Guest Post

Part Two

I have ten published novels. I’ll talk about just five today. Even five is too many, however, Judaism slips quietly into five, so I’m introducing five of my novels today. There are two novels I couldn’t write without being Jewish Australian. I’ll save those two for last. Let me give everything numbers, to make it easier.

1. In Langue[dot]doc 1305 (a time travel novel) I have a single Jewish character. That’s all. When I did my MA and PhD in Medieval History, I discovered many fascinating things about the Middle Ages, and some even more fascinating things about how we see the Middle Ages. I wanted to smash together our knowledge of the Middle Ages and how we interpret it and to make it explode. Also, I wanted marauding peasants. That single Jewish character is one of the pieces that led to the explosion.

I can’t tell you more without spoilers, but I can say that scientists checked my depiction of my bunch of scientists and said, “Scientists behave like this. How did you know?”Â That’s another story.  

2. My space opera novel, Poison and Light, tells of a society that reinvents the eighteenth century for all the wrong reasons. There are three Jewish towns on New Ceres, and they quietly rebel against the rule of the eighteenth century. Also, there are Jewish puns. The novel is set in a big city and the towns are a tiny part of the whole. The puns, the “I’m not what you think,” and the tendency to overeducation reflect my relationship to my own cultural relationship with my own country (as an Australian Jew). That’s the surface Jewishness.

Poison and Light has sword fights and balloon rides and gourmet food and much politics, but it’s actually about how Grania (the protagonist) deals with impossible loss and change. Her efforts are part of my personal response to the Shoah.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to learn how pogroms and exploitation and massacre and throwing people out of their homes and homelands affect survivors and I’m not even close to understanding. In Poison and Light, I built a society of colonisers and bigots because I wanted to understand the vested interests people have in defending what they know, even if it means hurting people. Poison and Light is one step towards me understanding, and none towards acceptance.  

3. I used a different Jewish history in The Time of the Ghosts. The Time of the Ghosts is a contemporary fantasy set in Canberra. Three women (the youngest is sixty) and their sidekick fight supernatural threats. There aren’t nearly enough novels with Jewish fairies, so their sidekick reads a memoir written by a Jewish melusine. These three women are all heroes of the tea-drinking, dinner party, and stock-whip using kind.  

4. My most recent novel (The Green Children Help Out) is totally about Jewish superheroes. My background is Australian Orthodox (somewhere between Modern Orthodox and Conservative) and I wanted to create an alternate universe where people could kick ass their personal work towards tikkun olam. Tikkun olam is more balancing the world and bringing it to rights than saving it, and it’s informed my whole life. It was about time it informed the lives of a bunch of superheroes who are, as the title suggests, the Green Children.

The Green Children Help Out is set on an alternate Earth (with magic) so that I could look into how to write people from cultural minorities. Also, I wanted a world so real that I could step into it in my mind.  

5. The very first Australian fantasy novel that incorporated Australian Jewish culture was my own The Wizardry of Jewish Women. It uses the Anglo-Australian Jewish culture I come from and it includes my grandmother’s recipes with their London Sephardi origins. There are many novels about ultra-Orthodox Jews, and very few about secular Jews, and I wanted to even things out a bit.

What happens when secular Jews rediscover lost culture and a lemon tree becomes demonically possessed? I began building the family culture with food, so I’ll tell you more about The Wizardry of Jewish Women and give you some of the recipes in Part Three.

BIO: Dr Gillian Polack is a Jewish-Australian science fiction and fantasy writer, researcher and editor and is the winner of the 2020 A Bertram Chandler Award. The Green Children Help Out is her newest novel. The Year of the Fruit Cake won the 2020 Ditmar for best novel and was shortlisted for best SF novel in the Aurealis Awards. She wrote the first Australian Jewish fantasy novel (The Wizardry of Jewish Women). Gillian is a Medievalist/ethnohistorian, currently working on how novels transmit culture. Her work on how writers use history in their fiction (History and Fiction) was shortlisted for the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review.

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This essay has three parts. The first tells you about who I am and why I find ways to put Jews and Judaism in my fiction. The second tells you about my novels and the Jewishness of them. The third is the good bit. When I build worlds for my novels, I make sure that there is food in the world. I will talk about some of that food and, of course, there will be recipes. Recipes are worth waiting for. If you want to start on the fiction before you read the first post, then my most recent novel is The Green Children Help Out. I explore what a superhero looks like when created by a Jewish Australian woman with disabilities. Hint: there’s no Superman. And now, on with the posts.

Part One

I’m Jewish Australian. It used to take courage to say this in front of strangers, and it still takes a moment and a deep breath. Things are different in Australia. It’s not just the big spiders and curious streetlife. I’d rather talk about the curious streetlife, because kangaroos are a traffic hazard where I live and our magpies attack people. Also, it’s easier than talking about being Jewish.

Officially, I’m classified as CALD (Culturally And Linguistically Diverse), but until recently I was NESB (from a Non-English Speaking Background). Unofficially, I’m called many things. I often call myself a giraffe (an exceedingly short one).

