The Overcast

Long As I Can See The Light by Maria Haskins.  Featuring as afterword by Maria Haskins.  Narrated by J.S. Arquin.  #SciFi  #Aliens  #PNW

"Thomas, why do you think I brought you here?"

"To kill me.  Or to let them take me away.  One way or another, you will destroy me."

She sighs.

"What is it you think happened when the light came?  Can you tell me that?"

Maria Haskins is a Swedish-Canadian writer and translator.  She writes speculative fiction and poetry, and debuted as a writer in Sweden in the 1980s.  Since 1992 she lives in Canada, and is currently located just outside Vancouver with a husband, two kids, and a very large black dog.  Her most recent published book is "Dark Flash", a collection os flash fiction stories.  Her work has also appeared in, or will be appearing in, Flash Fiction Online, Shimmer, Gamut, Capricious, and elsewhere.  Find her online at http://mariahaskins.wordpress.com/ and on Twitter @mariahaskins.

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How to Paper Train Your Dragon by Nadya Duke.  Featuring an afterword by Nadya Duke.  Read by J.S. Arquin.  #Fantasy #Dragons #Unicorns #Magic #Sisters  #comedy

"I'll tell you how NOT to paper train your dragon.  Don't bap it on the nose with a wooden practice sword.  It will light the sword on fire and then..."

Nadya Duke is a licensed electrical engineer who now makes her living as a product manager for a software company.  She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise writing workshop and her work has appeared in Crossed Genres magazine.  Nadya lives in Portland, OR and makes an excellent Manhattan.  Find her online at www.nadyaduke.com

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Tessa by Edward Ashton.  Featuring an afterword by Edward Ashton.  Read by J.S. Arquin.  #SciFi #space

"I look around the cafeteria.  There's a lot of stuff wafting through the air now, some of it heavy, and some of it sharp.  This would be a dangerous place to be if gravity came back.

   Of course, gravity's not coming back.  We're in an elevator at the top of infinity, and the cable has just been cut."

Edward Ashton lives in Rochester, New York with his inordinately patient wife, three beautiful daughters, and an adorably mopey dog named Max.  He sold his first short story to Raphael Alvarez for a sheet pizza, and has since then published in dozens of venues, ranging from Louisiana Literature to Daily Science Fiction and Escape Pod.  His first novel, Three Days in April, was released by HarperCollins in 2015.  His second is in the final stages of editing, with a scheduled release date of June 2017.  You can find him online at edwardashton.com 

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Graveyard Shift by Holly Schofield.  Featuring an afterword by Holly Schofield.  Read by J.S. Arquin.  #SciFi  #podcast  

"When Ryan Leong received the call about his mother's death, he had one foot crammed in a tree fork and the other dangling over an electrified fence."

Holly Schofield travels through time at the rate of one second per second, oscillating between alternate realities of city and country life.  Her fiction has been published in Lightspeed's "Women Destroy Science Fiction", Unlikely Story, Crossed Genres, and many other venues.  She lives in British Columbia.  For more of her work see: http://hollyschofield.wordpress.com

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The Trouble With Vacations by Robert Bagnall.  Featuring an afterword by Robert Bagnall.  Read by J.S. Arqun.  #SciFi  #podcast

"He wiped his hand across his forehead and came away with a palmsmear of pinky-red nanomites.  He watched as they coalesced into a single vermillion tear that ran down his pinky and dropped down onto the hard plastic surface of the bed-like layout.  From there they found their way back into one of the sinkholes.  It looked like a self-propelled bloodclot.  He could feel the remaining nanomites crawling off his body and away.

 Damn crummy vacation routine.  So shoddy the program didn't even bother getting all the mites back into the layout before it woke him up."

Robert Bagnall is an English writer who has completed four undistinguished marathons, but holds a world record for eating cream teas.  The two may be related.

His speculative fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines, websites, and anthologies since the early 1990s.  His words also very occasionally cropped up on radio, in newspapers, and out of the mouths of UK government ministers, for whom he was briefly a speechwriter.  He is currently taking a break from corporate wageslavery to renovate a Victorian villa on the English Riviera.

He can find his musings on science fiction and writing at meschera.blogspot.co.uk, and his non-fiction book "127a - Diary of a Self-Builder" on Amazon.  His science fiction novel "2084" will be released by Double Dragon Publications in late 2017.  He doesn't like dogs and is allergic to cats.  

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A Long Fuse to a Slow Detonation by Anaea Lay.  Featuring an afterword by Anaea Lay.  Read by J.S. Arquin.  #SciFi #Podcast 

"Marni nodded, smiled, wished him luck.  Just before he went through the doors, she yelled at him, then performed a perfect pirouette and did not overcompensate with either hip.  They blew kisses.

Then Marni went back to her room and built her bomb."

Anaea Lay lives in Seattle, Washington where she writes, cooks, plays board games, reads too much, and sells real estate under another name.  She's the fiction podcast editor for Strange Horizons where you can hear her read a new short story nearly every week.  Her fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Lightspeed, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Podcastle.  She lives online at anaealay.com where you can find a complete bibliography and her blog.  Follow her on Twitter @anaealay.

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Episode 52:  Skin in the Game by Jeff Samson.  Our 2 year anniversary episode!!!  Featuring an afterword by the author.  Read by J.S. Arquin.  #SciFi  

Jeff Samson brews Irish stout when he's not writing science fiction and occasionally drinks it when he is.  His work can be found in numerous publications, including Nature Magazine, Cast of Wonders, Perihelion, and Lore.  Jeff lives in the great Garden State of New Jersey with his wife and children, and no cats.  Find him online at jeffsamsonwrites.com.  

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Episode 51: Showing the Colours by M. Darusha Wehm.  Featuring an afterword by the author.  Read by J.S. Arquin.  

M. Darusha Wehm is the three-time Parsec Award shortlisted author of five science fiction novels, most recently Children of Arkadia (Bundoran Press).  Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in many venues, including Nature, Escape Pod, Mothership Zeta, and several anthologies.  Writing as Darusha Wehm (withot the M.) she is the author of the Devi Jones Locker series and is the editor of the crime and mystery magazine Plan B.  She is originally from Canada but currently lives in Wellington, New Zealand after spending several years traveling at sea on her sailboat.  Find her online at http://darusha.ca.

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A Slow Constant Path by Erica L. Satifka.  Featuring an afterword by the author.  Read by J.S. Arquin.  #scifi #cats

Erica L. Satifka is a writer and/or friendly construct, forged in a heady mix of iced coffee and sarcasm.  She enjoys rainy days, questioning reality, ignoring her to-do list, and adding to her collection of tattoos.  Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Lightspeed, and Intergalactic Medicine Show, and her debut novel Stay Crazy was released in August 2016 by Apex Publications.  Originally from Pittsburgh, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her spouse Rob and an indeterminate number of cats.  Find her online at www.ericasatifka.com .

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Endless and the End by Jennifer Brozek.  Featuring an afterword by the author.  Read by J.S. Arquin.  #steampunk  #horror

Jennifer Brozek is a Hugo Award nominated editor and a Bram Stoker nominated author.  She has worked in the publishing industry since 2004.  With the number of edited anthologies, novel sales, RPG books, and nonfiction books under her belt, Jennifer is often considered a Renaissance woman, but she prefers to be known as a wordslinger and optimist.  Read more about her at www.jenniferbrozek.com  or follow her on Twitter: @JenniferBrozek.  

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