At long last, Christmas is almost here! My daughter is so excited. She’s on break for the next two weeks and I’m taking some time off, so we’ll be spending time together finishing up the shopping, making Christmas cookies, going out to lunch, and all sorts of other things we don’t have time for when she’s in school and I’m working.
So, if you’re like us, and you’re still celebrating everything holiday, our latest new release is just in time for some last-minute holiday reading.
For Pulphouse Fiction Magazine: Issue #21, editor Dean Wesley Smith gathered some of the best Pulphouse writers and their strangest holiday season stories.
Of course, Pulphouse stories are not “normal” in the usual sense of the word. But they are fun. And unexpected. And entertaining. After all, attitude, feel, and high-quality fiction equals Pulphouse.
Just take a look at this table of contents, and you’ll see what I mean:
“Santa’s Shrinkage” by David H. Hendrickson “A Crafty Christmas” by Annie Reed “The Ghost of Christmas Beta” by J. Steven York “Emergency Elf” by Stefon Mears “A Grave Kind of Love” by Robert J. McCarter “The Asshole of Christmas Present” by Ezekiel James Boston “Christmas at Lake Mead” by Lisa Silverthorne “The Ghost of Christmas Present” by David Stier “Christmas Weather” by O’Neil De Noux “Max, Marilyn, Murder, and Me” by Ray Vukcevich “Scurvy and Forgiveness” by Rob Vagle “The Friendly Beasts” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman “Christmas at Glosser’s” by Robert Jeschonek “A Corner of the Mind” by Ron Collins “Other People’s Stupidity” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Happy reading, and from all of us here at WMG, we wish you a very merry and happy week full of fun and festivities, no matter what you happen to celebrate!
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer, working mother, and brain tumor survivor.
Isn’t it strange when fiction bleeds into real life? Sometimes, it’s a sense of déjà vu, where you could swear you’ve read or seen something before. Sometimes, it’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (also called the Baader-Meinhof effect or frequency illusion) where you learn something new and suddenly start noticing it everywhere. (It’s an interesting phenomenon…you can read more about it here.)
And sometimes, it’s just a strange coincidence.
That happened to me last week when I was rereading one of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s holiday stories so that we could publish it as a standalone. The story, called “Frank’s Corner Bar,” takes place, unsurprisingly given the title, in a bar. That’s not the weird part. The weird thing was just as I was reading about a bottle of Grand Marnier in the story, I got a text from a friend asking me if I had any Grand Marnier. She needed it for a recipe, and since she doesn’t drink or normally use alcohol while cooking, she didn’t even know where the liquor store was.
Adding to the strange coincidence, I had actually been meaning to pick up a bottle of Grand Marnier (not something I normally have on hand) for my own recipe needs and I was about to head out the door to run an errand for my daughter, which would take me right by the liquor store.
So, within 30 minutes, she had a cup of Grand Marnier and we both were marveling at the strange happenstance of it all.
Now, Kris has written several stories set in bars. But she has never mentioned Grand Marnier in the hundreds of titles I’ve published for her (I double-checked).
Until “Frank’s Corner Bar.”
And since the story is available for free this week as Kris’ weekly free fiction offering, you should read it, too, and see if you suddenly find yourself making a run for Grand Marnier.
But even if you don’t, it’s a great read and perfect if you like a little holiday in your crime stories.
You can see for yourself here.
Cheers!
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer, working mother, and brain tumor survivor.
I don’t travel for the holidays anymore. At least, not if I can help it. Between the brain surgery and the pandemic, I have a really hard time with crowds now.
And traveling at the holidays is a guaranteed way to find crowds.
So, I’ve found ways to travel without traveling. We have family Zooms with my parents and sister back East. We take walks together while we’re on the phone. We Facetime on Christmas morning.
There are so many ways to travel. You just have to get creative.
Like fiction. That’s the original form of creative traveling.
And right now, Dean Wesley Smith offers the perfect solution to travel without traveling with the latest StoryBundle he has curated: the Time Travel Fun Bundle. Here’s what Dean had to say about it:
Time travel fits in any genre and almost every type of story. Everyone seems to have their favorite kind of time travel. I know I sure do, and all the writers in this great bundle do as well.
As a genre distinction, time travel is considered science fiction, but actually it fits in fantasy much better. Diana Gabaldon characters rub a rock and magically travel into the past. Stephen King has his characters go into a closet. All fantasy.
Also, romance writers use time travel as a romantic element in their story, often to bring two characters together. So even though time travel, as a plot device, is considered science fiction, I thought it would be great fun in this Time Travel StoryBundle to show how really diverse time travel stories can actually be.
Okay. It’s official. The Christmas season has begun!
Our tree is up, our lights are strung, our house is decorated, and the holiday music and movies are streaming!
