Paradoxical Pets

by James Maxey (Editor), Cheryl Maxey (Editor), Kelsie Brumet (Illustrator)

Cats and dogs deserve acclaim, but dragons make great pets!
Love an octopus or polar bear and you'll have no regrets!
Not all pets are soft and cuddly... a dinosaur can be your buddy!
Spiders, sphinxes, parrots and kraken, all get to shine from front to back in...
PARADOXICAL PETS!

31 stories of weird and wonderful pets! Cover art and select interior illustrations by Kelsie Brumet!

Inside you'll find...
LOBSTERSAURUS Eric James Stone
FLUFFY PETS ARE BEST Holly Schofield
IF PRINCESSES WORE CONVERSE SNEAKERS Heather Santo
CHIMERALS Lena Ng
THE HOUSE OF TWENTY-THREE CATS Matt McHugh
NICOLE THE TIME TRAVELING PARAKEET Templeton Moss
MEGAN’S NOT AN UGLY DOG Linda Kay Hardie
OLAF AND LARS Kevin Lauderdale
EASY AS A BAG OF COOKIES Dawn Vogel
WAX EATER Jennifer M Zeiger
THE VAGABOND’S BABY Gregory L. Norris
THE GIRL, THE WYVERN, AND THE TALKING APE Matias Travieso-Diaz
THE FIRST RAT ON MARS L. R. Conti
TAKE ME TO YOUR LITTER BOX Peter Wood
SPREAD YOUR WINGS Laird Long
P IS FOR PET Beth Cato
QUEEN OF MARS California Lee
A HOME FOR MR. BINKY James N. Wood
ALISTAIR Jenny Blackford
DINOSAUR CLONES AND OTHER TEENAGE CONCERNS P.A. Cornell
BIRDS OF A FEATHER Thomas Canfield
EIGHT, TO THE EIGHTH Liam Hogan
DILEMMA WITH THE OMNIVORE Keyan Bowes
BLAME IT ON THE GHOSTS Annie Reed
TAKING FLIGHT Mike Lewis
THE WIZARD’S BOOK TASTES OF FLIGHT Jennifer Hudak
KEEPER OF THE GHOST SQUID Wendy Nikel
MY HOMEWORK ATE MY DOG Mike Murphy
MOLLY AND SQUIRT Vanessa MacLellan
HOW TO CONFRONT THE SPHINX HAUNTING YOUR GARDEN Alexei Collier
CHROMATOPHORIA Rebecca Demarest Panzer

Genres: Fantasy

315 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 22, 2022

About the author

I've been an avid reader since I first picked up a book. Luckily, I was within biking distance of three different libraries growing up. I was a skinny kid. If only I had maintained that link between biking and reading, I might be a skinny adult.

I'm also a writer. I wrote my first book as a kid, an adventure about pirates and ghosts. When I was a teenager, I used to write superhero adventures. Then I went to college and was steered toward writing "literature." It took me several years to shake that off, and today I write the sort of books I devoured by the shelf when I was sixteen, fast-paced fantasy, SF, and superhero adventures, which I use to explore deeper questions about life. My goal is to always be thought-provoking and always be fun.

I've had short stories in about a dozen anthologies and magazines. My novels to date are:

Nobody Gets the Girl

The Dragon Age trilogy
Bitterwood
Dragonforge
Dragonseed

Burn Baby Burn

The Dragon Apocalypse
Greatshadow (January 2012) -- A team of superpowered adventurers are recruited by the Church of the Book to extinguish the primal dragon of fire, Greatshadow.

Hush (July 2012) -- An effort to complete a quest for a fallen friend, the warrior woman Infidel stumbles onto a plot to kill Glorious, the primal dragon of the sun, and plunge the world into permanent cold and darkness, the elemental domain of the dragon Hush.

Witchbreaker (January 2013) -- A young witch named Sorrow has lost control of her magic after tapping into the spirit of Rott, the primal dragon of decay. Her desperate quest to save what remains of her humanity leads to an uneasy alliance with an amnesiatic warrior who might be the legendary champion of the church known as the Witchbreaker. But can there combined powers prevail when they trigger the wrath of Tempest, the primal dragon of storms?

Reviews

[Beth Cato]

Not a review. Includes my reprint story "P is for Pet."