DreamForge Anvil | Issue 10

In this issue we travel to Mars, where rich clods of soil break between our fingers; go door to door, selling magic wands and giving away steak knives; and visit a village where only the power of imagination can heal the greatest evil. Along the way, the heart of an Ancient beats strong, terrifying beasts wait just out of sight, and an AI experiments with generosity.

Door to Portal: A Salesman's Story

Adam Jarvis has played many roles in his life, with writing as a persistent hobby. Most recently, he realized having a great wealth of experience meant having a great wealth of stuff and nonsense to write about. Being somewhat capable of stringing letters together to make words, he decided to turn his hobby into a writing career.

He has much still to learn, and the journey continues: up a treacherous mountain, in the bitter cold, through fog with clandestine aspirations, snow with murderous inclinations, and mountain goats with bad tempers. But it has been more enjoyable than many of his other pursuits.

Door to Portal is Adam's second published short story.

NOTES ON "DOOR TO PORTAL: A SALESMAN'S STORY"

Door to Portal is based loosely on my father’s stories of his brief experience as a young door-to-door vacuum salesman, and the hopelessness he encountered in his potential customers. But where my father could do little to help with a vacuum, I wanted to place my salesman in a position where he could truly make a difference.

E.E. King is an award-winning painter, performer, writer, and naturalist. She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals.

Ray Bradbury called her stories, “marvelously inventive, wildly funny, and deeply thought-provoking.”

She’s been published in over 100 magazines and anthologies, including Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Short Edition, and Flametree. Her novels include, Dirk Quigby's Guide to the Afterlife: All you need to know to choose the right heaven, The Electric Detective and several story collections.

Her stories are on Tangent’s 2019 and 2020, year’s best stories. She’s been nominated for a Rhysling, and several Pushcart awards.

She’s shown at paintings at LACMA, painted murals in LA and is currently painting a mural in leap lab (https://www.leaplab.org/) in San Paula, CA

She also co-hosts The Long Lost Friends Show on Metastellar YouTube and spends her summers doing bird rescue and her winters planting coral in Bonaire.

Check out paintings, writing, musings, and books at:

www.elizabetheveking.com

https://twitter.com/ElizabethEvKing

https://facebook.com/pages/EE-King

https://whatsinanafterlife.wordpress.com/

https://www.instagram.com/elizabetheveking

https://www.pinterest.com.mx/elizabethevie

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHEEgte6Bgv-r1OaHz3Mf1Q

https://amazon.com/author/eeking

STORY NOTES FOR "THE LOST VILLAGE"

The Lost Village is pieced together from many real stories.

The story of the girl saved by caretakers, and later recognized by her locket was told to me by a friend.

I first found out about the holocaust when I saw numbers on the arm of a friendly baker. She was a lovely lady who used to give me cookies. I'll never forget the disbelief I felt. ( I was about seven.)

My mother used to make up scrabble words.

After I had massed those ideas together, I went to look for a village destroyed, "lost," by Nazis.

It was too easy to find.

There are many more.

Zlovnia is based on Oradour-sur-Glane, a village in Nazi-occupied France. On 10 June 1944, four days after D-Day, the village was destroyed when 643 civilians, including non-combatant women and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company.

A new village was built nearby after the war. President Charles de Gaulle ordered that the ruins of the old village be maintained as a permanent memorial and museum.

The mayor and his tale is real.

(Also real is the country that had 17 languages.)

Fiction may or may not be stranger than fact, but it's almost always crueler.

Mary Soon Lee was born and raised in London, but has lived in Pittsburgh for over twenty years. Her two latest books are from opposite ends of the poetry spectrum: "Elemental Haiku," containing haiku for the periodic table (Ten Speed Press, 2019) and "The Sign of the Dragon," an epic fantasy with Chinese elements (JABberwocky Literary Agency, 2020). After twenty-five years, her website has finally been updated: marysoonlee.com.

Susan Kaye Quinn is an environmental engineer/rocket scientist turned speculative fiction author who now uses her PhD to invent cool stuff in books. Her works range from hopepunk climate fiction to futuristic spec fic, with side trips into cyberpunk and steampunk romance. Her novels have been optioned for Virtual Reality, translated into German and French, and her short fiction has appeared in Future Chronicles, Beyond the Stars, and Grist’s Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors.

