Category: Uncategorized

Under the Ground: the Minhocão 

I was doing research for an article on something completely different when I ran across the Minhocão, a legendary, giant South American “earthworm.”  Of course, I changed my plans.

The Minhocão was first reported to Western explorers in Brazil in the 1840s, often as an enormous, 150-foot long earthworm that lived in several different lakes and was known to grab animals by the belly, pulling them underwater to eat them.  Some people said it was a sort of fish; one report gave it the scales of an armadillo.  It was usually described as black or very dark, and sometimes was seen to have horns on its head, and occasionally a pig-like snout.  Later, in the 1870s, it was said to be found in highland areas rather than near lakes, covered with bones like a coat of mail, uprooting trees, and leaving deep trenches in its path.  The Minhocão was commonly blamed for roads collapsing and deep trenches that might appear after stormy weather.

Brazil seems to have adopted the Minhocão as a national monster; in 1969, an elevated highway was built in São Paulo, Brazil, officially named “Via Elevada Presidente João Goulart,” but commonly called “Minhocão.”

Minhocão remains were rarely seen and never recorded photographically—such a monstrous creature could live and die almost invisibly, its only traces in its missing victims and its trails of destruction.

Something about the suddenly-appearing trenches created by the Minhocão struck a cord with me; last year, I had read Mark Kurlansky’s nonfiction book Salt (I listened on audio, actually; it’s an excellent production), and he wrote about sinkholes appearing in the middles of towns where salt brine was pumped out of the ground for use in saltworks.  Nearby towns, sometimes miles away, would collapse—and there were no legal remedies for assigning blame or recovering damages at the time, even though everyone knew who was at fault.  An interesting case.

A quick search showed that sinkholes and sightings of the Minhocão in Brazil occur in the same areas, often where limestone is prevalent.  For example, some of the earliest reported sightings of the monster were noted in the State of Goiás in southern Brazil.  In 2017, just across the border in the neighboring State of Minas Gerais, a giant sinkhole formed, 65 feet wide.

Coincidence?  Probably not.

There’s even a name for the topography of land that has a lot of limestone under the soil:  karst.  Karst topography is ridged, pitted, and full of caves; it can look like worm-eaten wood or even freestanding termite mounds, if the upper layers of soil and rock are worn away.  Minas Gerais is a karst area.

But it’s not the only one.

And who’s to say that Minhocão don’t travel?

A few of the many urban areas with karst toporgraphy and at high risk for sinkholes are St. Louis, USA; Montréal, Canada; and Guatemala City, Guatemala.  Also at risk are areas built on gypsum (for example, many sinkhole-prone areas in the UK), sandstone, or salt (as in Mr. Kurlansky’s examples).  Sinkholes can be caused by rainfall, underground pumping, or even a long-running sewer break.

Talk about an interesting monster to put under a city in an urban fantasy tale:  a burst sewer, a toppled building, a collapsed street, caves underground…all it would take was a way to get from Brazil around the world.

Perhaps underground…

–DeAnna Knippling

Uncollected Anthology #21: Deities

Search for missing gods or do some job hunting. Leave the window open for a brother bird god and be sure to protect an artifact. Use your credit and sacrifice it all for your warrior self.

Enjoy the urban fantasy stories of the Uncollected Anthology: Deities now collected in this bundle.

Search for missing gods or do some job hunting. Leave the window open for a brother bird god and be sure to protect an artifact. Use your credit and sacrifice it all for your warrior self.

Get your copy of Deities at Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, or Apple Books!

The Stories

The Stories

“Final Gift” by Michael Warren Lucas

Mha fought in the Spanish-American War and earned all the respect an orcess could dream of. But not even a life of constant struggle prepared her to endure her final days in a rural Michigan barn, so age-decrepit she can’t even pick up a cow. Her husband’s death abandons her to face that end alone.
Mha holds one thing beneath even solitude and weakness: dealing with senseless humans.
But only humans can save her from sacrificing all her warrior left her…

“With a Little Help From the Gods” by Leah R. Cutter

Ever since Bernadette’s younger brother transformed himself into a bird god, she’s kept the kitchen window open for him, in case he stops by.

But that morning, when he does make his appearance, he needs Bernadette’s help.

What help could Bernadette, who only has minor plant magic, give to one of the gods themselves?

With a Little Help From the Gods is another story in the same magic-realism universe as The Midnight Gardener and The Last Little Dogie. A little different than your average Seattle, with strange magic and stranger sites on every corner.

