Though this is late-coming, I was tagged about three weeks ago for The Next Big Thing meme, though I have to admit I wasn’t aware of it until Zachary Jernigan tagged me. Zack is an acquaintance of mine from Stonecoast, where I met him my first semester, his last semester. His book, No Return, is coming out from NightshadeBooks in Spring of 2013, and I can’t wait to read it, but I guess I’ll have to.

So now it’s time for me to be the tagger. I’m going to do this a bit differently, in that, for the purposes of keeping this blog short story-related, I will briefly review the short stories of the authors I tag. All of these writers are fellow Stonecoasters, but all of them are also writers who I respect, read, and root for.

Adam Mills lives in a bowling alley in the Missouri Ozarks and writes some great stories. He is Managing Editor as Weird FictionReview and an editorial assistant for Cheeky Frawg Books. In December, his short story “The Artist in the Tower”was published by Ideomancer. Inspired by a Borgesian dream, the story definitely seems Borges-inspired; it has the same playfulness of all the best Borges, mixed with the dark and fantastic. The story’s narrator is a professor who wishes to tell the story — long considered mere myth — of a great artist, Armin, and his role in destroying the tyrannical reign of the fictional Campano regime. The professor’s retelling of the artist’s confinement in the tyrant Raoul’s tower is peppered with footnotes; these footnotes often give fictional sources for the information, but they also give more personal details of the narrator’s father. These details feel at first like digressions, until the ending, when the two tales intertwine in a goosebump-inducing final footnote. “The Artist in the Tower” melds our world, with references to Salvador Dali, Samuel Beckett, and religious mythology, with a fantastic world in which the artist’s paintings become a tool for his survival.

Adam also has work in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. You can find him online at his blog adamwmills.wordpress.com.

Caspian Gray lives in Columbus, Ohio. Two out of three stories I’ve read by him are nightmarish horror stories featuring insects, which I find unusual and refreshing . His story “Insect Joy” was first published in Interzone #237 and reprinted as a podcast by PodCastle in July 2012 — which you can download for free from their archives. “Insect Joy” is about a young woman who can hear the thoughts of insects. When her boyfriend returns disabled from the war, she is confronted with guilt over her urge to leave him, until she makes a startling discovery of the solution to her problems which, it turns out, comes at a heavy price. His story “Centipede Heartbeat” is about a woman who begins to suspect that the reason for her girlfriend’s coldness is the presence of centipedes nesting in her heart and desperately searches for a way to exterminate them; it is forthcoming from Nightmare Magazine. Both of these stories are eerie and sad, and both left me feeling the characters’ grief and desperation. Check out his stories at the links below:

—“In Bloom”
First appeared in the July 2009 issue of ChiZine. Reprinted in PseudoPod: http://pseudopod.org/2011/08/05/pseudopod-241-in-bloom/

—“The Robber King’s Wife”
First appeared in Scheherezade’s Bequest, Issue 13, May 2011: http://www.cabinetdesfees.com/2011/the-robber-kings-wife-by-caspian-gray/

John M. Shade is a fellow Texan and a graduate of the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop. I’ve read two stories by him, both published on Daily Science Fiction. “Selecting”, published in October of 2011, is a flash fiction which explores the fantasy trope of sword selection in an original way; it’s also a story about revenge. Published in August of 2012, Shade’s “The Colors” is, at its heart, a superhero story, and it is one of the most innovative superhero stories I have ever read. “The Colors” tells, in prose which reads at time as beautiful as poetry, of a traveling superhero circus where the performers are trapped; Mother Circus is the leader of the caravan, and she is a terrifying villain, both motherly and evil. The world of the circus feels tangible, while the world outside the circus — revealed in tiny, subtle snippets to be in ruins — feels far away, like a world we’ve only ever heard of in stories. The main character here is overcoming the grief of losing his first love, and when a new hero joins the circus, he is given a second chance. You can follow John M. Shade on Twitter.

Now here’s the part where I answer some questions about my own stories, two of which are forthcoming in the next year:

What is the working title of your next book or story?

I’ll answer this question for my two stories which will be coming out soon. “The Siren” is a short story coming out in Strange Horizons in April. “An Exodus of Wings” is forthcoming from Daily Science Fiction.

Where did the idea come from for the book or story?

For “The Siren” — which centers around a love triangle among a teenage girl, the girl’s mother, and the mother’s new girlfriend, all three struggling with grief — the idea came from a song: Bat for Lashes’ “Siren Song.”

“An Exodus of Wings” is told in three sections, each section a new point-of-view, and each part is connected by the characters and their inability to communicate and connect to others effectively as well as by the faerie pests which take over homes like insects. It was inspired by the roaches which infested my house when I first moved back to Texas last July, and also a phrase which popped into my head.

What genre does your book or story fall under?

I would call these stories slipstream or magical realism.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

You know, I’m just not sure. Right now I can only imagine them as I wrote them; it’s difficult to impose an actor’s face onto them, and I’m not sure I want to before anyone else has read them and formed their own images.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I wrote “The Siren” in about a week. I wrote “An Exodus of Wings” in one day; once I started, I didn’t want to stop.

What other books or short stories would you compare this story to within your genre?

Well, rather than compare these stories specifically to other stories in the genre, I’ll list a few authors who I admire for their ability to twist genre conventions and mythology/fairy tale into new and interesting shapes, which is what I am attempting to do in my own stories: Kelly Link, Theodora Goss, Aimee Bender, Angela Carter, Karen Joy Fowler.

What else about the book or story might pique the reader’s interest?

Well, “An Exodus of Wings” is written in three sections, three points-of-view. The first section is in 3^rd, the second in 1^st, and the third in 2^nd (say that ten times fast). I was hoping, with this technique, to slowly decrease distance between the reader and the characters, so that in a story about connecting to people, the reader will slowly become more and more connected to the characters.

“The Siren” is a modernization of the old Greek mythology, which I always love doing and reading.