is a recipient of the World Fantasy Award, ReaderCon Certificate, and Lambda Award, author of THE DISFAVORED HERO and other novels, THE DEATH SONNETS and other poetry collections, and THE DEEP MUSEUM and other short story collections. Forthcoming – a giant omnibus of her works will appear from the extravagantly cool Centipede Press consisting of her Dell Books novel ANTHONY SHRIEK, a number of poems, and her Ace Books collection A SILVER THREAD OF MADNESS plus enough new and uncollected material to equal a third book in one huge volume. Her next poetry collection PETS GIVEN IN EVIDENCE OF OLD ENGLISH WITCHCRAFT AND OTHER BEWITCHED BEINGS will be issued this coming year by The Sidecar Preservation Society to coincide with Diversicon where she will be Guest of Honor. She’s presently working on a small collection THE BLIND AVIATRIX: Dream Life and Real Life, too odd for commercial publishers but she can’t help it she has to write it.

Your narrator – Sandra Espinoza is a voice actress and video/sound editor in New York with a background in publicity, research and writing. She’s provided voice over for games like Apotheon, Primordia, Combat Core, Norse Noir and Supreme League of Patriots. Sandra’s upcoming roles include Freida in Kreative Spill’s newest point-and-click adventure Norse Noir; and Ember in Combat Core. To find out more visit dustyoldroses.com or like DustyOldRoses on Facebook.

Your guest host – Kat Rocha is Associate Editor at PseudoPod, Guest Editor for the Artemis Rising Event, and Editor-in-Chief of 01Publishing. They released Whispers from the Abyss 2 in ebook in 2015 and will release it in trade paperback in early 2016. She is a longtime fan of horror and good horror stories and has made the promotion and publishing of them her career.

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I began life in 1950. Until then, everything was darkness. Afterward was suffering and beauty. How could 1 not become a masochist? By the age of four I had learned to mistrust everyone, a good philosophy. If one expects something terrible to develop out of even pleasant events, one may also expect consolations at moments of travail; and even I must delude myself from time to time, succumbing to the disease of sentiment.

People who are essentially cheerful annoy me. When they are finally bent and deaf, they are suddenly surprised. They find out their lives were pointless falsehoods; that it’s all nearly over, and for what? When in the end they are completely disillusioned they seek forgiveness from everyone, for they had always been oblivious to the obvious things, to the suffering around them. They are sorry for having insisted nothing was ever all that bad. Destined as they are to so much disappointment, they merit our sadness more than our disdain.

As for those of us daily anguished, we need not be pitied. The world constantly reinforces our perspective. We may nod our heads like true sages. We are impervious to disillusion, knowing as we do that worse is yet to come.

The post Pseudopod 475: The Toad Witch appeared first on PseudoPod.

In our first 2016 metacast, we present the Escape Artists (EA) stories that ran in 2015, which are eligible in the upcoming Hugo nomination season.

A quick plug. For us. All four EA shows – PodCastle, Pseudopod, Escape Pod and Cast of Wonders – are themselves eligible in the SEMIPROZINE Hugo category.

Not Fancast. Not Fanzine. SEMIPROZINE. Yes, the categories are confusing and often overlap. “Fancast” is traditionally dominated by commentary shows and sketch-based audio programs.

There’s an argument that we could split the shows and compete in multiple categories to increase our chances. We don’t think that benefits anyone. The division is artificial at best, and extremely difficult (at worst) to explain, given all four of our shows have harmonised pay rates and submissions policies. It would smack of gamesmanship, which doesn’t interest us.

Don’t get us wrong, we LOVED seeing PodCastle and Escape Pod on last year’s Hugo long lists, and we’d be honoured for any one of our shows to be a finalist.

But that’s a decision that rests solely in the hands of YOU, our fans and supporters.

(And just a note, Mothership Zeta doesn’t qualify this year because they’re too new.)

Below are links to some aggregation projects, where fans are building lists of those eligible in the various categories. They’re great tools, and we’d like to thank David Steffen for his efforts. We’ll also link to our Wikia page, containing links to all the eligible Escape Artists stories.

• Escape Artists Stories eligible for Hugo Nomnations (2016)
• Art eligible for Hugo Nomnations (2016)
• ALL Hugo Nominees so far
• Hugo Nominees for Best Semi-prozine (2016)

Please listen to this MetaCast for the Escape Artists entries!

The post For Your Consideration appeared first on PseudoPod.

by S.L. Gilbow.

“Mr. Hill’s Death” was first published in The Dark Magazine and was reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2015. “The English assignment in the story is based on a project I used to give when I was teaching high school. The idea for the short story came to me when a student showed a video of a car wreck to illustrate the word ‘tragic.'”

