An e-zine about spaceships, aliens, science, memory, motherhood, magic, and cats.
I just read “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” by Alice B. Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr.)… and oof.
What a beautiful, lyrical punch to the gut that calls to mind my dad lecturing me as a teen about how I couldn’t go out for a walk alone after dark.
Continue reading “Walking at Night”
My childhood was perfectly framed by the Star Wars original and prequel trilogies — I was taken to Return of the Jedi in the theatre at 10 months old and promptly fell sleep when Jabba came onscreen; Phantom Menace came out when I was a senior in high school. Continue reading “Star Wars”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Fantasia Divinity Magazine, January 2018
A hundred-some baby geese wandered through the field of mint. Shanna watched them from the river’s edge where she was busy washing the kitchen rags and tablecloths. She’d heard stories about geese who laid golden eggs and brothers transformed into swans, but she had no brothers who’d gone missing, and when she finished with the washing, she found no glints of gold hidden in the mint. Only a smooth, round stone that felt nice in her hand, so she slipped it into her pocket. Continue reading “Geese and Gingerbread”
Here’s the thing about Howard the Duck—as far as I can tell, people must mostly hate it because they’re squicked by the very tame human/duck romance, because it’s otherwise a pretty standard 80s movie.
BUT that duck is WAY nicer to the human lead than any of the human men are. Continue reading “Howard the Duck”
Things that felt like they were happening right now, now feel like they happened a long time ago. And yes, that’s pretty much the definition of living in linear time, but it’s also super weird.
The six-year-old is improvising a song about how if you want to carry steak around with you, you should store the steak and a steak knife in a bottle of steak sauce.
It is vaguely to the tune of “Everything is Awesome.”
The first question to ask when planning a story: what if the main characters weren’t human? Would it be better? Because, I mean, PROBABLY.
Interestingly, the conversation that inspired this post wasn’t about furry fiction, but simply brainstorming a sci-fi story that ended up possibly making more sense with aliens than humans. Yet, the observation couldn’t really have been more on brand for me.
This morning when I started playing Diablo 3, the game gave my character ten tasks that seemed impossible.
I’ve already completed nine of them.
Luring myself to bed: with the promise of chocolate cake for breakfast. Continue reading “Impossible Tasks and Magic Portals”
The six-year-old, running through the house, to go get scissors: “Don’t run with scissors!!!”
Yes, yelling at themself, apparently.
Writing a novel is like spending three months precisely calculating the best trajectories & carefully throwing fifty balls into the air; hopefully followed by one month of perfectly catching them all as they rain back down. Continue reading “Delightful Tidbits”