Holiday Hell

by Laura Roberts, Dmitry Blizniuk, Linda M. Crate

December. It’s never truly “cold” in San Diego, particularly after you’ve lived with the ice and snow of a Canadian (or even a Chicagoan) winter. But we did have a frost warning yesterday, and the temperatures do get chilly enough to warrant a hoodie and long pants, rather than the southern California uniform of shorts and T-shirts.

Celebrating the Winter Solstice seems all the more odd when you’ve just come off a week of 80-degree weather. But yes, our nights are just as long as yours, despite the lack of white stuff on the ground.

For our “Holiday Hell” issue, we pondered which holidays to include, and have come up with a bit of a stew. While most of the stories here focus on Christmas, with its inevitable corporate whoring and mass merchandising push through the end of the year, a few of the stories we found in our submissions pile took religion to task on other important days of the year. Some critique forced family interactions, more than mall mobs, while others address the more personal kinds of hell we manage to create for ourselves throughout the year.

Surprisingly, no one mentioned fruitcake’s hellish hold on the holiday season. Equally not one submission took up the torch of Festivus for the rest of us! (Maybe next year?)

In any case, we are thrilled to present our December issue for your entertainment this holiday season. As 2017 winds down, we hope these stories, poems and bite-sized reviews offer you solace in a sea of sameness, a respite from drudgery, and a bit of a twist on the “Happy Holidays” themes being repeated ad nauseam across the Internet.

FULL CONTRIBUTORS LIST


Susan Emshwiller
Paul Garrett
Rebecca Gomez Farrell
Sarah Hutchins
Evan McMurry
Laura Roberts
Karen Thrower
Teagan Walsh-Davis


Dmitry Blizniuk, translated by Sergey Gerasimov
Linda M. Crate
John Grochalski

92 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 22, 2017

About the author

Laura Roberts writes travel themed contemporary romance and short women’s fiction, with steamier stories under the pen name Laure L'Amour. She currently lives in Sacramento, California with her artist husband and their literary kitty, Percy. When she’s not writing, she can be found editing manuscripts for indie authors, transcribing reality TV (her day job), watching rom-coms, testing chocolate recipes, or searching for more typewriters to add to her collection.

Dabbling in both factual and fictional genres, Laura has penned 27 books for adults, including the alphabetical travel guides Montreal from A to Z and San Diego from A to Z, the offbeat writing guides NaNoWriMo: A Cheater's Guide and Confessions of a 3-Day Novelist, a collection of capital city meet-cutes called Sacramento Love , and various steamy romances under the pen name Laure L’Amour, as well as three nonfiction career guides for young adults (Careers in Gaming, Careers If You Like Music and Careers in Digital Media) published by ReferencePoint Press. She has also contributed shorter works to the following anthologies: SDW/EG's 5th edition of The Guilded Pen; Diane Lee's nonfiction collection, The Secret Lives of Writers; the cancer charity anthology Stardust, Always; Book Lovers: Sexy Stories from Under the Covers; Ironology 2014: The Iron Writer Championship Series, and Drabble Harvest #14: Extraterrestrial Reincarnation.

In addition to her writing, Laura is also the editor of the poetry collection Haiku for Lovers, and the ethnomusicological anthology Everything I Need to Know About Love I Learned from Pop Songs, and the founder of the literary magazine Black Heart.