Why a giraffe? Strangers tell me after panels or papers or talks,  “I’ve never met anyone Jewish before” or “You speak very good English for someone Jewish.” People with more worldly knowledge ask when I left New York or Israel or, if they’re less tolerant tell me, “You should go back to where you came from.”

I usually ask, “Do you mean Melbourne in general, or specifically Hawthorn?” Melbourne is my home city and Hawthorn my home suburb. I’ve been away for nearly forty years.

The conversation continues, “Go to where your parents came from.”

“That’s difficult, because my father lived in country Victoria and my mother in Melbourne””you need to choose.”

The conversation seldom stops there. Most of these people expect me to turn into some mythical being from somewhere they never quite identify, and are very disconcerted when they find out my father’s mother’s mother’s mother was born in London, as was her mother, and her mother’s mother. The rest of me comes from all over Europe. My family has been in Australian for well over a century.

Most Australians expect Jewish Australians to be exotic. The most common terms are “Exotic White” or “Near White.” During the infamous White Australia policy, Jews were Honorary Black.

These days, I describe myself as “off-white.”Â It stops all the questions before they begin.

The writer I’m most often told about when people discover my profession is Arnold Zable. He wrote a fictionalised account of his family’s last days in BiaÅ‚ystock during the Holocaust. He was one of the last people to escape this far, you see. Another member of his family who escaped married a cousin of mine and a couple of years ago I finally met Zable.

“You know my mother,” I said, “And your cousin married one of my cousins.”

“Which cousin?”Â he asked.

“Feivel, the carnival guy.”

This tells you something else about Australian Jewry. Prior to World War II, we were few in number. Many of us are related in some way, if we come from an older family. Or our parents went to Sunday school together.

We are culturally different to Jews who arrived after the Shoah. I call us the scones-and-committee branch of Judaism. Our branch has writers and musicians and dentists and teachers and shopkeepers and lots of people who worked in the garment industry. I have a cousin who specialises in lipstick and a sister who specialises in wine. My great-aunts ran a shop that Phryne Fisher would have gone to for her haberdashery. My family fought in World War II. We are, in our way, quintessentially Melburnian.

And yet”¦ I’m off-white. It took until my third novel for strangers to stop telling me my English was very good for someone Jewish.

All these descriptions roll out as if I’ve said them a thousand times. I have. They’ve been my defence against bigots and those who assume there are no Jews in Australia and against all those people who don’t see me unless I shout.

My fiction helps me shout. I hold the pinpricks I face up to the light so that a picture shines through. I don’t write literary novels. I write science fiction and fantasy. Every now and then I stop and ask, “Why don’t I write like CS Lewis or “Doc” Smith or, in fact, any of the writers I grew up reading?” I have things to say about myself and my culture, I suspect, that don’t fit into a classic SF story. There are scones, there are committees, and there’s a lot more.

Next post: Meet the novels in which I say these things.

BIO: Dr Gillian Polack is a Jewish-Australian science fiction and fantasy writer, researcher and editor and is the winner of the 2020 A Bertram Chandler Award. The Green Children Help Out is her newest novel. The Year of the Fruit Cake won the 2020 Ditmar for best novel and was shortlisted for best SF novel in the Aurealis Awards. She wrote the first Australian Jewish fantasy novel (The Wizardry of Jewish Women). Gillian is a Medievalist/ethnohistorian, currently working on how novels transmit culture. Her work on how writers use history in their fiction (History and Fiction) was shortlisted for the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review.

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Halloween has always been my very favorite holiday. I have a brilliant memory of being four years old and dressed as a bat, holding hands with my sister (dressed as a Rubik’s cube) eating powdered sugar donuts at the local fire station. We stood beside a fire burning inside an old metal barrel, and the flames lit our faces up more beautifully than sunshine. Looking at my sister’s multi-colored smile, I realized that Halloween was the best, most terrific day of the year, and I wished it could be Halloween every day.  

But of all the terrific Halloweens””Halloweens when I partied, Halloweens when I dressed up, Halloweens when I trick or treated for charity, all the many glorious Halloweens of the past forty-plus years””the best Halloween was the first one I spent in Ash Valley, Oregon. I was a first-grader, and my family had only moved to town in August. “Town” was a strong word for our community; there was no grocery store or gas station or post office there, only a two-room schoolhouse and a pre-fab shed sheltering the volunteer fire department. About sixty-five people lived in the immediate vicinity, and every holiday they came together at the school for lavish potlucks.  

I’d been excited about Halloween right up until the moment it was decided that instead of making me the costume of my choice (I’m pretty sure that year I wanted to go as a mermaid), we were just going to borrow a costume from our neighbors so my mom would have plenty of time to prepare for her first-ever Ash Valley potluck. On Halloween, I sulked around all day, only brightening when my mom let me lick out the mixing bowl. Although when I learned she was making cupcakes””a food that I’d never gotten to eat before””my day was transformed. As was I when I tried on the borrowed costume, which was a perfectly adorable raccoon suit that I looked cute in.  

