Susannah Mandel has lived in Boston, Philadelphia, and northern France. She enjoys reading, writing, and looking at things. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Sybil’s Garage, Goblin Fruit, Peter Parasol, and the Canadian anthology Escape Clause, among others. Her flash fiction appears monthly at The Daily Cabal. She can be reached at susannah.mandel@gmail.com.

Susannah’s Shimmer stories:

• “The Monkey and the Butterfly,” in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11)

Vincent’s story Otto’s Elephant appears in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11).  (Click here to hear Vincent read it! – 3.2 MB, MP3 file.) You can email him at vpendergast@gmail.com

Q: Did you ever want to write “just like” someone else?  Who?  Or was there any book that made you say “I can do better than this!”?

A: One author I am consistently envious of — and I refuse to be ashamed to admit it — is Stephen King. The man’s got talent. It’s his character work more than anything that draws me in, particularly in his short stuff. But do I want to write just like him? No. For starters, as a friend of mine puts it, “King is a primal force”. You couldn’t capture that if you tried, and to try would be a disservice him and to myself. I have a voice of my own that I want to explore.

Q: Do you have favorite characters?  Any characters, yours or others, are applicable.

A: A character who has stayed with me is Orlando Gardiner, from Tad William’s Otherland novels. He’s sort of the farmboy on a quest through mythical lands, (an old chestnut I’ve always been partial to), only instead of a farmboy he’s a late 21^st century net geek, has progeria, and his quest takes him through a mythical virtual reality program.

Q: Have you ever been disillusioned by a character or a book?

A: Yes, haven’t we all?

I’ll make a distinction here between character and author (yeah, I know the author is supposed to be dead, but that doesn’t really seem to be holding up, does it). Characters can disappoint me. Characters can shock me and anger me and make me cover my eyes in embarrassment. I hope they do, that’s good conflict there. But what’s not fun is when the author brings out these feelings in me.

No, I won’t be pointing fingers.

Q: How do you explain what writing is like?  Is it something that you think about?  Do you ever find yourself debating it with strangers?

A: For me, writing is an extension of the act of daydreaming. That’s what I tell people, and it’s true. I’m a daydreamer, always have been. Instead of being a busy, productive little bee I buzz around in circles, wasting my time imagining other worlds, other realities. I’d be doing this whether writing was in the picture or not, but in the last few years I’ve made an attempt to transcribe these daydreams into a more people-that-aren’t-me friendly medium.

Q: If you could choose any five literary people — real or imagined, living or not, friends or otherwise — for a tea party… who would they be?  A night on the town, karaoke, whatever suits.

A: Frodo and Bilbo Baggins to my birthday party — we all share the same birthday, you know. Merry and Pippin can come along too. We’ll all get wasted at the Prancing Pony and I’ll hurt my back trying to climb out on Treebeard’s nose. See, I have it all worked out.

Q: How did writing a theme story work out?   Is it more complicated than not having to adhere to a theme — or less?

A: Writing to a theme was great, for a number of reasons. For starters I was going for it with several writing friends, and the motivation and encouragement you get from that sort of environment is invaluable. The theme itself opened up new avenues to me, ideas I wouldn’t have considered otherwise. And I had to keep under a specific word count. The first draft of Otto’s Elephant came in at 5,000 words, and through some very painful rounds of revision I cut a third of that — definitely for the better!

Q: What was the absolute worst piece of advice someone gave you about writing?

A: I’ve been lucky. I’ve received a lot of good advice, and the bad I’ve forgotten.

Q: Have you ever wanted to let your character[s] run your interview?

A: God no. I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them.

Q: Is there something you do that no one ever asks you about?  This can be anything — something unusual you eat, playing poker as a day job, a hobby, whatever you like.

A: I’m still waiting for someone to ask me about the red stains on my boots.

Q: Particular favorites for books, movies, series, comics, blogs, etc.?

A: The story magazines. Print and online. Big names and small. Pro paying and semi-pro. Read them, buy them, support them, and maybe they’ll still be around in the future to take my stories.

Vincent Pendergast lives beside the Port Kembla steelworks in Australia, an industrial wonderland of sulfurous smokestacks, crumbling coke ovens, and the rusting relics of a time when the world really did run on steam. He has spent the last few years at the University of Wollongong, and has tried his hand at a number of genres–horror, fantasy, and science fiction, with a particular interest in the spaces in between. His story in The Clockwork Jungle Book is his second publication; his first appeared in Nossa Morte’s anniversary issue.

