New Release -- No Humans Allowed

An anthology called No Humans Allowed, edited by John Helfers, has just released. I have a story in it called "The Scent of Murder." It's an SF mystery where an alien troubleshooter has a problem. The Terran captain of a trading ship has suffered a catastrophic fluid rupture and died while docked at an Yzantris station. Thinker of Useful Ideas Yazvoras is on a deadline to figure out who murdered the human before the Terran ambassador claims the crime scene and has it removed. The time limit is completely unreasonable, but aliens are often incomprehensible. And as the Yzantris say, the world is. No Humans Allowed is part of the Fiction River anthology series by WMG Publishing.

Humans prove great fodder for fiction. But what about the universe of possibilities offered by the nonhuman protagonist? The eighteen daring humans of Fiction River’s latest volume explore just that. From a goblin who must choose whether to risk everything for love to a heroic rat adventuring at sea to sentient underpants (yes, underpants), these nonhuman tales demonstrate why Adventures Fantastic says: “If you haven’t checked out Fiction River yet, you should. There’s something for everyone.”

This volume contains….

“In the Beginnings” by Annie Reed
“At His Heels a Stone” by Lee Allred
“In the Empire of Underpants” by Robert T. Jeschonek
“The Sound of Salvation” by Leslie Claire Walker
“Goblin in Love” by Anthea Sharp
“Slime and Crime” by Michèle Laframboise
“Always Listening” by Louisa Swann
“Here I Will Dance” by Stefon Mears
“Rats at Sea” by Brenda Carre
“Sense and Sentientability” by Lisa Silverthorne
“When a Good Fox Goes to War” by Kim May
“The Game of Time” by Felicia Fredlund
“The Scent of Murder” by Angela Penrose
“Still-Waking Sleep” by Dayle A. Dermatis
“Inhabiting Sweetie” by Dale Hartley Emery
“The Legend of Anlahn” by Eric Kent Edstrom
“Sheath Hopes” by Thea Hutcheson
“We, The Ocean” by Alexandra Brandt

PS -- "Empire of Underpants" is great! :D

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Hope Everyone Had a Great Valentine's Day

I had a pretty good V-Day, although my husband and I didn't go out or anything. We had dinner and watched TV while cuddling on the couch, and that pretty much did it for us. :)

I made a chocolate cake, which I don't do very often. The cake recipe, from a Betty Crocker cookbook, is very yummy, nice and moist. The chocolate fudge frosting, which I've done once before, tastes great, but the texture is less than optimal. :/ The recipe tells you to be very careful not to add too much milk (the last thing you do, while beating the mass of powdered sugar/butter/vanilla/chocolate), that too much milk will make your frosting soupy, that you should add just a few drops at a time so you don't overshoot and end up with frosting too loose to spread.

Just F everyone's I, that's not really a problem with the Betty Crocker Chocolate Fudge Frosting recipe. [wry smile] I ended up adding at least twice as much milk as the recipe called for, possibly three times as much (I wish now I'd kept track) and I still ended up with frosting thick enough that it was tearing up my cake. :/ By the time I stopped mixing and started spreading, it looked pretty darned soft, but I guess that was just in comparison to how it'd looked six or ten tablespoons of milk earlier. [laugh]

Frosting the cake was frustrating, but it did end up tasting pretty yummy, so it wasn't a total failure. And the husband liked it too, so I'll take that as a win for this year's Valentine's Day. :)

In writing news, I did proofs recently on a new story, "The Scent of Murder," which will be coming out at the end of March in the anthology No Humans Allowed. The theme of the anthology is inhuman protagonists, and the editor, John Helfers, meant really not human. Characters who had been human but transformed, like vampires or werewolves or zombies, frex., weren't allowed. I wrote a murder mystery, where an alien works with a ship's AI to solve the murder of a human. More deets when the book is available.

Keep warm!

Angie