M-Brane #10
My new short story has been published! I’m, oh, just a little excited.
The story, “The End of the Beginning,” is in the latest edition of M-BRANE SF magazine, issue number 10. You have a few quick, easy, and inexpensive methods of getting it:
Visit this URL: http://mbranesf2.blogspot.com and on the right-hand side you’ll find the options:
- Buy it in print through Lulu for $7.95 (direct link)
- Buy a single PDF copy for $2.00
- For the Amazon Kindle for $2.99 (direct link)
- For the MobiPocket version for $1.99 (direct link)
- Subscribe to a year of M-BRANE SF for $12! (A real steal!)
- (You can also just donate to the writer’s fund; I’m sure they’d really appreciate it!)
(NOTE! As of this writing, the Amazon and the MobiPocket versions aren’t yet available. If you want it for Kindle or Mobi-compatible reader, please check those sites in a couple days or so.)
“The End of the Beginning” was a fun story to write. It started with my musing about the eventual heat-death of the universe and just flowed from there in just an hour. (Plus, of course, some significant time editing to make it at least slightly readable.) As for the rest of the stories in issue #10, can’t say. I haven’t read it yet as the second it came available ti started writing this post. 🙂 But the stories found in issue #1 (which you can get for free) and #9 are varied and interesting!
Anyway, if I may beg, please support struggling authors and the publishers that give them a voice and buy yourself a copy! 🙂
Don’t forget, you can also get my first published story, “A Price in Every Box” (huh, I’m sensing a theme in my titles) in Moon City Review 2009. It’s available for $15.95 or through Amazon for $12.44. That story is kind of a contemporary fantasy, or maybe slipstream if you will. The book itself is a very eclectic collection of all different genres, including poetry and photography. So if you don’t like all SF, give Moon City Review a try!
(And keep your eye open, sometime next year the book Confederate Girlhoods: A Women’s History of Early Springfield, Missouri will become available. I helped edit it and contributed a little original text for it.)
UPDATE: Oops! Can you tell I’m new at this self promotion thing? Here are the beginnings of the stories to interest you:
From “The End of the Beginning” published in M-BRANE SF issue #10:
Ash was too late to see the end of the universe; it was already dead when he woke up.
At first he had no idea what had happened. He’d expected to be floating in the secured testing area in high Martian orbit, or at least find himself surrounded (cosmically speaking) by the familiar planets and moons of his solar system. Instead, he seemed to be nowhere. Outside the viewports was complete blackness. The sensors picked up nothing nearby, then nothing at a distance, then nothing as far as they could scan. Not a single photon nor x-ray nor infrared wave nor alpha particle. Nothing.
He thought he must have still been asleep. The situation seemed too surreal, too hard to wrap his mind around, like trying to read a sign in a dream: no matter how hard one tries the words may change and shift or become meaningless. Ash tried to understand what the readings told him, but they made no sense. He would look out a port, see a part of the outside of his capsule in the dim illumination of one of his own exterior lights, but beyond that the dark was an oppressive, suffocating thing. His eyes kept trying to view through and past the impenetrable obscurity, into infinity, at something. The dark was absolute, unyielding and his eyes grew weary of working at focusing on the featureless black.
He considered the possibility that he was trapped in an alternate dimension. The entire process of time travel required the manipulation of at least two of the other seven dimensions humans could not directly perceive….
And this is from “A Price in Every Box” published in Moon City Review 2009:
A suitcase was an embarrassing container for the evil of the world, but it was all Pandora had in her apartment to store him in. The wheels on the suitcase broke off when she got it nearly to the first landing of her apartment building. While they weren’t a great help, the plastic rollers had for a while helped her round the top of each step.
She pulled and strained halfway to the second landing when Craig from 3C ascended into view and offered a hand. Craig was annoying, crude, and every afternoon when they passed in the foyer he would give his latest unasked for assessment of what was helping the country descend to hell in a hand basket. Fearing what she would have to gift him in increased attention in return for his assistance, she reluctantly dismissed his offer to help her–but he would have none of it. With a smile and a grunt Craig grabbed hold the bottom of the suitcase and helped lift the container to Pandora’s fourth floor landing. He gave her a wave and a “Have a good day,” and flitted back down the staircase whistling a cheery tune. Craig: still annoying, though now differently annoying.
Craig was just the latest in a disturbing trend she noticed. An hour after evil’s capture and already things all around her started to seem different. She realized she hadn’t heard a car horn in quite some time, the constant buzz of people yelling at each other from open windows had transformed to the bleat of compliments and well-wishing, and the only time she heard a siren it was followed by the laughter of children the cop had been entertaining.
She had been searching for evil, for him, how long now? So long she couldn’t recall. In fact, there were several decades in there she had even forgotten her search altogether….
Confederate Girlhoods: A Women’s History of Early Springfield, Missouri
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