A 2011 graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop, S.L. GILBOW‘s short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, The Dark Magazine, Betwixt and many other publications. Gilbow is a retired lieutenant colonel and navigator with twenty-six years of Air Force service and over 2000 flying hours in the B-52. He currently teaches English at Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton, Virginia. You can learn learn more about S. L. Gilbow at slgibow.com.

Your narrator – Mat Weller – well, you may heard of him if you keep your ears open.

**************************** Mr. Hill’s death is posted on YouTube. You can’t actually see him. Just the back of his sunflower yellow convertible, top up, cruising along a two lane road. The fifty-second clip, taken from a dash cam in a following car, seems rather ordinary at first, and you might think you were watching a typical drive through a wooded countryside. That is if the clip weren’t titled “Tragic Car Wreck.”

The post PseudoPod 474: Mr. Hill’s Death appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Chris Kuriata
• Narrator : Spencer Disparti

by Chris Kuriata

“Sack Race To The River” was first published in issue 3 of Phobos in December, 2014.

CHRIS KURIATA has written stories about home invading bears, elderly poisoners, and ghastly family photographs, which have appeared in many fine magazines. He lives in the Niagara Region. He has a funny and creepy story included in the upcoming Exile anthology THE PLAYGROUND OF LOST TOYS.

Your narrator – Spencer Disparti – is a poet and the podcast host for “The Green Magick Podcast”. You can find most of his work at Skeletopia and you can find the podcast in iTunes or at Podbean.com.

**************************** After cramming ourselves into the sack—my brother and I crouched on top of Dad’s shoulder blades like a pair of folded wings—Dad galloped down the stairs and out into the night. My brother and I cheered, enjoying the midnight wind blasting across our faces. Dad ran to the escarpment, grabbing the trunks of skinny trees to keep his balance as we skidded down the incline. He ran to the edge of the river, huffing and puffing, checking the time on his phone.

“Seven minutes,” he said. “Thank God we’ve started now ’cause we need practice. We need so much practice.”

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The post PseudoPod 473: Sack Race To The River appeared first on PseudoPod.

by Ryan Dull

“Self Portrait With Embellishments” is a PseudoPod Original.

RYAN DULL Ryan Dull lives in Washington, DC. Find him on Twitter at @RyanSoDull.

Your narrator – Joe Calarco works with the Coeurage Theatre Company.

**************************** These are the things you need to make art: Discipline, Opportunity, Inspiration.

Discipline begets Craft, Output, and Dispassionate Self-Criticism. I’ve had Discipline since I was eight years old.

Opportunity means that you can afford the time and the food and the ink required to make art. I’ve had Opportunity since I was a pair of star-crossed gametes.

I have never had Inspiration.

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The post PseudoPod 472: Self Portrait With Embellishments appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Authors : Jon Padgett and Nathaniel Lee
• Narrators : Jon Padgett, Graeme Dunlop and Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

These are the winners of the fourth round of the Pseudopod Flash Fiction Contest. All are Pseudopod Originals.

The next phase of the Flash Fiction Contest will be run by Escape Pod. Get your science fiction flash prepared.

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“Cold Spots” by Lena Coakley

Lena says about this story, “To me, ‘Cold Spots’ is a very New England story. All the imagery is pinched from childhood memories of my grandmother’s summerhouse on the Connecticut shore. I see it as being about the disappointment that comes when we realize adulthood is not what we thought it would be when we were children, and the desire to get back to a self that may never have existed. This will be my first podcasted story so I’m beyond excited to hear it.”

Lena Coakley’s YA fantasy, Witchlanders, was called “one stunning teen debut” by Kirkus Reviews and won an SCBWI Crystal Kite award. Her forthcoming novel, Worlds of Ink and Shadow, is a portal fantasy about the young Brontë siblings and the imaginary countries they wrote about in childhood. It will be out January 5th from Amulet Books in the US and Harper Collins Canada in Canada. She lives in Toronto and is the current Vice President of CANSCAIP, the Canadian Society of Children’s Authors, Illustrators and Performers. Follow her on twitter @lenacoakley

Your reader – Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali lives in Houston, Texas with her husband of twenty-five years and three children. By day she works as a breast oncology nurse. At all other times she juggles, none too successfully, writing, reading, gaming and gardening. She has self-published one novel entitled An Unproductive Woman, has published a story at Escape Pod and has a story upcoming in the An Alphabet of Embers anthology. Khaalidah also reads slush at Escape Pod where she is on a mission to encourage more women to submit science fiction stories.

Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to long youth.

