50 Losing Angel

Welcome to (drum roll please) episode 50 of Read Me A Nightmare!

Betty might be forgetful lately, but she KNOWS her daughter-in-law would never leave her son. Can she find Angel before it’s too late?

Today, we are featuring a story starring one of my most popular protagonists, Betty, a detective battling dementia. (Based on my fierce mother-in-law, Linda Fawns).

“Losing Angel” continues the tale that first began in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine with my very first pro sale, “Three Calendars.”

“Losing Angel” was first published in a pro-pay sale to Mantelpiece Lit in April 2024, and is based on a vacation to Florida that I went on with my mother-in-law as she navigated the progression of her disease while tackling everyday life.

Our voice actor is Karen Shute, who also played the role of Betty in the “Three Calenders” episode. Karen is a professional editor, voice actor, and she and I were co-creators/hosts of the Big Brother Canada podcast.

Grab your beach towel, toast a bagel, and let’s go hunting for Angel.

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Bruce McAllister talks about VOICE and his writing journey

It’s rare I “hero-worship” another writer, but it when it comes to Bruce McAllister, I am definitely star-struck. McAllister is a Hugo and Nebula nominated science fiction and fantasy writer. My first taste of his genius was the imaginative telling of an alien assassin “Kin” on actor Levar Burton’s podcast Levar Burton Reads.

Issac Asimov himself says, “Bruce McAllister is one of the greatest talents working in the science fiction field today.”

He published Stealing God and Other Stories in June 2022 which showcases how strong a role voice should play in a short story.

He kindly agreed to chat with me about his anthology, writing process, and career. He even drops a few priceless pieces of advice for authors.

AF: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today. Tell us what inspired your latest collection of short stories?

BM: Though I’ve published three novels in my career, it’s the short story that’s always held my heart—from the Golden Age of Science Fiction short stories I read when I first started reading SF (and writing SF) through the experimental New Wave of SF’s 60’s and 70’s to the present. The form just won’t let go of me; it’s a Siren that, rather than dashing me on rocks in the sea, has always made me happy, made me feel guided by a muse of some mystic kind, and always rewarded me in my life. The loyalty has been worth it.

A novel (as I learned from writing DREAM BABY) can be sprawling and epic and cover a lot of time and have many character points-of-view, and is a glorious thing because of these virtues, but the short story can achieve a kind of craft perfection—or at least the possibility of it—for an author when a novel has, as one writer friend put it, and as Faulkner, for one, would agree, “too many words ever to be perfect.” This isn’t to say that the short story will ever replace the novel; it won’t and it shouldn't, because novels take us away to magical places and keep us there when short stories just can’t—at least in the same rich embracing way. The short story is an American invention, they say, so I suppose I’m very American. My writing has always been mainly short stories, so collecting them—in the case of STEALING GOD AND OTHER STORIES collecting what people feel are my best “new millennium” science fiction, fantasy and horror short stories since my first collection—was natural; and I’m grateful to John Kenny at Aeon Press in Dublin, who also published by last novel, THE VILLAGE SANG TO THE SEA (which was a novel of linked stories—you can see the theme here), for making it happen.

AF: How long did it take for you to create the collection, and what was your writing process?

BM: As I said, all the stories in the collection are from the new millennium. They were written as I always write: a short story idea (and main character and “voice”) inspires me to write it; and by that I mean the emotion is pretty intense. I don’t “think” my way through the fiction I write—which people tell me puts me in a Bradbury camp rather than an Asimov camp by “method” and in turn brain-and-heart wiring. I write it and send it out and still, after nearly sixty years of publishing SF and fantasy, have no idea which editor it will click with. Some of my best stories (i.e., those destined to make a splash with people) have appeared in smaller venues, I should add—which means that it’s important, as some writers can be, not to be a snob: A good story needs a home, and once it finds one, all sorts of good things can happen. I’m not saying a venue with terrible writing is the place