by Kris Rusch | Feb 27, 2014 | Podcast
This week’s story podcast is brought to you by the noun, neutrality.
As nouns go, it’s perfectly serviceable, but not brave or daring or desirable. For my taste, it’s too close for comfort to impassivity or apathy, and often parties with verbal cousins such as disdain and negligence. Who wants to go there?
If states of being were places, for me, neutrality would be a distant and rarely visited location. A place I avoid unless it’s through a novel or movie involving dashing spies, twisty plots and wide shots of beautiful terrain. One of my favorite writers, Elie Wiesel, wrote, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
So how it is that our podcast this week brings you a story in which neutrality takes a starring role? A role we might even label heroic?
Trust author Karen L. Abrahamson to take something you think you know and use it in an original and exciting way. Her story, “Neutrality,” is from Fiction River Special Edition: Crime.
This podcast is no longer available. To hear the current podcast, please click here.
You can read “Neutrality” by Karen L. Abrahamson in Fiction River Special Edition: Crime, which is available in ebook and trade paperback at your favorite retailer.
by Kris Rusch | Feb 20, 2014 | Podcast
USA Today Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith returns to his acclaimed world of the novel Dust and Kisses with a side adventure.
After a freak phenomenon destroys most of the human life on Earth, survivor Mandi Meyers wants to find her parents’ bodies. So she takes a trip to their home outside of Portland, Oregon, only to find impossible, yet familiar things.
Sometimes, we must all learn that nothing with our parents ever changes
This podcast is no longer available. To listen to the current podcast, please click here.
“A Pity About the Delusion,” a Seeders Universe story is included in Smith’s Monthly #2, available in ebook and trade paperback.
by Kris Rusch | Feb 13, 2014 | Podcast
There have been times when I wanted to kick one back and have a stare down. Then and there.
If you’re no stranger to frustration, you’ve probably been there, too. In my experience, the mood usually passed and life was all the better because of it.
But what if I’d taken that extra step?
In this week’s story podcast, “Cowboy Grace” written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Grace bellies up to the bar, and after that, nothing is quite the same.
This podcast is no longer available. To listen to the current podcast, please click here.
“Cowboy Grace” is included in the collection, Five Female Sleuths, available in ebook and trade paperback, and can also be found as a stand alone story in ebooks format at your favorite retailer.
by Kris Rusch | Jan 30, 2014 | Podcast
In the neighborhood where I grew up, there was a house all the kids feared. When my adult brain looks back, I see a perfectly ordinary brick ranch fronted by a lovely green yard on a perfectly ordinary Midwestern street.
Still, my kid self shivers because we knew there was something wrong behind the long low windows and tasteful curtains. Never mind the fact that, as far as I know, nothing terrible ever happened there. Or wanted to happen there.
Not so with the Moorhead house.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch shows us the beautiful, old Victorian mansion in a perfectly ordinary Oregon town. If you’re ready to walk through the front door, give a listen to this week’s story podcast. “The Moorhead House” is from her short story collection, Five Mystery Stories.
This podcast is no longer available. To listen to the current podcast, please click here.
“The Moorhead House” is included in the collection, Five Mystery Stories, available in ebook and trade paperback, and can also be found as a stand alone story in ebooks format at your favorite retailer.
by Kris Rusch | Jan 16, 2014 | Podcast
What if your life depended on the astute observations of a kindly stranger? If someone walked in your house right now, what would they see?
Tumbled stacks of books and a blinking computer monitor along with coffee mugs ringed with lipstick and headless chew toys might be a normal state of affairs. Business as usual. It might also indicate that a terrible struggle occurred between a writer and a small-but-ruthless dog bent on distracting her from anything productive. The logical conclusion might be that they went for a walk.
Or not.
What if a terrible possibility lurks behind ordinary observations?
That might have been one of the questions in author Dean Wesley Smith’s mind as he wrote our story for this week’s podcast, “The Road Back.” He takes the stuff of the everyday and twists it into an intriguing story set in the same universe as his poker thriller, Dead Money.
In print and electronic editions, you can also find this story in the first issue of Smith’s Monthly, which features new and original short stories like this one, plus full novels and great non-fiction.
This podcast is no longer available. To listen to the current podcast, please click here.
You can read “The Road Back” in Smith’s Monthly #1, available in ebook and trade paperback, and can also be found as a stand alone story in ebooks format at your favorite retailer.
by Kris Rusch | Jan 2, 2014 | Podcast
Simple math.
Word problems.
Familiar phrases that still make me sweat even though I escaped elementary school a long time ago. You remember the kind, right?
“The blue train leaves Kansas City at 2 pm traveling at a rate of 50 mph. The red train leaves Dallas at 3 pm traveling at 60 mph…”
Thankfully, the only such conundrum on tap this week is a nifty one to kick off the New Year: “Discovery,” written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The story is from her collection, Five Female Sleuths.
Welcome to 2014 and a story where simple questions lead to surprising answers, with no math required.
This podcast is no longer available. To listen to the current podcast, please click here.
“Discovery” is included in the collection, Five Female Sleuths, available in ebook and trade paperback, and can also be found as a stand alone story in ebooks format at your favorite retailer.
This week’s story podcast is brought to you by the noun, neutrality.