When my sister finished painting on my raccoon mask, I saw the cupcakes my mom had created and nearly burst into tears. Orange frosted and decorated with mini-marshmallow ghosts, they were the single most amazing thing I had ever seen. I couldn’t wait for my friends to see how brilliant my mother was. We did a cursory round of trick or treating (in the car, because the houses were all miles apart) and made our way to the school.  

With lights blazing and Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow whirring on the film projector, the school looked nothing like its day-lit self. After dinner (my first potluck, and the first time I ever got to eat two kinds of lasagna in one meal!), adults dressed as witches urged me to go into the basement to check out the haunted house. I held sweaty hands with my best friend and managed to wobble downstairs. More witches attempted to convince me to touch hideous, slimy things. Pirates grabbed at me. A vampire rose from its coffin, making us shriek and run toward the faceless monster rattling in the closet. At the exit, a head on a plate invited us to join them for dinner. I was so terrified I nearly puked.

“Did you recognize my dad?” another student asked, and I nodded. It hadn’t mattered that I’d recognized every face; it had been too much fun letting myself get so scared while I also knew I was perfectly safe. It was the best feeling, and one I’ve spent the rest of my life chasing.  

Then Mom gave me one of her cupcakes, and the night got even better. I’ve recreated her recipe below, although I’ve taken the liberty of jazzing up the frosting a little. You’ll notice that the recipe is vegan; it’s supposedly from the Depression, when eggs were often in short supply. This version might be a touch healthier: I’ve swapped out half the oil for applesauce, which lowers the fat a bit, and I use half as much sugar as some versions of the recipe.  

Trick or Treat Cupcakes

Preheat oven to 350 degrees; prepare your cupcake pan with liners (or by greasing and flouring). I made 6 regular-sized cupcakes and 12 mini cupcakes.  

In a mixing bowl, whisk together:
1 1/2 c flour
3/4 c sugar
6 tb cocoa
1 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp salt

In another bowl, whisk together:
2 tb applesauce
2 tb light-tasting oil, like corn or canola (honestly, I used part melted vegan butter & part olive, and it was fine)
1 tb vinegar (balsamic is actually a nice touch!)
1 tb Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey (or vanilla)  

Pour the wet ingredients over the dry and stir to combine. A few small lumps is okay. Fill pans 3/4^th full, and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean: 12-15 minutes for minis and 15-18 minutes for full-sized.  

Halloween Peanut Butter Frosting

This tastes like a spreadable Chick-o-stick.  

Combine 2 tbs peanut butter with 2 tbs butter (vegan is fine). Add 1 tb vanilla creamer, then add enough powdered sugar to make it smooth and spreadable (about a cup, maybe). Add enough orange food coloring to look seasonal. If the frosting looks too thin, just add a bit more butter and powdered sugar; if it’s too thick, add a bit of milk”“make it the texture you like!  

Marshmallow Ghosts

I used Dandies vanilla marshmallows, which are vegan and very vanilla-y. Use scissors to make two or three small snips at the bottom of your marshmallow, giving it a “cute but ragged death shroud” look. Use a toothpick dipped in black food coloring to apply eyes.  

Assemble to your liking! My mom just put the marshmallows on top of the cupcakes, but it’s also fun to create a haunted cemetery tableau, using graham crackers as headstones and chocolate ganache as fresh churned grave dirt (a sprinkle of crushed chocolate wafers adds a nice touch). Do note that if you put these in a sealed container, the moisture in the air might make your ghosts’ eyes bleed a little, so if you make them in advance, maybe toss one of those moisture-absorbing packets in with them, or leave the lid ajar a bit.

BIO: Wendy N. Wagner is the editor-in-chief of Nightmare Magazine and the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed. Her short stories, essays, and poems run the gamut from horror to environmental literature. Her longer work includes the novella The Secret Skin, the horror novel The Deer Kings,  the Locus bestselling SF eco-thriller An Oath of Dogs,  and two novels for the Pathfinder role-playing game. She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family, two large cats, and a Muppet disguised as a dog. You can find her at winniewoohoo.com and on Twitter at wnwagner.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!  

I’m a city person (despite the occasional dream of country solitude), and a crucial part of the worldbuilding for my Marek series of fantasy novels has been the city of Marek itself. It’s been a lot of fun to create. As well as having its own unique form of magic through its cityangel, it’s a port city and the only outlet to the Oval Sea for Teren, the country to which Marek notionally belongs (in practice it’s largely independent, which becomes an issue in the latest book, The Rising Flood). Marek’s trade is lucrative, especially for those belonging to its founding Houses, who act as middlemen between the craft Guilds and the ships from the islands of Salina who monopolise sea transport. Marek grows little of its own food and relies heavily on imports””basics from Teren shipped along the river, more expensive options from elsewhere around the Oval Sea.

At one point in The Rising Flood, Marcia, Heir of House Fereno, is seeking votes in the ruling Council to block a bid to censor some political newspapers. She asks Andreas, Head of House Tigero, the father of her forthcoming baby and also her co-parent-to-be (two slightly different things in Marek) to host a political dinner. As well as providing an opportunity for political debate and canvassing, the menu for dinner gives Andreas an opportunity to demonstrate the strength and prosperity of House Tigero”¦

Dreaming up the menu for this was a lot of fun!

