An e-zine about spaceships, aliens, science, memory, motherhood, magic, and cats.
That feeling when you’re trying to help your kid write an essay on Ozymandias, but instead end up comparing the essay — which is not yet written — to the top half of Ozymandias (ie. gone)… except also Merlin, because it’s in the future instead of the past…
I am very helpful. Continue reading “Tidbits from a Reality That’s Evolving Into Crabs”
A decade ago, my Halloween costume was Cookie Monster, and I liked that fuzzy jacket so much, it’s become my standard winter coat.
I also have a cozy green scarf shaped like a dragon. So when it’s really cold, I end up dressing like Cookie Monster choking on a noodle dragon.
by Mary E. Lowd
A Deep Sky Anchor Original, November 2022
A tiny metal object jumped through Lea’s open window, drawing her attention away from the Animorphs book she’d been reading. She put down the borrowed e-reader from her mom on the bed and went over to investigate.
Lea hadn’t seen the object very well — it had been moving too fast. Just a blur really. But it had reflected the sunlight, shining like a quarter thrown into a fountain, outshining all the pennies around it. So, she wondered if it might be valuable. Continue reading “Flerble Gerbil was a Hologram”
It used to be that if I didn’t practice getting out and interacting with people, I would go kind of feral…
After several years of pandemic, sticking to my small bubble, it feels less like going feral and more like I’ve just become a permanent indoor kitty.
Out of curiosity, I made an account with a text generating AI program, and I’ve been wrestling with it to see if it’s useful or fun…
So far, it’s at least as hard as normal writing, possibly harder.
I wanted to start off with a project I’m invested in enough to bother with… but not so much that I’ll mind outside interference.
Then I remembered I had a first sentence stored away for a furry re-imaging of The Matrix and figured writing about AI with an AI could be fun… Continue reading “Experimenting with AI Writing”
The music at the open air plaza where I go to write sometimes is especially jazzy today and has a repeated riff that strongly evokes the music in Sneakers to me. It makes me feel like instead of writing a novel, I must be doing some sort of top secret codebreaking hacking.
My spouse, a professor: “I came up with an academic parody of Monster Mash!”
Spouse, singing: “I was working in the lab late one night…” Continue reading “Monster Mash Variant”
Halloween accomplished! We took the kids trick-or-treating downtown, watched The Sixth Sense, ate pumpkin spice pancakes for dinner, carved jack-o-lanterns, and walked through a haunted farm event.
And yet, somehow there’s still a full day before it’s Halloween…
I’d only ever seen “The Sixth Sense” once before, easily over twenty years ago, and my brain had condensed it down in my memory to basically just the twist at the end… but wow, that is a masterful movie all the way through. Just incredibly well done on every level.
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Daily Science Fiction, October 2018
Lee-a-lei and her clone-daughter Am-lei perched in the Crossroads Station recreational airlock with their long spindly legs folded. The two lepidopterans exchanged a glance with glittering, multi-faceted eyes. Lee-a-lei was nervous and kept flapping her mechanical wings, but her daughter looked excited.
Am-lei didn’t have wings. She’d followed the traditions of their homeworld and had her yellow-blue-and-purple wings cut off after she metamorphosed. So, she wore a simple zero-gee jetpack like a human or one of the canine Heffens would. The jetpack strapped around her thorax, firmly secured. Lee-a-lei had checked her daughter’s straps several times. Continue reading “Jetpack and Cyborg Wings”