I had a dream the other night where I’m standing near a lake, when all of a sudden this old VW bus comes rumbling across the grass and – SPLASH – drills straight into the water. How I could tell that my old buddy Chan was driving was one of those dream mysteries, so, worried for his safety, I ran along the bank shouting his name, until I finally spotted him, casually backstroking away from the now submerging vehcile. 

     “Are you OK!?” I hollered.

     “Yeah,” he said, waving me away. “Just had to get rid of this old thing, is all.”

     Chan moved out of state about a decade ago, and I haven’t seen him in years, so why he would suddenly make an absurd cameo appearance in a dream is beyond me. But it gets even stranger, because later the next morning, I’m working in my office when I hear a tap on the window. I turn.

     Hunched over is no other than Chan himself, grinning like he just drove a VW bus into a lake.

     Don’t ask me how to explain this. Sure, you could chalk it up to coincidence, but I think Gandalf put it nicely: “There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo.”

     The years since his departure haven’t been easy for either of us; more recently came Chan's leukemia. I don’t know why disasters strike, no more than I know why people randomly pop into dreams and then show up on doorsteps while passing through town. Life is a grind. And it doesn’t always end the way we want.

     But sometimes, things work out. Sometimes, our lives are changed. Sometimes, even the dragons are driven back into their lair.

     Remission, I think, is the word for it.

     

    Driving to work recently on a Tuesday morning, our editor-in-chief was promptly pulled over and fined $400. Why? Catch the full story in our latest podcast episode HERE (or anywhere you listen). Further inspired, Dan also wrote a song about (or to?) officer Peter Owen. Have a listen!

By Dana Wall

 

The ladybugs arrived on a Tuesday, the same day Dr. Foster told me the cells in my left breast were dividing with purposeful fury. I came home to find them gathering on my bedroom windowsill—first dozens, then hundreds, their lacquered backs gleaming like drops of blood beading on white gauze.

     “It’s a hibernation,” my neighbor explained when I called in a panic. “They cluster before winter. Happens every few years. Harmless.”

     But Mrs. Abernathy hadn’t seen how they arranged themselves on my window: a perfect outline of a breast, complete with a dark center where they clustered most densely. I took it as a sign, though of what I couldn’t say. The universe acknowledging the betrayal happening beneath my skin?

     I didn’t tell my daughter about the diagnosis when she called that night. Lily was in her first semester at Berkeley, voice bright with discovery, unaware that her mother was becoming a landscape of invasion. Instead, I asked her about ladybugs.

     “They’re coleoptera,” she said, biology major already showing. “They secrete a yellow fluid when threatened. Smells awful, stains everything. It’s called reflex bleeding.”

     Reflex bleeding. The phrase followed me to bed, where I dreamed of yellow fluid seeping from between my fingers as I pressed them against my chest, trying to hold something essential inside.

     By morning, the ladybugs had moved. They covered the bathroom mirror in a constellation that resembled my latest mammogram—white background, dark masses where no darkness should be. I was thirty minutes late to work, unable to brush my teeth or apply makeup while they watched with their blank, obsidian eyes.

     “You need an exterminator,” my sister said over lunch, after I confessed about both the diagnosis and the insects. Rachel had survived her own battle three years earlier, had the reconstructed chest and chemo-induced platinum hair to prove it. “Or stay with me until they’re gone.”

     “I can’t leave them,” I said, surprising us both. “They feel...significant.”

     Rachel’s eyes softened with familiar pity. “The mind creates meaning when the body betrays us. Don’t read too much into the bugs, Helen.”

     But that afternoon, I declined the exterminator’s services. Something about the ladybugs’ perfect red shells—so intact, so symmetrical, so unlike what was happening inside me—felt necessary, like their presence was a counterpoint to my dissolution.

     They continued their occupation as autumn deepened. I became accustomed to their rustling movements, the faint smell of something sweet and bitter beneath the chemical aroma of their defensive secretions. I named the largest one Sylvia, after the poet whose words suddenly made visceral sense: dying is an art, like everything else.

     My treatment plan took shape: surgery before Thanksgiving, radiation after New Year’s. The ladybugs formed new patterns each day, arranging themselves in shapes that mimicked my medical diagrams—the outline of a tumor, the tract of lymph nodes, the radiation field mapped onto my chest wall.

