Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem – On Moms, Superheroes, and Cookies

Leave a comment

By Paige Daniels

Be gentle, dear reader, for it’s been quite some time since I’ve blogged. With a full time job and kids who need shuttling to and fro, I had to make the decision between writing actual stories or blogging … spoiler alert writing stories won. This brings me to the inspiration for my story “Super Mom’s Cookie Caper”, set to appear in the new Crazy 8 Press scifi anthology Love, Murder & Mayhem. I love superhero comics, movies, t-shirts, toothpaste, whatever it is I love ‘em, can’t get enough.

But sometimes I wonder: what happens when the earth or universe has a day or weeks off from being nearly destroyed by the latest super villain with a chip on their shoulder? There’s no way one guy, like Superman, could carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, thus the forming of the Justice League. So what happens when Superman has a day off? Does he have to clean up the cat poop out of litter? Do you think Lois gets mad when he forgets to put the cap on the toothpaste, yet again? Does Wonder Woman have to clean her own toilets? Does Black Widow worry about having to fight with the cable company for raising her rates again?

Yes, these are the things that go through my mind late at night and oh, crap, I forgot to put the pot roast in for tomorrow. I thought it would be interesting to explore the more human side of superheroes. Besides the Incredibles, the only superhero I can really think of having just a normal boring family life is Hawkeye aka Clint Barton. Some may argue he’s not a “real” superhero. But who’s the MVP here? The guy who got brainwashed by Loki then had to go home to his family without skipping a beat and take out the trash and coach his kids’ little league team or Tony Stark who has paid help to everything under the sun for him?

I think about this because as an engineer (that’s what pays the bills), and a female engineer in particular, your teachers, parents, mentors tell you how you get to build cool stuff, work in cool labs with cool technology, and see cool things. No one tells you in between all the cool stuff you still need to make dinners the kids will eat, make sure you don’t run out of toilet paper, and find a matching lid for your Tupperware containers … you know, basic adulting stuff.

This story was just my idea of how a superhero, who happens to be a mom, would handle life. She she’d have to have a lot of support from her partner, work, and co-workers to make it work. Sometimes the mom work would be a lot harder than the superhero work. And at the end of the day, many times she’d wonder if all the effort was worth it all, but when she saw that her work led to a bad guy being put away and ended the day with a hug from her kids she’d know that it was worth it.

Love, Murder & Mayhem from Crazy 8 Press will be on sale both in print and digital formats in July. Stay tuned for updates!

Writing under the pen name Paige Daniels, Tina Closser is the author of Non-Compliance: The Sector and their sequels, Non-Compliance: The Transition and Non Compliance: Equilibrium, all through Krisell Ink. They are face paced science fiction, cyber punk tales with elements of humor and romance with a strong heroine. They explore different themes such as family, government control, and how one seemingly insignificant person can make a difference.

Feel free to contact her at: http://www.goodreads.com/PaigeDaniels,  www.facebook/paigedanielsauthor.com, and www.twitter.com/TClosser.

 

 

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem – When My Brain Goes Future Noir

Leave a comment

By Lois Spangler

Listen: the moment you utter science fiction and love, murder, and mayhem all in the same breath, my brain immediately goes future-noir. And future-noir bubbles up in my mind as a cyberpunk detective story.

Great! A detective tries to solve a murder whose motives lie in love. But that’s a broad canvas, with all kinds of variables. So I thought about the love angle. Romance immediately came to mind, but I’d just seen a run of old films with the usual detective-dame dynamic, and to be completely honest, I’ve never tried romance—I haven’t had the guts. So I thought about other kinds of love, and the bonds of family came immediately to mind.

Another topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is artificial intelligence, and robots in general. A few years ago, a friend of mine helped put together an interactive installation that was all about the common cultural perceptions of robots and how humans are learning to respond to them, and the problems that arise from a dearth of empathy for things that can be dismissed as mere machines.

