Karl Dandenell is a graduate of Viable Paradise and a Full Member of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He and his family, plus their cat overlords, live on an island near San Francisco famous for its Victorian architecture and low speed limits. His preferred drinks are strong black tea and single malt whiskey. 

Karl has appeared in over a dozen magazines including Fireside Fiction, Buzzy Magazine, Metaphorosis, Speculative North, Little Blue Marble, plus the anthologies ABANDONED PLACES and STRANGE ECONOMICS. He has also narrated his own fiction for The Word Count Podcast. You can find more of his thought on Twitter (@kdandenell) and www.firewombats.com.

I was thinking about the trope of an old witch and a young apprentice, and the power of oaths in traditional fantasy. My first draft was inspired by a 500-word flash fiction contest, which really pushed me out of my comfort zone. Throughout my drafting process, I had to carefully pick which worldbuilding elements to include without losing the emotional core of the story.

My goal was to create a small tale that could been seen as a moment in time, or the beginning of a larger story. I hope you enjoy it.

R.J.K. Lee is a native Oregonian residing in Japan for nearly two decades where he plays games with his two wonderfully awesome kids, bicycles through typhoons, and works as a language teacher, proofreader, and voice actor. Since he was young, he’s written and imagined strange characters and worlds. During his elementary school years, he drew crayon maps, wrote story fragments in journals, adventured around the wilderness with his siblings and friends, and played roleplaying games of various sorts. He continued dabbling in writing, showing up in a local newspaper after performing his poetry and snagging a few awards at universities for a non-fiction essay and a literary fiction story about USA-Japan relations.

After moving to Japan and taking a break from writing, he’s returned to push himself to get his work published, the idea being that shorter work will eventually lead to his yet-to-be published longer work. His current publications include Don't Trust Molters in DreamForge Magazine (2022), Stone Shaper Tanukis Estranged in Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging - Volume Blue (2021), and Memo from the Jolly Overlords in the Weird Christmas Podcast (2020). He also has stories forthcoming in Clamour and Mischief and Tales & Feathers Magazine. His awards include semi-finalist from the Writers of the Future contest (2021) and a third-place fiction award from the University of Oregon KIDD contest (2005). Follow his posts at https://figmentsdiehard.blogspot.com/ or @rylandjklee on Twitter.

Light Winds with a Chance of Velociraptors

Michelle Ann King is a short story writer from Essex, England. Her stories of fantasy, science fiction, crime, and horror have appeared in over a hundred different venues, including Strange Horizons, Interzone, Black Static, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. Her collections are available in ebook and paperback from Amazon and other online retailers, and links to her published stories can be found at her website: www.transientcactus.co.uk

I love a good apocalypse story, especially that ones that focus on ordinary people. A lot of the time, the people who step up and fix things are scientists, soldiers, or superheroes —larger than life characters who have lots of power and influence (and are often young, fit, and gorgeous)— and I thought it would be fun if, this time, it was a bunch of old folks in a retirement home who got to save the world. It also tickled me enormously to have the person behind it all be not a supervillain, psychopath, or entitled billionaire, but just a cantankerous old woman from Croydon who liked animals more than people.  

Peter S. Drang builds his army of 3D printed hexapod robots by day (see VorpalRobotics.com) and writes sublimely unhinged fiction by night. Someday he hopes to combine and leverage these two activities to achieve his dream job: Philosopher-King of planet Earth. His stories have spontaneously materialized in fine publications such as Nature, Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction, the FlameTree Fiction Newsletter, The Arcanist and other places. This is his second appearance at Dreamforge, which is becoming one of his favorite markets. Check out his maniacal musings at DrangStories.com, and (at the risk of sounding needy) be sure to "like" him at Facebook.com/PeterSDrang. 