     “Mom, that’s not normal,” Lily insisted during her weekend visit home. “It’s like they’re... communicating.”

     “Perhaps they are,” I said, watching how they parted around her finger when she touched the mirror, reforming the pattern seconds later. Perfect symmetry. Perfect order. Everything my body now lacked.

     The night before surgery, I couldn’t sleep. The ladybugs had gathered on my bedside table, surrounding the orange vials of pre-operative medications. In the moonlight filtering through my curtains, they seemed to pulse with a collective heartbeat.

     “Are you here to witness?” I whispered. “Or to carry something away?”

     One detached from the group, crawled onto my hand, its tiny feet tickling my skin as it explored the blue veins at my wrist. I felt an unexpected kinship with this creature—both of us housing something vital inside fragile shells.

     When I returned from the hospital, breast excised and replaced with surgical packing, the ladybugs had migrated to my recovery chair. They formed a cushion of living insects, their collective warmth somehow soothing against my bandaged chest. The pain medications made their movements seem deliberate, choreographed—a scarlet ballet performed for an audience of one.

     “This isn’t right,” Rachel said when she came to check on me. “You’re not thinking clearly. Let me call someone.”

     “They’re helping,” I insisted, watching them crawl along the edge of my surgical drain, seeming to measure the fluid’s daily decrease. “They understand something about transformation.”

     I learned to live with their presence through recovery. They followed me from room to room, a crimson shadow that arranged itself into meaningful patterns: the signature line on medical forms, the arc of the radiation beam, the jagged peaks of my pain scale diary.

     Lily flew home for Christmas, brought me a gift of a vintage etymology book with beautiful hand-colored plates. “So you can identify your roommates,” she said, trying for lightness but watching with concern as a ladybug crawled from my cardigan sleeve.

     I didn’t tell her I’d stopped seeing them as insects weeks ago. They had become something else—cellular, interior. Not invaders but witnesses, marking each progress, each setback. When I vomited from the medications, they formed a circle around the toilet bowl. When I cried from frustration, they gathered my tears into their bodies, turning the droplets from clear to amber.

     Radiation began in January, five days a week of lying beneath machines that hummed with invisible intent. I returned home each day to find the ladybugs arranged in new configurations that mapped my treatment field, their bodies concentrated where the burn ached the worst.

     “Ladybugs hibernate in winter,” my radiologist commented when I mentioned them. “They’re attracted to warmth. Perhaps they sense the heat from the radiation in your skin.”

     I didn’t correct her misconception. How could I explain that these creatures were not following ordinary insect logic? That their movements corresponded to my cellular changes, to the death of malignant tissue, to the slow reclamation of my body?

     On the final day of treatment, I dragged myself home to find them gathered on my kitchen table, arranged in a perfect mandala. At its center lay a single molted shell, transparent and empty. I placed it in a small box lined with cotton, tucked it into my nightstand drawer beside the fentanyl I hadn’t needed.

     That night, the ladybugs began to leave. Not all at once, but in organized groups, their departure as methodical as their arrival had been. Through the open window they flew—red confetti against the February sky, carrying something invisible but essential with them.

     By morning, only Sylvia remained, perched on my pillow as I woke from the first dreamless sleep I’d had in months.

     “Thank you,” I whispered, though for what exactly, I couldn’t articulate.

     She opened her wings, revealing the intricate black architecture beneath the red dome. For a moment, she seemed suspended between staying and going, between bearing witness and granting solitude.

     Then she was gone, a final cardinal point vanishing into the winter light.

     The house felt cavernous without them. I ran my fingers over the windowsills, the mirror edges, the picture frames where they had clustered—seeking evidence of their occupation. Nothing remained except faint yellow stains, the reflex bleeding Lily had mentioned months earlier. In sunlight, the stains formed patterns like star charts, mapping territories both traversed and still to come.

     Six months later, the scans showed no evidence of disease. “Unremarkable,” the radiologist called my images—the highest praise in medical parlance. I sent Lily a text with the news, added a ladybug emoji. She responded with a string of hearts.

     That night, I dreamt of red shells opening to reveal wings transparent as newly healed skin. I woke with the certainty of being watched, though by what, I couldn’t say. The bedroom was empty of insects, the air still. But on my chest, directly above the surgical scar, I found a single yellow stain—proof that some transformations, once witnessed, leave their mark forever.

