You might never realize, if you were not trying to record the audio to a story of about eleven thousand words that takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to read even without mistakes (and oh boy are there plenty!) how constantly dogs are barking in a place like, say, St. Petersburg, Florida. If you want an idea, well, check out next week’s story on podcastle. Or, I’m not sure if it’s going up next week. But if you listen carefully to the one I recorded, you occasionally hear dogs barking.

That reminds me of this story about a guy named Carl Weismann who was out recording bird songs for Danish State Radio. On every tape, he found himself chopping out the barking dogs. (Hmm, is that because stupid dogs are always barking, Carl?). Anyway, at the end he had this bowl of tape fragments big enough to be make-believe chips at a big party. So he started checking the pitch of each bark. Soon he found that he could arrange the individual barks to form a song. And thus, the immortal barking dogs “Pop Goes the Weasel” was born. Click here to hear them sing what appears to be “Reading and Writing and ‘Rythmatic.”

I would do that. But I’d have the dogs sing “Tainted Love” and the St. Pete dogs don’t really sing on key.

[source]

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After a career as a professor of English at Kent State University, Dr. Mary A. Turzillo is now a full-time writer. In 2000, her story “Mars Is No Place for Children” won SFWA’s Nebula award for best novelette. Her novel An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl was serialized in Analog in July-Nov 2004. These two works have been selected as recreational reading on the International Space Station.

Mary’s Pushcart-nominated collection of poetry, Your Cat & Other Space Aliens, appeared from VanZeno Press in 2007. Her collaborative book of poetry/art, Dragon Soup, written with Marge Simon, appears from VanZeno in 2008.

Mary’s collection Lovers & Killers, in addition to winning the Elgin Award, was also on the Stoker ballot and contains “The Hidden,” second place winner in the Dwarf Stars award for 2012, plus two Rhysling nominees “Tohuko Tsunami,” “Galatea.”

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Lisa Tuttle began her career as a published writer in the early 1970s, and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer of the year in 1974. She’s the author of seven novels and more than a hundred short stories. Born and raised in Texas, she has lived in a remote, rural part of Scotland for the past twenty-five years. Her first novel, Windhaven, was a collaboration with George R. R. Martin published in 1981. This was followed by a horror novel, Familiar Spirit, in 1983. Unable to stick to one well-defined genre, although most of her work features elements of horror and/or dark fantasy, she went on to write novels of psychological suspense (Gabriel and The Pillow Friend), science fiction (Lost Futures), and contemporary/mythic fantasy (The Mysteries and The Silver Bough) as well as books for children and young adults, and non-fiction (Encyclopedia of Feminism and Heroines). (more…)

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Michael Uhall is an academic, a political theorist, and an aficionado and author of horrific and weird prose. He is particularly interested in dark ecology and speculative biology. His work can be found on his website, in Vastarien, in a recent volume of stories inspired by E. T. A. Hoffmann, and in various academic journals. He’s currently working on a short novel called Exit Paradise, about a surreal and violent revolution on a cruise ship.

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Guan Un is an Australian writer of Malaysian-Chinese heritage. He loves sentences, dumplings and sentences about dumplings. He has upcoming publications in khoreo, Translunar Travelers Lounge. And he lives in Sydney’s inner west, with his wife, kids and a dog named after a tiger. He can be found on Twitter @thisisguan.

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Rachel thinks that now is an excellent time for us all to be kind to each other. Yes, really. She spends her days excavating stories from the dirt, staring down a microscope, and daydreaming about her next bike ride.

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SIMON KURT UNSWORTH was born in Manchester in 1972 and has not yet given up the hope of finding that the world was awash with mysterious signs and portents that night. He lives in an old farmhouse miles from anywhere in the Lake District with his fiancée Rosie and assorted children, dogs and guinea pigs. His neighbours are mostly sheep and his office is an old cheese store, in which he writes essentially grumpy fiction (for which pursuit he was nominated for a 2008 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story). STRANGE GATEWAYS is his third collection, following 2011’s critically acclaimed QUIET HOUSES (from Dark Continents Publishing) and 2010’s LOST PLACES from Ash Tree Press. His stories have been published in a large number of anthologies including the World Fantasy Award-winning EXOTIC GOTHIC 4, TERROR TALES OF THE SEASIDE, WHERE THE HEART IS, AT EASE WITH THE DEAD, SHADES OF DARKNESS, HAUNTS: RELIQUARIES OF THE DEAD, and LOVECRAFT UNBOUND. He has appeared in Salt Publishing’s YEAR’S BEST FANTASY and five volumes of Stephen Jones’ THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR. He has a further collection due, the as-yet-unnamed collection that will launch the Spectral Press “Spectral Signature Editions” imprint. His novel THE SORROWFUL is due out from DoubleDay in the US and Del Ray in the UK in early 2015. Simon blogs here.

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