BEHOLD: DARK LUMINOUS WINGS!

I have a certain fondness for my dark SF short story, "Alchemy." On December 22, 2016 I returned from a long hospital stay during which I dreamed daily of coming home to family and muse. It wasn't that the latter was acting scarce as 2017 began -- in fact, my constant hospital companion helped me dive almost directly into a big project, the novelization of the classic made-for-TV movie I'd been hired to write the previous October, The Day After Tomorrow: Into Infinity (I escaped from Room 384 with a tiny scrap of paper covered in notes for the novel and one short story that I penned in first draft on Christmas Day, a long and beloved tradition). But as 2017 unfolded and the weeks progressed, something seemed to be missing.

My imagination is a new idea factory. Among the results are wonderful ideas and quite a few not-so-pretty ones. I write across a broad spectrum of genres, unable or unwilling to judge the good from the bad from the ugly. They're all my babies, I love each and every one, and I've learned more about writing from difficult efforts than pretty, shiny tales that wrote and sold themselves with ease. No, the problem was that for the first time in a very long time, new ideas eluded me. I thought about writing a story concerning my hospital bed, which tortured me for twenty-three nights, destroyed my spine, and made sleep impossible. I grasped at invisible story threads while translating the movie script into novel format. Nothing. It's not that I didn't have enough banked material to work on once the novelization was done -- I kicked off 2017 with ninety-nine unwritten ideas on note cards. But the new births had waned to nothing following my hospital stay, and a voice inside my skull wondered if the well had dried up. Not so, it turned out. A story about an alien planet and technology discovered in caves and beneath the soil crept upon me one winter day while seated at my desk, and the idea blossomed. I took a two-day break from the novelization to pen a first draft and, upon conclusion, was exhausted -- and unsure if what I had was even of quality. But I let the longhand draft sit, polished it up, and sent it off on its maiden voyage to the fine folks at Pole to Pole Publishing, the wonderful team responsible for last year's magnificent release, In A Cat's Eye, who were reading for a new project, Dark Luminous Wings. Within two days, the verdict came back, "Alchemy" was accepted. And as for that drought? As of November 2017, I've been deluged by thirty-eight new ideas, all but four of which (including a short novel and a screenplay) have already been written in first draft.

Why this theme?

“[Fellow Pole to Pole publisher] Vonnie Winslow Crist and I like to read fantasy, science fiction and horror. So, we're always looking for a theme which allows us to collect stories that will work with any of those genres. And when we put together a collection, we like to narrow the focus so that the stories we choose will blend together to form one cohesive collection. We usually start with a poem -- or an adage -- to give us the flavor of the anthology. We make a point to include the inspiration when we make our call for submissions so that authors can keep it in mind when they write their stories,” says publisher Kelly A. Harmon. "This worked extraordinarily well for Hides the Dark Tower and In a Cat’s Eye. Dark Luminous Wings was inspired by the second stanza of the poem Mors et Vita by Richard Henry Stoddard:

‘Under the awful wings

  Which brood over land and sea,

  And whose shadows nor lift nor flee –

This is the order of things,

And hath been from of old:

    First production,

    And last destruction;

So the pendulum swings,

While cradles are rocked and bells are tolled.’

What we were expecting was an influx of dragon stories -- and what we got was altogether different -- which we were ecstatic about. Dark Luminous Wings does include one dragon story, but it’s not what you’d expect, we guarantee it. And there are a host of other stories that are equally fabulous and different -- each including wings."

Many of my fellow authors shared the back-stories behind their stories in Dark Luminous Wings.

Nancy Springer on "the Raptor": "My good friend and neighbor, a remarkable woman raised in a circus family, suffered and struggled with cancer for five years before she died.  Her death was recent when I received the invitation to write a story for Dark Luminous Wings, and it was an event in my life that required exorcism via words.  Around the same time I saw a swallowtail kite swoop low over my car.  These are magnificent birds. Looking up at its white breast, I nearly drove off the road.  In some mysterious and symbolic way guided by the unconscious mind, the two events mixed to set off my story.  I had to change the bird's markings, but only a little.  The swallowtail kites visit my area once a year, in May, and they do indeed soar at treetop level hunting for snakes."