 

~~~

About the author:

     Dana Wall traded balance sheets for prose sheets after years of keeping Hollywood's agents and lawyers in perfect order. Armed with a Psychology degree that finally proved useful when creating complex characters and an MBA/CPA that helps her track plot points with spreadsheet precision, she ventured into the haunted halls of Goddard College's MFA program. Her work, which has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Fabula Argentea, and Columbia Journal Online confirms that words are more reliable than numbers, though occasionally harder to balance.

 

By R. F. Marazas

 

Letter to General Harrison from Oliver Hazard Perry, United States Brig Niagara, off the Western Sisters :

“We have met the enemy, and they are ours.”

 

Beyond my window, the sands of Mars shift like some great restless beast disturbed in sleep. Something undefined nags at me. Not the whiplash storm that greeted us at touchdown, keeping us prisoners for twenty-six hours listening to the sand pound in sheets against the hull. Not the eerie, deathlike, non-movement after the storm that makes a silence you don’t need to hear because you can see it. This is something else, unreal. Something. How can you define it when you have no reference? I’d never heard anything like the sand pounding the hull, never heard a silence like this one that followed. So how am I supposed to define this other something?

     My eyes are gritty, leaking tears a dull gray color. My nose and mouth leak too, a steady drip. I’ve been staring at the patches of coppery sand. One minute the sand builds a chain of hills miles away, the next it reappears within twenty yards of the ship in grotesque shapes that seem alive. Staring is useless. The sand keeps changing, but I only see the result.

     My skin is clammy, with a shiny slickness that no amount of wiping will stop. My clothes cling to me like damp tissue paper. Touching surfaces leave my splotched oily fingerprints in strange pop-art patterns. I can’t wipe those away either.

     So there it is, simple enough: my life is slowly draining away. When it stops, I’ll be dead.

     I know, I know, got to get hold of myself.

     Go figure. After all those years of working my tail off, eyes on that one goal, impressing the hell out of my superiors and the bureaucrats, not only do I see my name on the flight list—was it a misprint?—but right there at the top. My mission! My command!

     So what do I do? Dream.

 

#

 

     Well dammit, I told them about it, or at least hinted enough, during our sessions. They’re supposed to be the experts. The clown with the Dali mustache should have raised a red flag instead of sitting there with that smug look, surrounded by his microtapes and profiles and behavior manuals. Should have recognized the signs—what signs?—I was a granite face, giving away nothing. Should he have grounded me, I’d have climbed over his desk and strangled him.

Smug bastard. His mustache curved up and inward, twin stingers poised to stab his nose. Fingertips steepled, barely touching, in awe of each other. The programmed smile, curled upward, mimicking the mustache.

     “So. Captain. In command of the first Mars probe. Feeling emotional up top?” Always an economy of monotoned words.

     “Yes, sir.”

     “You seem unsure. Tell me.”

     “Tell you, sir?”

     “You can’t find words. Try. Your halting words, my probing keys. With them, we’ll unlock the doors.” He waved a dismissive hand and tapped a shiny fingernail against the recorder. “We’ve already unlocked all your doors, true? The entire profile is right here. Ergo, whatever your words, the corresponding keys exist.”

     I took a careful breath, kept my face granite, and neutered my voice.

     "A few dreams, sir. Incomplete thoughts spoken by three black robed, hooded creatures yelling, ‘If God wanted man to know the mysteries of space, He’d have…’, or a cartoon character grinning at me and saying, ‘We have met the enemy and…’. I wake up with the strong feeling that I’m supposed to complete the phrases.”

     My voice died and I stared, fiercely indignant, at the supercilious arch of eyebrows.

     “Captain, I understand you have a hobby.”

     “Yes sir.” What the hell?

     “We encourage this. Space program pressures need release. Safety valve. Do you dabble in historical nostalgia or trivia? I hear you were somewhat of a wunderkind when you were young, won prizes on quiz shows, eh?”

     I nodded stupidly, anxiously. Would he force me to surrender my collection of old magazines, comic books, and records?

     “Now. Simple, non-critical problem. Inconvenient to you, but not critical. And it has an answer.”

     I leaned forward.

     “To relieve your tremendous pressures, you subconsciously use your hobby to escape. Your hobby’s lighter aspects mingle with your mission’s serious aspects. Minor conflict of opposing thoughts, nothing more. A simple clash between fantasy and reality. Easily resolved once you’re out there in the great void.”

     For a long while, we both sat waiting. He wanted my thanks for his perception. I wanted an answer. Simultaneously, we turned cool.

     “That’s it?”

     “Captain, are you requesting that you be relieved of command?”