Vincent Pendergast’s Shimmer stories:

• “Otto’s Elephant,” The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11) (Click here to hear Vincent read it! – 3.2 MB, MP3 file)

Blake’s story “The Jackdaw’s Wife” can be found in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11).  His website is at www.blakehutchins.com, and you can email him at hexabolic@gmail.com.

Did you ever want to write “just like” someone else?  Who?  Or was there any book that made you say “I can do better than this!”?

Man, there’s a lot of authors I’d love to write “just like.”  It’s virtually impossible to list everyone.  James Clavell always seemed to juggle multiple viewpoints seamlessly, and I loved his complex plots of intrigue amid colliding cultures.  I admired Roger Zelazny’s way of turning lush mythic images and themes inside out with what seemed to me a deceptively spare style.  Richard K. Morgan for grit and sentiment and razor-edged description.  Steven Saylor for his noirish portrayal of Republican Rome.  Jim Butcher for his sense of fun.  James Ellroy for relentless darkness.  Kate Elliott for her amazing sense of geography and detailed, character-based plots, Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning for awesome space opera action.  Garth Nix, Julian May, Warren Ellis, William Gibson, Madeleine L’Engle, Daniel Abraham, Octavia Butler, Katherine Kerr, Dan Simmons….  Yeah, I have a bloody long list.  And I’ve known fellow Wordo Jay Lake for a long time, and become a serious fan of his writing, so it’s a great pleasure to have a story in the same collection as one of his.

I’ve been reading Philip Reeve’s Larklight series to the kids, and I love his writing and sense of humor.  Same for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which has a fascinating voice deeply invested in breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the reader.  As a great plus, I do all the voices and accents, so these two series are amazingly fun for me to read.

But I think it’s a trap if you actually try to write like someone else.  Voice is important, and you have to have room to develop my own.  I try to borrow techniques from my favorite authors and integrate them with my work.  It’s daunting, because I still feel as though I’m working to perfect the craft part of my writing, and that I have a way to go before I can start thinking of it in terms of art.

I don’t know that I’ve encountered any book that made me think “I can do better,” specially since I just finished my first novel.  Let me tell you, that was a humbling experience.  By the time I arrived at the end of the book, I figured I only had to write two or three more before I started to know what the hell I was doing.

Do you have favorite characters?  Any characters, yours or others, are applicable.

Marlowe from Chandler’s work.  In similar vein, I’ve really enjoyed the development of Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden over the course of that series.  Julian May’s Aiken Drum has always been a favorite.  Guy Gavriel Kay has a woman minstrel in his novel A Song for Arbonne whom I liked a lot.  Turner in William Gibson’s Count Zero is a great example of a man trying to turn his back on a life of violence.  Augustus McCrae in Lonesome Dove.  Joss and Marit from Kate Elliott’s Spirit Gate series.

Of my own characters, I think my favorite is the synaesthetic orphan girl in my Writers of the Future story “The Sword from the Sea,” perhaps because writing from the point of view of someone with cross-wired senses was so much fun.

Have you ever been disillusioned by a character or a book?

I have to admit I felt let down by the conclusion to Pullman’s brilliant Golden Compass trilogy.  I’m not certain exactly why, but I think Lyra felt tamed in the third book, and she was such a wonderful, passionate, wild spirit in the first two books that the final book felt more removed for me, more of an intellectual journey, less emotionally engaging.

James Ellroy’s White Jazz is well-written, but brutally depressing.  I mean, yeah, it’s Ellroy, but nobody in that novel comes out with any kind of redemptive quality.  Life is short, venal, blood-spattered, corrupt, and then you’re beaten to death in front of Howard Hughes.

How do you explain what writing is like?  Is it something that you think about?  Do you ever find yourself debating it with strangers?

I think about writing all the time, mostly about how I’m going to make sufficient time for it amid the daily demands of being a father of two young children while retaining enough time to keep myself healthy.  Since I work as a freelance writer in the videogame industry, I think about it from a hustling up jobs standpoint as well.

