CoW Ep. 055: Flash Collection II - "Color Contacts" and "The Quest Unusual"

[danooli]

Episode 55: Flash Collection II by Bethany Powell and David Steffen

Narrated by Graeme Dunlop

Our first story is Color Contacts by Bethany Powell. Bethany didn’t really know people wore contacts until one day in middle school, when one of her classmates ran out of homeroom because one of his flipped. The fascinating trickery of it has stuck with her. (Though he was just as cute in glasses the next day.) She also has a weak spot for manga with plot points about glasses or contacts.

Bethany has mainly published fantasy genre poetry, which you can find at bethanypowell.com. She also keeps a semi-popular Tumblr on suit fashion, mainly featuring Asian celebrities. When not scribbling or reblogging photos, she waits tables in a tea room.

Our second story is The Quest Unusual by David Steffen. David runs the webzine Diabolical Plots, which posts interviews, reviews, lists and other material related to the field of speculative fiction. At this point DP is the only site to regularly review Daily Science Fiction, where this story originally ran. Another highlight is the “Best of” podcast lists, including a “Best Of Cast Macabre”, and in the near future a “Best of Cast of Wonders”.

He has stories upcoming in Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and Daily Science Fiction, and his stories have been published in more than a dozen others. See his a bibliography page on Diabolical Plots for a full listing.

Click here to listen to Episode 55

Tags: Bethany Powell, Cast of Wonders, David Steffen, Fantasy, Graeme Dunlop, Young Adult fiction

[Unblinking]

"The Quest Unusual" was written by just trying to take two extremely common elements and trying to mix them in a way that I hadn't seen before.  I love dragons, but dragons are a very common element, as are knights hunting dragons.  But I thought it would be fun to write a story where the knight hunting a dragon was also, apparently, a dragon. 

Really, I thought of this primarily as a joke story, basically an epic fantasy version of a Groucho Marx's "what the tiger was doing in my pajamas, I'll never know".

I have been working on ways to flesh out the world to justify the existence of the joke, and have finished one story in that cycle, also humorous, but which I have not managed to sell (and it has no clear connection to this story it just takes place in the world and is several stages of separation removed from it though both involve dragons and humor).