Shadows of the Emerald City (59 page)

( waggingthefox.blogspot.com )

Lori T. Strongin
learned to hold a pencil long before she understood the magic that tool held. There has never been a time in her life when she didn’t want to be a writer—armed with the power to take words and ideas and mold them into something that can create, end, or change lives. Lori has been published in several literary journals, trade magazines, and anthologies, including
Tip o’ the Tongue
,
Reflections of the Flatirons
,
Beneath the Harvest Moon
,
The Florida Palm
,
The Florida Writer
,
Literary Liftoffs
,
Tales of the Talisman
, and most recently in
Renard’s Menagerie
.

On
Not in Kansas Anymore
, Lori writes:

After a school production where the high points were the Yorkie playing Toto got flattened by the cardboard Oz’s jaw falling off, a promiscuous Dorothy not being able to sing, the Tin Man not being able to act, and Oz himself delivering his lines in Spanish, in his underwear, to the low point of my hair catching on fire when my crystal ball-slash-garden lantern blew up, I’ve always had a bit of a sore spot where
The Wizard of Oz
was concerned. I consider
Not in Kansas Anymore
my revenge.
( www.loristrongin.com )

Martin Rose
began life dyslexic, until he picked up a pen at the age of 12 and hasn’t put it down since. A steady diet of Alexandre Dumas, Anne Rice and Stephen King, marinated in a Donna Tartt sauce, kept him nourished during his grammar school years; he holds a degree in the visual arts and works as a graphic designer/copy editor for local publications where he currently resides, in coastal New Jersey. Look for his work in forthcoming publications such as the anthology
Hideous Evermore
.

On
King of Oz
, Martin writes:

I kicked around this story for several years when I heard about the Shadows of the Emerald City, and thought it would provide the setting I needed to get it off the ground. I pulled on my real life experiences with my father, who set a cornfield on fire with a gas can and a match, and the story came out of a need to convey my terror of becoming my father. Words like
“straw”
and
“scarecrow”
became synonyms for
“crazy”
and
“schizophrenic”
as the character of David Gale explores my own private terrors.

( www.martinrosehorror.com )

Northern Frights
Publishing

In the Great White North, Blood Runs Colder…

www.northernfrightspublishing.webs.com

Also Available from NFP: War of the Worlds: Frontlines

No one would have believed that in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water…

These words marked the beginning of H.G. Well’s classic science fiction novel
War of the Worlds
…and marked the end of man’s child-like belief that we are alone in the universe. Published in 1898,
War of the Worlds
has been heralded as one of the greatest works of science fiction ever written, and it cemented H.G. Well’s legacy as a founding father of the science fiction genre. A 1938 radio play by Orson Welles caused mass panic when it hit the airwaves, and frankly we haven’t been able to trust aliens ever since…

www.northernfrightspublishing.webs.com

Timelines: Stories Inpired by HG Wells’
The Time Machine

Coming From NFP in 2010!

So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away…

These words marked the passing of the man known only as
The Time Traveller
as he sailed across the span of the future of earth and into its final years.

First published in 1895,
The Time Machine
by Herbert George (H.G.) Wells is a blueprint for science fiction and horror that persists to this day: underneath the science and the theories that attract a reader’s mind, there is an underlying story of a person who struggles with the question that burns in the heart of every man: what does it all mean? Now is your chance to find out…

www.northernfrightspublishing.webs.com