Month: August 2019

2019 Gold Quill Award

~ D. J. Moore ~ Leave a comment

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The anthology Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel (which I contributed a story to) just won a League of Utah Writer’s Gold Quill award for Published Collection! The award was presented at the Quills Conference last Saturday. I wasn’t able to attend, but it sounds like it was a blast.

 

My story that appears in the collection, “The Miracle of the Gulls”, is partly based on the true story of Olive Oatman, partly based on the miracle of the gulls event from Mormon history, and also a little bit inspired by the Hell on Wheels television series. It’s a steampunk story featuring zeppelins and mechanical men, so it’s not exactly historical fiction, although I did read Olive Oatman’s 1857 biography for research and sprinkled a lot of old-fashioned words into the narrative for flavor. I loved working with editor John M. Olsen on the story. His suggestions improved the story a lot.

 

If you haven’t read this award-winning anthology yet, be sure to give it a read.

Disorder

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Disorder is a collection of horror stories released by Amazon and free to read for Amazon Prime members. I present the stories below in the order I read them.

“The Best Girls” by Min Jin Lee takes place in Seoul, South Korea in 1989. A poor couple who have only girls are overjoyed when they finally have a boy because he’ll actually be able to get a good job and be able to provide for the family while the girls cannot. His older sisters aren’t upset that their little brother gets special treatment, they acknowledge that, given the culture they live in, he is considered more valuable than them. This actually wasn’t a horror story until the final, brutal sentence. Continue reading →

Asimov’s July/August 2019

~ D. J. Moore ~ 6 Comments

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“The Work of Wolves” by Tegan Moore is probably the best story I’ve read so far in the pages of Asimov’s. (Why didn’t the author get her name on the cover when there was enough room for all the authors’ names there?) Our viewpoint character is Sera, a search and rescue dog who has been artificially enhanced. Sera’s human handler isn’t used to working with an enhanced dog, so Sera has to train her. Because she doesn’t act like a regular dog, people are uneasy around her. I liked this description of a drone: “The sound of it is like an itch inside my head, where I can’t reach it. It is like the feeling before a sneeze.” It also describes the sound of a drone as wasp-like. (Coincidentally, I was reading this while camping and mistook a passing drone for a wasp at first.) Sera ends up having to chase a rat being controlled by terrorists though a power plant. A very enjoyable read with a surprise ending I did not see coming.

Continue reading →

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy

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Based on a review I read, I was really looking forward to this one. I love the title and the cover image is amazing. But of course, you can’t always judge a book by its cover. I’ve learned in the past that it’s a bad idea to get too excited about movies based on the trailer. The ones I look forward to the most usually don’t live up to my expectations and I walk away from the theater disappointed. So the fact that I was disappointed by this book may have more to do with my high expectations going into than the book itself. Continue reading →