Faux Paws

by Piers Anthony, Matthew Brady, Gary Clifton, Craig Crawford, Chris Doerner

Overview

Sometimes, life can be taken at face value; other times, there is more than meets the eye. Is your house pet simply an average cat, or is she a witch's familiar eagerly searching for her companion? Was that animal you encountered in the woods just a bear, or was it a mysterious cryptid of ancient lore? Be mindful of how you approach the animals in this collection of tales, because jumping to conclusions may prove to be a faux pas!

Featuring all original stories by:
Piers Anthony
Matthew Brady
Gary Clifton
Craig Crawford
Chris Doerner
Angelique Fawns
Ashleigh Hatter
Fiona M Jones
Nicola Kapron
Connor Kuntz
Ronald Linson
Rhiannon Lotze
Muri McCage
Rachel Nussbaum
Deidre J Owen
Gary Power
John B. Rosenman

"Faux Paws" is a Mannison Minibook flash fiction anthology published by Mannison Press, LLC.

CONTENT WARNING: Some of the stories in this collection contain depictions of violence, gore, death, and murder. Discretion is advised.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940166109347
Publisher:	Mannison Press, LLC
Publication date:	10/12/2023
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	938,937
File size:	234 KB

About the Author

Piers Anthony, whose web site is www.hipiers.com, has been writing and and publishing since 1963, with 139 books and counting. He was on the New York Times bestseller list in the 1980s with 21 titles. He and his wife of 52 years live on their small tree farm in central Florida, which resemble his fantasy land of Xanth.

Matthew Brady is a young writer currently living in Nashville, Tennessee. He attended Belmont University, where he studied writing and literature before earning his bachelor's degree. He is the author of four novelettes and one novella through Mannison Press, with his shorter works appearing in various anthologies. His short story, "Midnight Oil," was published in the second volume of Nosetouch Press's "The Asterisk Anthology" (2018), where it won first prize in the Southern Gothic genre.

Craig got into writing in junior high school because of a lifelong buddy. His interests in horror started with his mom who loved all things creepy. He read and watched a lot of horror growing up and, adding YouTube and small presses to the mix, it seemed like a good idea to try and write some of his own. Craig has currently published thirteen short stories, including a novella, from a variety of presses. He has three more due out including a serial. You can learn more about his publications and what makes him tick at craiglcrawfordbooks.com.

Chris Doerner has been at different times in his life a consultant for folks with disabilities, a free-lance videographer, an Indie film producer, and most recently, an antiques and collectibles auctioneer. He vowed two years ago to return to creative writing and has been hacking away at it ever since.

Angelique Fawns is a journalist and speculative fiction author. She started her career travelling the world and writing about the most bizarre people. Now she interviews publishers and authors on horrortree.com and Mythaxis.com. (Also some wonderfully bizarre people.) Check out her podcast READ ME A NIGHTMARE wherever you like listening best. You can find her short stories in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and DreamForge Anvil to name a few of many magazines and anthologies. Learn more at www.fawns.ca

Benjamin Michael Greene lives in America's Heartland, where he spends his days doting upon his daughter and two sons. Aside from creative writing, he also enjoys discovering new board games, gorging himself every Taco Tuesday, and getting lost (on purpose, to his wife's ire) in bookstores.

Benjamin has a number of other works published under the pseudonym Ashleigh Hatter. You can learn about some of these other publication by visiting the Smashwords profile here: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/AshleighHatter

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. She writes very short things, not yet collected together into one volume. You can read Fiona's published work through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter or Thinkerbeat.

Nicola Kapron is a Canadian student who has just finished her fourth year of Digital Media Studies and Creative
Writing at Vancouver Island University. She's contributed poetry to Portal Magazine and non-fiction to Rebel Mountain Press's upcoming anthology Disabled Voices and Mannison Press's upcoming anthology Little Girl Lost: Thirteen Tales of Youth Disrupted. She lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia, with a hoard of books—mostly fantasy and horror—and an extremely fluffy cat.

Hi!

I'm Connor Kuntz! I am a Canadian writer of mostly horror, fantasy and sci-fi. I graduated from the University of Waterloo in 2018 with an honours degree in Recreation and Sports Business, but I found that I enjoyed writing stories more than studying. I am currently working on a horror novel and a fantasy series.

