In the new short story anthology The Chaos Clock: Tales Of Cosmic Aether (paperback, Kindle), writers including James Chambers, Jody Lynn Nye, and Jeffrey Lyman mix together the seemingly disparate genres of steampunk and cosmic horror.
In the following email interview, Chaos Clock editor Danielle Ackley-McPhail discusses how this anthology came together.
Under normal circumstances, I cannot abide the “throw it all away” philosophy of Marie Kondo. I just like my stuff too much.
But sometimes, decluttering can be good.
Which brings me to writer Danielle Ackley-McPhail who — as she explains in the following email interview — put together her new steampunk short story collection Echoes Of The Divine And Other Steampunk Stories (paperback, Kindle) when she realized she, “…had a lot of short stories … just sitting around cluttering up my hard drive.”
In science fiction, subgenres often give birth to other subgenres. Solarpunk, for instance, begat lunarpunk. It’s also how we got dieselpunk out of steampunk. But what exactly is dieselpunk? That’s one of many questions I put to Danielle Ackley-McPhail and John L. French, co-editors of the new short story anthology Grease Monkeys: The Heart And Soul Of Dieselpunk (paperback, Kindle), in the following email interview.
As the co-founder and editor for eSpec Books, Danielle Ackley-McPhail has overseen all of the entries in the Systema Paradoxa series of novellas about cryptids. But now, after eleven previous entries, she’s taking matters into her own hands with her own installment, The Play Of Light (paperback, Kindle).
In the following email interview, she discusses where she got the idea for this urban fantasy thriller, and how working on the other Systema Paradoxa novellas influenced it.
For years, people have written novels based on such table-top role-playing games as Arkham Horror, Twilight Imperium, and others. But in the following email interview with writer Danielle Ackley-McPhail, she explains how her military sci-fi novel Daire’s Devils (paperback, Kindle) came out of writing stories based on a game that isn’t out yet.
The folk tale “Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves” is perhaps the most famous of the One Thousand And One Nights stories. And like all classic folk tales, “Ali Baba” has a universal appeal, even when told in a very different way.
Which brings us to Baba Ali And The Clockwork Djinn (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), a steampunk faerie tale co-authored by Danielle Ackley-McPhail and Day Al-Mohamed.
With a new version being released by Danielle’s eSpec Books, I present the following email interview, in which they discuss what inspired and influenced this retelling, as well as what they changed for this new edition.
In first contact stories, writers explore what might happen when we first meet aliens. But in the new sci-fi short story anthology Footprints In The Stars (paperback, Kindle), the focus is instead on what might happen when we first get evidence that aliens exist.
In the following email interview, Footprints editor Danielle Ackley-McPhail talks about how this collection came together, what subgenres of sci-fi are included, and why it features a bunch of writers with Star Trek novels in their oeuvres.