Todd Sullivan on "Wheels and Deals": "I came up with the idea for my story, ‘Wheels and Deals’, years ago while attending university. The idea was supposed to be for a novel, and I actually wrote twenty or thirty pages before putting it down. In 2015, I finished my most recent novel, NATURAL POLICE. When I began to work on its sequel, GWI’SHIN, I decided to explore some of the less developed subplots of the narrative. One of the minor characters in NATURAL POLICE is possessed by a darkness that only he sees and interacts with, and I wanted to give a back-story to the darkness. I thought back to the idea I had conceived years ago in university and decided to recycle many of its narrative components to flesh out the history of the dark entity. ‘Wheels and Deals’ is a short story meant to develop the character of the dark force that will play a major role in the sequel to NATURAL POLICE. Readers have not seen the end of the fallen angel from ‘Wheels and Deals’. When the angel appears in GWI’SHIN, it will be significantly more malignant as it strives for individuality."

Rebecca Gomez Farrell on "Treasure": "‘Treasure’ is one of the first short stories I wrote after deciding to pursue writing as a career. It was initially titled ‘Black and White’ as it was an exercise in exploring how someone with a harsh worldview might react to encountering people very different from themselves, people who prize taking care of each other and the greater good over personal enrichment. The ultimate test in this fantasy fable is Enkid’s, the protagonist. She must decide what’s most worth treasuring -- the peacefulness and love of the community she’s discovered or the tangible wealth that could set her for life back home. Can she overcome the avarice she’s cultivated to survive? Enkid is quite similar to one of the three main characters in my first fantasy novel, Wing Unseen, that came out this summer from Meerkat Press. But their ultimate ends are very different, although both stories feature a flying menace."

Jason J. McCuiston on "The Wyvern": "When my wife and I first moved to our new town, I was blessed with the opportunity to write almost full-time, but also cut off from everyone and everything I’d ever known. To battle the creeping funk of this new isolation, and to improve my craft, I decided to create a world to use as my sandbox for writing. Inspired by my love of the Fallout 3 video game and the horror movie, The Atticus Institute, I came up with a post-apocalyptic world devastated by magic and monsters, where I could write in pretty much any genre I like. To date, I’ve done a high-fantasy story, a western, a military adventure, a sci-fi tale, a neo-noir detective yarn, and of course the story in question, which is a blend of steampunk and horror, set in the skies above the Mojave Desert. Like in Stephen King’s “The Mist,” the real horror is not the supernatural threat encountered by the protagonist, but rather his ongoing series of bad decisions, which only makes matters worse. For me, that’s where real fear lives; in the place where we can no longer trust ourselves to do what is right in a crisis."

D.H. Aire on "Knight of the Broken Table": "I first wrote ‘Knight of the Broken Table’ six years ago. A couple of months later I received my first book contract. I believe there’s a lesson in perseverance here somewhere. You see, when I wrote ‘Knight’ I had just gotten divorced. Looking to find myself again, I’d turned to writing and seeking to getting published. That first published novel I’d actually copyrighted over twenty-five years before. After a number of rejections, I’d stopped sending anything out. I decided to just write for myself and as I re-wrote draft after draft, my writing got better and better -- I just didn’t realize it until my life went into the toilet, as it were. I then began entering my stories in contests, getting a few Honorable Mentions in Writers of the Future, and ‘Knight’ came this close to getting published early on through another contest. The editor wrote me his reason for rejecting the story, which got a thumbs-up from all the judging readers but him. It came down to his not liking the tone. So, I took that to heart and believing in the tale kept honing it. Definitely a lesson in perseverance and learning to believe in yourself."

(the fabulous Ms. Harmon)

Nemma Wollenfang on "The Devil You Know": "I’ve always been fascinated by the way one culture can invade another and, in some cases, obliterate it, leaving only tantalizing traces of what once was. You see it throughout history -- when the Romans invaded Britain, when the Old World colonized the New. Pagan religions are particularly obscure, as most existed pre-record. Very little is known about them and what is has often been vilified and altered by the new order. With ‘The Devil You Know’, I explored this concept a little -- in my own darkly speculative way -- how one religion takes over another, how aspects of the former become twisted into a more abominable light. In this case, my focus lay particularly on dying paganism in Celtic Britannia. I read somewhere that the Devil wasn’t always depicted as a cloven-footed, horn-headed, half-beast man. That, however, was how pagan gods such as Pan and Cernunnos were depicted -- this overlap was supposedly created by early Christians in an effort to throw the old pagan gods out of favor and push conversion. While I don’t know how true this is, the idea is what gave birth to this dark little number."

