I asked fellow Midnight Garden anthology contributors to share some things about themselves prior to publication and those generous enough to do appeared in previous Midnight Garden posts for the past week or so.
Each entry gives a taste of their contribution, a little about them, how to contact them, how their story came about, and definitely a link to Midnight Garden (which you should purchase because it would make each and every one of us happy.
you do want to make us happy, don’t you?
i mean, considering what we wrote, you want us to know you’re a good person, right?).
Anywho, having run out of authors to post about, I now turn my posting eye on myself.
We’ll round out Midnight Garden posts with my five contributions to the anthology, this time…
Striders:
Gladys stopped in the doorway between the comm, and the ship’s claustrophobic living-room. Dobrynin shuffled on his roll-bed, and she balanced herself in mid-stride, the toe of one slipper not quite touching the floor, her tiny figure framed by the comm’s instrument lighting.
Dobrynin sat up and scratched his beard and gut. “Where’d you go?”
“I had to go to the john.”
“You didn’t fuck anything up, did you?”
Alarms sounded.
How the story came about:
Striders came out some time in the late 1990s as part of a “women’s arc.” I had several psychotherapeutic clients back then and my specialty was trauma – family, spousal, childhood, combat, …
The women’s arc consisted of three short stories; Striders, The Raping of Cyrynda Strong, and Rachel, Above the Clouds, While Flying. Each story dealt with women in crisis and are based on an amalgam of the people I worked with. Rachel and Cyrynda Strong, found homes, the former in 2023, the latter in 2018.
Striders is a story about spousal abuse and one woman’s solution to her problem. It is the most blatantly science-fictional piece of the three and the most fun to write of the three. Hope you enjoy.
Continue reading “My “Striders” in Midnight Garden“
