CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (37 page)

Of “Angel Dust” he says: “The story is set in a fantasy universe I’ve been kicking around for a while. Early iterations of it can be found in
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine
and the All Star Stories anthology
Twenty Epics
. ‘Angel Dust’ had its genesis after a friend told me that Korean fairy tales sometimes begin with the line ‘Back in the days when tigers smoked cigarettes,’ and trying to think of my own version of ‘Once upon a time.’ The line I came up with didn’t survive redrafting, but maybe I’ll find a story for it one day.”

Ann Leckie
is a graduate of Clarion West. Her fiction has appeared in
Subterranean Magazine
,
Strange Horizons
, and
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine
. She has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, and a recording engineer. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Asked for a note on “The Endangered Camp,” she replied: “Back in 2004, I read an interview with John Joseph Adams, the notorious Slush God of
Fantasy & Science Fiction
. The interviewer asked him what kinds of stories did he wish he saw more of in the slushpile, and he said he wished he saw more dinosaur fic, more stories about Mars exploration, and more post-apocalyptic stories. I said, entirely in jest, ‘Who’ll be the first to send in a post-apocalyptic dinosaurs on Mars story?’

“About a week later it dawned on me—dinosaurs had an apocalypse! All I had to do was get them to Mars! It took me a while to figure that bit out, and by the time I wrote the first draft, during Week 4 of Clarion West, I read another interview with Mr. Adams in which he added skyhooks to the list. It was too late to add a skyhook to the story, but if I’d known I’d have tried to cram one in there. I think, ultimately, it’s better without the skyhook.”

Mary Robinette Kowal
is the 2008 recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has appeared in
Strange Horizons
,
Cosmos
and
Asimov’s
. Mary, a professional puppeteer and voice actor, lives in NYC with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters. Her first novel,
Shades of Milk
and Honey
, will be published by Tor in 2010.

Here’s how she says “At the Edge of Dying” came about: “While I was living in Iceland, I was talking with a friend of mine who told a story about her upstairs neighbor. The woman apparently claimed to be a psychic but was always on the verge of death. We speculated that the reason she was a psychic was because she was so close to the other side. Bing! The idea of magic that was tied to how close you were to dying popped into my head.

“The setting is very loosely based on Hawaii, where my husband grew up. He often talks about how the more obviously volcanic parts of Iceland remind him of the Big Island and it seemed natural to translate the story there.”

Saladin Ahmed
was born in Detroit. His fiction has appeared in
Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show
and
Beneath
Ceaseless Skies
. His poems have appeared in journals including
The Brooklyn Review
and in anthologies such as
Abandon
Automobile: Detroit City Poetry
, and
Inclined To Speak:
An
Anthology
of
Contemporary
Arab
American
Poetry
. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the songwriter Hayley Thompson.

Saladin says that “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela” is “actually a prosification of a very short poem I’d written years before. The poem consisted entirely of a single image—an old man somewhere in the medieval Islamic world defying the narrow-minded by declaring his love for a hooved woman. Translating this image into a story, of course, introduced deeper demands in terms of plot and character. These demands eventually led to the story that appears here. The characters’ names, by the way, are vaguely allegorical—‘Abdel Jameela,’ for instance, might be roughly translated as ‘servant (or slave) of beauty.’”

Tanith Lee
was born in North London (UK) in 1947. She didn’t learn to read—she is also dyslectic—until almost age 8, and by 9 she was writing. After grammar school, Lee went on to work in a library. This was followed by various other jobs. In 1974, DAW Books of America, under the leadership of Donald A. Wollheim, bought and published Lee’s
The Birthgrave
, and thereafter 26 of her novels and collections.

Since then Lee has written around 90 books, and approaching 300 short stories. Four of her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC; she also wrote two episodes for the TV series
Blake’s 7
.

Lee writes across many genres, including Horror, SF and Fantasy, Historical, Detective, Contemporary-Psychological, Children and Young Adult. Her preoccupation, though, is always people.

