DOUGLAS SMITH | Writing the Fantastic

I'd posted back in April that I'd appeared on a very fun podcast out of Australia called The True and the Fictional. 

Well, I was invited back in early September (so I guess the first appearance was deemed sufficiently entertaining). That episode is now up for viewing on their YouTube channel here.

Once again, I'm interviewed by Jamie Bryden, the resident podcaster, and Ryan Haigh, the resident reader. They start with some ice breaker questions which are all a hoot: 

• Dwarves or Elves?
• What is my least favourite trope in books or movies?
• What animal would you want as a talking companion?
• What book (not your own) would you most like to see made into a movie?
• If Dr. Emmett Brown showed up with the Delorean, what would you take back in time to confuse an archaelogist?

Then we talk about my writing for a while, including a deep dive into my new how-to book, Brick by Brick: How to Build a Story. We end with a game they play with guests where I have to come up with two story pitches based on extremely random prompts they provide. 

Give it a watch. It was much fun to do, and I think you’ll find it fun to watch.

Tar Vol did a recent review of The Year's Best Canadian Fantasy & SF, Vol. 2, even though that anthology came out two years ago and contained the best stories from 2023 by Canadian authors.

Aside from the reviewer's kind comments on my story in the antho (see below), what really caught my eye was the following bit (emphasis in the text is mine):

"As an American reviewer, I don’t tend to have many country-specific awards at the front of my mind, but this anthology has every single English-language finalist for the 2024 Aurora Award for best Canadian SF&F Short Fiction, and I’d take it in an absolute walk over the theoretically-worldwide Hugo shortlist for Short Story from the same year."

That was a pleasant surprise, to hear an American reviewer say they prefer the stories in this antho over the Hugo finalists that year. 

And I will immodestly mention what they had to say about my entry in the anthology:  

"And one thing I knew going into the anthology is that the quality at the top was not going to be a problem. If I Should Fall Behind by Douglas Smith was one of the best stories I read all year, and it absolutely holds up, even on multiple rereads. The narrative voice catches the eye and generates easy immersion, and the story itself is poignant and heart-wrenching. 

"One thing I often find missing in reprint anthologies is the story that’s worth the price of admission—with so much fiction being available elsewhere, why spend the money on this book in particular? But with “If I Should Fall Behind,” Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, Volume Two passes that test with flying colors. ... it’s tremendous."

Very cool. Besides this anthology, "If I Should Fall Behind" also appears in my latest collection, Borderlanz: Tales From the Edges, as the closing story.

Well, I thought that I'd caught up with posting my anthology appearances from recent months, but I just found another one, this time from a late 2025 publication. 

Strange Legacy 2025:Creature Feature contained stories each featuring, you guessed it, a fantastic creature, either from legend or from the author's imagination.

My contribution to the antho was the urban fantasy tale, "Out of the Light," which first appeared in Dark Wisdom Magazine in 2007. My creature is a shapeshifter, but a very different one from any you've ever encountered in other stories.

Every society around the world has shapeshifter legends. The kallikantzari of Greece. The loup-garou of France. The kitsune of Japan. But in those legends, all of those creatures inhabit the forests, the wilderness, the jungles, where they can blend with the animals of their wild habitat.

The idea for my story came from wondering what kind of shapeshifter might be able to exist and hide in a large city, an urban wilderness, so to speak.

Click the cover at the right for buying links.

Yet another recent anthology appearance for one of my stories. Street Magic IV is the next entry into the excellent urban fantasy anthology series from Camden Park Press that invites you to step into the hidden supernatural ecosystem operating just beneath the surface of our cities and daily routines.

In this captivating volume, fifteen urban fantasy storytellers pit their characters against real-world issues in settings both arcane and all too real.

My entry is "Going Down to Lucky Town," another Springsteen-inspired title and tale, this one dealing with an inveterate gambler and con man who can "see" luck but can't see how to repair his relationship with his daughter. This story first appeared in my collection, Impossibilia, and is my third appearance in this series.

Click on the cover image to be taken to buying links.

My new writing craft book, Brick by Brick: How to Build a Story, is available now from all major retailers and in all popular formats: ebook, trade paperback, and hardcover.

From the book blurb:

Most writing craft books, courses, and workshops focus on the tools for being a writer and how to use them: dialog, setting, pacing, plot, openings, exposition, point-of-view. And so on.

And on and on and on.

Their aim is to add another tool, or maybe even a set of tools, to your writer's toolbox.

The problem with that approach is the vast gulf in knowledge between having your toolbox filled with tools and applying those tools to create a story.

Those craft books are the equivalent of telling a rookie construction worker, "Here's how to use a hammer, saw, level, screwdrivers, band saw, power drill, etc. Got that? Great! Now go build a house."

In this book, Douglas Smith, a five-time award-winning author described by Library Journal as "one of Canada's most original writers of speculative fiction," takes a different approach.

In these pages, Doug will show how to design that house so that you can build it. You'll learn how to create a blueprint for your story idea to take you from inspiration to story structure, a structure you can then build, brick by brick.

Or rather, scene by scene.

As an extra bonus, the book includes the full version of "Scream Angel," my award-winning story that is the source of most of the examples I use in the book.

If that sounds like a book that might help you on your writing journey, then click here to order Brick by Brick from your favorite retailer. Available in ebook, trade paperback, and hardcover.

I have another reprinted story in a yet another new anthology, Horrorific Tales Vol 5 (Mad Science), this one, as you probably guessed, filled with SF/Horror tales each featuring a mad scientist. From the blurb:

"The human creature has always been a curious one. Sometimes that curiosity can turn to an all-consuming obsession. Sometimes the line between whether we could or whether we should become blurred."

My contribution is my Aurora-nominated and Poe-inspired tale, "State of Disorder," which first appeared in Amazing Stories and resulted in me being a finalist for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer wa-a-a-a-y back when.

Click on the cover image to see buying links.

The recently released SF anthology, Not Like Us,  contains eleven tales of alien encounters, set up by this quote by Werner von Braun: 

'The Sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that that we are the only living things within that enormous immensity.'

My entry is my award-winning novelette, "Scream Angel," which, by the way, provides the bulk of my examples in my new writing guide, Brick by Brick, which was released just yesterday.

Click on the cover image to find buying links for the antho.

If you're a fan of flash fiction, you should check out both Merganser Magazine and this book, their first anthology of flash stories.

The book contains 44 (!) stories, ranging from mainstream to SF to Fantasy to the undefinable. 

My story is "The Stopover" and first appeared in the inaugural issue of the magazine and is the shortest story I've ever written. It is included in my recent collection, Borderlanz: Tales From the Edges.

If you read this story, you're going to say, "Ah! This is his COVID story.” Nope. I wrote this in September 2019, a full four months before any pandemic rumours surfaced. I wasn’t being prescient. My go-to apocalypse trigger in my writing has often been a plague.

Click on the cover to the right to go to a buying link for the antho.

This is a fun one: SF stories based in the Earth Sciences and aimed at YA / middle grade students. 

Each story is accompanied by questions on the science used in the tale, together with steps to assist the student in answering those questions. 

My entry is "Jigsaw" which uses plate tectonics as the heart of the mystery the heroine solves on an alien planet in a race to save her shipmates.

The story originally appeared in the anthology Odyssey (Wonder Zone #4), which, in a similar vein, was aimed at grade 7-8 students and was based on the Ontario school science curriculum at the time. The book was intended to be used by both English and Science teachers to connect the two subjects. 

Click on the cover to the right to find buying links for the antho.