Mike Strickland has made a career out of writing everything from marketing copy and finance articles to technical documentation and mobile app messages—and even twenty thousand science fiction-themed trivia questions. Other jobs he's been paid to do include scuba diver, navigator, call center representative, user experience designer, and now, science fiction author. His love of words began with fantasy and sci-fi, where it has now brought him full circle. After a long hiatus from fiction, Mike started writing and publishing again in 2024. A year later, he earned a master's degree in creative writing and won the prestigious Writers of the Future Contest.
The story idea for “As Long as You Both Shall Live” was born from a dream two days before the Writers of the Future contest deadline. Mike wrote most of the story on the day of the deadline itself—his most prolific day of writing yet. The inspiration that powered such output focused on this question: “If technology allowed a person’s consciousness to be transferred to a virtual environment, disconnected from their physical body, what would happen if that person’s body died while their consciousness was in that state?” Mike explores the ethical questions inherent in this premise through the context of a hopeful love story—as all the best stories are told. Kathleen Powell received 18 awards from Writers of the Future before claiming her place in the 2026 anthology—two of them finalist stories. Since winning Writers of the Future, she placed third in the 2025 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award contest.
When not writing about changelings or happily reading folklore and fantasy from across the world, she is usually thinking about writing changelings or reading folklore (she also likes tea).
The inspiration for her winning story, “Saffron and Marigolds,” came after reading “Circulate” by L. Ron Hubbard in Writers of the Future Volume 39. In that essay, Hubbard writes “And in despair, we wail that there is nothing of interest in our surroundings or in the lives we lead. We say that and we believe it…If we knew our surroundings well enough, we could put them on paper. Someone else comes around, looks us over and studies our environment for a brief period and then goes off to write a novel. Why, we moan, didn’t we write that book?”
Well, why not? After writing about New York and London and Iowa (they have a tulip festival!), she decided to give writing about a place she knew firsthand a shot. After all, why should faeries and dragons and grand adventures always exist only somewhere “far, far away?”
So “Saffron and Marigolds” is based in the little city where she attended college, and features good friends, high stakes, and cheese, because those, after all, are the essentials in any magic story.
She hopes the locals will enjoy recognizing a few familiar details, and that readers everywhere will remember impossible adventures aren’t always so far away as we might think.
The Contest, one of the most prestigious writing and illustrating competitions in the world, is currently in its 42nd year and is judged by some of the premier names in speculative fiction.
The Writers of the Future Contest judges include, Tim Powers (author of On Stranger Tides), Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert (Dune prequel series), Robert J. Sawyer (The Oppenheimer Alternative), Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn series, The Stormlight Archive), Larry Niven (Ringworld), Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game), Nnedi Okorafor (Who Fears Death), Hugh Howey (Wool), and Katherine Kurtz (Deryni series) to name a few.