The next Theme-Thology from HDWP Books came out this week! It’s available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Kobo, and other outlets.

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Instead of interviewing all or a few of my antho-mates, I asked just one question to the writers who contributed to this anthology:

What is unreal in your own life?

Mike Reeves-McMillan

Weave

I’m married to an alien from Planet California.

She’s pretty cool.

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Susan Joslyn

Render

I spend a great deal of time restoring old photographs (digitally)  from multiple branches of my family.  Often they are people that I never met, but to whom I am related, so I feel that kinship. I find myself making up personalities for them, getting to know them very intimately as I fix a crack in an ancient photo that covers their face, or matching the lace edging of one sleeve to another.  They come alive and I begin to imagine their lives and very specifically the day, the moment in the photograph. I begin to feel as though I was there and that I truly know these people. If you ask me if I talk to them, I will not answer.

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CM Stewart

Candy Marries Rich

I have four kidneys, discovered by a surgeon while I was getting a re-implantation surgery as a child. It’s either a genetic mutation, or I ate (absorbed) my twin in the womb. I’m guessing it was the later, as I was a 10-month baby, and the longest (tallest) in the hospital nursery (took me a while to finish off my twin).

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Charles Barouche

Editor

House Sampson

My younger daughter and I have both been dead once. It didn’t take.

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John Frater

The Politics of the Apocalypse

I’m a librarian, so books are the only real objects I encounter. The rest of it is an intricate simulation housed inside a massive supercomputer residing in a cyber-city run by a giant bat.

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Lisa Kramer

Levoça

Whenever I travel, and wherever I go, I receive messages from the universe. The problem is, sometimes I don’t listen.

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Micha Fire

Fiona’s Game

What is real? The dream, the daily life, the computer game?
Sometimes it is hard to differentiate between them;
their boundaries a fluctuation of electrons.

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Michelle Mogil

The Track Meet

It had been a very long night: my father was stricken with a brain aneurism and rushed to the hospital with little hope of recovery. We children hurried to be at his side and support our mother during this crisis.

In the ICU room, where he lay dying, I got frustrated with the process at one point. The machine that was monitoring his heart kept slowing waaaay down, then coming back up to normal speed, then slowing waaaay down, then back to speed. Finally, I said, rather more loudly than I intended, “For God’s sake, Dad! Make up your mind!”

My sisters frowned at me in disapproval, my mother gave a nervous laugh, but the weirdest thing was the smirk on Dad’s face and the strong whiff of the cologne he used to use just before the monitor stopped altogether.

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AmyBeth Inverness

The House on Paladin Court

Our house used to be fueled by oil, but was converted to gas by a previous owner. They didn’t remove the oil tank…they just disconnected it and walled it in.
It still sits there, off the utility room. But sometimes we hear strange noises coming from inside, like something is trapped there. I’ve never opened it up to find out. If something is still alive after thirty years, I’m not sure I want to know about it.