To drink: Exurian wine or fruit juice

Fertile Exuria grows many of Marek’s fruit and vegetables; they have grape terraces around the base of the mountains between Exuria and Teren. The Vintners’ Guild imports wine from Exuria and from the grape-growing regions inland of the Crescent Cities east of the Oval Sea, as well as making more complicated beverages of their own.

First course: salted rice dumplings, pickled vegetable rolls, honeyed goat’s cheese with rosemary crackers

Andreas is terribly on trend: this Salinas-style course, with several dishes on the table from which guests help themselves, is a current fad. The Salinas eat this way because it’s practical on board ship, and their cuisine is heavy on finger food. Andreas’ version wouldn’t all be at home on a Salinas ship; the Salinas grow rice but don’t trade it, so these are Crescent-style rice dumplings. Pickled vegetables are eaten on Salinas ships, but would be wrapped in flatbread rather than thin pastry as here; the goat’s cheese comes from the herds on the precipitous far side of Marekhill.

Second course: barley stew with whole new beets and broad beans, spiced with cumin

Balancing the modern first course, the soup course is very traditional. The barley and vegetables are Teren (and thus Marek) staples. There’s a twist, though: cumin is a brand new spice from beyond the Oval Sea. The Salinas have only recently begun to bring it in, and the Spicers charge through the roof for it. Andreas is showing off.

Third course: hot-pepper lamb skewer, summer squash and peppers fried with wild mustard, wheat rolls

Teren soft wheat rolls, tasty if predictable, with new Exurian lamb (born early spring, best eaten at the start of summer) and summer vegetables, brought by a fast Salinas ship. (In another month there’ll be a glut of summer vegetables in all the markets, but right now, they’re expensive.) Wild mustard is another popular Exurian herb, which has recently come down in price after Marcia sent a team to find a new route over the mountains to Exuria. The route is too narrow and challenging for anything large, but will work for some mountain herbs and spices (culinary and medicinal), and for other small luxury goods. Andreas is giving a subtle reminder of Marcia’s competence.

Final course: preserved berry pastries

Pastries are sold from carts on every street corner, and even the Houses love them (though theirs come from their kitchens, not the carts). These are sweeter than the street versions at this time of year (they’ll be selling goats’ cheese pastries instead), as the berries are preserved from last year’s Exurian crops. A popular note to end on with a touch of luxury; then apple brandy or hot infusions afterwards.

Even the place settings have something to say: Teren porcelain (from the clay deposits in parts of the river basin upstream of Marek); cutlery of Crescent silver; the pastry-platter from the Woodworkers’ Guild, of Exurian wood with silver inlay; and Marek glassware with its unique blue tinge and inlaid copper wires. Andreas is keen to demonstrate his House’s links with both Guilds and foreign traders””the cutlery was a gift from one of their Crescent trading partners, though unfortunately he doesn’t get a chance to mention that.

So, does it all work? Do Andreas and Marcia get the support they need? And how does Marcia handle Andreas having invited his friend Daril Leandra-Heir, wielder of no small political power, and long Marcia’s nemesis (not to mention her ex)?

Well, you’ll have to read the book and find out.

BIO: Juliet Kemp is a queer, non-binary, writer. They live in London by the river, with their partners, kid, and dog. The first book of their Marek fantasy series, The Deep and Shining Dark, was on the Locus 2018 Recommended Reads list. Their short fiction has appeared in venues including Cast of Wonders, Analog, and Translunar Travelers Lounge, and they were short-listed for the WSPA Small Press Award 2020. They can be found online at julietkemp.com. The Rising Flood is available now from your preferred e-book retailer or in paperback from December.

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A few years ago, I decided to try writing a fantasy book as a web serial. It was a project I came to for a lot of reasons, but one of the keys was that I wanted to have a way to put a little joy out into the world on a regular basis with my writing.

That idea spawned a whole cozy fantasy trilogy, which is now complete! And I am Kickstarting funds to officially publish them as books.

That starting seed, that fundamental goal to bring joy with story, shaped the whole trilogy in ways I didn’t initially predict. After all, what does it even mean to write fiction that is “uplifting?” As with anything, people have different tastes for what brings them joy or makes them feel validated.

When it comes to uplifting fiction, I think of this along an axis of “escapism” to “realism.” To be clear, I don’t consider either of these a value judgment: tastes vary, and we all crave different kinds of stories at different times.

For some people, what they want is fantasy that takes them away from their problems. They want to read about other worlds that don’t have the same micro and macroaggressions””or even just the minutiae of daily life””that they have to deal with every day of their actual lives.

For others, those fantasies are unrelatable at best, or erasure at worst, pretending real-world problems don’t exist rather than giving us characters who grapple with them and triumph in some fashion, empowering us in our real worlds thereby.

