Next stop, Riverdale High

Hey all! Agent Q here. Check out my latest post over at Finding the Yummy, where I talk about the CW's new show, Riverdale, and the dos and don'ts in adapting a beloved comic.

ARCHIE AND THE GANG GET CWED

A Lovely Way to Start 2017!

Firefly By Bruce Marlin
Own work http://www.cirrusimage.com/beetle_firefly_Photuris_lucicrescens.htm,
CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1536654

Lisa's first publication has hit the interwebs! Scrapie's Trap, one of the stories in her Insect Cycle, has been published in the on-line journal Kaleidotrope. And, appropriately, the art for the edition is a tech-spider.

The world in the story has a train that is part animal, part vegetable and looks like a giant caterpillar. The train only has a minor role in this story; it is the lightning bug that has the major role. The story opens thus:

Lampyridae: Firefly. Female Photuris fireflies will mimic the mating flashes of other subfamilies of firefly, such as Photinus, in order to draw their males as prey. The mating behavior of the male Photuris includes their mimicking the flashes of the males of the Photinus subfamily, the prey that the female Photuris attempts to capture with her own mimicry. In this way predator and “prey” may find in each other a mate.

Fireflies are wicked cool. In the story you will also meet two goats, Tinus and Turis, and a girl named Scrapie.

Here's the Table of Contents: 

Fiction

"The Song of the Whistling Crab" by Michael McGlade
"One Thousand Paper Cranes" by Julie C. Day
"The Big Reveal" by David Stevens
"Scrapie’s Trap" by Lisa Bergin (That's me!)
"The Last Seven Eternities of Dr. Julian Slade, PhD" by Joshua Kamin

Poetry
"Ship of Jinn" by Holly Lyn Walrath
"From the Dictionary of Nonexistent Words, A Sampler" by Kathrin Köhler 
"The Last Word" by Gwynne Garfinkle

Artwork

Cesar Valtierra 

I've read the edition - if you like a bit of horror and humor and speculation and the unknown, you will like these stories and poems. Also, there are horrific/humorous horoscopes!

And even better: in the same issue, my dear friend Kathrin has an amazing poem for word-lovers and dictionary-lovers. Please go read it! 

For me the end of 2016 had a bitter taste of loss and estrangement, and I'd spent the last days of December with a whiff of dread for the coming year. And then this issue came out with me and Kat bound up in cyberspace together. I needed that reminder from the universe.

So: here's to 2017. Here's to hope. Here's to writers (and plumbers and mail carriers and philosophers and geeks and teachers and parents and friends and sweethearts and kids and...) doing our work well, with generosity and curiosity for what lies beyond. Here's to readers and listeners. Here's to you and here's to me and here's to exploring what lies in the in-between.