When Tara awoke Thursday morning, her pillow had turned to marshmallow, gooey from the warmth of her head and the sunshine blazing through the window. Fruit rollup blankets slicked her legs with psychedelic slime. The mattress, now a soft-baked blondie with white chocolate chips, was permanently indented by her ass.
It was even larger than we realized, half-buried in the cove’s sandy beach. Scales the size of cars covered its sides; the smokestacks running from nose to dorsal fin towered above the seawall ringing the cove. Its cavernous mouth moaned as the sea breeze passed through. Rigging and fishing nets dangled from its teeth; shredded block and tackle dripped and shivered in the wind. The great megaphone, perched atop its nose like a human-sized conch shell, crackled, but was otherwise voiceless.
Since her writing career began in 2005, Nebula–nominated author Caroline M. Yoachim has written over a dozen short stories which have appeared in Lightspeed, Interzone, Daily Science Fiction, Shimmer, and Asimov’s, among many other top–notch markets.
After being bitten by a radioactive writing bug at the 2008 Clarion Writer’s Workshop, Ferrett Steinmetz found his writing career wholly transformed into something with intense focus, buff craft–muscles, and the ability to scale previously impossible publishing walls.
Claire Humphrey has witnessed more sides of the publishing industry than most writers see in a lifetime. By day, she works as a buyer with Indigo Books, and by night she is the reviews editor for Ideomancer, in addition to writing dark fictions of her own.
Besides knowing the intricacies of installing Linux on a dead badger, Lucy A. Snyder is the two–time Bram Stoker Award–winning author of the poetry collection Chimeric Machines and the Stoker Award–winning short story “Magdala Amygdala,” which originally appeared in Apex’s own Dark Faith: Invocations.
Gene O’Neill is a writer who knows a thing or two about life. He was a US Marine, a boxer, and played college basketball. He’s held a variety of day jobs, and only began seriously pursuing writing in his forties.
Sigrid Ellis is a woman of many talents. She is not only an editor with some impressive credits to her name (she co–edited the Hugo–nominated Chicks Dig Comics with Lynne M. Thomas, and co–edited Queers Dig Time Lords with Michael Damian Thomas, and the comic Pretty Deadly), but also an author of fiction and non–fiction, an air traffic controller, a blogger, and a home–schooling mom to boot.
Maria Dahvana Headley is not your average writer. She wears ball gowns and tiaras while writing on occasion. In New York, she once dated everyone who asked her out for a whole year just to see what would happen.
Jim C. Hines does not typically write about your average strapping country–boy–turned–hero or dashing princes on yet another epic quest. He much prefers the underdog hero (such as Jig, a goblin), and thank–you–very–much–but–I’ll–save–myself princesses, and his books are all the more delightful because of it.