Part 37 (2/2)
Many years later, after Steve and I had moved to Maine, I was feeling just a touch homesick for the hot streets of my native city. It didn't occur to me to write a story about Baltimore, though, until I had a conversation with a friend in which he indicated that a particular person had so little personal power as to actually possess ”mouse mojo.”
Clearly, Mouse Mojo was the name of someone familiar with the streets of Baltimore and The Block. I put the word out-and a day later, I knew where to find him.
After the kind of varied career path that indicates either extreme curiosity or a very short attention span, Chris Szego found the job of her dreams managing Bakka, Canada's oldest SF bookstore. A prize-winning poet, her work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and anthologies. Most of the time she lives in Toronto.
About ”Angel's Kitchen”: Social work is not for the merely compa.s.sionate. It's a job for those very few whose hearts are both infinitely giving and tough as diamond. The people who can learn to measure success by an increase of time between failures. Who know that no matter how bad it gets, there will always be something worse ahead. But who try, anyway.
People that brave need an angel who's not afraid to get dirty.
Edward McKeown is a native son of NYC from which he draws much of the color and att.i.tude of his stories. He moved to Charlotte, North Carolina in 1985 in search of reasonable house prices and a commute free of the ”non-bathing public.”
In Charlotte he developed an interest in the martial arts, achieving a black sash (belt) in Esoma Kung Fu. Writing was always a desire and became a pa.s.sion after his muse took up full time residence behind his eyeb.a.l.l.s. He's fortunate to be married to the noted artist, Sch.e.l.ly Keefer.
About ”Lair of the Lesbian Love G.o.ddess”: ”Lair of the Lesbian Love G.o.ddess” came out of sheer serendipity. I finally listened to my wife and came out of the writing closet to join a critique group. The experience, which I think is an essential one for a writer, was terrific. The group known as Brinker's at Border in honor of a deceased member became a wellspring of ideas as well as a sounding board.
One day, I was e-mailing a friend from the group about a missing member. Our exchange spun out of control as we went back and forth about her possible fate: kidnapped, abducted by aliens, lost in a South Carolina swamp? Finally my friend, Diane Hoover, suggested that she had been captured and disappeared into a particular local inst.i.tution of higher learning (which I won't name, so don't ask) that she called the Lair of the Lesbian Love G.o.ddess. I laughed till tears appeared.
I decided that I had to write a short story with that as a t.i.tle. Gradually the pulp-noir tale began to populate itself with characters: the world weary McMa.n.u.s, ambitious Regina Del Mar, flirtatious Freddie and that most critical of characters, New York City, in all its sordid muscularity. The four of them continue to whisper in my ear and three more stories have resulted. I hope eventually to have enough for an anthology of Lair tales.
Nathan Archer is a former New Yorker and a former bureaucrat. He is the author of half a dozen licensed novels and a few short stories. He's not sure what else he is that isn't ”former,” but hopes to figure it out soon.
Lee Martindale is a warrior-bard in the old tradition. Editor of Meisha Merlin's first original anthology, Such A Pretty Face, her own short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, online venues, anthologies and collections. When not slinging fiction, she's a member of the SFWA Musketeers, a songwriter and filker, activist, public speaker, Life Member of SFWA and a member of the SCA. She lives in Plano, Texas with her husband George and three feline G.o.ddesses, and keeps her friends and fans in the loop with her website, ) and Myth Alliances (Meisha Merlin), co-written with Robert Asprin, and Advanced Mythology (Meisha Merlin).
About ”Bottom of the Food Chain”: ”The bottom of the food chain” is a common phrase currently used to describe the dispossessed. When I read the author's briefing for Low Port, it popped into my mind. The homeless or the marginally employed, especially in cities, have trouble maintaining a decent diet. Where they would be accorded basic nutrition by law, such as on a s.p.a.ce station, logic suggests that they'd be given the least common denominator of food: enough so they wouldn't starve, but nothing as appealing or as varied as if they could actually pay for it. Like Oliver Twist, my main character dreams of the kind of food that rich people get to eat. His dreams may seem very small, but until he's attained those, it's hard to reach for higher goals.
Joe Murphy lives with his wife, up-and-coming watercolor artist Veleta, in Fairbanks, Alaska. His fiction has or will appear in: Age of Wonders, Altair, A Horror A Day: 365 Scary Stories, Bones of the World, Book of All Flesh, Clean Sheets, Chiaroscuro, Crafty Cat Crimes, Cthulhu's Heirs, Demon s.e.x, Full Unit Hookup, Gothic.net, Legends of the Pendragon, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, Outside, On Spec, Silver Web, s.p.a.ce and Time, Strange Horizons, Talebones, TransVersions, Vestal Review, and Why I Hate Aliens.
Previously published stones are now on the Internet at Alexandria Digital Literature () and at fictionwise.com. Joe is a member of SFWA, HWA, a graduate of Clarion West '95 and Clarion East 2000.
About ”Zappa for Bardog”: I really found the guidelines for Low Port interesting. And I've been experimenting with alien points of view. That's how the idea to tell a story through an artificial life form who could read information directly from human DNA came about. Having also been a fan of the late Frank Zappa, I've always wanted to do a tribute story as well. All these things kind of just came together and somehow managed to work.
Paul E. Martens is a son, a husband, and a father. He has a job. Paul was a first place winner in the Writers of the Future Contest and received an Honorable Mention in the 2001 Best of Soft SF Contest. Other stories have appeared in a variety of print and online magazines. He likes to pretend to be a cynical curmudgeon but he's actually a neurotic optimist.
About ”The Times She Went Away”: I knew I wanted to write a story for Low Port. I started with a guy like Peter in his middle years (a smuggler, a fence, someone making his living, not exactly on the dark side, but certainly on the crepuscular side), and his kind of wild adopted daughter. I thought the story had potential, but no real plot yet. Then Annie Jones showed up. Once he met Annie, Peter had no choice but to spend his life hanging around the Low Port, waiting for her to come back, and I had my story.
Douglas Smith's stories have appeared in over 40 professional magazines and anthologies in fifteen countries and thirteen languages, including Amazing Stories, Cicada, Interzone, The Third Alternative, On Spec, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. In 2001, he was a John W. Campbell Award finalist for best new writer, and won an Aurora Award for best SF&F short fiction by a Canadian. He's been an Aurora finalist eight times and has twice been selected for honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. In real life, Doug is a technology executive for an international consulting firm. He lives just north of Toronto, Canada. Like the rest of humanity, he is working on a novel. His web site isand his email is About ”Scream Angel”: The genesis of this story was a trip to a circus. Ever since my oldest son, Mike, was about five and until my youngest son, Chris, decided it was no longer cool, we've gone to a circus show that tours Toronto each summer. They just set up in a field near the parking lots of one of the big suburban shopping malls, charge way too much for popcorn and candyfloss, and put on a fair-to-middling show. It's no Vegas, but it was always fun and for a good cause. Chris is physically handicapped, so when he started going, we were given seats reserved for wheelchairs right at ringside. A great view, close enough to really smell the elephants. But being that close let me notice something I'd missed from farther back. All of the performers did double, or even triple, duty as circus hands, setting up equipment, acting as safety catchers, or even shoveling up after the horses and elephants. Seeing the trapeze artist, who had just dazzled the crowd in his spiffy sequined outfit, show up in coveralls cleaning up elephant p.o.o.p gave me the idea of a down-and-out circus of aliens, just sc.r.a.ping by. I coupled it with another idea about a drug I ended up calling Scream, made the big act a pair of bird-like aliens, and the rest grew out of that.
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