     He had me there. Had me right where he wanted me.

     And now something else had me here.

 

#

 

     I stare at the transmitter, willing it to span the great void, and turn knobs with infinite hairline precision until my fingers ache. In answer, the wasp is buzzing, the mosquito drones, they crackle. Martian wasps? Space mosquitoes? A crackle of unknown language?

     I must decide: stay with the ship or form a search party of one. A good captain is supposed to go down with his ship, but that seems rather farfetched now. The captain’s ship is incapacitated, incommunicado, and unlikely to go down or in any other direction. The others should touch down in what, nine more days? The best bet seems to be to get out there, and get some data to prepare them for—

     If I see one more of my slimy fingerprints I’ll scream. Decision duly made, duly logged.

So damned absurd. We know all there is to know about Mars. No little green men with yellow saucer eyes, no wisps of blue smoke that speak through telepathy. No indescribable monsters or intelligent plants. Sparse vegetation, thin air, empty canals, storms. Your average unexplored planet.

     And that sinister red sand that shifts its hulk when your back is turned. Nothing unexpected.

So what happened to my crew—Major Denby, Captain Sparr, Doc Mellors? First men on Mars, gone four hours, headset intercom snuffed out. Follow-up search team of Major Lime, Captain Planer. Three hours overdue, no contact. Captain Argood, Lieutenant Talansky, gone. And no partner for the skipper because Childress never made it to Mars. The flight burst his heart with joy. Childress, wherever you are, drifting slow and lazy toward the sun, perhaps you are the luckiest of us all.

     I glance at the porthole. Earth is sliding from sight against the lower left arc. No eclipse, no death in darkness. Stop acting like some scared kid.

     Leaning forward, I see the sand flat straight across to the horizon. It looked that way when the others left before it followed their bulky figures that finally became specks blended into the sand.

     A shiver jolts up my spine.

     Angrily I punch the airlock control auto-button and move toward the hatch. The button must have activated me too because I trudge fifty yards before I remember to turn back to face the impact of where I am and what I’ve done. The ship is there, dully one-dimensional, a cutout rocket ship from a children’s magazine glued to a starkly black backdrop.

     And I’m the kid. This is my wildest dream come true, only hey, this is real. Mars! I’m an Earthman, a human being and ship’s captain, and I’m standing on the surface of Mars. On Mars! And I almost forgot to savor the moment, the way I used to make an ice cream cone last. Too many things on my mind, like missing crews and subconscious warnings and hooded figures and fragmented phrases.

     Okay, okay. The moment is savored in my mind’s log. Time to shove philosophy and romanticism aside. Time for the business of survival and detection. Trudge on, traveler.

I move away in the general direction of my lost crew. There is sand. There is silence. Yes. Unlike any other silence I’ve ever felt. Felt? Strange way to describe it. I think about the tree in the forest. Nobody around to hear the sound the tree makes when it falls, so if nobody hears the sound, does the sound exist? A step further. If I fall now and I can’t hear the sound, and nobody else hears the sound, does the sound I make exist? If I make a sound that doesn’t exist, does that mean that I don’t exist?

     Oh, Captain, the clown with the Dali mustache would have a field day with that one.

     I veer right, following the moving mounds of sand. I’m not tired; all my body processes have accelerated despite the feeling of walking in slow motion on a treadmill. A fine, humming pitch flows from inside me. I flip on the headset.

     “Denby, Lime?” A movement to the left, over there?

     “Doc? Do you read me, Sparr?” Was that a voice? An echo? “Come in, Planer. Come in, Talansky. Argood?” Come in somebody, anybody. “Dammit, Childress are you out there!”

     No, no Captain, you keep forgetting, Childress is out there all right but not within reach. Perhaps we’re all out of reach somewhere out there.

     I tilt my head back to gaze up into the black. It brings a smothering sensation, this blackness. So immense, so limitless. How can Man cope with this?

     Oh, God—Crazily I look around, flinching in the expectation of hearing a voice thundering through a sudden gap in the blackness: “Yes?”

     You cannot fool with that name out there. No matter what the academy skeptics tell you, this is His turf. I have a bizarre vision of myself on my knees, arms outstretched in pleading frustration, yelling, “Why me, God?”

     And the gigantic hand, finger-pointing. “Because you bug Me, little man!”

     We’re all little men, so tread softly until you know the lay of the land. Tough break. My academy training is shot to hell because right now I’m a believer and I don’t intend to rile the gods or God or whatever it is that spins out this blackness.

