Twitter updates include reports on upcoming DragonCon coverage, a new anthology edited by Lavie Tidhar, a new Miyazaki film, Kevin J. Anderson on Winds of Dune, and Terry Pratchett’s speech in favor of assisted suicide.
Mari Ness worships chocolate, words and music, in no particular order, and has a second career as cat furniture for two adorably cute cats. Her work has previously appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Aberrant Dreams, Coyote Wild, and several other print and online places. She keeps a blog at mariness.livejournal.com. Her short story, “Playing with Spades” is featured this week at Fantasy Magazine.
I suppose part of my awareness of culture, as such, is about how similar in many ways people are. What seems exotic to one person is commonplace to another. The question is who do you write for? How much do you explain, how much do you let the reader infer from the text? It’s a balancing act.
Usually, I have to find the ending through draft after draft, but not this time. I was driving through South Alabama (on the way to Disney World) with my family a few summers ago and saw an ancient looking water tower. Immediately, I thought: What if some kids find something in the water tower?
We all know there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, don’t we? It would be nice to think most people at least hope there are. The saying ‘away with the fairies’ would be well placed here, I think. The thought made me smile anyway.
There was a certain ancient, mythological, allegorical feel to the whole “married to the sea” idea, and I wondered how it would translate to a more contemporary setting, i.e., “what would really happen” if this was a real custom. I think there’s a lot to be said for humanizing myths.
Ruth Nestvold is an American writer living in Stuttgart, Germany. Her work has appeared in numerous markets, including Asimov’s, F&SF, Realms of Fantasy, Baen’s Universe, Strange Horizons, and several year’s best anthologies. She has been nominated for the Nebula, the Sturgeon, and the Tiptree awards. In 2007, the Italian translation of her novella “Looking Through […]
Ofelia may well be a psionic superhero leading a dual life, or a frightened young woman coping with her circumstances in a somewhat unorthodox manner, or both. I held the two scenarios in equal regard as I wrote this piece. I may also have been subconsciously influenced by my Doc Holliday historigeekery—namely Doc’s desperation to go out in a blaze of gunfire rather than be laid low by a wasting sickness.
I was thrown off my high school newspaper for handing in a Valentine poem that the advisor asked me for knowing full-well I was NOT the mushy Valentine type. In it, a jilted lover swallowed razor blades “internally slitting his throat”–in iambic pentameter! Despite the fact that I don’t normally write graphic or violent pieces, I am proud.
I wondered what happened to the children—there were theories about where they went (through the mountain to a new settlement; to death; to be conscripted in the Children’s Crusade), but the tale really ends with the children being swallowed up by a mysterious opening in a mountain. And the piper is gone.
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