Author's Note

Oh dear.  It’s happened again.  Another speculative fiction magazine is biting the dust.  Realms of Fantasy will soon be no more.  Back in 2009, Warren Lapine and Tir Na Nog press saved it from the brink of extinction and purchased the magazine from Sovreign Media.  Warren and his talented staff did thier best, and turned out some fine issues, but alas, it was not enough.  The economy got worse and the subscriber list shrank past the level needed to keep things viable.

I always wanted to publish a story with RoF; it was one of my personal goals as a writer.  They have always been one of my favorite magazines as a reader.  Over the years I’ve sent them manuscripts and gotten pleasant rejection letters, occasionally with handwritten encouragement.  Now that they will be shuttering the magazine, it seems that small part of my writing dreams will never be realized.  I will miss this magazine.

You can read publisher Warren Lapine’s goodbye here.

I have a confession to make.  Sometimes I write horror.  There, I said it.

It’s taken me a long time to get to the place where I can admit that I write horror fiction.  For a long time I’ve had this mental block against all things horror because of the focus of mainstream horror – which is blood and guts and cheap shock value.  And that’s just gross, and even worse than that, it’s not terribly creative.

I’ve never been the type of writer who wrote happy, sunshine-filled kind of stuff.  I just find the darker side of things more interesting.  And sometimes that darker side does include things like blood and guts and zombies.  I won’t shy away from the story that needs to be told, but I’m also not putting that sort of thing in the story just because it might make the story sell better in the horror market.

So far, things seem to be working out well.  The Library of the Living Dead is publishing my short story, “Bad for Business,” in their Malicious Deviance anthology, and the fine folks over at Sam’s Dot Publications took my short story, “Haceldama,” for their Potter’s Field 4 anthology.  Both are pretty straight horror, complete with vicious fairies and zombie witches.

I won’t do splatter gore.  I won’t do blood porn.  But my name is Michelle D. Sonnier, and I write horror (sometimes).