For me, writing is a struggle.  Not so much the actual act, which I love, but the courtship and coming to consummation parts.  I feel easily distracted by life in general, and thus tend to come to the keyboard in manic efforts that span many hours or several days.  Writing a modest amount on a steady basis is not a habit I have been able to sustain.  Oddly, from a generating word count perspective, I’m capable of churning out a huge volume of decent to good material in a relatively short amount of time.  That’s not process, though.  That’s compensation, and it adds to my stress level in the long run.  What I’ve learned is that in this activity as in so many others, it’s more important to be the tortoise than the hare.  So of late I’ve been trying to channel my inner terrapin.  I have–seriously–about a hundred short stories on my hard drive that need rewrites or a final scene.  And then I need to send them out, which is whole other story for me.

I don’t debate writing with anyone, though I love to swap ideas and experiences and tips.  Every writer has to find his or her own way.  Perspective and advice is helpful, but the only absolute is that writing is like calculus.  You learn by doing, and by stretching yourself into material that challenges you.

If you could choose any five literary people — real or imagined, living or not, friends or otherwise — for a tea party… who would they be?  A night on the town, karaoke, whatever suits.

Hmm.  Mark Twain. the Gray Mouser, the Cat in the Hat, Pushkin, and Sherlock Holmes.  It would have to be karaoke.

How did writing a theme story work out?   Is it more complicated than not having to adhere to a theme — or less?

It worked out well for me, apparently.  I find creative constraints liberating.  I always seem to thrive on having a target to shoot for.  That said, in the case of the Clockwork Jungle issue, the story just popped into my head, practically done from conception, at least from the ten thousand foot level.  Set themes are an exercise the Wordos do with their holiday stories every Halloween and Christmas, so I find them far less complicated than an unfettered blank page.  It’s really fascinating to see what different authors produce around a particular theme.  On the one hand, you see tremendous diversity of creative vision, but then these parallel elements crop up on the damnedest places.

What was the absolute worst piece of advice someone gave you about writing?

That I should concentrate on doing something “productive” as a career.  I spent a lot of time tail-chasing around professions I didn’t want to be in instead of writing.

Have you ever wanted to let your character[s] run your interview?

Not really.  I have a feeling Badger would be quiet, and Jackdaw would be too distracted to focus on the–look!  Shiny!

I have other characters I wouldn’t let near an interview.

Is there something you do that no one ever asks you about?  This can be anything — something unusual you eat, playing poker as a day job, a hobby, whatever you like.

I was raised listening to musicals while other kids listened to rock and roll or jazz or classical.  So I sing.  I mean, I don’t sing well enough that people would want to hear me, nor yet so badly that they’d take icepicks to their eardrums.  I’ve never taken classes or participated in a choir, but I sing pretty much all the time when I’m doing chores, every day.  I don’t even know many songs; I mostly just make up stuff on the spot, ludicrous stuff about cat food or the Great Spaghetti Monster or how the sky is raining babies.  I sang to my daughters when they were babies, and I still sing to them.  And they sing too now, belting out their stuff all around the house.  Constantly.  It’s like being at ground zero in a perpetual girl circus version of Broadway.

Not that I know what I’m doing.  When I contributed a verse to a song at Jay Lake’s birthday a couple of years ago, I couldn’t figure out when to jump in on the guitar rhythm, like a kid trying in vain to suss out the playground jump rope pattern while the ropes are twirling.  Everyone was hugely amused.

Particular favorites for books, movies, series, comics, blogs, etc.?

Favorite books would be a huge list.  What comes up for me at this moment is Michael Chabon’s Summerland, Philip Reeve’s Larklight trilogy, Roger Zelazny’s Amber series, Tanith Lee’s Piratica, Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song for Arbonne, and Richard K. Morgan’s Thirteen.  I love James Clavell’s Tai Pan, which has the distinction of having the final line on the final page of a thousand page gob-stopper of a book deliver the perfect conclusion, thematically and with immense power.

I’m not as much of a movie watcher, but I’d take Richard Lester’s “The Three Musketeers” and “The Four Musketeers” over pretty much anything else.

As I’m currently writing web comics for clients and working on my own, I’ve delved much more deeply into comics.  Lately my favorite print mag is Marvel’s Nova, which manages epic space opera with a very grounding human element.  Online, I’d recommend Lackadaisy at lackadaisycats.com, Lovecraft is Missing at lovecraftismissing.com, and Wonderella at nonadventures.com.  There’s some amazing work out there, as well as an incredible diversity of vision.