I volunteer taught AP Physics and Robotics at a high school for ten years. I became fairly conversant in millennial slang, which is on full display in this story, though I had to simplify it lest I lose readers over 40. (The first version of this story used full-out slang, and some of my workshop reviewers misinterpreted important details.) I also became attuned to phenomena such as teenage angst over getting into the perfect college, and their idealism as well as their blind spots and sometimes cruelty. Teaching the calculus parts of AP Physics was always a challenge, and I loved watching the "light bulb moment" when students finally understood that an integral is just a fancy way of doing addition. I recall one discussion with a student and I said something like, "You are the sum of your choices, so try to make good ones." And she replied, "So I'm the integral over all my choices!" These experiences somehow combined to produce this story. To me it's about committing to use your current self's choices to lay the groundwork for becoming your best future self--something we can all strive for.

Mara Buck writes, paints, and rants in a self-constructed hideaway in the Maine woods. She hopes to leave someday. Recently short-listed for the Alpine Fellowship. Winner of The Raven Prize for non-fiction, The Scottish Arts Club Short Story Prize, two Moon Prizes for women’s writing. Other recent first places include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Poetry Prize, The Binnacle International Prize. Awarded/short-listed by the Faulkner/Wisdom Society, Hackney Awards, Balticon, Confluence, and others, with work in numerous literary magazines and print  anthologies. The ubiquitous novel lurks.

For more pix and linx, the Scots have generously provided an author page: Mara Buck — Scottish Arts Trust Story Awards

This feminist ghost story is fiction, based on a vandalized property and a discarded wedding gown. My Aunt Alice was married in that gown; sadly her husband died only a year later. She bought the farmhouse with the insurance money, but when she became ill and moved to town, the house was vandalized. I, the fearless heir, climbed through the wreckage and discovered the gown—and wrote Threshold in tribute to Alice’s artistic temperament. I hope she’d be pleased.  

Scott Edelman has published more than 100 short stories in magazines such as Analog, PostScripts, The Twilight Zone, and Dark Discoveries, and in anthologies such as Why New Yorkers Smoke, MetaHorror, Crossroads: Southern Tales of the Fantastic, Once Upon a Galaxy, Moon Shots, Mars Probes, and the Harlan Ellison tribute anthology The Unquiet Dreamer.

His collection of zombie fiction, What Will Come After, was published in 2010, and was a finalist for both the Stoker Award and the Shirley Jackson Memorial Award. His most recent collection, Things That Never Happened was published in 2020. He has been a Bram Stoker Award finalist eight times, in the categories of Short Story and Long Fiction.

Additionally, Edelman worked for the Syfy Channel for more than thirteen years as editor of Science Fiction Weekly, SCI FI Wire, and Blastr. He was the founding editor of Science Fiction Age, which he edited during its entire eight-year run. He also edited SCI FI magazine, previously known as Sci-Fi Entertainment, as well as two other SF media magazines, Sci-Fi Universe and Sci-Fi Flix. He has been a four-time Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor. 

He is also the host of Eating the Fantastic, a podcast which has allowed listeners to eavesdrop on his meals with writers and editors since 2016.

Wulf Moon learned oral storytelling as a child when he lived with his Chippewa grandmother. He begged stories from her every night and usually got his wish—fireside tales that fired his imagination. If Moon had a time machine, those are the days he would go back to. Since he doesn’t have a time machine, he writes.

Moon wrote his first science fiction story at fifteen. It won the national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and became his first professional sale in Science World . He has won over forty writing awards, and thirty in public speaking. His stories have appeared in Writers of the Future Vol. 35, Best of Deep Magic Anthology 2, Future Science Fiction Digest, Best of Third Flatiron, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2 by Pocket Books. Moon is a professional voice-over actor and is podcast director at Future Science Fiction Digest .

Wulf Moon's award-winning SUPER SECRETS Writing Resource and Workshops have been attributed by many aspiring writers as the secret to their success in obtaining first professional sales. Two of Moon's books on writing will be published by Mark Leslie of Stark Publishing Solutions in 2022. Want in on the Secrets? JOIN THE WULF PACK at http://thesupersecrets.com.