Summer of Shakespeare #3

Yes, it's that time of year again--Summer of Shakespeare time. This will be SoS number three, and there will be Shakespeare geekery coming out your ears by August 31. The festivities begin June 1, so "brush up your Shakespeare" as Cole Porter urged you to in his musical Kiss Me Kate, based on his play The Taming of the Shrew (one of my least favorites).

Freebie Fairytale Fiction

A Dream of Sun and Roses is still free on Amazon, so if you're looking for a short, futuristic fairy tale (based on Sleeping Beauty) you can get it here.  I like rewriting fairy tales, not so much because I don't have ideas of my own, but because I like telling the stories in my own way. But at a certain point I realized that everyone picks the same five fairy tales--Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and maybe...Red Riding Hood.  When I started my "Modern Magic Series," I knew I wanted ten stories in all, so I had to go beyond the obvious. (Plus, outside of doing a werewolf take on Red Riding Hood, I didn't really see much I could do with the story)

Here's what I came up with:

Fashionista (Cinderella)
While My City Dreams (Rapunzel)
Hunter's Kiss (Snow White)
Hero's Kiss (Beauty and the Beast)
Beauty Sleep (Sleeping Beauty)
Unknown Road (East of the Sun, West of the Moon)
Hideous (Ugly Duckling)
Midnight's Daughter (The Twelve Dancing Princesses)
Lady in the Water (The Little Mermaid)
Soul Kiss (The Snow Queen)

I have covers for almost all of the stories--some women buy shoes, I buy covers. The amazing Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services created some, and I bought the others as premades from various sources. Hunter's Kiss was created by Ravven, whose work is exquisite. I bought two of her premades last year as a Christmas present to me. I also picked up a couple on The Book Cover Designer. I know people can be sniffy about pre-mades, but there's some gorgeous work there.

The Time Traveler's Almanac

I am a fan of short stories. I'm a fan of time travel stories. So this collection of short stories (edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer) sounds like it's right up my alley. And I would never have known about it if I hadn't stumbled across the cover in a review. I love this cover. I love that the butterfly is a call out to one of my all-time favorite short stories, Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder." I remember reading that story for the first time and just being stunned by it. It was my introduction to Ray Bradbury and, most likely, the beginning of my life-long love of the short story form.

This is not the first cover this book has. When I went searching for it on Amazon--because to see it is to buy it--an older cover came up. And for me, the older cover was not as inviting. Maybe it's the background color. I used to work in print magazines and one of the things we were always doing is gathering data on which covers sold the best. (Covers with white backgrounds were not that popular.) For me this alternate cover looks like it might be a work of popular history or popular science. It doesn't say "fiction" to me the way the butterfly cover does. But either way, this book is on its way to me and I can't wait.

Freebie Fiction

I'm going to be running free promotions for various books all the rest of this month and into June. I'm staring with A Dream of Sun and Roses, a long short story which was originally written for an anthology of future fairy tales that never happened. It's a version of Sleeping Beauty. The other freebie availale right now is Unsanctified, a horror  story with spiders and other creepy stuff.

Weekend Flash Fiction

                                DARKLING      

                       by Katherine Tomlinson                                 

The sun didn’t rise on Thursday.  The blogosphere, which never sleeps, outpaced the news channels in reporting the situation, but CNN had posted a graphic (Black Thursday!) by 11 a.m.  The parade of pundits began that afternoon, with self-styled experts throwing out phrases like “Little Ice Age” and “global hydrological cycle.”

Dr. Nicholas Solarz, whose theories on nuclear winter had been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, seemed to be everywhere at once, basking in his moment of geek glory. He talked a lot about the surface temperature of the earth being 300 Kelvin and predicted that without sunlight, the temperature would drop by a factor of two in weeks.

When these statements were met by puzzled looks from anchor-people who couldn’t do long division without a calculator, he explained that 275 Kelvin is the freezing temperature of water and that in a month; the planet’s surface temperature would be down to 150 Kelvin.  Then he had added, somewhat unhelpfully, “You do the math.”

But to do the math, people needed to know the difference between the Kelvin and the Celsius temperature scales and have a passing grasp of the concept of “absolute zero” and most everyone had enough problems just converting Celsius to Fahrenheit.  Also, a fair number of viewers thought Dr. Solarz was saying “Kevin” and wondered who he was and what he had to do with anything.

Shakespeare Fan Fic--Macbeth

Weirdos

by Katherine Tomlinson

 

The cops eventually showed up at school. Cate knew they would. When a guy like Kingman Duncan gets killed, people pay attention. Questions get asked. The police want answers. So we were expecting them and we had answers ready.

It was a week after Homecoming but the posters were still up all over the school.

Go fighting Scots!

Dunsinane H.S. rules!

As far as the cops were concerned, they had a whole high school full of suspects, kids who might have stabbed Duncan. Studies have shown that popular kids get bullied as often as the misfits do. My experience suggests they probably deserve it.

I wasn’t going to shed any tears over dead Duncan and neither were my sisters.

We didn’t do it, but we knew who did.

We weren’t going to throw him under the bus.

Unless we had to.

The cancer you've never heard of...

I had never heard of Angiosarcoma until just over a year ago when a friend of mine collapsed in pain while at work and soon after learned that his spleen had essentially exploded as a result of the disease.

What is Angiosarcoma?  Angiosarcoma is a cancer of the inner lining of blood vessels, and it can occur in any area of the body. The disease most commonly occurs in the skin, breast, liver, spleen, and deep tissue.

Cancer of the inner lining of blood vessels. Who even knew there was such a thing? Seriously, there aren't enough major organs for cancer to infest, it has to invade the inner lining of blood vessels?  Even the Wikipedia article on the disease is really brief. By the time my friend knew he had this aggressive cancer, it had already spread all over. He fought it as hard as he could with heart and courage and humor. But it killed him anyway.

There used to be a tagline for American Cancer Society PSAs. "Help fight cancer in YOUR lifetime." It's too late for my friend, but maybe not too late for someone you know. If you have a spare dollar and don't know where to put it, here's a place.

Angiosarcoma Awareness, Inc.
P.O. Box 17421
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33318
www.cureasc.org