Dreamrush: Free Download and Author Q&A

Good news! The Kindle version of my short story collection, Dreamrush, is available to download for free on Amazon.com for the rest of the week (8/8/17 – 8/12/17). Get your free download here.

To celebrate, my intern-extraordinaire, Jayna Bosse, and I are hosting an author Q&A over on Facebook. So please do head on over there to hit me up with whatever burning questions you have, either about the stories in the book, the writing process, my favorite color, etc., etc. (after downloading the free book first, of course).

Lastly, to get some intel on the stories in the book (in case you're still not convinced), here's a great story-by-story review of Dreamrush from steampunk author Robyn Bennis.

Enjoy!

-Garrett Calcaterra

Spec-Fic Author Interview: M.E. Parker

M.E. Parker is the creator of the erstwhile literature and photography magazine Camera Obscura, as well as author of Hinterland Trilogy, a series of novels that melds elements of dystopian, post-apocalyptic, steampunk, and literary fiction. Book 1, Jonesbridge, introduces his main characters, Myron and Sindra, in a dystopian work farm, and book 2, The Nethers, picks up the action with Myron as he ventures out into a post-apocalyptic world beyond Jonesbridge. Book 3, Bora Bora is due for release later in 2017.

In this interview, M.E. Parker and I discuss his love for craftsmanship, how the real world influences his dystopian visions, and his place in the world of literature which is so keen on creating categories. In doing so, he lands upon a term for a subgenre that's new to me, and one that I particularly like: junkpunk.

The Story Behind Page Fault

I am very excited to announce the release of my novella, Page Fault, a high-concept mash-up of cyberpunk, fantasy, post-apocalyptic, and noir fiction. I can't take sole credit for the high-concept idea, though.

Two years ago, I taught a George R.R. Martin author study course at the Orange County School of Arts. As you might expect, the class was great fun. We read Martin's early horror and sci-fi, read one of his Dunk and Egg novellas, watched a few episodes of Beauty and the Beast from his television writing days, and even got a visit from the man himself for a private lecture.

Seeing as how the class was for the Creative Writing conservatory, though, I also wanted to include a writing component to the course. So one day the students and I round-tabled to come up with a shared world in which we could all write stories, a shared world inspired by Martin's writing across the genre spectrum. The result of our collective imaginations was Soteria—a computer generated world that harbored the majority of Earth's population in a post-pandemic future. The students were great, and by the end of the day we had an entire codex written for our shared world.

Page Fault was my contribution to the subsequent short story collection the class wrote; it started off as an introductory vignette for the collection, but there was something about the vignette that called for more, so I revisited it and expanded it once the course was over. The resultant story is the three part novella you have before you now. It's a story I'm very proud of, and one I couldn't have written without the rich imaginations of all my students. So here's a big shout-out and thank you to all the students from that author study course. Cheers!

-Garrett Calcaterra