Blake Hutchins lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two daughters, four cats, and one large dog who very much wants to join the cats on lap sojourns. Blake’s previous stints include public defender, teacher, videogame designer/writer, firefighter, and software executive. Writing, he thinks, is harder. His fiction has appeared in Writers of the Future, Vol. 22, Polyphony, and Blood, Blade & Thruster. He also has a number of computer game credits and currently works as a freelance writer in the industry.  His website is at www.blakehutchins.com, and you can email him at hexabolic@gmail.com.

Blake Hutchins’ Shimmer stories:

• “The Jackdaw’s Wife,” The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11)

Genevieve’s story “A Garden in Bloom” appears in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11).  Her website is  www.genevievevalentine.com.

Did you ever want to write “just like” someone else?  Who?  Or was there any book that made you say “I can do better than this!”?

Goodnight Moon. What, like that’s the first time anyone thought to wish inanimate objects goodnight? What a hack. (I was four. You pick weird battles.)

Do you have favorite characters?  Any characters, yours or others, are applicable.

Whatever characters I’m currently working with tend to be my favorites.

Have you ever been disillusioned by a character or a book?

I’m a huge fan of Tanith Lee, but after finally finding a copy of Metallic Love, her sequel to Silver Metal Lover, and I wish I hadn’t.

How do you explain what writing is like?  Is it something that you think about?  Do you ever find yourself debating it with strangers?

Some people know how to talk about writing and make it fascinating, and I prefer to leave the discussion of the writing process to them. My process tends to be, “Start, write it, edit it, finish it,” which doesn’t go very far at parties.

If you could choose any five literary people — real or imagined, living or not, friends or otherwise — for a tea party… who would they be?  A night on the town, karaoke, whatever suits.

I’d like to get Poe, Bramwell Bronte, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Kerouac together, declare a drinking contest, and start taking bets.

How did writing a theme story work out?   Is it more complicated than not having to adhere to a theme — or less?

I think most short stories have a theme; with a story designed around a given theme, it’s a matter of finding an element of the theme that appeals and then giving the story additional elements, for texture.

What was the absolute worst piece of advice someone gave you about writing?

“Stop.”

Have you ever wanted to let your character[s] run your interview?

Nope.

Is there something you do that no one ever asks you about?  This can be anything — something unusual you eat, playing poker as a day job, a hobby, whatever you like.

I’m a movie freak; I don’t think that’s a secret, but it takes up so much of my free time that it precludes any other secret hobbies!

Particular favorites for books, movies, series, comics, blogs, etc.?

A recent book I loved was Ekaterina Sedia’s Alchemy of Stone; a recent movie was the outstanding Moon; a recent TV series was the criminally-cancelled The Middleman; and as for comics, I recommend going back in time to when I was 13 and buying whatever I bought, because I remember comics being universally awesome that year, though that might just be a symptom of being 13.  

Genevieve Valentine’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy, Farrago’s Wainscot, Escape Pod, and Federations. She is a columnist at Tor.com and Fantasy Magazine. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog.  Read more at www.genevievevalentine.com.

Genevieve’s Shimmer stories:

• “A Garden in Bloom,” in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11).

Shweta has been published in Shimmer twice: once for her story “The Mechanical Aviary of Emperor Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar,” in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11) (click here to listen to her read it! 2mb MP3 file), and once for her tale “One for Sorrow” in Issue #10 (read her interview about the story!).  You can email her at shweta@shwetanarayan.org, or just visit her at her author website www.shwetanarayan.org.

Did you ever want to write “just like” someone else? Who? Or was there any book that made you say “I can do better than this!”?

I’ve wanted to write “just like” most of my favourite authors at one time or another. These days I remind myself that they can write like themselves just fine, and nobody else can write like me. (But I still want to write like Catherynne M Valente!)

Do you have favorite characters? Any characters, yours or others, are applicable.

Do I ever! More than I can list, but the ones that come to mind first are: Cordelia Naismith (Lois McMaster Bujold), Eugenides ( Megan Whalen Turner), Arry (Pamela Dean), Taumad (Sherwood Smith), Granny Weatherwax (Terry Pratchett), Mosca Mye (Frances Hardinge), Mawhrin-Skel (Iain M Banks), Shan yos’Galan (Sharon Lee and Steve Miller), and Bangladesh Dupree (Girl Genius Comics).

