An e-zine about spaceships, aliens, science, memory, motherhood, magic, and cats.
As our present to you today, we’re releasing our very first stories, two tales about scientists at Wespirtech (The Western Spiral Arm Planetary Institute of Technology) and their wacky inventions. The scientists in both of these tales have to worry about balancing pure science — invention for its own sake — with the practicality of the real world. They don’t always succeed. One of them fails more spectacularly than the other… Continue reading “And we are go…”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in FlagShip, Volume 2 Issue 6, September 2012
The elasti-tron was covered with dried and wilting plants again. Einray grumbled as he started peeling the putrid produce off of the glass sample plate. He hated the squishiness of biology.
“What are you guys doing in here?” Einray asked. Continue reading “Einray and the Biologist”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in COSMOS, August 2011
“Hey, Deenah, want to come down to the grav-lab with me? I hear the physics department is putting on a wild party tonight. Free-fall twister, skate around the edge of the black hole… That sort of thing.”
Deenah put down the annulator she was using to fine-tune the wires in her hackishly made brain-wave generator. Wespirtech was legendary for its parties, and the physics department hadn’t thrown one since Deenah arrived. She was sorely tempted to put her work aside and accompany Rayston… Continue reading “Slug Time”
We’ve loaded up our cargo bay with twenty-five stories — the complete contents of three science-fiction anthologies, Welcome to Wespirtech, Beyond Wespirtech, and The Opposite of Memory — and we’ll begin releasing the stories, several per day, on December 25th, 2015.
Many of the upcoming stories have been published online before, but some of them have only ever been available in obscure anthologies or small press magazines.
Get ready to read some science-fiction!
Over the last more-than-a-decade, I’ve submitted nearly one hundred stories to more than 150 different markets. A bunch of my stories have been published. Some of them haven’t been (yet). And, of course, I’ve received a lot of rejections. 969 so far.
As I approach 1000 rejections, I’ve been thinking about the publishing process — what it costs and the benefits it provides. I don’t intend to stop submitting my stories to markets that seem well-suited to them. However, I also don’t see a reason to stay dependent on other people’s e-zines to make my work readable online. Continue reading “Approaching 1000”
Number of giraffes on my desk: five. Number of poems I wrote tonight: two.
Wesley loves the Christmas tree — it’s like a buffet of toys.
I dreamed that Heidi came home, her fur faded from age — she looked like the pictures of her on the telephone poles, faded from rain.
It’s very sad to play an ocarina and not summon a golden-eyed, ghost-faced, calico cat.
* fliers
* tape
* staples (once you’ve upgraded from packing tape to a brand new staple gun)
* energy (for asking strangers if they’ve seen the cat and then talking with them about how you miss her)
* breath (for playing the ocarina she loves) Continue reading “Things you can run out of while looking for your missing cat:”