And that’s when things started to gel. What if the murder centered around the affection and respect shown by a human to an android? What if that human treated this android like family? And what if other members of the family were not at all happy with that?

There’s an approach in neurology that posits that all human emotions are just chemical reactions, just physics in action. If we take these emotions seriously, and if they are just complex and glorified electro-chemistry, then how are the perceptions and processes of complex artificial intelligences any different? Can they understand what it is to be loved? Can they love in return? Does guilt have any meaning for them, or does it exist at all? And if empathy from an android to a human can be written off as programming, can the same be said for empathy shown from one android to another, if mutual preservation protocols are not expressly written into their code?

My story for the Crazy 8 Press Love, Murder & Mayhem anthology, titled “A Matter of Principle”, is an exploration of the choices people make about things that can be said to be sapient and sentient, what happens when those choices clash, and what happens when these sentient and sapient things make choices about themselves.

Love, Murder & Mayhem from Crazy 8 Press will be on sale both in print and digital formats in July. Stay tuned for updates!

Lois Spangler is a Mexican-American ex-pat currently living in the antipodes. Some of her stage works have been performed in New York City, and her short fiction has appeared in ReDeus: Native Lands, and will be appearing in works produced by Tiny Owl Workshop. When she’s not at her day job or tooling around doing narrative design research, she’s likely trading stabs and cuts with friends using centuries-old sword manuals, and occasionally translating bits of those manuals for folks to use.

 

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem – My Three Elements

Leave a comment

 

Writers often like a challenge. When presented with a title, the mind begins to spin in different directions until finally rising in on the one that tickles the creative fancy the most.

When you get a title like Love, Murder & Mayhem (our new scifi-themed anthology from Crazy 8 Press), you see three different story elements and get excited about blending them into something fresh and frothy. When the title is then assigned a specific genre, you jettison so many possibilities and begin focusing.

In my case, science fiction immediately takes me to other worlds before thinking about things on Earth. So, I wonder to myself, what would cause there to be love, mayhem, and murder on another world? After all, new worlds often represent fresh starts. True, but we’re still humans and humans can get irrational. Especially when it comes to love.

What if, I wondered, there was a love triangle that has gone pear-shaped resulting in one corner wanting to eradicate the second corner, keeping the third for him/herself? Okay, so there’s love and there’s murder. Where does the mayhem come in?

Go back to that new world. You get a fresh start but not everything works. People have conflicting ideas as to what the next step should be or which is the right decision? From different ideologies can come conflict. Now, rational people may talk it out, debate and filibuster and protest. But, what if the decision being discussed is volatile enough to escalate feelings to the point where protests become violent ones?

And wouldn’t that be the perfect place for a lover to commit murder, under cover of mayhem?

Armed with that, I decided to keep things relatively near-future, researching the current theories as to how colonization of Mars, and putting my triangle on a colony suffering growing pains with wildly different notions of how best to expand. Honestly, reading all the different articles, journals, and reports was fascinating and made the story a nice reward for all that research.

Does the murder happen? Is the would-be murderer caught? Does the society survive the mayhem? Find out in July.

Love, Murder & Mayhem from Crazy 8 Press will be on sale both in print and digital formats in July. Stay tuned for updates!

Robert Greenberger is a writer and editor and founding member of Crazy 8 Press. He has worked for Starlog Press, where he created Comics Scene, the first nationally distributed magazine to focus on comic books, comic strips, and animation, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Weekly World News, Famous Monsters of Filmland, ComicMix.com, and is a founding member of Crazy 8 Press. His dozens of books, short stories, and essays include Hellboy II: The Golden Army, for which he won the IAMTW’s Scribe Award, and The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Murder at Sorrow’s Crown, co-written with Steven Savile. He is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America and the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, and holds a Master of Science in Education from the University of Bridgeport and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing & Literature for Educators from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Find him at:

Website: www.bobgreenberger.com
Twitter: @bobgreenberger
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bob.greenberger
GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/43771.Robert_Greenberger

Uncategorized

Love, Murder & Mayhem – “But What About the Bad Guys?”

