B. Morris Allen

I’m a biochemist turned activist turned lawyer turned foreign aid consultant, and frequently wonder whether it’s time for a new career. When I can, I make my home on the Oregon coast. In between journeys, I edit Metaphorosis magazine and workon my own speculative stories of love and disaster. My dark fantasy novel Susurrus came out in 2017.

Technicalities…

• Serial comma? Of course.
• Punctuation within quotation marks? Not when you don’t have to. It only went within the quotes to begin with to make the text look nicer – there’s no logic to it.
• Ending a sentence with a preposition? Who cares?
• Two spaces after a period? Break the habit. It’s hard, but you just don’t need them.
• Adverbs? Sure, they can be overused. Anything can. But I don’t hold with the modern fad of abolishing all adverbs all the time. Why refuse to use a perfectly good part of speech? Adverbs are useful; it’s just a question of moderation and appropriate use. So, if someone tells you to cut an adverb, they may be right. If they tell you to cut all the adverbs, move on to a more thoughtful reviewer.

You can contact me here.

Metaphorosis

Projects from Metaphorosis Publishing and B. Morris Allen.

Occasional anthologies and novels.	Beautifully written speculative fiction, every week.	Reviews of current and classic SFF.	Discussion of science fiction and fantasy topics.	Speculative stories of love and disaster.

Hivernaculum is a set of static links that nonetheless tells a story of alien life.

C B B tells one story at varying levels of detail, depending on how long the reader has available. Because the sections are short, and I thought readers might read several, I also tell a slightly different story at each level, while staying within the same basic facts. Finally, for those that read the whole sequence, there are a couple of extra sections at the end to round things off.

“Oh no, not again” was written to explain one of the funnier and more mysterious parts in a popular writer’s story.  Except that once I’d finished and gone to tidy up some details, I found he’d provided his own answer in the only book I hadn’t read.  If you don’t get it, don’t panic! It’s an inside joke.

The Orange Donkey is the first story I can recall writing, when I was about six.  You have to be really interested to want to read this.