You can catch her posts at her website, www.khaalidah.com, and you can follow her on twitter, @khaalidah.

Salt on my lips. Sun on the sea. My body slides through the water easily as if it had never aged. I have to swim farther and farther out to find you, but you are always there. In the cold spots.

On land the past is vague and distant, but something about the sudden gooseflesh, the delicious shock between my legs, brings you back, and I remember.

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“Down” by Nathaniel Lee

Nathaniel Lee lives with his family in South Carolina. His work has appeared in dozens of venues online and off, including several times previously here on PseudoPod. He serves as the editor of the Drabblecast and assistant editor at Escape Pod.

Your reader – Graeme Dunlop is a tall man, mightily shouldered and deep of chest, with a massive corded neck and heavily muscled limbs. He is clad in silk and velvet, with the royal lions of Aquilonia worked in gold upon his rich jupon, and the crown of Aquilonia shines on his square-cut black mane; but the great sword at his side seems more natural to him than the regal accoutrements. His brow is low and broad, his eyes a volcanic blue that smolder as if with some inner fire. His dark, scarred, almost sinister face is that of a fighting-man, and his velvet garments cannot conceal the hard, dangerous lines of his limbs.

It started with the basement. The steps descended into darkness. The light was on, I could see the light, the light was glowing its little heart out, but about three steps from the bottom, it just stopped. The shadows thickened and there was a hint of concrete floor, then nothing. I didn’t want to go down there, even though I’d just heard the dryer buzz.

Linny went to investigate. She made it five steps down. Then she was gone, too. And the darkness was closer.

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“The Mindfulness of Horror Practice” by Jon Padgett

Jon says about this story, “After my family and I returned home to a devastated New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, a friend of mine suggested I start meditating to help deal with acute depression and anxiety. I did so after finding a mindfulness of breathing practice which I favored, and it was transformative. Some time back, it struck me that the flip side of such a practice might be interesting to explore, and—thus— ‘The Mindfulness of Horror’ was born.”

Jon Padgett is a professional—though lapsed—lesser ventriloquist who lives in New Orleans with his spouse, their daughter, and two cats. Padgett has work out or forthcoming in Pseudopod, The Lovecraft eZine and Xnoybis. Padgett’s chapbook, The Infusorium, was released in spring of 2015, and his first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, is forthcoming from Dunhams Manor Press, June 2016.

Your reader – Jon Padgett is also a professional voice-over artist with a couple of books and many amateur productions under his belt. Later in 2016, Padgett–along with a team of editors and the artistic wizardry of Dave Felton–will be releasing the first issue of Vastarien, a source of critical study and creative response to the corpus of Thomas Ligotti and the authors who influenced and are influenced by him.

In this recording I’m going to be leading you through all four stages of the mindfulness of horror practice. Closing your eyes. Become aware of the air on your skin, the temperature in the room. Any noises or smells. Accept them all, good or bad and let go. Not clinging to anything or pushing anything away, but embracing every sensation.

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The post PseudoPod 471: Flash On The Borderlands XXX: Flash Fiction Contest IV appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Helen Marshall
• Narrator : The Word Whore
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

“The Santa Claus Parade” was first “published” by Helen as a Christmas card which she had specially printed with artwork by Chris Roberts and sent around to friends and family in 2013. It was reprinted and first made commercially available in GIFTS FOR THE ONES WHO COME AFTER (ChiZine Publications, 2014) which recently won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award!

“This is one of the weirdest stories I’ve written but I had a pretty gleeful grin on my face the whole time I was typing it out.”

Some people think the Santas are smiling.

The Company tries to weed out that kind of thinking pretty early on with videos from the eighties, people with big hair, shoulder pads, smiling in bleached out, crackling colours. There are diagrams about brain function. A specialist gave a talk on the subject but I slept all the way through it. Sweet dreams.

The post PseudoPod 470: The Santa Claus Parade appeared first on PseudoPod.

by Caitlin Marceau.

“Hunger” was published through Sanitarium Magazine, issue no. 23, in July of 2014. The text can be read at Shadows At The Door.

“I’m Canadian and winters can be long and rough up here, and that was sort of the inspiration for this story. It wasn’t uncommon for people in rural areas not all that long ago to get horribly lost during a whiteout (a heavy and unrelenting snowstorm). People would leave their home to get something in their barn, and they’d be found a few days later in a pile of snow because they couldn’t find their way back. I always thought it was a terrifying idea, and I really hope the listeners at home think so too!”

