Before you read about me and my boring life I have something important to say. The following authors have written some of the best stories I've read on this site but suffer from a chronic shortage of reviews. So before you look at my random rants below please look them up and give them a comment, because they deserve it.

Verilligo, for Gospel Story, which is funny and pokes holes in most western ideology I can think of.

The Wallflower, for The Heretic, brilliant for making a world so similar and yet so different to our own.

Teenagezombie, for Qua Scelestus es Sanctus, believable characters, suspense and just hinting at what might happen next.

SavageMouse, for Monsters, still the best tory I've read on this site for pure quality of writing.

There are loads of others I should mention, but I haven't either because the stories were one-shots, or because they have all the reviews they're likely to need. Anyway those four people are truely talented and I hope you'll read what they have to say. I rant on way too much...

If anyone is interested, Yemaya is a Yoruba (Nigerian) goddess of the sea and the moon.

My stories:

Monks of Tiber comes somewhere in between being 'comic-ish' and being fantasy, I'm not sure which. That one came from a holiday in Canada when it was invented to relive boredom on a very long car journey.

That feeling you get when the wind is changing, is definately a one off. I lived in Saudi Arabia for most of my life and although I'm not patriotic (it's hard to be when you come from everywhere or nowhere, and if you go back far enough we're all Africans) May be this will show you what it's like to live there.

Mother Africa is my very poor attempt at poetry, now you will understand why I don't review poems, it's because I can't write them.

Pandemonium is erm...pandemonium. It losely comes from the thought that heaven has grown so fanatical that virtually everyone goes to hell. I wondered what hell would turn out like if that was the case, and this is what I turned up with. Most of the characters are based on stories my friends have told me about things their families/friends have done, Crisis is based on a man from the RAF that my physics teacher knew (who had the same nickname).

Sephy and Wave are more or less serious.

Sephy came from reading too many well written crime/horror stories (Hanibal, Puppets, etc) and doubts about what sanity really means. Most of all I think she came from a room, a small old basement room with whitewashed walls that you had to crawl through a small tunnel to get to. She grew in that little room, fleshed out if you will but I have a feeling she was there for a long time before that.

Wave came from religious extreams (Christian parents in a strict Muslim country, Wican friends, unhealthy interest in mythology), some very good RS teachers, philosophers, and a prep talk about the Quantum Theory, String Theory and all the other wonderful accidents that make life possible by a slightly off-the-wall sciencist. I think that any message in it is too much like something from The Life of Pi, but perhaps it's a good story.