Fantasy authors have the power to invent the entirety of what goes into our worlds, what’s explicit and implicit. Do we choose to carry over the sexism, racism, queerphobia, ableism, and all the rest from our world and tell a story where characters find happiness despite their oppression? Or do we imagine a world where those oppressions don’t exist, and in so doing invite the reader to imagine other ways of being worth striving for?

Both approaches can be radical. Both can be triumphant, validating, and uplifting stories””though not necessarily for the same audience, and that’s fine.

In Tea Princess Chronicles, I tried to find a balance between them. I wanted to write about people who care about other people, and lifting up everyone around them, and gutting oppressive systems who prevent that; people who do the work, without the feeling it can be too easy to drown in while doomscrolling on social media that caring is a necessarily joyless slog. I wanted to tell stories about people who find ways to make things better, in small ways and large, that don’t feel like wallowing in awfulness but instead inviting joy.

More like the feeling of drinking a warm cup of tea in front of the fireplace on a chilly day.

Whether I succeeded, whether any story succeeds, is a judgment for each individual reader. But I think living with joy, and spreading joy, can be fundamentally radical, and storytelling is one of the most powerful mediums for it. For me, that’s what “uplifting” fiction does, in whatever form it takes.

BIO: Casey Blair writes adventurous fantasy novels, including the cozy fantasy series Tea Princess Chronicles and the novella Consider the Dust. After graduating from Vassar College, her own adventures have included teaching English in rural Japan, attending the Viable Paradise residential science fiction and fantasy writing workshop, and working as an indie bookseller. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest and can be found dancing spontaneously, exploring forests around the world, or trapped under a cat. Find out more at caseyblair.com or follow her on Twitter @CaseyLBlair.

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Do you like getting high sometimes? Do you like writing? Have you always suspected that these two activities would go really well together but didn’t know how?

Well, here’s how.

I’m going to share my favorite buds to write with and also leave you with some tips on how to find your own favorite.

For the purpose of clarity, assume that you will be consuming dried cannabis flower. If smoking or vaping dried flower is not possible or desirable for you, there will be more near the end about edibles, oils, etc. But for now, continue as though smoking isn’t a problem for you. Not all strains are available in forms besides dried flower. The industry is still young. And still, disappointingly, subject to prohibition laws in some places.

If you’re new to cannabis, it can be hard to know where to begin. Same if you’re new to buying legal weed. In like, a store.

Some of us have spent years consulting little more than a “˜field’ or a ‘dealer‘; neither of whom care whether they’re giving you indica, sativa, or a hybrid.

Broadly speaking: indica gives you a “˜body-high’ and sativa a “˜brain-high’. You might assume that since writing is a creative activity, you’d always be looking for sativa. But don’t sleep on indica. Remember: you will be physically using your body to write your story. We haven’t evolved into a singularity yet.

My preferred strains for a solid, two-hour writing session in the morning or afternoon are all hybrids. My favorite two are Jack Haze and Mac-1.

Jack Haze is more sativa-tending and Mac-1 is more indica-tending. Jack Haze is available from 7 Acres, which is an easy to find brand.

Mac-1 was bred by Capulator’s Cut and is only available to companies that meet their conditions for cultivation. The easiest way to find a store selling Mac-1 in your area is to use Leafly. The Mac-1 I smoke is by Edison.

Both strains provide an uplifting, energetic boost, propelling you through ultra-clear thoughts as though you’re taking the greatest shower you’ve ever had. If your brain is bushed from storming for your WIP, it will suddenly alight with suggestions.

However Mac-1 also has more of the physical effects you might look for in an indica. This can be helpful if one of your writing barriers is anxiety.

The Science is still catching up to the generations of wisdom from the consumers on this, but I believe indica targets more of the body’s CB2 cannabinoid receptors. CB2 receptors are abundant in the gastrointestinal tract.

With indica, the effects on the vagus nerve in our tummies is immediate. And anxiety treats our vagus nerve like a punching bag.

My favorite straight-up anti-anxiety strain is Sensi Star, which is widely available. I’ve had the 7 Acres and Spinach brand Sensi Stars and they’re both great. If I’m having more anxiety than usual, I might sprinkle a bit in with my Jack Haze or Mac-1.

If physical pain is a barrier for you, I recommend a more potent indica such as I.C.C. (aka Ice Cream Cake), or Wappa 49. I also recommend you see a medical professional and look into medical cannabis.

If neither anxiety nor pain are a barrier to you, and you’re someone who would be too easily distracted by, for instance, how good it feels to wiggle your toes right now, you might do better with a sativa. Your CB1 receptors are most abundant in our brains and Cannabis sativa aims right for them. There are literally too many good sativas to recommend. The easiest thing would be just to try them all.

Keep in mind that brainy sativas are more likely to give you paranoia. If you suspect paranoia would be a writing barrier for you, choose a low THC% strain, or a strain with a more balanced ratio of THC:CBD, or avoid sativa altogether.

If you don’t like to smoke but still want to give writing with cannabis a try, edibles and edible oil are a nice way to go. A cheap way to explore this is to buy an indica oil, a sativa oil, a CBD oil, and find a combination that works best for you. The cheapest brand I’ve found anywhere is Soleil.