In 1992 she married the writer-artist-photographer John Kaiine, her companion since 1987. They live near the sea, in a house full of books and plants, ruled over by two Tuxedo cats.

Here’s what caused her to write “The Pain of Glass,” a new tale set in her famous Flat Earth milieu: “A conversation between my husband, myself and a friend of ours which involved a broken window, brought forth the phrase ‘a pane of glass.’ Given my sort of mind I instantly visualized the pain of the pane—and then the flat earth drifted through the back of my thoughts, a beckoning mirage . . . the rest is the story.”

Joanna Galbraith
grew up in Brisbane, Australia, but now spends her time writing and teaching English in Basel, Switzerland. Her stories have appeared in a number of print and electronic journals including the first
Clockwork Phoenix
anthology. Her first novel
The Uncanny Abilities of Philomena
Philpott
is scheduled for release in 2010.

Joanna says “The Fish of Al-Kawthar’s Fountain” came to her while sitting beside the courtyard fountain of the Al-Haramein hotel, Damascus, Syria. Mesmerised by the water and the fish reeling round in it, she distinctly remembers thinking she saw a couple of fish exchange pleasantries or at the very least a few bars of an old madrigal in perfect harmony. Of course, in hindsight, she realises it was probably just the intense heat and overwhelming fragrance of apple nargileh but she still relishes that idea that fish can hold a tune.

She wrote this story for the
Majnun
who took her camel riding at three o’clock in the morning. For more information on Joanna’s writing go to
www.joannagalbraith.com
.

Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979,
Catherynne M. Valente
is the author of
Palimpsest
and the
Orphan’s Tales
series, as well as
The Labyrinth
,
Yume no Hon: The Book of
Dreams
,
The Grass-Cutting Sword
, and five books of poetry. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the Spectrum Award and was a World Fantasy Award finalist in 2007. She currently lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner and two dogs.

Here’s what Cat says about the origins of “The Secret History of Mirrors”: “I had the idea for this title three years ago, springing from a conversation with Sonya Taaffe, and have been struggling to write a story to go with it ever since. Ultimately, it was learning a little about how to make mirrors that triggered the right tale. I wanted to talk about fairy tales and how their mirrors are so terribly similar, but also about what a mirror is, both physically and spiritually, what it can be, and how learning one thing can change your understanding of everything else. One of the best things fiction does is allow us to see plain objects differently, to see their resonance, to see them as a connection from the real world to the world of magic. I wanted to do that for the mirror in my hall.

“Also: lesbian nuns. Go with what you know, right?”

Forrest Aguirre’s
fiction has recently appeared in such venues as
Asimov’s
,
Farrago’s Wainscot
,
Hatter Bones
, and
Avant-Garde for the New Millenium
. He has received a World Fantasy Award for his editorial work, and has most recently edited
Polyphony 7
with Deborah Layne. He is currently completing work on his second novel,
Archangel Morpheus
, and is working through his third novel,
Panoptica
.

He writes that “Never nor Ever” was “a reaction to the realization that I am, now, genuinely middle-aged. In this tale, I harked back to two characters from my childhood, filtering my view of their growing older and facing death through the lens of Derrida’s deconstruction and the fractal analysis of chaotic systems. I also recently began fencing again (in order to find my youth again, no doubt), and have done some in-depth study of dueling. Honestly, I just plain wanted to finish the sibling challenge that was begun, but never concluded, so long ago, in Wonderland.”

Gemma Files
won the 1999 International Horror Guild award for Best Short Fiction with her short story “The Emperor’s Old Bones.” Since then, five of her stories were adapted into episodes of Showtime’s
The Hunger
TV series, she spent ten years teaching people how to write screenplays, published two collections of fiction (
Kissing Carrion
and
The Worm in Every
Heart
, both Prime Books) and two collections of poetry (
Bent
Under Night
, from Sinnersphere Productions, and
Dust Radio
, from Kelp Queen Press). Her novella
Words Written Backwards
is available from Burning Effigy Press, and her short story “Marya Nox” will appear later this year as part of
Lovecraft
Unbound
, a Lovecraft-themed anthology edited by Ellen Datlow.