At some point I realized that most of my favourites cheerfully sow chaos, whereas I was writing rather more introverted characters myself. The Artificer Bird in this volume is sort of my response to that, and as such she’s currently my favourite among my own characters.

Have you ever been disillusioned by a character or a book?

Yes, sadly; often. Not so much by bad books or implausible characters; it’s books that are almost wonderful, or characters who I want to love, that get me. This seems to happen most often because of a cop-out of some sort. For example, a character I love makes a really bad decision – but then it just happens to all work out anyway, and they never have to deal with the consequences. Or a book takes on a truly messy topic with no easy answers, and then romanticizes away an aspect of the mess.

How do you explain what writing is like? Is it something that you think about? Do you ever find yourself debating it with strangers?

I don’t, really. I think it’s too subjective for debate or general comments. I sometimes talk about what it’s like for me; it’s like having a vivid daydream-like string of images and a voice that tells them, with me just trying to get the voice right.

If you could choose any five literary people — real or imagined, living or not, friends or otherwise — for a tea party… who would they be? A night on the town, karaoke, whatever suits.

A tea party, surely. And given that no group I picked would be exactly harmonious, I’d choose Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Ellen Kushner, Salman Rushdie, and Steve Brust’s narrator Paarfi. Then I’d make sure none of the knives were actually sharp enough to do damage, and videotape the result. And sell it.

How did writing a theme story work out? Is it more complicated than not having to adhere to a theme — or less?

I’m not sure how it’d be to have to stick to a theme. I followed this one because it was an inspiration, not a limitation. I happened to see the call for submissions not long after reading Catherynne Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales, the combination sparked a story-within-story in my brain, and poof.

The corollary is that if my story had wandered too badly off theme, I’d have shrugged and submitted it elsewhere. The theme was just one (yummy) ingredient in my story pot.

What was the absolute worst piece of advice someone gave you about writing?

“A kid is a baby goat.” My English teacher wrote that in the margins of a story of mine when I was thirteen or so (this was at a British school). Mind you, I’d used the word “kid” in dialogue. In a young American character’s dialogue.

It was a pretty good lesson in using only the advice that rings true.

Have you ever wanted to let your character[s] run your interview?

Well, I hadn’t, but I do now.

Is there something you do that no one ever asks you about? This can be anything — something unusual you eat, playing poker as a day job, a hobby, whatever you like.

I build mechanical children out of scraps and send them out to destroy cities.

Oh wait, that’s the character. Honest.

Particular favorites for books, movies, series, comics, blogs, etc.?

Books: Far too many to name. Of those I’ve read this year, Nisi Shawl’s Filter House and Karen Joy Fowler’s Wit’s End are the absolute standouts.

Comics: Nearly too many to name. Ongoing webcomics, in decreasing order of steampunkishness: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Syndey Padua, Girl Genius by Phil & Kaja Foglio, Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell, Family Man by Dylan Meconis, Skin Horse by Shaennon Garrity & Jeffrey Wells, xkcd by Randall Munroe, and Digger by Ursula Vernon. Print Comics: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and (I am so addicted) Hikaru no Go by Yumi Hotta and Takeshi Obata.

James’ story “The Wolf and the Schoolmaster” appears in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11), and he’s previously appeared in Shimmer’s The Pirate Issue (Issue #7) with his story “The Barbary Shore.”  His website is www.sciencemadecool.com.

Q: If you could talk to any author from the past, who would it be?  Why?  Who would you NOT want to talk to?

A: The author I’d most like to sit down with for a long evening would be Mark Twain. He’s a tremendous paradox:  most of his work is in a very personal voice, frequently first-person.  At least two of his major works (Innocents Abroad and Life on the Mississippi) are memoirs or travelogues . . .
. . . and yet Twain himself is a mystery, hiding behind his pen name even after he (and it) became internationally famous.  Even his face in photos is a bit like a mask, with the big bushy mustache and eyebrows as camouflage.  Who was he, behind the Mark Twain makeup?

