Interview: Nathaniel Lee
Nathaniel Lee puts words in various orders. Periodically people give him money for this. The correlation is weak at best, but present. He lives somewhat unwillingly in North Carolina with his wife, son, and obligatory cats, where he maintains a vague sort of career that provides sufficient money to continue his writing and board game habits. Coincidentally, he is the Assistant Editor of both Escape Pod and the Drabblecast (the posts were each offered independently and without knowledge of the other). As a result, he has read enough stories about penises, serial killers, and time travel. He is also an assistant editor for the humorous anthology series Unidentified Funny Objects. Check out his blog at Mirrorshards where he does Very Short Stories. Exactly 100 words. No more. No fewer. Every day.
Time for my yearly review, Yippee! Last year I wrote a very long analysis on the winning story and another that I really, and of the authors that wrote them. A few took my comments as needlessly personal. I regret that. I was only attempting to illustrate the first impressions I had of Jordan Lapp and Emery Huang, which were swept aside when I read their stories. I by no means meant that either of them acted or did anything wrong. In fact, I think every author is entitled to a little self-promotion and should take full advantage of their fifteen minutes of fame in hopes of stretching it out into a life-long center stage. 
The central character of “After the Final Sunset, Again” is a creature called the Phoenix, who is a kind of demi-god that exists to further humanity’s goals from the grandest scale right down to the personal level. Every morning a new Phoenix is birthed from the ashes of its predecessor, assembling a personality by copying and internalizing memories from surrounding humans, and is then sent into the world to accomplish specific goals. On this particular day, one of the humans who is “donating” memories dies at the moment of the Phoenix’s conception, thus giving her a sense of her own mortality, something no other Phoenix has ever had to confront.
K. D. Wentworth has reached an almost divine state in the eyes of many aspirants; especially those who participate in the quarterly Writers and Illustrators of the Future contest. K. D. is editor of the anthology, and first-reader for the writing portion of the contest. She reads, or at least starts to read, every entry that comes through the doors of Author Services, Inc; a colossal task that she completes not once but four times per year.
We have, for example, a story that was very popular with our readers last year, Elena Gleason’s Erased, which I was just looking at again. That story on one level is about someone’s boyfriend who is invisible and what do you do when you’re confronted with an invisible boyfriend. But on the other hand, at a deeper level, it’s about what do you do in a relationship when the other person is vanishing.