CAITLIN MARCEAU is an author and professional editor living and working in Montreal. She prefers to focus her time on journalism and works of horror, but has also been published for poetry as well as creative nonfiction. When she’s not covered in ink or wading through stacks of paper, you can find her ranting about issues in pop culture or nerding out over a good book. She has a play coming out at the end of the year called SHADOW PUPPETS. Her work can also be found at at Sanitarium Magazine, Shadows at the Door, and Morpheus Tales. Look for her to be featured in “The Women in Horror Annual” issued by the Horror Writers Association. For more information on how to support this project visit: WOMEN IN HORROR ANNUAL and WOMEN IN HORROR ANNUAL. Caitlin blogs here.

Your narrator – Brian Rollins – is a voice actor living in Denver, Colorado where does double duty as a web developer and voice actor. Brian is probably best known in audiobook circles as the voice of the Glen & Tyler series. You can find out what he’s working on next or hire him for your next project at The Voices In My Head.

**************************** Jean pulls a pine needle from inside his coat pocket and slowly begins to gnaw on it. “It’s better than dying lost in a forest, or being eaten by starving wolves.”

“I’d welcome the wolves, Jean. At least then I’d have a chance to bite some meat off one of them, and die with a full stomach. Besides, the dogs had enough brains to get out of here a long while ago.”

“There’s still some. How else do you account for the howling outside our cabin all night?”

“The wind,” he shoots back dismissively.

“Or a wendigo,” Jean says quietly, in a voice a whisper. “Wendigos?”

“Wendigos. Mom used to tell me stories of how your father’s ancestors lived in these woods during the time of them. She said to me her, your, great grandfather was almost tricked into becoming one, but he saved himself from them in time.”

“My grandfather-”

“My great grandfather-”

“Was almost a wendigo?” Pierre laughs bitterly.

“It’s true! Mom told me when he was a young boy he was tracking a moose with some men from the tribe, when he and his friend got separated from them. The moose lead them all through the woods, for many days, until both of them were lost and hungry. The moose tracks had disappeared days before and there wasn’t any game to hunt. They grew so hungry, that one day an evil spirit overcame him. Mom told me he was possessed by the urge to eat his frie…”

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The post PseudoPod 469: Hunger appeared first on PseudoPod.

by B.T. Joy.

“The Angel In The Marble” is original to Pseudopod.

‘The Angel In The Marble’ is an example of a kind of story that has haunted and fascinated me since early childhood and which, until writing this, I had never quite expressed in words. It’s one of those ‘stormy night’ stories we find in the darker corners of books of fairytales in which someone is lost in a deep wood and so follows the single light shining from a nearby cabin; wandering, unknowingly, even further from the road. It’s a story about two strangers, not desiring company and having their own personal reasons for solitude, who nevertheless meet on common ground and must reveal and complete one another’s stories. I see this as a trope very near to the heart of horror and dark literature and I’ve witnessed it play out time and again in such places as Pinter’s The Caretaker and No Man’s Land, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and, more recently, the 2008 Marek Losey film The Hide, which is probably the best contemporary example I can name.

B.T. JOY has been writing horror for some years now and has had around two dozen works of fiction included in magazines, journals, anthologies and podcasts worldwide. His intention is to produce tales set in a realistic environment in which the psychological preoccupations of the protagonist drive the narrative and any supernatural elements are left for the reader to infer; rather than being openly stated by the writer. Also a practicing poet, B.T. Joy’s verse has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize on three occasions and can be found in the pages and internet presences of over fifty markets. He is the holder of a BA from London Metropolitan University and a PGDE from Strathclyde. This year he was awarded an MLitt in Poetry from the University of St. Andrews and he relocated to Heilongjiang, in Northern China, where he writes and reads voraciously and teaches English at high school level. This year his first solo collection of poetry Teaching Neruda will be released through Popcorn Press. White Knuckle Press are also releasing a selection of his prose poetry in a chapbook due out in March. For information on all his writing and publications listeners should refer to his website: B.T. Joy: Online Poetry and his blog: Turning To Visuals

Your narrator – Simon Meddings is a freelance script writer, podcast etc and audio actor. The waffle on podcast can be found at waffleon.podbean.com You can follow simon @hawkeyemeds

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It’s always been the consensus that symmetry is synonymous with beauty.

But Adrian Speer disagreed.

What was more symmetrical than that block of rough, square-edged marble; fresh from the quarry? If symmetry was all we were looking for we’d be exhibiting a slab of raw, unchiseled stone on that glass-surrounded plinth in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.

They do say the great artist went personally to Carrara; to choose just the right marble for his masterworks. And so the raw resources were important. No one’s saying different. But, in the angles of the white stone, Michelangelo saw angels; and he chiseled until he released them into the air. Breaking symmetry for beauty’s sake.

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