     Definite movement this time, caught in my peripheral vision. To my left, something angles in a wide arc toward me. I follow, my eyes hurting from squinting and skimming across the sand. “Clear your mind’s silly memory banks, this is serious. Headset on.” An echo of my tense voice calls to the figure. Yes, yes, a figure; this is no sand witchery. He is suited up, angling toward me in a hesitant, teasing walk, circling.

     He? Are you sure? Now let’s not get carried away. Has to be one of the crew. There are no Martians. Nothing lives on this planet except a few minor organisms. He’s a man, fellow crewman. Acting rather strangely, but we’ll explain that soon. Won’t we?

     He’s closer. I can see that his suit is just like mine. Naturally. Funny thing though, the lettering and markings are distorted, or maybe faded or…flawed. As if that particular suit didn’t pass quality control inspection. A kink in the assembly line, and out pops a dud.

     Feeling stupid but somehow dead-certain it’s the only way to communicate, I raise my hand slowly in greeting. He stops, shimmering against black space and red sand. I’m trapped in a photographer’s darkroom. But he’s not trapped, moving closer in that jerky motion. Finally, I manage to shake off the hypnosis of the stark colors.

     I lean forward and peer inside his face shield. And see me, distorted.

     Despite all my training, I’m shaken. They never told us what to do when confronted with our images while strolling on an alien planet. This scene might as well be suspended. Nothing exists but my mind. Mind pure and simple, right here, filled with endless accumulated blurbs of trivia. An infinity of trivia, running wild. Okay mind, go ahead, trivia yourself out of this one.

     Wait a minute. Those underwater divers on Earth—spend too much time down there too deep and they suffer from the rapture of the deep, right? Hallucinations, suspension. So I’m suffering from a rapture of deep space.

     My pure and simple mind accepts that. I peer again at the figure, in control now. I recall a story I once read about a man who meets his image.

     “Are you my Secret Sharer?” I call through the headset.

     I take a closer look. It’s indeed my face but not a mirror image. It’s misshapen and grotesque like the portrait of the beautiful young man in another story.

     “Are you my Dorian Gray?”

     I hear the hysteria in my voice now. Perhaps that triggers my body to lurch forward. Up to this point, we’ve both been cautious, and wary, each poised for flight. But my panic has committed me to make a sudden move. I’ve made it and my cracked, distorted reflection, the timing slightly behind that of the original, makes an equally aggressive move. The circle is completed and now must go on and on.

     All right, mind, you blew it! Nothing left to do but run back because that—whatever it is—is no longer willing to stand and analyze.

     Across the bleak Martian landscape I go, overwhelmed by the deepest loneliness I’ve ever known. Over my shoulder I see him following, not gaining, not falling back. Has my face ever looked like that? Have my features ever been so distorted? It’s all there in that other face: anger, hatred, lust, greed.… One massive, cancerous sore pulsing with the effort to erupt in horrible violence. I jolt myself with another backward glance. Move faster before it catches up!

     Hunter and hunted in a slow-motion nightmare. The adrenaline pile drives my weary body. Perhaps it short-circuits my mind too because the bits of trivia keep caroming around in there.

     I swear loudly. What a damn fool time for nostalgia, right now, when I have to get back and log a warning for the others. They must be warned. And my head is a solid buzz. I could power the ship right off this planet with the force in my skull.

     Up the ladder, punch the airlock control button.

     Got to warn them: This is what happened to my crew.

     My Secret Sharer, or my Dorian Gray, is coming. Got to explain it, explain to those who follow. What do I say to make them understand? A time warp, a space warp, a trick of lighting peculiar only to Mars. Or a microbe, a virus, or a gaseous agent that causes hallucinations. Explain in their terms. Something, anything reasonable, because there’s no other way to explain what I believe.

     It’s climbing the ladder.

     I’m through the airlock, ripping my helmet away, switching on the log, sweating despite climate control, and bending close to the speaker.

     Time warp, space warp, mosquitoes, something their scientific minds can work with, grasp, and analyze. They won’t comprehend philosophy or intuition or religion or history or…sudden blinding insight into man’s dark soul.

     The airlock door swings wide.

     God, has my face ever looked like that?

     Now I remember. My completed trivia phrase, a paraphrase, a takeoff on a famous statement from American history. It presents itself like a cartoon character, some kind of animal, both funny and sad in his satiric pose. I remember what he said!

     I open my mouth, leaning closer to avoid misunderstanding, even though I know that no one will understand. There is ragged breathing in my ears and no time to determine whether it’s his or mine.

     I speak very slowly and very, very clearly.

     “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

 

