Well, it’s hard to believe, but today marks the third anniversary of Excerpts From Nonexistent Books, your blog source for quality selections from authors and texts that are resolutely imaginary. 1096 posts, 365 per year plus one leap day, which puts EFNB ironically in sync with the IRS this 2013 tax season. this has been the site’s best year yet; more comments, more watchers, and more hits than the last two years combined! We even made it to Freshly Pressed this December!

As before, this post will serve to highlight those imaginary authors who either began submitting to EFNB in 2012-13 or submitted the majority of their work during that period. Let’s wish these new authors the best of luck! Please do comment if you would like to see more from any of them; they all take requests or can be…convinced…to do so!

Natalie J. H. Able
Character Sheet for a Fictional Rogue, Character Sheet for a Fictional Rogues’ Gallery

Natalie works for Warlocks of the Interior, the publisher of the famous Ruins & Rogues roleplaying game. She started out as a pimply teenager submitting creatures and dungeon modules to Mageozine, the official Ruins and Rogues rag, but the quality of her submissions has earned her a place in the most recent editions of the Ruins & Rogues Creature Compendium. She hopes to collect her pre-made characters into an upcoming publication, 1001 Characters for Every Occasion.

Carla Minch Betts
The Lost and Found Detective, The Lost and Found Parlor

C. M. Betts declined to fill out our questionnaire, insisting that the only information we needed was in the public domain. As such, we can only report that Betts lives at [redacted] and earned $212,287 last year working as a short order fry cook.

William “Black Bill” Cubbins IV
A Pirate is Not a Halloween Costume, A Pro-Pirate Counterpoint

A noted Buccaneer-American activist, Black Bill Cubbins has devoted his life to advancing the cause and cultural perceptions of his people. Most readers will be familiar with his “Reclaim Pirates” campaign, which seeks to appropriate the once-insulting word “pirate” as a term of pride, albeit one only to be used by pirates to refer to themselves.

Bridget-Alicia Elba
Lady of the Boon, A Guide to Sapient Creatures Vol. 1, The Jack-of-Cards, A Guide to Sapient Creatures Vol. 2

Another prominent contributor coming to us from the role-playing world of Ruins & Rogues, Bridget-Alicia wrote and maintains the “Mistworlds: Modernity” campaign setting, which posits fantasy races in a modern setting. She wished us to express how diligent she has tried to be in the creation of these races, trying to avoid the usual stereotypes of basing fantasy races off of existing human cultures.

Madelyn Aisha Goeke
Crisis at SciCon 2012, All Tapped Out

Madelyn Goeke writes a series of short stories and novels revolving around a core group of hardcore nerds who solve extremely nerdy crimes. The Nerdcore Sleuths, as they’re called, have recently been picked up for international distribution by Kyoto Processed Ricepaper Concern Press.

Petra Natalia Langley
Odessa Mullen Slips Into the Zombieworld, Odessa Mullen Slips Back Into the Zombieworld, Odessa Mullen’s Zombieworld Revealed

A self-described “zombaddict” university student from the Midwest, Ms. Langley admits that her character of Dessie Mullen is essentially herself “turned up to 11.”

Odis Perun
Καλλίστη, Brewster’s Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena, 17th edition

A paranormal researcher and erstwhile medium, Dr. Perun teaches at a non-accredited degree mill in northern California. In his spare time, he writes fiction that reflects his interest in paranormal phenomenons and mass panic. He assures us that there is nothing sinister behind these interests, and certainly no prototype panic projectors in his woodshed that anyone should be concerned about.

“Lady” Kaila Pisciotti
The Other Book of Changes, Fastest and Highest, The Forever Swim, Up the Ladder

All of Ms. Pisciotti’s submissions have been postmarked from places that do not exist with stamps that have never been issued. Nonexistent, that is, even by the standards of EFNB, which maintains a robust imaginary correspondence network with subscribers and authors. As none of our mail can be delivered, and her provided email address is for a top-level domain that was proposed but never implemented, we cannot with certainty provide anything other than Ms. Pisciotti’s self-description as “a minor noble from the northernmost part of the Inland Empire where it touches the Beral Lands.” Opinion is divided as to whether this is an elaborate prank or mail arriving from an alternate dimension.

Victorina Rudolf
The Girl and the Teddy-Bear, Astride the Great Fish

Ms. Rudolf’s selections are from what she calls “an achingly nostalgic and painful exploration of childhood’s end through the lens of fantasy.” The editors did not think that talking teddy bears and flying fish were indicative of concrete reality, but it was nice to see this confirmed.

Andrew A. Sailer
Why I Hate MMORPGs, Why I Hate Reboots

A self-described “larval curmudgeon,” Mr. Sailer is a journalist who channels his inability to express his own opinions on issues into a series of rabid online essays about things that irritate him. He generally shies away from hot-button political or religious topic, preferring to save his bile for “the little annoyances that help make everyday life a festering cauldron of inconvenience.”

Hazel Pace Santiago
Tripping on the Green, A Caryatid Fashionista, Minimum Wage Fig Tree Dryad, Pendant of Generations, In A Weird Place

Ms. Santiago submitted her first writing to us shortly before the site’s two-year anniversary and has since gifted us extensively with excerpts from her forthcoming young adult urban fantasy novel. “I hate that I have to call it that,” she told us, “because those terms have been so thoroughly debased by overmarketing, bad Harry Potter wannabes, and worse fan-fiction with serial numbers filed off.”

Arkady Tuvalev
Marshal Nedelin, Cradle of the Elbrus IV

An ethnic Russian nuclear engineer, Tuvalev lives and works in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. Further details, he says with a smile, are “classified.”

Tune in tomorrow for a retrospective on our established contributors who have written for us during 2012-2013!