If you’ve never taken edibles before, you need to approach with caution. Smoking gives you the peak of a high immediately. Whereas with edibles, you will be high for 2-4 hours before you even reach the peak. And you will be stuck at that peak for another couple of hours.

And some effects of a dried flower will be heightened. Indicas will have your skin feeling tingly for longer. And sativa will give you a prolonged change in your perception of time.

For some, 8 hours is too long a time for time not to exist. For me, it’s perfect.

If you find a strain you like in dried flower like but don’t like smoking, and you also perchance enjoy baking, you can get a butter infusion kit. A homemade cookie is actually my favorite way to consume.

Finally, take your time. And don’t be intimidated by all the choices and the jargon. Not all weed jargon is necessary to enjoying weed.

Don’t worry about “˜terpenes’, ‘tasting notes’, or any of that. That’s just pothead stuff. And potheads like me fetishize pot. How it smells or tastes has no bearing on how it makes you feel. Or in any case, the causal links are too acute for beginners””or even some seasoned potheads””to discern.

As a final note, I just want to add that if your area is still under prohibition laws, or if it only recently became legalized, please consider donating to a local marijuana legal defense fund. No one on Earth should be serving a prison term for cannabis.

Derek Nason lives and writes in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, where he owns and operates a special care home for men with mental illness. His speculative fiction has appeared in Fusion Fragment, Abyss & Apex, and anthologies by Gehenna & Hinnom and Belanger Books. He can be found on twitter @dereknason.

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It doesn’t take any very profound insight to see that the roles nonhumans play in speculative fiction are often stand-ins for humans. In first-intention and unselfaware work (two very different things, see below), nonhumans are often monstrous and hostile. They frequently stand in lieu of othered humans who the writer might think it improper to name directly, or for that matter who the writer is intentionally dogwhistling by associating their secondary attributes with the negative qualities that racism and other forms of bigotry have painted for them.

And yet there are dangerous animals and people in our world who are hostile, sometimes implacably hostile and deadly dangerous, and in principle there should be nothing wrong with embodying these figures in fantastic fiction, even in pared down and totally inhuman forms from which all other qualities but their monstrousness have been flensed. In real life, sharks and venomous snakes and grizzly bears are not generally malicious, and their relative danger is far inferior to that of automobiles, diseases, and police officers. But in fiction, does it do any harm to pretend they are terrible threats? As always, the answer is yes, and no, depending on technique and presentation.

The trope-subversive reaction to monster stories generally involves their humanization. The dragon-viewpoint story that sees the questing knight as a villain, the sympathetic look at a fallen angel’s rebellion, the AI who comes to life only be oppressed and treated as a thing by their creator, the alien whose attempts to help humanity are viciously rebuked: all these acknowledge the base form of the monster story and turn it on its head. In many cases, the inversion is charmingly, touchingly, and effectively achieved, but again the final result depends on the author’s insight and skill, not just the fact of the reversal.

So what makes a monster story good or bad, or for that matter, a monstrous-sympathy or anti-monster story? In a word, understanding. In The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells had two objectives: first to present the visceral fear of the monster to his reader, the overwhelming power of an implacably hostile foe whose strength cannot be contested. But he also wanted to present his idea of what indigenous populations such as the Tasmanians must have experienced when British colonial military forces invaded. There’s no characterization of the Martians in Wells’ book. They’re apparently trying to seize terrestrial resources, but it’s not as if they twirl their mustachios and speechify to a captive audience. They just do their thing, obliterating any opposing military forces and casually wiping out civilians who are in the way until finally they’re overcome by terrestrial disease. (This last is so that for Wells’ didactic purposes, something like the status quo can be regained, with a cautionary warning.) This is an example of a “first-intention” monster story that is nevertheless self-aware; the monsters are simple to the point of being simplistic and more or less incomprehensible, but their action and the reason for their action is based on the writer’s understanding of humanity and his hope to prevent his own people from adopting the monstrous role of his Martian invaders.

Must a good monster story always be intellectualized? Not at all, hopefully needless to say. Consider Beowulf, another first-intention story, and this one with probably considerably less deliberate auctorial intention behind it. In this story, Beowulf is a pure hero, and both Grendel and his mother are pure monsters, though the mother’s desire for revenge is only natural, and this serves in some way to humanize her. But I shouldn’t leave the reader with the idea that self-awareness and understanding are modern qualities, and that older works are necessarily simpler, more direct, and more “primitive.”

One can see some very profound self-awareness in the nameless author of the Gilgamesh epic, who takes the monstrous and frightening foe Enkidu (created by the gods to give Gilgamesh someone to fight because he’s been ruining his own subjects’ lives) and turns him into a sympathetic friend. Along with the wild and uncivilized Enkidu (humanized through sleeping with a priestess of Inanna), and apparently as a result of their coming together, Gilgamesh matures from a boorish and casually destructive youth into a mature, responsible, and reflective adult. With its transformation of Enkidu from monster into a friend so intimate as to be closer than most lovers^[1], the epic’s attitude may seem implausibly modern, except of course that our intuitive notions of what constitute “modern” and “primitive” are wildly biased in our own favor. Coming thousands of years before most classic western monster stories, the transformative early section of the Gilgamesh epic (the latter half mainly involves Enkidu’s death due to Gilgamesh’s arrogance, and Gilgamesh’s futile quest to resurrect his fallen friend) illustrates that anti-monster stories are at least as old and as essential.