An author I don’t really want to talk to is H.G. Wells.  I admire his work, I might even like him — but in a way he kind of embodies the “original sin” of science fiction.  That sin, of course, is SF’s deep discomfort with democracy and its fondness for dirigiste, technocratic solutions.  The “one right answer” imposed on people for their own good.  Wells is the wellspring of that tendency and I’m afraid that if I had dinner with him we’d be throwing things before dessert.

Q: And would you use a character to speak to that author, or yourself?

A: Why, yes.  Mr. Shepton in “The Wolf and the Schoolmaster” is talking to Wells, pretty directly.

Q: If you got to borrow a character [or several], who would you choose?

A: Tough question.  I’ve done one story, “The Vampire Brief,” using an established character (Hellboy, from the comic by Mike Mignola), and it’s tricky.  One always wonders ,”Am I getting this right?”  I care about getting things right, possibly too much.  The character I’d most enjoy playing with, I think, is the Doctor, from the Doctor Who series.  He is probably the most under-utilized character in science fiction despite having been on television for nearly half a century.

Q: Do your characters talk to you?  Do you see the stories as images?  Do you ever argue with characters you hadn’t planned?

A: I tend to agree with Connie Willis, who once said that her characters do what they’re told without any back-talk.

Q: Have you ever wished for a particular character — or idea — to walk into your story?  Has that happened?

A: God, yes.  I frequently have to create characters through a kind of intellectual brute-force approach:  “Who do I NEED in this story?”  And what does that character have to be like in order to do the job?  When inspiration comes unbidden it’s a relief.

Q: Do you ever get to a certain point, reading a story, and feel the click! as you have got to the point of no return/can’t stop now?  Does writing ever feel that way?  If you had to liken writing to anything, what would it be?

A: When writing does feel that way it’s the greatest feeling in the world.  There’s a scientist at Chicago, Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi, who has studied the phenomenon — he calls it “flow.” When we achieve the state of “flow” we are living Socrates’s definition of what is good:  each man doing what he does best.  I’d say the biggest difficulty comes when that state happens too early in the process, so you’ve had the fun of the “winning move” and still have to play out the endgame of actually writing it.

I’ve read various metaphors for writing — a battle, a love affair, etc.  I tend to approach my stories as puzzles to be solved.   This means that writing, for me, involves a certain amount of walking around and muttering to myself.

Q: What piece of writerly advice do you wish someone had given you?

A: The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever heard was from Mike Stackpole, who wrote a great ‘blog post about writer’s block — he said that if you can’t figure out what will happen, that means you don’t understand the characters and their motivations well enough.  It’s excellent advice and I wish I’d heard it twenty years ago.

Q: What kind of advice do you wish characters listened to?  Or offered?

A: See the Connie Willis quote above.  I don’t want advice from my characters.  That being said, as a reader I get very impatient with characters who act stupidly, especially when it’s not consistent with their other behavior.

Q: Is there something you do that no one ever asks you about?  This can be anything — something unusual you eat, playing poker as a day job, a hobby, whatever you like.

A: Since I’m still not very widely known, people don’t ask me about all kinds of things.   Being from New Orleans I do spend a surprising amount of time thinking about food, but I seldom get asked for recipes.

Q: Particular favorites for books, movies, series, comics, blogs, etc.?

A: Four of my favorite books are Kim, by Rudyard Kipling; Declare, by Tim Powers; Excession, by Iain Banks; and  the Borges collection Labyrinths.  My favorite movies include Repo Man, Blade Runner, Casablanca, and The Third Man.  At the comic shop my “pull” is Mignola’s Hellboy, Aaron Williams’s PS238, and Busiek’s Astro City; I also read Foglio’s Girl Genius and Burlew’s Order of the Stick online.  My taste in ‘blogs is eclectic — see the blogroll on my own ‘blog, “Science Made Cool.”

James L. Cambias is a writer and game designer, who grew up listening to steam calliope music from the Mississippi River in New Orleans. He now lives in western Massachusetts, where he is a partner in Zygote Games, a small publisher of science-based card and board games. His writing career began with adventures for the steampunk roleplaying game Space: 1889. Since then his fiction has  appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, and original story anthologies. They laughed at him at the university, the fools.

James L. Cambias’ website is www.sciencemadecool.com.

James’ Shimmer stories:

• “The Wolf and the Schoolmaster,” The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11)
• “The Barbary Shore,” The Pirate Issue (Issue #7)