VISITING is a collection of 12 stories, fantasy (F) and science fiction (SF), 11 of which have been previously published in magazines ("Space and Time," "The Palace of Reason," "Speculon," "Aoife's Kiss," "Delirium," "Alternate Realities," "Glyph," "Cyberthirst," and "Night to Dawn"): 1) THE WAITING ROOM (F) - a young man in a wheel chair, an old ex-businessman, and a girl straight from her prom wearing a plastic crown meet in the after-life and 2 recapitulations result -- of civil society and of personal character development. Actually a moving story. 2) STATEMENT (F) - a situation arises when criminals want to use a young woman who dreams items to her and, so, kidnap her. 3) NEW WORLD ORDER (SF) - the war in America started over a drought, and then the rest of the world got involved; but this is the effort of one young woman to survive all the different sides. 4) RAIN (SF) - a young woman, a spy, trained to be a honey trap is bio-chemically augmented, resulting in some devastating unintended consequences for anyone who gets close to her. 5) FLIGHT (F) - a dream about flying. 6) Purgatory (vampire) - how might a vampire escape her fate, or does she embrace it and wait for the light of day? 7) EYE OF THE BEHOLDER (SF) - Adamina is a "britney," a Hollycrat rather than a Repugnant, of course, living by the Reiner Rules, and now seeking a job to get some "real world" experience before she starts endorsing Presidential candidates. 8) ENCHANTMENT (F) - an enchantment is freed to make her way in the world, until she's recognized for what she is. 9) WOULD YOU LIKE TO ENJOY LIFE? (SF) - a humorous advertisement for a new/old technique to make you happy! 10) LILITH (F) - the wife of Satan, condemned to wander the earth, helps free her sister, The Shekinah, from a blood-stained Nazi amulet, and then appeals to her sister to break the bonds holding Lilith on earth. 11) WHAT DID IT TELL YOU ABOUT YOURSELF? (F) - a patient tries to figure out with his therapist what is real. 12) THE GARDENS OF EDEN (SF) - longstory appearing in print here for the first time - a "Christian" settlement on a distant planet is attacked and an ex-Marine, retired to an independent weather station on the same planet, and his wife, who was essentially ex-communicated from that settlement and then set up by the senior with the ex-Marine so the girl could go live a life, come to the rescue ... with their children, including the little girl known as 'Hard Corp'.
About the Author: I go back a long ways. I was born in 1950 and started sending out my stories in 1964. My first published stories were in the early 1970's. In the eighties, I placed hundreds of poems and more "literary" stories, reviews, and essays. In the 90's my love for fantasy and science fiction finally started paying off as I started selling genre stories (which included horror and suspense). That was selling for money! The poetry and literary stories for all those years paid in copies in all but two token payment cases. I've studied under a lot of good people in college and in workshops, two that gave me a lot of encouragement at the CSU Imagination Workshop in 1999 were Tim Powers and Karen Joy Fowler. Still, it's easy to get distracted in life -- and I did. I worked on a couple of novel manuscripts and stopped submitting stories to write "my novel" ... and then time passed (like Baen books keeping the manuscript a year, asking for changes, and keeping it for another eight months before passing on it). I've been a musician and song writer performing in garages and coffee shops, painter, an award winning photographer, computer programmer, as well as a farm laborer, tree trimmer, dish washer, house painter, business owner, store manager, retail supervisor and on and on over the years. And now I'm old and settled in and back at it again. My influences over the years, meaning the authors I've read and re-read, are Heinlein, Niven, Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorcock, Robert Asprin, Jordan, Goodkind, Martin, Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts, David Feintuch, David Drake, Lois McMaster Bujold, Pournelle, De Lint, Joel Rosenberg; but especially female fantasy authors, such as Elizabeth Moon, Patricia C. Wrede, Tamora Pierce, Anne McCaffrey, Sherwood Smith, Jane Lindskold, and Kristen Britain most recently. A lot of the stories I had published in the nineties and two thousands I wrote under the pen name Beverly Bonnie O'Neill, writing about heroines like the fantasy writers I was mostly reading rather than heroes. Visiting is a collection of a dozen of those Bev stories.