Man, I hope all that didn’t come off as too pompous, or too obvious either. In my own stories, I most often do the inversion thing, but I have the deepest respect for people who can write first-intention monster stories without dehumanizing the antagonists or deliberately or unconsciously linking their monsters to othered humans in the real world.

But that’s a tough thing to pull off. In my stories, the apparent monster is frequently your friend, and the real monster is another human, or perhaps the social forces that move humans to act monstrously. For me, that kind of story is much easier to write.

My romantic noir urban fantasy series beginning with The Demons of Wall Street (Mirror World Publishing, 2020) and in its recent sequel The Demons of the Square Mile (Mirror World Publishing, 2021) features demons who are indeed monstrous in many respects, due to the horrible ecology and social forces of their native world. But they’re also oppressed slaves summoned and bound by financial industry banker-sorcerers who want to exploit their precognitive abilities to manipulate markets. Some of these demons are true to type, but others are capable of defying and transcending their origins to become people more capable of kindness and compassion than the abusive humans who summon and bind them. The real monster is late-stage capitalism; but I guess that’s either trite or obvious, depending on your point of view.

The main character in this series, occult PI Nora Simeon, is a deeply traumatized and alienated person, in danger of becoming a moral monster herself by dint of her isolation and lack of empathy. She starts the first book convinced that demons are essentially evil and destructive (note in the books they are beings from an alien realm of existence, not fallen angels). She soon learns that just like with humans, these qualities are contingent, not essential, and in the usual moral fashion, the worst monsters are those we make of ourselves. And with the help of her unusual friend and lover Eyre (met in the first book and becoming a Thin-Man-style romantic and professional partner thereafter) she wrenches herself free from her downward spiral; it’s not an easy thing to do, and it will take her the full arc of the series to become truly free, but like the rest of us, all she can do is take the next step. My own next step is tentatively titled The Demons of Chiyoda, a just-completed first draft that I’m getting ready to submit to my publisher. In the meantime, I hope you’ll take a look at the first two entries in the series, available in paper or ebook direct from the publisher as well as from most online bookstores.

^[1] I suspect this to have been the first ship in history, and that therefore the epic of Gilgamesh could be the first example of fan fiction, too.

BIO: Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and technologist. He has worked in R&D at such firms as Bell Communications Research and Google, and he has five patents along with numerous industry publications. His areas of expertise include Internet and cloud-based applications, artificial intelligence, telecom applications, and online games. He has published many science fiction and fantasy stories and is a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Find out more about Laurence Raphael Brothers on his website.

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Most writers can probably remember the moment when they realized that they wanted to become a writer. Maybe it was a story someone read to them when they were a child. Or a novel they read in junior high. Or the first time they wrote a poem or a short story for an English assignment in elementary school. Maybe they saw a play or a film and felt inspired to write their own script. Or wrote an article for their high school newspaper. Or took a writing class in college.

Everyone has their Aha! moment. An epiphany that sends them down a path of words and characters and plots, that takes them on a journey of creativity and self-doubt and soul-crushing rejection. Not to mention years of emotional therapy.

That moment for me happened in the late fall of 1985, during the first semester of my sophomore year in college. I’d been introduced to The Stand by Stephen King the previous summer and devoured the novel while on a family vacation. I didn’t read much as a kid. I was allergic to libraries and would rather play outside or watch TV. Books were an afterthought or a requirement for high school American and Western Lit classes. Although I did enjoy Vonnegut. And Lord of the Flies remains near the top of my list of Desert Island Books (irony noted). But after reading The Stand, I was hooked.

So I picked up a few more of King’s novels, along with novels by Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, F. Paul Wilson, and John Saul, among others. All horror writers, all the time. I’d fallen in love with reading and I couldn’t imagine my life without books. But there came a moment when I was in the middle of The Talisman by King and Straub that I became so caught up in the adventure unfolding within the pages of the story that the world outside of the novel ceased to exist. It was something I’d never experienced before. Not with The Stand or any other of the books I’d read. And it was such an amazing and exhilarating moment that I thought: I want to make someone feel like this.

So I took some writing classes and I kept reading. When I graduated, I got a job to pay the bills and wrote short stories in my spare time, sending them out to magazines in the hopes of having them published. The stories were all of the supernatural horror variety, of course. And the influence of the books I’d read, especially the novels of King and Straub, loomed large on my writing. They were, after all, the impetus for my wanting to become a writer.

Over the next decade, I wrote dozens of short stories along with three novels. While I managed to get a dozen of the stories published, the pay didn’t amount to much. And although I received positive feedback on my novels, none of them found an agent or a home. Writing soon became a grind, the joy replaced by discouragement, and I started to question whether or not continuing along this path was something that I wanted to do. Cue the self-doubt.