“Shattered, Scattered, and Saved” by Dayle A. Dermatis

Bree works for a top secret agency in London that protects magical artefacts.

Also caring for an ill son, she chafes against being sent to oversee Arianrhod’s Wheel during a special full moon.

Will temptation to heal her son with the Wheel overwhelm her?

Does anyone have the right to choose who lives and who dies?

Only the Goddess knows for sure….

“The Winter Goddess of Anoka, Minnesota” by DeAnna Knippling

An urban explorer breaks into what was once the United States’ “most haunted asylum” in order to test a theory that people will only sense ghosts under certain conditions.

She’s a skeptic. She’s already convinced she knows the truth.

But when she gets into the tunnels underneath the restored buildings of the asylum, she encounters someone–or something–she didn’t expect.

“Where Credit’s Due” by Stefon Mears

When a god backs your credit card, the rewards are out of this world.

Phil Jeffries, a musician with a very special credit card. Mercury Federal Credit Union. Excellent terms. Low interest. Bonus points for paying the balance every month.

Phil Jeffries, about to discover that those bonus points can change his life.

If he can live with the consequences.

“Job Hunt” by Rebecca M. Senese

Silvia prides herself on her professionalism, assisting the unemployed with their job search. She considers herself tough but fair, ready to extend any effort as long as her clients do their part.
Until she meets a man named Baal.

Dressed in a tattered robe, a rope for a belt and no shoes, Baal claims to need a job but has no discernible skills.

Presenting Silvia with the challenge of her career.

Solve the puzzle with Silvia in Job Hunt.

“Chariots of the Godless” by Robert Jeschonek

The old gods have returned and walk among us. Their powers are divine, their glory awesome to behold.
But someone, somehow, is abducting them.

As gods go missing, their disappearances seem inexplicable…until strange clues impossibly point to beings from beyond the stars. Alien abduction expert Dr. Hector Nessus gets the call to investigate, working with the breathtakingly beautiful Captain Mayet, goddess of justice.

The hunt for the missing becomes a race against time as more gods are taken, and Nessus and Mayet discover a dark purpose behind the abductions. As brutal conflict between the godly and the extraterrestrial looms, only Nessus, with his own secret past, might stand a chance of putting a stop to the carnage.

Or triggering a cataclysm unlike any the world has ever known.

“A Better Place” by Jamie Ferguson

Once every dell, mountain, and river had its own god or goddess, but now Dideacea, goddess of the spring Licurgha, is the last of her kind. After years of being alone, forgotten by the people who worshipped her, she decides to leave her beloved spring and go to the nearby village. What she finds on her journey is far, far different from what she expected.

Find Deities at Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, or Apple Books!

Learn more about the Uncollected Anthology at our website and Facebook page, and sign up for our newsletter to learn more about our authors and upcoming issues!

Urban Fantasy: Where the Glitter and the Grimy Underbelly Meet

Urban fantasy has a couple of obvious requirements:  a definite location (usually a city) and magic.  But it also has a few hidden ones.  Sex.  Crime.  A tangled, ongoing drama of relationships that rivals Sex in the City or The Young and the Restless.  A feeling that the location where the stories are set has somehow come alive and is taking action, sometimes helping the characters, sometimes making their lives hell.

You can wander a bit.  There’s room for humor in urban fantasy; there’s always room for romance.  Sometimes the stakes are life and death (literally, if you’re a vampire).  Sometimes the stakes are nothing more than a good slice of pie.

As of 2018, over half of the world’s population live in urban areas*, including over eighty percent within the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and most of Europe.  Our case study today is the U.S., which became over half-urbanized all the way back in the Great Depression era of the 1920s.

Until the 1970s (at least), one of the major fiction genres of the U.S. was that of the Western. Westerns tend to be set in the American West in the latter half of the 1800s.  The typical Western tale was this:  Once upon a time, there was a lone and reluctant hero, often of questionable morals himself, who brought justice to a small town plagued by villains.  It was not a courtroom justice, but one in which the hero was judge, jury, and executioner.  Sometimes he could be merciful, though, and if he spent a night or two with a lonely widow before moving on, well, who could blame him?**

It’s hard to relate to that story, though, if you live in a city.

Slowly, Westerns faded from one of the major genres of popular fiction into a very small category today.

As a kind of contrast to Western genre sensibilities, “noir” emerged as a genre in the 1930s with tales of crime, violence, and doom.  Some of the stories were set in the city; others, in the country.  One of the things they had in common was a sense of location.  The plot of a city noir story, like Cornell Woolrich’s “Rear Window,” could not be plunked down in a story set in the country, like The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson, set in a small Texas town.  Where something happened mattered.  It wasn’t all English la-di-dah country houses or anonymous Western towns.

