Melanie Lamaga, Writer, Editor, Photographer
Fiction on the Border Between the Real and Unreal
In Which I Answer a Riddle Written in 1865, & Kick My Workaholic Monkey-Mind in the Lady Balls Lewis Carroll featured this famous riddle in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: How is a raven like a writing desk? He admitted later that he didn’t have an answer to the riddle, but I do: me. Yes, arrogance be damned, […] Read more »
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor is a complex coming of age, hero’s journey: a blend of science fiction and magic that offers a realistic depiction of a culture at war. In this future African country, the (white) Nurus believe that they have been given the divine right to enslave or even exterminate the (dark […] Read more »
I’ve been working overtime launching The Evolution of Reptilian Handbags and Other Stories and keeping various other businesses afloat, while writing a new novel, all of which necessitated organizing my files, because my head hurts from all the different hats piled on it, like so many mattresses atop the pea, and I needed a better […] Read more »
by Melanie Lamaga from the collection The Evolution of Reptilian Handbags and Other Stories, now available from Amazon. Jade I slide to the barn on a skin of blue ice, sky layered rose and gray. Almost dawn. The wind, a white knife, cuts through my red down coat. Pinfeathers escape—a flock of tiny geese vanishing […] Read more »
Wouldn’t It Be Great If You Could Rewrite, Reclaim and Recreate the Story of Your Life? This is the question posed by storyteller and activist Leah Lamb. She is launching a new old kind of storytelling project this week at www.medicinestories.com. According to the website, “A medicine story is a one-of-a-kind story designed to bring […] Read more »
by Melanie Lamaga This excerpt is from the collection The Evolution of Reptilian Handbags and Other Stories, available from Amazon.com in paperback and e-book format. WHAT KIND ARE YOU? “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” -William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark When I remember Dundalk, […] Read more »
Beyond the Zombies … True Horror I have a love/hate relationship with zombies as they are portrayed in American culture. They’re crude and redundant: all they do is stagger around looking for something to eat. They never get full or tired, even when their rotting limbs are falling off. I can’t resist the gory little […] Read more »
Juggling the Balls of Desire This is the writer’s life: we carefully construct plans and schedules; we arrange and sacrifice. Everything from, “If I give up TV, I can write for two hours more each night,” to life-altering decisions like deciding to major in creative writing in college or putting off having children. This probably […] Read more »
My Fun Summer Read I’ve read the first two books in the Spiritwalker Trilogy, Cold Magic and Cold Fire, and plan to soon gobble down the final installment that came out this summer, Cold Steel. I’m writing this brief review now because the Metaphysical Circus is packing it up for a few weeks and I […] Read more »
If You’re Not Doing Anything Wrong… Marcus Yallow is a 17-year old geek genius living in a near-future San Francisco where kids are monitored constantly by cyber-security on their school-issued laptops, radio frequency ID chips in their library books, and gait recognition software in the halls. Marcus delights in getting around the system with harmless […] Read more »