Stephen J. Barringer’s
first publication was the SF short story “Restoration” in
On Spec
; he has since won first and second prizes in the short story competition for the long-running Toronto Trek/Polaris media convention, and has written several gaming products for various RPG systems, as well as a radio play adaptation of E.F. Benson’s “The Room in the Tower” that’s supposed to be seeing production Real Soon Now. He also does a lot of business proposals and copywriting, but that isn’t nearly as much fun.

(In case you’re wondering, Barringer and Files are married, with one son.)

When they were interrogated about “each thing i show you is a piece of my death,” the following transcript was the result:

STEVE:
The secret to a successful collaboration, especially for two writers who each have their own voice, is either (A) to create a third voice that’s a seamless fusion of both separate voices, or (B) take advantage of the differences by juxtaposing them. “each thing,” as an essentially epistolary story, was a perfect candidate for approach B, with each of us trading off different viewpoints and sections as inspiration and familiarity suggested. We’re both huge fans of the read-between-the-lines, corner-of-your-eye school of dread seen in films like SESSION 9, or the stories of Ramsey Campbell, and of finding the creeps in a story’s implications rather than its depictions, so the actual process of writing was remarkably straightforward: each of us could stand at a different angle and take various shots at an agreed-upon target, then fit them all together afterwards for optimum effect.

GEMMA:
Coming from a film criticism/film history background, I’ve always wanted to tell a story revolving around that Holy Grail of cinematic urban legends, a haunted film. I’d also covered a lot of Toronto’s experimental scene over the years, and wanted to work that stuff in as well, to give it added cultural oomph—thus the idea of the Internet-driven exquisite cadaver project. Add characters, and things fell together fairly quickly.

STEVE:
I came in about halfway through the process to help organize the background and fill out the technical side of things. One aspect I really glommed on to was the chance to prove wrong the old canard that clinical, expository writing can’t be scary. My own background is straight out of the old school of world-building, rules-logical SF&F, with a large side-order of professional business writing; I’ve always loved the craft required for good exposition, and the idea of describing something utterly horrible in as detached and clinical a way as possible was a terrific challenge.

GEMMA:
Oddly, the oldest part of the story itself is probably the wrap-around, which sprang fully-formed into my head a good three years before I ever figured out what it should end up being attached to. But here’s facts: Without Steve, the rest of this story probably wouldn’t’ve come to fruition at all—not as quickly, at any rate, or by the specified deadline, either. Like Background Man and his image-drunk initial enabler, I couldn’t’ve done it without him.

Kelly Barnhill’s
work has appeared in journals such as
Postscripts
,
Weird Tales
,
Underground Voices
,
Space and Time
, and
The Sun
. Her first novel was recently purchased by Little, Brown and is due to be released in the spring of 2010. She has received grants and awards from Intermedia Arts, The Loft, and the Jerome Foundation. She also writes funny nonfiction books for children—a job that allows her to be nosy and curious, to think like a fourth grade boy, and to assemble amalgamations of weird, creepy and disgusting facts for a living. It is, she feels, the Greatest Job in America. She lives in Minneapolis with her three evil-genius children, her astonishingly handsome husband and her emotionally unstable dog.

And on the writing of “Open the Door and the Light Pours Through,” she says: “This story grew in fits and starts, arising from free-written sketches in different notebooks, for different purposes. I didn’t even realize that I was writing about linked characters until I had nearly enough material to weave into a semi-coherent story. This actually happens quite a bit with me. Stories, I’ve found, have their own intelligence and sense of purpose. They are wily and full of tricks, and my own plans, alas, end up being rather meaningless.