But noir, too, faded, even if we can still see strong threads of it running through mystery, crime, and suspense tales today.  People didn’t really want to think that the world was nothing but violence and doom, and that the only way to beat the bad guys was to become even worse.

Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, about the time that the U.S. was reaching about seventy to eighty percent urbanization, urban fantasy took up the reins that the Western and noir genres had let slip.

No longer did readers overwhelmingly want to read about rough justice in a rural area.  (Although there certainly is still a market for Western stories, the tone has often shifted, with more diverse characters, storylines, locations, and time periods being used.) And no longer did readers wish to be told that the bad people out there were far more pervasive than most people suspected—they already knew.

Instead, what many readers began to crave was a different type of story, about what it’s like to live in a city.  We wanted acknowledgment that things weren’t always what they seemed, and that traditional systems of justice weren’t always enough—but we didn’t quite want the in-and-out, isolated justice of a Western, or the doom and gloom of a noir story.

What urban fantasy tells us is that magic happens, too—that the rules we are told aren’t always all the rules, all the time.  Sometimes the little grinning grandma walking along the dark alleyway is a bigger threat than the two nervous-looking teens. Sometimes the anonymous dance club isn’t so anonymous, especially when you’re one of the prey lured in by the predators.  Sometimes you don’t just misunderstand another person’s culture—you take for granted that their monsters can’t affect you.  And they can.

Sometimes magic helps; sometimes it hurts.

Life in a city isn’t about riding into a place, then being able to ride away again, leaving behind little more than your reputation as a quick draw.  People’s relationships matter more in a city.  There are multiple circles of influence, multiple sets of rules—and multiple loopholes to be exploited.  Often the resolution of an urban fantasy story is more about who you know and how you get them to do what you want than about magic itself.

Urban fantasy isn’t just about people with magic and an attitude trying to find justice in their neighborhoods, but about how humanity is dealing with a shift from rural to urban life.  Are we replaceable cogs in an anonymous machine?  Does where we live matter?  Do we have dull lives—or rich ones, in which our loves and hates and allies and enemies are more than just another checkbox on social media?  How do we navigate an urban world?  Should we follow rules straightforwardly, or should we follow the rules so well that we know how to break them without getting caught?

And, as always, extra bonus points for looking cool while asking the questions.

*According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs & the CIA World Factbook.

*Side note: my best guess is that in Europe, this feeling of pursuing rough justice in an isolated area was satisfied by sea stories and adventure tales where the hero traveled to a less-populated area already inhabited by actual people, pretended they weren’t really all that important, and Did Heroic Stuff, a la Rudyard Kipling.  I’m not hip enough to other world cultures to make even a tentative guess on how they’re handling this, although the glimpses I get are fascinating. –Ed.

Author Spotlight: Rebecca M. Senese

Website | Goodreads | Facebook | Twitter

1. Please tell us a little about yourself – how long have you been writing, and an overview of the UF books or series you’ve written.
I have been writing almost all of my life. The first story I remember writing was in a school exercise book on the left side of the page which was where we weren’t suppose to write anything because that’s where the teacher was supposed to write their comments. It was a story about a group of kids who go into a haunted house and encounter a vampire, a werewolf, a mummy, Frankenstein’s monster, and a gorilla because I thought gorillas were scary. Even then I was drawn to the fantastical in fiction, to the strange, to the speculative. I use that thinking when I approach any of the UA themes and I especially like putting the strange and fantastical into everyday life.

Most of my stories for UA have been separate stories although I did start the Crossroad City Tales with my story “Tear Away” in the Spells Gone Awry issue. That is a series of short stories about Maeve Hemlock, a faerie detective in the Spells and Misdemeanours Bureau. So far there are five stories about Maeve, with more to tell, I’m sure!

“Winging It” from the Fabulous Familiars issue is also set in the same world as my short story “Cauldron Bubbles” about witch Malinda Hazelthorn.

I really like the world in my story “Borrowed Magic” from the Warlocks issue and would like to explore it more in the future.

2.  What’s your writing process, and has it changed over time? For fans who also write, do you have any favorite bits of writing advice you’d like to share?

