I've been trying to crack the pro writing markets off and on for about five years now. This past March, I sold my first novel. When I announced the sale at my local Romance Writers of America chapter (which I'd joined only a couple of months earlier), one person (a multi-published author with Harlequin and Mills and Boon) remarked, "Wow, that was fast!"

Not really. It took me two years to write the novel, and two years to get it published. But when I mentioned that to this particular author, she looked amazed and said, "But I thought getting e-published was easy!"

All night she dreamt of blood. The crackle and crunch of bones made her uneasy.

Morgan gasped and kicked until she was awake. Her head throbbed. She smelled like sweat and fear and there was something stuck between her teeth. She pried at it unsuccessfully with her fingernails. Frustrated, she threw the sheets aside and ran into the bathroom. She grabbed a bit of dental floss. The thin piece of white string slid back and forth. Morgan let out a sigh of relief when she felt whatever it was come loose.

She felt large piece of skin between her thumb and index finger. Only it had…ridges. She frowned.

That’s strange.

A disembodied voice of an unidentifiable gender demands the visitor’s identity.

‘At this moment,’ he lied, ‘I am Q’ab-El.’

Traversing the threshold of the first portal, visitor and disciples enter a hallucinatory extravaganza: simultaneously, a synthesised acceleration in the speed of light renders them invisible to its inhabitants.

He thinks He has me this time. As always, He underestimates me.

The happy couple never knew what befell them. One minute they dance to their joyous, ear-stabbing music, kissing their smiling families, the bride’s white gown billowing around her as she skips from groom to cake to groom to guest. The next, they cling to each other in delicious, unabashed horror as they are whisked from their festivities into the suddenly maddening sky.

The Toronto nuke blew about five minutes before the clowns came. This meant that Claudio and Mariah spied the red, yellow, and orange figures at the same time they heard the news.

"Toronto?" Mariah said. "Nuclear?" She'd been messaging on her comm unit.

Claudio looked at his daughter and clenched his teeth. On her arm he could see faint razor marks and her comm still bore the outline of the Dream Puke sticker he made her remove on a weekly basis. They were on the way back from her treatment session: recovery from DP was long and painful. He looked away from her. Long and painful for her: excruciating for everyone involved.