As John Grant he has received two Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award and a number of other international literary awards. Under his real name, Paul Barnett, he has earned for his editorial work a Chesley Award and a nomination for the World Fantasy Award. He says that, like many of his stories, “‘All the Little Gods We Are’ owes its genesis to one of those little fancies that pass through one’s head a dozen times a day and are mostly forgotten before they’ve even come out the other ear, as it were. In this instance, I had an image of dialing a phone number and being answered by myself. Who knows how many times that notion must have been used by fantasy writers? Whatever, the rest of the story just flowed from there.”
After growing up in Texas, Santiago, Kansas, Mexico City, and Indiana, Cat Rambo wandered through Baltimore, Bloomington, and Brooklyn before beating the B curse to settle in the Pacific Northwest. “I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, which does feature a ‘Dew Drop Inn Restaurant Lounge’ on Lafayette Street that was once just the Dew Drop Inn. I was always amused by the expansion, and when I was accosted in a Seattle coffee shop by a woman who thought I was her blind date, the two concepts interacted with each other and became ‘The Dew Drop Coffee Lounge.’” Other stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Her collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories, is available from her website at http://www.kittywumpus.net. Yes, it is her real name.
Leah Bobet lives in Toronto, where she works in Canada’s oldest science fiction bookstore and has just completed a degree in linguistics. Her fiction has appeared recently in Strange Horizons, The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy, and On Spec, and her poetry has been nominated for the Rhysling and Pushcart Prizes. She says, “‘Bell, Book, and Candle’ came from hearing a regular phrase, an ignorable phrase sidewise, and the way the world tilts at an angle when you realize it might have meant something different all along.” She is currently writing a novel about a girl with bee wings and a boy who grew up underground.
Michael J. DeLuca has the utmost respect for prophets. Sometimes he wishes he’d been one, but he was never quite crazy enough to make it happen. “I carried the ideas and images that compose this story around in my head for a very long time before anything came of it. When I saw that stark church in the desert, I was just a kid, and a very different person by the time I came across the angel. What finally brought it all together was the riff of a Bob Dylan song called ‘Wicked Messenger.’ If you’d heard that song with those things in your head, you’d have written this story too. Or so I’d like to think.”
Michael asserts that fiction is a compromise. Read more of his compromises in Interfictions, or on his blog at michaeljdeluca.com.
Laird Barron’s work has appeared in places such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCIFICTION, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence, was recently published by Night Shade. Mr. Barron is an expatriate Alaskan currently at large in Washington State. He confides, “The core horrific conceit of this piece originates from a nightmare as recounted by a relative who served in the Marine Corps and who apparently survived many a hedonistic adventure while abroad. The relative’s name is withheld to protect the guilty, of course.”
Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey, and shares these thoughts about the genesis of “There Is a Monster Under Helen’s Bed”: “This story was written as a reaction to an increasing number of foreign adoptions—and the realization that these are often complex and wrenching. I find the conflict between an adopter’s need to help and the adoptees’ frequent inability to recognize it especially heartbreaking.”
Her second novel, The Secret History of Moscow, was published by Prime Books in November 2007. Her next one, The Alchemy of Stone, was published in June 2008. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Dark Wisdom and Clarkesworld, as well as the Japanese Dreams and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.
Cat Sparks is a writer, graphic designer, editor and photographer, with stories and artwork appearing in and on magazines, anthologies and book covers in Australia and abroad. She was born in Sydney, Australia, but relocated to Wollongong eight years ago. She has travelled through parts of Europe, the Middle East, Indonesia, the South Pacific, Mexico and the lower states of North America. Her adventures so far have included: winning a trip to Paris in a Bulletin Magazine photography competition; being appointed official photographer for two NSW Premiers; working as dig photographer on three archaeological expeditions to Jordan, and winning seven DITMAR awards including one for Best New Talent in 2002.
“I can’t be sure where ‘Palisade’ came from,” she says, “but I suspect it was influenced by the years I spent working as a government media monitor. Daytime talkback radio presented so much ugliness. At some point it occurred to me that whatever horrible things I could imagine, somewhere out there in the world were people doing them to each other. When I combined this thought with the promising advancements of science…”
In 2004, she was both a prize winner in Writers of the Future and received the Aurealis Peter McNamara Conveners Award. In 2007 and 2008 she won the Aurealis Award for best SF short story and the Golden Aurealis Award for best Australian speculative fiction story of the year.
Check her newest happenings at www.catsparks.net or http://catsparx.livejournal.com.
Born in 1947 in London, England, Tanith Lee is one of the leading fantasy authors working today. After working various jobs she became a full-time professional writer in 1975 and has written nearly 90 novels and collections, among them the best-selling Flat Earth Series and The Secret Books of Paradys, over 260 short stories, four radio plays broadcast by the BBC, and two episodes of the cult TV programme Blake’s 7. She has won the World Fantasy Award numerous times as well as the August Derleth Award.