Steven R. Southard on "Instability": "Seeking inspiration for a ‘wings’ story, I came across an account of a medieval monk in England who supposedly flew from the abbey’s tower on a pair of homemade wings. I’d written plenty of historical stories, but none from the Middle Ages, mainly because I focus on my characters’ reaction to new technology. I couldn’t resist the idea of a Benedictine monk attempting to fly. Why would he do that? What did his fellow brothers and the abbot think of him? The resulting story has its dark elements in keeping with the anthology’s theme, but also humorous ones. Some readers will laugh at my unimaginative and skeptical monks. Other readers will wonder whether today’s society treats its more innovative thinkers any better in our more enlightened age, as they invent their own metaphorical wings and attempt to fly."

Kelly A. Harmon on what's next for Pole to Pole Publishing: "You’re hearing this first:  As an experiment, P2P is going to publish two reprint anthologies in 2018. One will be dark science fiction, the other will be dark fantasy and horror. P2P is still firming up details, but look for that announcement soon! And, of course, P2P will be publishing their annual new-fiction anthology in October next year. Vonnie and I have been looking at artwork and dreaming of themes. We’ll make our pitch to the folks a P2P in a few weeks to see what they think. P2P will open that call for submissions some time in February. Finally, P2P will be publishing a short book that Vonnie and I have written about writing for anthologies. (In it, we divulge the secrets of how to get your work looked at more seriously by editors!) It’s in the final editing stages now. Look for it in a few months!"

BEHOLD -- A BLEAK NEW WORLD!

In June of 2014, I gave myself a much-needed permission slip to free write, the act of putting pen to paper to be transported wherever stylus and imagination chose to lead me. It turned out being more fun than I'd expected, and highly productive -- some ten stories, short and long, written over the course of almost two weeks. Among the completed story drafts was one titled "Third World", in which a young girl in a dystopian future society labors in a factory job to survive. I was deeply affected by the character's travails, and the bleak world into which she'd been born. There wasn't a whole lot of the usual prep work that goes into the creation of my writing, no story premise or outline jotted down on a note card, no dreaming up the starting or ending scenes. I simply sat on my sun porch with iced coffee and trusted the muse to get me from Points A to Z. And it was more fun than should be humanly possible.

Like the majority of the stories written during that marvelous spell -- a western, a SF tale, several horror efforts -- I later edited the draft of "Third World" for submission to publishers and sent it out the door. This particular tale went to the fine folks at Raven International Publishing, who were reading for a dystopian-themed anthology, A Bleak New World, where it was soon accepted. This week, the anthology debuts, offering dark glimpses into possible futures best avoided apart from visits to within the covers of this wonderful reading experience. Bleak is the brainchild of RIP head honcho Clark Chamberlain. As any familiar with Clark's fiction writing work, daily podcasts, or his stellar The Book Editor Show, Bleak's subject matter is a fair departure for the publisher's normally upbeat vibe. So why did he go the dystopian route for RIP's first multi-author anthology?

"I choose to be upbeat and positive. I have slogged through a lot of life, death of children, divorce, crises of faith, and then there was Iraq," says Clark, a former and still part-time soldier. "What I did there and what I was willing to do there really made me look at myself in a negative light. When I got home I was drifting, had thoughts about killing myself or at least going back to the war. Some of my persona is a mask to hide that darkness, or at least keep it down. I want peace so badly in this life because I've seen the darkness. I feel that we need to confront those emotions and feelings and really look hard at ourselves. Through story we have that opportunity. And on the business side, my then partner and I thought the sci-fi community would be a good place to dive in."

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was the inspiration behind Bleak.

"I read that and thought this isn't much of a dystopia," Clark adds. "Being satisfied with your lot in life, that sounds pretty great. I'd much rather live there than 1984. So I wanted to see what others could come up with and I was pleasantly surprised."

Several of my fellow authors in A Bleak New World's Table of Contents shared the back-stories behind their stories.