Leave a comment

By Kelly Meding

Anyone familiar with my work shouldn’t be surprised that my contribution to the Love, Murder & Mayhem anthology for Crazy 8 Press is a superhero story. I’ve been fascinated by superheroes since my first childhood rerun of the old Adam West Batman TV series. And it was my minor kid crush on Burt Ward as Robin that led me to read my first comic book: The New Teen Titans #9, from the 1980 Wolfman & Pérez team.

Superheroes are pretty awesome, but to be an awesome hero, you need to have an awesome villain. What’s Batman without the Joker? Superman without Lex Luthor? The Tick without Chairface Chippendale? Am I right? There’s an old piece of writing advice that goes “every villain is the hero of his own story.” Well, yeah, but usually the story is written from the point-of-view of the actual hero, and we don’t get to see the villain’s side.

Until now. “A Goon’s Tale” is my take on the villain’s side of the story. Why decide to become a bad guy? Why choose a life of crime? What pushes a person to do wrong, instead of right? The genesis of this story actually came from—believe it or not—an insurance commercial from last year, where an adjuster is looking at the battle damage done to a man’s home. My superhero loving brain seized on that thirty-second spot. I grabbed a notebook and pen, and started making notes.

Who are these people? What if it turns out that the insurance adjuster is a villain who uses his day job to case homes he can later burglarize? This adjuster became the hero of my story, Rocky Mills. I had other thoughts about the homeowner and how this could be an actual story, instead of just a character essay, but those thoughts are spoilers, so I’ll keep them to myself. I tucked this idea away for a while, unsure exactly how to develop it—until I was invited to submit to Love, Murder & Mayhem. The three requirements to the story helped me develop the character of Rocky into an actual, interesting plot.

At first, I was going to try and set “A Goon’s Tale” in my Metawars universe, maybe in a time before the heroes and villains destroyed major cities and killed each other to near-extinction. But I wanted more freedom to play around with tropes and titles, so I created another original superheroes universe, and I’ll probably play here again. Until then, I hope you enjoy Rocky’s tale of love, murder, and revenge.

Love, Murder & Mayhem from Crazy 8 Press will be on sale both in print and digital formats in July. Stay tuned for updates!

You can find Kelly Meding on:
Twitter (@KellyMeding)
Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/kellymeding/)
Her website (http://www.kellymeding.com/)
Blog Organized Chaos (http://chaostitan.blogspot.com/), and on Facebook.

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder, Mayhem – Write What You Know…A**hole!

Leave a comment

 

“The Case of the Missing Alien Baby Mama” is my fourth outing with Leo Persky, “a solid five foot seven, one hundred and forty-two pounds of average, complete with glasses, too much nose, not enough chin, and a spreading bald spot that I swear isn’t the reason I always wear a hat.”

Leo was born in 2008, when I was invited to contribute a short story to an anthology published by Moonstone Books. I’d dabbled in horror before, but in that broody-meant-to-chilling kind of way, so I wanted to do something a little different this time around. That I had been, up until several months earlier, a writer for and executive editor of the fake news humor tabloid Weekly World News probably had a lot to do with my decision to take a little tongue-in-cheek poke at the conventions of the form.

So Leo Perksy, under the penname of Terrance Strange and a picture of his much more photogenic grandfather, is an investigative reporter for WWN. In Leo’s world, everything the News prints, from ghost stories to interviews with alien visitors is the one hundred percent, fact-checked and verified truth. And to say that Leo views his world through jaundiced eyes would be an understatement; Leo is a proud, self-proclaimed snarky asshole because, well, everybody always tells me I should write what I know.

Two more Leo stories followed “Man Bites Dog,” “Vodka Martini, Straight Up, Hold the Jinn” (2012) and “Shunning the Frumious Bandersnatch” (2014), both for horror anthologies.* Then, in 2016 came Russ Colchamiro’s call for stories for the Love, Murder, and Mayhem anthology we’re doing through Crazy 8 Press. Russ had only one rule: “Each story within the SciFi realm must contain at least one component of love or romance, and at least one murder. Mayhem always welcome.”