I use to outline, not all the way, but a little ways ahead but then I found that my stories were veering completely away from any outline. Even when I tried to realign my outline, the story would go off on its own. So now, I just make notes of thoughts or ideas of things that might happen in a story but I don’t try to force it.One of the best ideas about writing that worked for me was the idea of things get worse, keeping making it worse for the main character and let them find their way out. Having everything going well might be nice in life but it’s really boring in fiction. We read to experience the tension of the problems and challenges and to feel the triumph of the character’s win. But they can’t win if things don’t get worse.

3.  Why do you write Urban Fantasy? What are some of your favorite UF tropes and settings?

I really enjoy adding the fantastic to the mundane, to see how the normal world and the magical world interact. I’m also a big mystery fan so that gets mixed up a lot in my fiction which is how I came up with a faerie detective.But more than that, I just like taking normal people and having them confront something fantastical, something they can’t explain, and see how they react and adapt.

4. Who are some of your favorite authors in the genre and why?
Other than the other Uncollected Anthology authors, I enjoyed the early Anita Blake novels, and Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files. I enjoy the set-up of the worlds and the similarities to mystery novels.

5.  What do you enjoy the most about writing stories for UA?

I love the challenge of writing for themes that I might not have considered otherwise. For instance, we have the Urban Western theme coming up and I’ve never written westerns before. I’ve read them before but never thought of writing one. Having this opportunity to take that theme and put my own spin on it, especially putting the fantastical into the everyday which I love, is to much fun for me.

6. Has writing short stories for UA helped to inspire other projects or novels? Please tell us more about these spin-off projects.

My story “Tear Away” inspired the Crossroad City Tales about faerie detective Maeve Hemlock. She has a total of five short story adventures so far, with more to come.I haven’t done so yet, but I really like the world of Borrowed Magic and I’d like to explore that a little more in the future.

7. What new releases or writing news do you have to share?
On December 6th, I launched The Claus Connection, the third book in the Noel Kringle Chronicles. The Noel Kringle Chronicles are the tales of Noel Kringle, second son of Santa Claus who leaves the North Pole to become a private detective in Toronto where he solves mysteries that are strange and fantastical.

    

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Monsters in unlikely places…mysteries with unlikely magic.  Subscribe to the Uncollected Anthology’s urban fantasy newsletter now!

An interview with Dayle A. Dermatis on the origins of the Uncollected Anthology

Surprising, Wonderful, Uncollected

 

An interview with Dayle A. Dermatis, mastermind behind the Uncollected Anthology series

 

Originally published in a previous issue of the Uncollected Anthology Newsletter.

 

My name is DeAnna Knippling, and I was recently invited to join the Uncollected Anthology as one of the regular writers.  I immediately said “yes,” because the idea of writing urban and contemporary fantasy stories on the most random topics sounded like my kind of challenge—and I wanted to work more with the other authors in the series.  Totally selfish.

Then I realized that I didn’t have a clue about what was going on.  And just before I confessed to my ignorance, I realized that none of my readers (or the other writers’ new readers) would know what was going on, either.

So I asked Dayle A. Dermatis, mastermind behind the project, if I could ask her a few questions…

1. I understand that you’re one of the founding members of the Uncollected Anthology (UA).  Where did the idea for UA come from?  How did the founding members know each other?

I’m both a founding member of UA and the “mastermind” behind the project.

For many years I’ve been attending a workshop on the Oregon Coast where authors write stories for themed anthologies, and those stories are then discussed by all the editors, with the editor of a particular anthology having the final vote whether to include a story. The purpose is to show how an anthology is built and what thought goes into it, and how a story can be spectacular and still not fit in the end.

At the workshop in 2014, I thought about how much I loved writing for themed anthologies, and how much I loved some of the authors at the workshop, and how I didn’t always love the themes or genres—so wouldn’t it be fun to come up with themes I wanted to write about? But, I couldn’t figure out how to get past one hurdle: I didn’t want to be an accountant. I didn’t want to put together an anthology and have to figure out how to pay authors.

The following year at the workshop, I was still pondering this, when it hit me: uncollected. If we each published our stories ourselves, there’d be no need for someone handling payments. (Allegedly I grabbed the arm of the fantastic author Phaedra Weldon, one of the original members, and hissed, “That’s it! Uncollected!” much to her confusion.)

At a social gathering that evening, I went around to the authors I loved and asked them if they were interested. Every single one said yes, with much delight.

We had our first meeting towards the end of the workshop, at which point I realized how amazing the other authors were. Each one brought something different the table. Each one brought up things I hadn’t considered, such as contracts and cover templates. I realized we were a collective, as each of us slipped into different roles.