Susan writes full-time, trying to dream a better future into being. She believes being cozy, gentle, and healing is radical and disruptive. Check out her website for more about hopepunk, solarpunk, and why she believes stories can lead the way forward.

https://susankayequinn.com/hopepunk-solarpunk

STORY NOTES FOR "THE JOY FUND"

As I was driving cross-country on one of my Sue Walks the Earth trips to travel (COVID-safely!) and visit friends, I heard a true story on the spectacular eco-podcast Green Dreamer that absolutely captivated my brain. A woman had an awful medical diagnosis and her friends, in addition to setting up support systems, created a Joy Fund for her, exclusively to purchase things that would bring her joy during this hard time. I wiped away the tears, but that concept burrowed in fast. It’s such a hopepunkish thing to do, so full of love, and I wanted a future where such a thing was normalized for everyone, just part of the world we existed in. So I created that… and then dreamed up a story about what might hilariously go wrong… and the result is The Joy Fund. I hope readers enjoy the tale but also: let’s make Joy Funds a reality, shall we?

Against the Time Beasts

Ana Sun (pronounced “Soon”) writes from the edge of an ancient town along the River Ouse in the south-east of England. She spent her childhood in Malaysian Borneo, and has lived on two other islands prior to moving to the UK. In another life, she might have been a musician, an anthropologist or a botanist obsessed with edible flowers.

STORY NOTES FOR "AGAINST THE TIME BEASTS"

“Against the Time Beasts” is the first of a set of tales where the title of each story corresponds to a line in a poem — examining time, entropy and the moments of minute deaths.

Indiana Tilford is a reformed fishing guide and river rat. When not writing, you can often find him falling into past habits on the water somewhere. Check out his work in Etherea Magazine, and connect with him on Instagram @gottahavepoetryinthename.

STORY NOTES FOR "WHERE RIVERS MEET"

This story was formed from two things. The first was the great bakeoff, a writing challenge hosted by Dreamforge for its Dreamcasters. The second was Scot suggesting that I write about something I know, the story flowed from there.

Michael Zahniser lives in Boston with his wife Christina, three housemates, and two guinea pigs. As a software engineer at an autonomous vehicle company, his job is to create robots that don’t kill people.

Wulf Moon's SUPER SECRETS: Heart's Desire

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 the spring of 2022. Want in on the Secrets? JOIN THE WULF PACK at http://thesupersecrets.com.

Illustration, Design, Layout

Jane is the Founder of Chroma Marketing Essentials, a digital marketing agency located in Jeannette PA. She holds a degree in Visual Communications from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and more years of experience than she cares to count.

Before founding CME, Jane worked as an Artist, Art Lead, Art Director, and Project Manager for the computer game developer DreamForge Intertainment, where she worked on a number of early computer games, including Roger Zelazny’s Chronomaster.

Editor, Editorial Selections, Essays, and more.

Scot Noel is a content writer for websites, blogs, social media, e-newsletters, and the like. Speculative fiction has always been his obsession, resulting in a Writers of the Future 2nd place win in 1990, a 7-year career in computer game development, and a handful of published stories, ranging from far future and zombie fiction to the tale of a fairy sheriff fighting an evil dragon. He serves as the editor and publisher of DreamForge Magazine and DreamForge Anvil.

Henry Gasko was born in a displaced persons camp in Yugoslavia after World War Two. He was raised on a vegetable farm in Canada, and emigrated to Australia more than forty years ago. He has recently retired from a career in data analysis and medical research.

Henry has had stories published in the anthologies "Dreamworks", “Alternate Apocalypse”, “On Time”, in Australia's Aurealis magazine, and in the SciPhi Journal . He is a two-time semi-finalist in The Writers of the Future and he won first prize in Positive Writer's "Why I Write" essay contest. He also won the 2018 Sapiens Plurum short story competition, and came third in the 2020 competition.

When he is not writing, he enjoys cycling, kayaking, swimming and playing bridge.

Catherine Weaver is a writer, editor and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area, where her family has lived for four generations.

She is the author of two Middle Grade fantasy novels, one bilingual English/Japanese picture book, and many short stories.

For the past ten years, she has been a freelance proofreader and editor, and has helped dozens of self-published authors of all genres bring their work into the world.

She has spent over forty years volunteering with her church in literacy and education programs in her community.

Her books are on Amazon and Goodreads and her website is: https://catherineweaverauthor.com/

Lloyd has been a science fiction fan for close to 45 years, busy with conrunning, clubs, and being a vendor, but has finally been able to match up his literature of choice with his career of being an editor/copy editor/proofreader. His has been a copy editor/proofreader with Amazing Stories Magazine, and book editor for Amazing and various other authors, and is looking further afield for new editorial challenges.

Photo credit to Yvonne Penney.