I’ve always wanted my own character. John D. MacDonald has Travis McGee and Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes. You know what I mean. They create a character that is rich and compelling, interesting to both the writer and the reader. Their personality and status quo allows for a rich variety of storytelling opportunities and like an old friend, grow old with them through time.

As much as I adore writing in other universes, and helped create one or two to share with others, I always thought I should have one or two characters to call my own. In the back of my mind, I guess I’ve been sending out a signal and have been patiently waiting to see who will walk out of the dim recesses of my mind.

At first, I thought it might be the young apprentice wizard I introduced in “Solo”, a short story that appeared Mob Magic a decade-plus back. And while I want to return to him, he hasn’t been insistently bothering me.

Instead, it appears that Gabriella Trotter, my protagonist in ReDeus has decided to inhabit my mind. When Aaron Rosenberg, Paul Kupperberg, and I began developing this shared universe, we each wanted our own character to roam with. Paul’s Junker George is out to slay the “false” gods and is hopping the globe to do so and Aaron’s cop Tom Duran seems content to operate in New York City, the one free zone on Earth. Continue reading

The stars were twinkling in the barren night sky as Gabriella Trotter leisurely drove down Route 90. Her eastward route took her farther and farther away from Seattle. It had been a hasty decision and one she didn’t allow herself to contemplate. Instead, she listened to pop anthems from her youth on the satellite radio, finishing the now-cold and greasy fries that remained in the white paper Sonic bag. Thankfully, the local deities allowed burgers, although the mandate was that they were now all-buffalo—more authentic, it had been declared.

She had lost her job at the newspaper thanks to the gods’ intervention, and she was more than a little tired of being Kunulla’s plaything. Gabbi had no idea what the god wanted with her but he somehow found her lack of faith in any deity appealing or challenging or something. He’d already exposed the unseemly side of the celebrities she’d covered, altering her coverage from fawning to jaundiced. While it might have made her a sharper writer, it had also seemed to piss someone off and now here she was, without income. Continue reading

By Kevin Dilmore

It’s all Kansas’ fault.

I certainly mean the state, which I regard as my own native land despite that my birth and first five years of life took place in upstate New York. I also mean the band, a favorite of mine for nearly 40 years whose music accompanied the majority of my writing process on this story. And I also mean the residents, from the native tribes to the homesteaders, who struggled against nature and, yes, each other in their quests to live off of the land and make a home on the prairie with only their determination and faith and work ethic to fuel them.

Mix those inspirations liberally with the weirdness drifting through my own mind, and that is the formula for my contribution to Native Lands, “The Initially Unsettling But Ultimately Triumphant Return of Afterbirth Boy.”

Spoiler alert: Don’t read the story title until after you have read the story.

When I received the very gracious invitation to propose a story for the Native Lands anthology, I immediately knew that I wanted to write a tale that felt like home. Growing up in a town of 6,000 in central Kansas and then spending 15 additional years in a similarly sized Kansas town while reporting for a twice-weekly newspaper, I many times had the sense that the problems of big-city America did not apply to our lives here. As I read Divine Tales, I was struck with a similar impression. Sure, the Gods would work wonders or horrors in the lives of people on the coasts. But how would things shake out around here? What challenges might a small town face in light of these arrivals? Who would step up for the little guys? Continue reading