My short story, O Sister, Where Art Thou, published by Mannison Press as one of their signature minibooks is out now! It can be purchased on Smashwords and on Amazon.

Born and raised in western Connecticut, Ronald Linson now lives in New York City. He earned a degree in Computer Information Systems from Baruch College of the City University of New York, and has found that he prefers writing to database management.

He writes mainly science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but has been known to dabble in other genres. Many of his short stories and poems can be found at http://www.bewilderingstories.com.

In November 2017, he won first place in the On the Premises Mini-Short Story Contest #35, under his real name, Morgan Schafer.
It can be found here: https://onthepremises.com/minis/mini_35/

He has a number of projects in the works, including a YA fantasy novel and collaborations on a children's series and a short story, "Overworked: A Legal Fiction," with Deidre J Owen.

Rhiannon Lotze is a Canadian author from Windsor, Ontario, which means she's 97% maple syrup and 3% Timbit. She's been a writer (and huge nerd) since she was nine years old and writing her first Star Wars fanfiction, although she didn't know it was called "fanfiction" at the time. Her first short story, The Vampire with Braces, was published when she was 13 years old in Narwhal Magazine. Since then, she has gone on to win multiple Windsor-based writing competitions for short stories, including "Offline," and "Golf with the Gods." Her short story "Barrens and Brine," is soon to be published in the Little Girl Lost anthology from Mannison Press.

Muri McCage has been published in Analog and several Pocket Books anthologies. She recently moved to the beach in California and enjoys calling the Pacific Ocean her front yard. She is addicted to ice cream, screenwriting competitions, and her husband, but not necessarily in that order.

Rachel Nussbaum is a writer and artist from the Big Island of Hawaii (and recent California transplant). She writes horror, science fiction and urban fantasy--basically anything with monsters. Rachel's short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies including Night Terrors III from Blood Bound Books and The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk from Running Press.

Rachel likes her coffee at all times of the day, loves animals, and hopes one day to write and illustrate her own novels and comic books.

Deidre J Owen was born in Lexington, Kentucky, but aside from a stint in the Canadian Maritimes she has spent a majority of her time in the Tampa Bay area in Florida. A versatile writer, Deidre has taken joy in a variety of genres including science fiction, weird fiction, speculative fiction, horror, humor, children's books, and Christian themes. She has a published children's picture book series called "The Heaven Zoo" as well as a number of short stories, novelettes, and novellas.

In 2019, she partnered with editor and fellow indie author Ronald Linson to establish independent publishing house Mannison Press. Specializing in short-form fiction, Mannison Press publishes in a wide variety of genres of varying lengths, including flash fiction, short stories, novelettes, and novellas.

Although formerly a certified veterinary technician by trade (with a quirky history of random interests), Deidre is currently loving life with her husband in Lithia, Florida, as a writer, publisher, and work-from-home mother to the couple’s young daughter.

Gary Power is a UK based author who lives in Sussex with his wife, a cat that stares (a lot) and a tortoise, Phinneas, that bites (a lot). In his professional life he is a radiographer specialising in neurosciences. His weird, wonderful and often shocking short stories have appeared in popular anthologies such as When Graveyards Yawn (Crowswing Books), several volumes of ‘The Black Book of Horror’ (Mortbury Press), Jeani Rector’s, The Horror Zine for which he was featured author of the month, and the ‘Years Best Body Horror 2017’.
Gary has been a member of the British Fantasy Society since 2006 and attended World Fantasycon 2013 in Brighton where he participated in a memorable signing for the BFS nominated Tenth Black Book of Horror.
He has been shortlisted for the Ian St James short story award and is a registered Amazon author. He is also a member of Allen Ashley’s ‘Clockhouse London Writers’ group.
For more information and a rogue's gallery visit www.garygpower.com

John was an English professor at Norfolk State University where he designed and taught a course in how to write Science fiction and Fantasy. He is a former Chairman of the Board of the Horror Writers Association and has published 300 stories in places such as Weird Tales, Whitley Strieber’s Aliens, Fangoria, Galaxy, The Age of Wonders, and Hot Blood. John has published two dozen books, including SF action-adventure novels such as Beyond Those Distant Stars and Speaker of the Shakk (Mundania Press), A Senseless Act of Beauty and Alien Dreams (Crossroad Press), and the Inspector of the Cross series and The Amazing Worlds of John B. Rosenman (MuseItUp Publishing).