Funny he should say that, because after finishing “Shunning the Frumious Bandersnatch,” I realized that all three of Leo’s stories had supernatural elements—vampires, genies, and Atlantean magic—and I hoped that in the next outing, I could do something with those other staples of WWN headlines, alien visitations and interspecies progeny, especially human/alien hybrid babies. Within twenty-four hours of Russ’s email invite, we had an approved pitch for “The Case of the Missing Alien Baby Mama.”

And now that alien baby is about to be born, an adorable little tale complete with the requisite love and murder, as well as its fair share of mayhem. As just one of the parents of this beautiful, bouncing newborn book, I couldn’t be prouder.

Love, Murder & Mayhem from Crazy 8 Press will be on sale both in print and digital formats in July. Stay tuned for updates!

*The previous Leo stories are collected in one handy, dandy Crazy 8 Press volume, In My Shorts: Hitler’s Bellhop and Other Stories.

(By the way, if you’re unfamiliar with the “real” Weekly World News or want to revisit that funny old friend, you’ll find an archive of back issues online.

You can follow Paul at PaulKupperberg.com and on Facebook and Twitter. He is a member of Crazy 8 Press.

 

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem – Geek Parenting and the Language of Love

Leave a comment

By Karissa Laurel

When I heard one of the themes of the new scifi-themed Crazy 8 Press anthology was love – the collection is called Love, Murder & Mayhem — my thoughts didn’t go straight to classic romance pairings for my lead characters. Instead, I almost immediately thought of me and my son, and our love for each other. Speaking from personal experience, the mother-son relationship is regularly fraught with conflicts, and, yet, it’s a bond that often endures and overcomes. That was the kind of love I wanted to write about in my story – The Reboot of Jennis Viatorem.

I use a lot of imagination when it comes to parenting, but I think most mothers work that way, even those who gave birth to their kids instead of being introduced to them with a sticky hug when they were two years old. My husband had full custody of his son when we started dating. As we progressed towards marriage, I worried that I wasn’t ready for instant motherhood.

My son and I have lived in confusion of each other almost since the beginning. If I am a right brain thinker, then he is left brain, or vice versa. I used to wonder if we would ever find anything in common. Then, one day when he was about six years old, I set him down in front of the television and said, “There’s something I want to share with you that is of great importance to me. I hope you will cherish it as well.”

He gave me a funny look, but from the moment those first words, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” scrolled across the screen, he was enthralled. After that, it was light sabers and Star Wars action figures for every gift giving opportunity. He would stand outside the automatic doors at grocery stores, flapping his arms. “Mom, I’m using the Force,” he would say when the doors slid apart.

Then he discovered my stash of Harry Potter novels and insisted we read them together. We went on stick foraging expeditions to find the perfect material for a wand.  We invented new spells and magic words for everything from cleaning rooms to tying shoelaces.

Although not always easy, it has been eleven good years since the day I vowed to spend the rest of my life with my son and his dad. I still think my boy and I will never completely understand each other, but when we speak in the language of sci-fi and fantasy geeks, I can hear him saying he loves me, and I trust he hears it in return.

Love, Murder & Mayhem from Crazy 8 Press will be on sale both in print and digital formats in July. Stay tuned for updates!

Karissa Laurel lives in North Carolina with her kid, her husband, the occasional in-law, and a very hairy husky named Bonnie. Some of her favorite things are coffee, chocolate, and super heroes. She can quote The Princess Bride verbatim. On weekends you can find her at flea-markets hunting for rusty things to re-use and re-purpose. She is the also the author of The Norse Chronicles, an adult urban fantasy series based on Norse mythology; and The Stormbourne Chronicles, a young adult fantasy series.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/karissalaurel
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/karissalaurel
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karissalaurel
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/karissalaurel
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/KarissaLaurel

Crazy Good Stories