~~~

About the author:

     R.F. Marazas won first place and tied for first in two novel contests for his unpublished novel, Legend Blues, and published short fiction and flash fiction in ten Anthologies and online and print venues.

 

Isn’t this the perennial question?

 

I spent decades writing “on the side,” “as a labor of love,” and all the other clichés that indicated I didn’t believe it was possible to make a respectable living as a writer. Journalist, marketer, technical writer, teacher of writing, yes. But creative writer? I didn’t believe it.

Until I did.

 

Call it a midlife crisis if you want, but in my mid-40s, I started wondering when I would take myself seriously. I mean, I’ve always identified as a writer first and foremost, but it was the thing I did “whenever I had free time.” Which wasn’t often.

 

I wrote books and they got published, but none made any money. I wrote articles and essays on the side of my lucrative marketing career. And I dreamed of being an author who lived on the fat of my earnings from book sales and author talks.

 

When I decided to take myself seriously, I shifted my life to make it actually happen. Just like I did with my two businesses, I created a strategy and a timeline and I committed to the outcome I wanted.

 

I began writing every day. I submitted finished pieces far and wide. I hired a writing coach to fast-track my essays and get them out in the world. I reconnected with editors I’d met through marketing and public relations channels, told them what I was doing, and asked if there was room for me to write for them.

 

I approached my author career just like I did my “real” career—planning, researching, committing to a schedule, networking and finding mentors who’d succeeded at what I wanted to succeed at.

 

One day about two years later, I realized, “wow, I’ve done it!” Shifted my schedule, yes, and generated some income from writing. I was focusing my most creative time of each day on what I love to do—write!—and I had a book in the publication pipeline.

 

In fact, while I had eight books traditionally published through small presses between 1996 and 2013, I made the leap to creating my own publishing imprint and self-publishing my books for many reasons, not the least of which was that I wanted to earn as much as possible from my book sales and not give up earnings to gatekeepers.

 

So if you want to make a living writing, here’s what you need to know…

 

Sign up for my weekly newsletter on writing

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Listen to the Make Meaning Podcast

     In 1989 Jim Baen signed me to a contract for a novel, to be named, Cyberpunk…Actually, I signed two contracts. One was for Cyberpunk, and the other was to develop a three-book shared-world anthology series. Of the shared-world clusterf*** there is much that could be said, but perhaps it is best to leave it with these simple words from Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, chapter 11, page 74:

 

    If you're not familiar with Bruce Bethke, you probably should be. Aside from being the guy who wrote (and coined the word) Cyberpunk, he also runs a magazine and has a pretty storied history in and out of the writing world. And when he writes about those storied histories, we like to pay attention. So read the next installment of Bruce (reminiscing, recounting, lamenting?) The Saga of Cyberpunk by CLICKING HERE.

Listen on:

Dear Story Unlikely,

     I get that literary journals are largely a labor of love, aren't exactly cash cows these days, but there's some shady stuff out there: outrageous contest submission fees, and venues that almost seem to DISLIKE in advance the writers trying to get into their pages. I wish "breath of fresh air" wasn't such a cliche, because that's really what you folks feel like.

     I love what you wrote about good stories coming in all types. I have a problem with "genre," if that isn't obvious =) As in, I can't seem to stay in one. I consider my stuff to be literary fiction, first and foremost about the characters, but a horror or sci-fi element always seems to find its way into every story I want to tell. Which makes it a little difficult with some of the more, ahem, "erudite" and "sophisticated"-type places. 

     Anyway, here's hoping you like [my story]. And I would LOVE to see what an illustrator would do [with it]. That would be so cool. Whether or not you choose my story, I think I can speak for all submitting writers when I say thank you. And no submission fee to boot? Well, look at you!

 

Sincerely,

Raymond Arcangel 

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