Stone Cold Beauty

Reading Time: 4 minutes Totally narcissistic, Electra loved admiring her herself in the mirror. One day a wish turned her to stone gazing in a mirror at herself for eternity. She was mostly happy with this situation, until her old, dying husband visits her and gets a wish of his own.

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Gods and Monsters Installment 3: Music and Moths

Reading Time: 7 minutes At eighteen, when Gabriel leaves the orphanage, the sisters breathe a sigh of relief.  He has never been any trouble. Never talked back; indeed, rarely talked at all. He is obedient, clean, and scentless. The nuns can find no fault in him, but neither can they feel affection. He makes them forget Christ and contemplate Gabriel. He induces guilt. His very silence screams for attention. He is a shadow in the soul.

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In the Fire of Her Eyes

Reading Time: 4 minutes She kept her eyes shut. She ran deep into the wilderness. And as the sun flickered out, and the sky went black, and she held all the light of the world behind her eyelids, she tried to pretend she could bury her pain, and she wouldn’t die alone in the cold of the mountains.

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MetaStellar is Accepting Flash Fiction Submissions for Spring 2024!

Reading Time: 2 minutes The spring 2024 submission cycle for original speculative fiction runs from March 1st and closes at midnight on March 31st. We’re looking for your best enthralling, imaginative, or bone-chilling original fiction stories of 1,200 words or fewer. Please visit our flash fiction submission page for full details and the online submission form. Accepted authors will

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Empty Sleeve

Reading Time: 4 minutes The vet said that my grief would modulate over time and eventually become a part of who I was, something I would cease to question, like the existence of my own arms.

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Gods and Monsters Installment 1: Wherein we meet the three Fates

Reading Time: 7 minutes My love affairs ever end thus. I always long for them to turn out differently. It’s so disheartening. If only I didn’t fall in love so often with these warm-blooded vessels of nutrition. I constantly swear I’ll convert, become a celibate bloodsucker, a monastic mosquito, a vamp nun. But then I see some sun-glazed man smelling of day, and it begins again.

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A whimsical house made of books, paper, pens, and ink in a clearing surrounded by water

Writing Advice of the Week: The Craft is in Drafts

Reading Time: 11 minutes When you write your first draft, you’re telling yourself the story, as you need to hear it, to make the best sense of it. That first draft is typically when you learn about your main character’s goals and motivations, the barriers or villains that hinder their success, and what the ultimate stakes are if they don’t succeed. You also meet the rest of the cast and get to know them, understand them, see them moving about in your story world. But when you tell your story to your reader, you begin to uncover what the reader needs.

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Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for Feb. 23, 2024

Reading Time: 10 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top five free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes a paranormal police department, mermaids and dragons, Greek mythology, and a space opera in which humans are fighting against an invading alien force — from within.

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Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for Feb. 16, 2024

Reading Time: 10 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top five free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes a sexy fae king and his mate, a seductive fae king, forbidden romance between a princess and a barbarian, a trip back in time to ancient Alexandria, and a group of outcast marines who must save humanity and the galaxy.

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Um

Reading Time: 4 minutes She wondered if she should even say it. She didn’t even want to think it. But Wyx definitely had to know, had a right to know probably. “There’s someone else on board.”

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Free Friday: Today’s top free Amazon sci-fi and fantasy books for Feb. 2, 2024

Reading Time: 10 minutes We read the first few chapters of each of the top five free fantasy and sci-fi books on Amazon. Today’s list includes an alien romance, a paranormal romance, a box set from one of our favorite romantic fantasy series, and a sci-fi book about tourists traveling to alternate Earths.

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Mudpot

Reading Time: 4 minutes No magic in it. She didn’t need any. She just turned around looking some kind of way, and bung he went. Sometimes, a person sees their future in stark clarity and chooses to roll off the coil while the going’s good, and that’s the best thing that could be said about Amajane’s father.

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