Fiction For Now
When did Halloween become such a big deal? As a kid, trick-or-treating with my sister, I don’t recall much neighborhood decor besides the jack-o-lanterns grinning on the porch or some fake spiderwebs strung across the hedges. Now Halloween seems more popular than Christmas. Specters dangle from the trees on my block; front yards become graveyards;... Continue Reading →
October is my favorite month for many reasons, including the Major League Baseball post-season. The crisp air amplifies the crack of wood on leather, and my strident voice when I scream at the television: "Come on, ya chumps! You got a runner in scoring position, just put the ball in play and..." I paused in... Continue Reading →
"...The story of an astronaut as she struggles to adjust to life on Earth!" the radio ad promised. My car's dashboard briefly transformed into the glowing cockpit of a space shuttle. Space, psychology, and a female protagonist? That sounded like a movie I'd see (or a book I'd write). But when I looked up which... Continue Reading →
Since I tend to fall off the daily flash fiction wagon after the first week of each new month, I set myself punitive parameters for August: every prompt missed would have to be used in the next piece I wrote. Some days I accumulated as many as four mandatory words. This challenge, unexpectedly, resulted in... Continue Reading →
Confession: I usually avoid Twitter during PitMad. The quarterly Twitter "Pitch Party" invites writers to post 280-character manuscript pitches, which agents and editors can request with a 'like'. Twitter's eager writing community, amped up on fantasies of scoring a book deal, turn my feed into an endless scroll of self-promotion and supportive retweets. I'm not... Continue Reading →
Despite his popularity as a science fiction writer, the late author Douglas Adams championed the value of planet Earth. In the late 1980s, he teamed up with zoologist Mark Cawardine for a BBC radio series called Last Chance to See, in which the pair tracks endangered species around the globe. Adams' 1990 book chronicling the... Continue Reading →
July was a hurricane, friends. In addition to the usual demands of a full-time job by day and wrestling with final revisions on Binary Chop by night, my month included: A whirlwind international business trip; Publication of the fourth Brave New Girls science fiction anthology, featuring my short story "Armed for the Future"; Big projects and... Continue Reading →
Fifty years ago today, emissaries from Earth--riding in a command cabin the size of a car, and guided by a computer less powerful than a modern smartphone--landed on our Moon and left Homo sapiens' first footprints on another world. In honor of the Apollo 11 anniversary, I chose this date to launch the print edition of my lunar-based... Continue Reading →
If you or a kid in your life need some sci-fi summer reading, I've got a book for you! Brave New Girls: Adventures of Gals and Gizmos goes on sale today. The fourth in its series, this anthology features 26 science fiction short stories starring STEM-savvy girls. All proceeds support the Society of Women Engineers... Continue Reading →