Soon after, in October 2002, I was browsing the books at my local bookstore in preparation for another trip and came across the novel Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk. I’d seen the movie Fight Club and loved it, and Lullaby was a supernatural horror-satire with a premise that sounded fun. So I bought a copy and put it in my backpack for the flight.

Have you ever read the first few pages of a novel or a short story and had to go back and reread them immediately because they spoke to you in a way that no story has ever spoken to you before? Suddenly an idea forms in your head. Except it’s more than just an idea. It’s an awareness. A realization that you have this story inside of you but you never knew it was waiting to be told until that moment.

That’s what happened to me in the first five minutes of that airplane flight, reading the opening pages of Lullaby. I’d written previous supernatural horror stories with elements of dark comedy and social satire but had never considered expanding any of them into a novel-length form. The idea had never occurred to me. But the dark comedy and social satire in Lullaby spoke to me in a way that straight supernatural horror no longer did.

So I read more Palahniuk. Around that same time, I discovered the comedic fantasy books of Christopher Moore (Lamb and Bloodsucking Fiends). Together, the influence of their books had an enormous impact on my writing. Where King and Straub had made me realize that I wanted to become a writer, Palahniuk and Moore made me realize what I wanted to do as a writer.

When I finally sat down to flesh out my darkly comedic short story “A Zombie’s Lament” that I’d written a year earlier, I discovered the joy of writing again. More than that, I discovered my voice. And that voice helped me to write Breathers, my fourth novel and first published novel, which came out in 2009.

I wrote four more novels after that, all of them dark comedy and social satire with a supernatural, speculative, or fantastic element. In addition to Palahniuk and Moore, I continued to read King and Straub but added other writers to my diet, including Gaiman, Pratchett, and Hiaasen, who all helped my writing to evolve. But Palahniuk and Moore were the catalyst for the writer I had become.

Then around 2014-2015, I discovered the short story collections of Karen Russell and Kelly Link, specifically St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Get in Trouble. This discovery created a third shift in my writing and I found myself exploring ideas and stories and characters that I never would have considered writing about before. Not only did the stories of Russell and Link inspire me to write a number of my own short stories, but they also helped me to bring more balance to my writing.

Although all of my novels and many of my previous short stories included female characters who featured prominently in the plot, none of the women played the role of the main protagonist. Half of the 14 stories in my new collection, Lost Creatures, are told from a female POV””including a ten-year-old Japanese girl, a college zombie, and a time-jumping alcoholic. And they are some of my favorite stories I’ve ever written.

Over the course of my creative career, dozens of writers have had an impact on my writing, influencing and inspiring me. And while my writing wouldn’t be the same without the existence of every single one of those writers, the books and words written by these six authors found me at the right time and had the most significant impact on the formation and the evolution of my writing.

BIO: S.G. Browne is the author of the novels Breathers, Fated, Lucky Bastard, Big Egos, and Less Than Hero, as well as the short story collection Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel and the heartwarming holiday novella I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus. He’s also the author of The Maiden Poodle, a self-published fairy tale about anthropomorphic cats and dogs suitable for children and adults of all ages. His new short story collection, Lost Creatures, is a blend of fantasy, science fiction, dark comedy, and magical realism. He’s an ice cream connoisseur, Guinness aficionado, and a cat enthusiast. You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, check out his website at www.sgbrowne.com, or learn more about his new collection Lost Creatures.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!

When I first began working on a story about women who turned into werewolves as they entered menopause way back in 2009 or so, there was not a whole lot of representation of middle-aged and older women to be found in science fiction, fantasy, or horror. I mean, there were the evil middle-aged queens with talking mirrors, out to poison their younger, prettier rivals and the ancient witches who popped up to do terrible things or sometimes, provide directions, as the case may be. But, with rare exceptions, they were never protagonists, and they were seldom more than cardboard embodiments of evil or just plain window dressing.

Around 2010, that started to change. A bunch of other things happened around then too, including a huge growth in ebook publishing by indie authors and indie publishers which brought in a lot of voices that were not previously being heard from in more mainstream science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Along with that came writers willing to take risks, to tell new stories, to tackle things like representation that had been pretty sparse up until then. Those writers included women who were middle-aged and beyond looking to see themselves and their stories in the pages of the genres they loved.

Things are tense these days. I hope I’m not shocking anyone by saying that. There’s a lot of negative emotions going around, and people deal with them in different ways. One of the healthier ways is to engage with a good movie, game, book, or other form of media and get lost in a story. As a person empathizes with characters, they achieve catharsis as they experience their emotional journey together with the characters they empathize with. People enjoy dramas to release their sadness, they enjoy action to feel power over a world which often shows them to be powerless. Some enjoy horror for the endorphin rush, or to release pent up negative emotions in a more healthy way than going to the hardware store and looking for a chainsaw that’s light enough to chase someone with, yet not so light that it can’t get the job done.

Um, for example.