2.  What kinds of stories does the UA publish?  I know there’s a topic for every anthology, but how are those picked?  How is all this organized? 

Originally UA published urban fantasy, but as time went on, we started having lengthy conversations about the definition of urban fantasy, and whether all the stories we wrote really fit that definition. I believe it was last year that we rebranded as “Redefining the boundaries of urban and contemporary fantasy.”

We have quarterly meetings to discuss business, including themes. We usually pick themes at least a year in advance. Each one of us brings ideas to the table, and as a group we pick the ones that we want to do for foreseeable future. Our Spring issue is usually urban fantasy romance or something along those lines; the rest are usually random unless we decide to do a theme tied to another holiday or season, such as Winter Witches.

3.  What’s the most memorable UA anthology, in your opinion?  Is there a story behind it?

I’m not sure I have a most memorable anthology. Certainly our first, Magical Motorcycles, holds a special place in my heart because it was the first one. I love reading the stories in every issue, though, because it’s a joy to see how each author has interpreted the theme. I think all of us have written stories that might never have happened without the challenge of each theme.

4.  Given that readers of UA should expect the unexpected, what do you think is the joy of putting together, and reading, a particular UA?  What makes it more awesome than a regular anthology?

One of the things we learn early in the Oregon Coast anthology workshop is to avoid “low-hanging fruit.” In other words, toss out your first few ideas because it’s likely someone else will have thought of them. You want to write something only you can write, and have it be different and unique while still hitting the theme.

I’d like to think that the UA authors have this concept well in hand. There are no predictable stories. Just really awesome, kick-ass stories. If you like a theme, you’ll like at least some of the stories in the issue. If you like one of the authors, I’m betting you’ll like some of the other authors and will go check out their other work.

Also, with each issue we have a guest author, just to shake things up a bit. (Several of those guest authors have become full-time members.)

5.  What’s the current issue, and what’s next?!?

The most recent issue is #15, Heart’s Desires, with guest author Mindy Klasky. The next issue, Fairy Tales, with guest author Kim May, will be out August 1, 2018.

[Editor’s note: Click here for the latest issue, and here for our archives!]

Some additional things I’d like to mention:

Mark LeFebvre (formerly) of Kobo Books interviewed us for the Kobo Writing Life podcast. It gives more members’ perspectives on UA and its evolution. We laughed a lot—and I hope listeners will too!

We have a newsletter so you’ll never forget when the next issue comes out.

We started UA before bundling stories was an option. One of the biggest complaints we received was that each story had to be purchased individually. Well, thanks to new technology, we were able to give readers what they asked for! Each issue is available as a collection. That’s right—we’ve collected the uncollected!

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You can find the Uncollected Anthology at our website, UncollectedAnthology.com, as well as on all major ebook retailer sites (just search for “Uncollected Anthology”) or follow the links on the website.

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Hailed as “one of the best writers working today” by bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith, Dayle A. Dermatis is the author or coauthor of many novels and more than a hundred short stories in multiple genres, including urban fantasy novel Ghosted. She is a founding member of the Uncollected Anthology project, and her short fiction has been lauded in year’s best anthologies in erotica, mystery, and horror.  She lives in a book- and cat-filled historic English-style cottage in the wild greenscapes of the Pacific Northwest.

To find out where she’s wandered off to (and to get free fiction!), check out DayleDermatis.com and sign up for her newsletter.

DeAnna Knippling has a browser history full of murder, gore, and Victorian street maps.  She has been published in Black Static, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Aliterate, Crossed Genres, Cast Macabre, The Fog Horn, Penumbra, Big Pulp, Horror Without Victims, and more.  You can find her in Colorado with her husband and daughter, on her website at www.WonderlandPress.com, or on Facebook.

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Note: In case you’re not familiar with the difference between a bundle and an anthology…read on!

A “bundle” is a group of stories, novels, or even short story collections that are grouped together to sell for one price.  Like a grab-bag, it’s a great way to sample a lot of fiction for a low price.  Sometimes bundles are called “box sets” or “collections,” especially when they collect several works by the same author.

Anthologies, on the other hand, are usually only short stories or novellas (no novels) that are under the watchful eye of an editor, who has a lot more control in selecting and editing the stories and is responsible to make sure the authors all get paid!  In a bundle, the company in charge of the bundling handles a lot of the technical details (and payouts) for the authors, which makes it a lot less of a hassle all around.

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Monsters in unlikely places…mysteries with unlikely magic.  Subscribe to the Uncollected Anthology’s urban fantasy newsletter now!