Andrew J. Lucas on "Day Worker": "In recent years I’ve moved from frontline employee positions in call centers to management and supervisory positions.  This has given me a unique, well sort of unique, perspective on my workplace.  Being asked to mold the behaviour of employees or hire employees with a specific skillset has let me see how potentially interchangable any of us are.  In point of fact we are all just a set of skills, behaviours and responses to various stimuli.  Heck, my day job runs itself via a set of processes and protocols.  One of my peers made the offhand comment that you can’t teach good customer service skills but what If you could simply download them?  What would the world look like if you didn’t need to spend five years in university to become a doctor?  What would an employment agency look like in this ‘utopia’ where everyone was as skilled as everyone else when they wanted to be?  What if it all went wrong?"

Eileen Maksym on "Incarnation": "I majored in philosophy in college, and followed it up with a master's degree in theology.  One of the things that intrigued me in my studies was the mind-body problem. How much of what makes us ‘us’ is physical? How much of it is metaphysical, be it called a soul or a more hand-wavy consciousness? I would often confront friends (and acquaintances...and people at parties...) with this question: if you were to switch brains with a friend, which person is you and which is your friend? Or are two new people created in the melding of minds and bodies? My short story ‘Incarnation’ is a meditation on that question.  What happens when a mind is put into a new body, and that body's urges are diametric to the principles of that mind?  And in the end, it raises the inevitable question: how is that any different from the war between the mental and physical that goes on within so many (perhaps all) of us?"

Nemma Wollenfang on "GOD is in the Rain": "We all look forward to that bleak dystopian possibility and we all picture it in different ways. Some imagine it as a cataclysmic natural event, some lean towards a fatal clash of opposing military powers. Mostly violence and panic reign supreme and the remnants of humanity are lawless and brutal nomads. In ‘GOD is in the Rain’ I wanted to depict a future where the decline of humanity was not a sudden and violent occurrence but one that was slow and creeping and almost gentle, however ultimately destructive. One where the survivors could not afford brutality. The basic bones of the story had been rattling about in my head for a while, though I didn’t think of giving them flesh until being unintentionally prompted to by a reader of my online story. This individual has always been very encouraging and supportive of my writing… and just happened to have an almost identical username to my working title. It was fate, or perhaps divine providence. Simply seeing their name led me to sit down and type it out. So this one’s for you, reader. Thanks for the inspiration."

(Raven International Publisher Clark Chamberlain)

Sealey Andrews on "Touch Piece": "The idea for my story first took shape while watching an episode of Storage Wars where they discovered an antique medicine doll in a storage unit. I'd never heard of them before and was instantly intrigued. (If you don't know what they are, you can find out more here.) ‘Touch Piece’ is my envisioning of the aftermath faced by a world that's been devastated by rape culture. I wanted to play with the concept of technology progressing toward touch applications, while sexuality moved in the opposite direction -- hands off. I drew on tropes from classics like The Handmaid's Tale and A Clockwork Orange.  Blade Runner was my inspiration for the noir mood and atmosphere."

Josh Schwartzkopf on "Elysia": "Irony has a peculiar interest in our society.  It’s akin to standing in an elevator, waiting for the door to close when someone cries out, ‘Hold the door!’ instead you let it shut, snickering your way to the next floor -- and then the elevator breaks down.  There’s a morbid fascination with ironic situations.  I feel that was the basis of this story.  It’s ironic that these poor colonists have traveled millions of miles to reach a new home planet with a misspelled name only to find themselves living in the same squalor that they left behind on Old Earth.   Even more ironic they are being targeted by an invisible enemy who is killing them off one by one and they are powerless to stop it.  And the final irony, they are religious fanatics who despise technology and abhor artificial intelligence, so, of course, the only thing that can save them is that which they cannot abide.   I’m thrilled that this story has been included in A Bleak New World and through this experience (and Clark’s vote of confidence), I was inspired to flesh this story out into a full novel which I’m currently shopping around among various literary agents." 

Chris Galford on "Clinging": "Tragedy is a staple of the apocalyptic. Not just tragic situations, but tragic characters forced into them. It makes sense for a world that is as unforgiving and unrelentingly dangerous as these visions of the future -- but what is more terrifying, more profoundly heartbreaking, than a character hiding from themselves? I have always danced with threats external and internal alike in my works, but it is the internal which most fascinates me -- the duel we all dance on a daily basis of us against our own minds. In my writing I have the tendency to take this to extremes, exploiting the fragility of the human psyche under fantastical situations. What better chance to explore the fight against the beast known as grief than when one also has killer robots nipping at their heels?"