I love the Christmas holidays, as you might have gathered.
My daughter is very excited, too. And we haven’t even started the advent calendars yet. This year we have three: our annual Jacquie Lawson electronic advent calendar, an Escape Advent Calendar (which I supported via Kickstarter), and one I do myself (little drawers that I fill with different things year after year).
As you can see, we love advent calendars here at WMG. That’s why we came up with the WMG Holiday Spectacular 2022 Calendar of Stories. Because there was nothing like an advent calendar for fiction on the market.
Of course, our stories cover all sorts of holidays and span the genres. And you get to open them every day from American Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day.
That’s why we call it a Calendar of Stories. Advent calendars inspired the idea, but ours is so much more.
And it’s not too late to get in on the fun. You have until Sunday, Dec. 18, to give it as a Christmas or Hanukkah gift and have the recipient get sent all the stories they’ve missed, plus start getting new ones every day, on Monday, Dec. 19. You have until Sunday, Dec. 25, to make it in time for Kwanzaa.
You can still sign up for the calendar after that, too, if you realize you missed someone on your list or just didn’t have time to read until after the holidays.
Just click here to go to the Calendar of Stories page on our website and find out all the details.
Happy Holidays to one and all!
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer, working mother, and brain tumor survivor.
I was talking with a friend recently about vision issues, and I was trying to articulate what it’s like to have lived for as long as I can practically remember with extreme nearsightedness. I’ve needed a correction of more than -10 diopters for my entire adult life, and I was at greater than -3 by middle school. For those of you who are mercifully not nearsighted, -3 diopters of nearsightedness puts you at about 20/400 vision (unable to see even the big E on the top of the chart).
I’m currently at a correction of -15 diopters, which puts my vision at about 20/2,000. But that’s not really accurate, either, because who can see 2,000 feet away?
What’s really relevant here is that I haven’t truly seen the world since I was 8. I mostly see it. But not what it really looks like.
Here’s the best way I can describe it: Think about being inside your house and looking at your yard through the window. Maybe you see trees, grass, flowers, birds. You can see the green of the grass, the individual blades. But then, you open the window and look again. Same trees, grass, flowers, birds, but everything is brighter and sharper. You see the variation in the green, the definition of the blades of grass.
My whole life has been looking at things through glass. Either glasses or contact lenses. Without aid, I can only see between .5 and 1.5 inches in front of my face. And what I do see is magnified. So, I have a vague sense of what I’m missing, but not a clear one (yes, I realize the pun I used there).
On the plus side, I’m a master splinter remover. That comes in handy more than you might think.
But it’s strange to never see the world as it truly is. It’s sometimes disorienting and exhausting. However, I’m grateful for the sight I do have. And I’m grateful for the technology that corrects my vision as much as it does and will someday allow me to see clearly again (my ophthalmologist says cataract surgery will be life-changing for me, so I will be grateful to one day get cataracts, too).
I have a friend who is hearing impaired (since birth) and is now also going blind. Yet, she’s one of the sweetest, kindest, most positive people I know. She could absolutely feel angry and frustrated all the time at the cards life has dealt her. And sometimes she does, but she doesn’t let those feelings consume her. She acknowledges them and then thinks about her loving husband, great kids, supportive friends. She’s the living embodiment of why it’s so important to focus not on what you don’t have but instead on what you do.
With American Thanksgiving approaching, now is the perfect time to focus on what we’re grateful for.
One of those things, for me, is always working in a field that I love. Fiction is a great way to escape what troubles us in the real world, and during challenging times, I’m very grateful for that.
And I’m grateful for the readers, like you, who support our fiction.
So, with my gratitude, I’m giving you a free short story this week to celebrate this time of Thanksgiving. It’s one of my favorites.
I promised last month that I’d tell you about another of our free first-in-series ebooks in November, and that time is now!
Dean Wesley Smith’s Thunder Mountain series deftly blends together science fiction and time travel with the old west, and even throws in a little romance, to boot.
Here’s the synopsis for the first book in the series, the eponymous novel Thunder Mountain:
USA Today and New York Times bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith weaves a science fiction tale of love and survival of two modern professors dealing with the past.
Offered a free trip into a remote Idaho wilderness that she loves and studies, Professor Dawn Edwards agrees. On the trip she meets Professor Madison Rogers, and they fall for each other before they even reach their destination.
But living in the Old West proves to be a brutal task.
A science fiction novel of new times in the old west by one of the best and most prolific writers working in fiction today.
Just click here to go to the Calendar of Stories page on our website and add two calendars for the price of one. Or get four for the price of two. Or…well, you get the idea. There’s no limit to how many BOGO deals you can get, so add as many calendars as you want.
Happy reading to one and all!
Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer, working mother, and brain tumor survivor.
