It’s been one whole year since EFNB started–365 days with one unique excerpt from the finest imaginary literature every single day! In honor of the site’s one-year anniversary, the editors at Excerpts from Nonexistent Books would like to recognize some of our most prolific nonexistent contributors over the past year:
Eric Cummings Jr.
“Nothing vs. Firewall,” “Cynical Blows,” “Intercepted,” “The Firewall”
Eric Cummings Jr. is a former instructor at Southern Michigan University and current slacker who finds inspiration for his stories in the mind-numbing depths of unskilled minimum wage labor. A man of strong opinions and inflated ego, Cummings readily admits that his stories and characters are highly autobiographical, though he avers that “some of my traits are taken to an extreme to make it a better read.” His current projects include a two-book series about dangerous “information revolutionaries” who destroy a Michigan university–a project which Cummings insists is in no way shape or form influenced by his opinion of or time at SMU.
Phil “Stonewall” Pixa
“Reigo and Sauvagine,” “Lights of New Providence,” “Peg’s Story,” “Breakdown,” “Beyond the Morning Star,” “Beyond New Providence”
Phil Pixa, whose nickname comes from a short stint on his high school football team that left him in traction for six weeks, is a New York-based science fiction writer and general waitstaff worker. He describes his twin interests as being “good old-fashioned space opera” and “stories that find the unreal in the everyday life,” which he admits is far easier in New York, which he describes as a “breeder reactor for the bizarre.” Pixa is working on two projects at present: a collection of short stories revolving around a place he creatively calls “The City” involving time-based attacks by a ferocious band of temporal anarchists, and a three book cycle on the rise, fall, and rise again of an interstellar shipping worker named Peg Gregory.
Altos Wexan
“Across Worlds Book IV: Sands of Taas,” “Across Worlds Book V: Xencobourg’s Fury,” “Precinct Amputation,” “Purple Nights in the Furniture City,” “The Rise of Metromart #832,″ “The Battle for Metromart #832,″ “The Decline and Fall of Metromart #832″
Clinton Illinois born and bred, Altos Wexan has earned a gold star as our most prolific contributor. Wexan describes his writing as “the mishmash of a hundred ideas from college-level literature classes, mediocre video games, and movies that think they’re smarter than they really are.” A perennial experimenter and procrastinator, Wexan’s longest work to date is the as yet unfinished “Across Worlds” saga, a massive six-book dimension-spanning epic. He has also experimented with film noir and more modernistic writing, often in the same work. When not setting aside an unfinished older story to charge headlong into a new one, Wexan works as an adjunct professor at a small midwestern university.
Van Bullock
“The Team,” “Icechip Heart,” “Speaking with Dead Leaves,” “High-Caliber Children,” “The Accountant and the Assassin,”
Vance Bullock was born in South Africa but grew up in the rural Midwest. As a Peace Corps volunteer, he was present throughout many global hotspots during the tumultuous early 1990’s, helping to build clinics and schools that were inevitably torn down by anti-American revolutionaries. His encounters with “private defense contractors” in southern and eastern Africa form the basis for many of his stories. Bullock is currently working on a novel based on his earlier short stories, about an icy and troubled female assassin and a mild-mannered accountant. “If that sounds like wish-fulfillment, it really is,” he said. “I don’t meet nearly enough lethal girls in my line of work, even though I definitely checked that box in eHarmony.”
C. Alton Parker
“Prosperity Falls,” “Prosperity Rising”
Catherine Alton Parker lives in Tuscon Arizona where she works as a manager for KNOW, Arizona’s only radio psychic station. In her spare time she participates in local dressage and show jumping tournaments with her horse Karen. A self-described feminist, video game junkie, and devoted fan of Louis L’Amour, Parker claims that her lifelong dream has been to write a “rip-snorting western with a strong female lead” that nevertheless “has plenty of action to go with the bleeding-heart crap you’d expect.” An Aries, she credits her sign’s “neurotic and task-oriented” nature as her inspiration to write.
Nokin Kobayashi and Irene York
“Sōtan and the Wayze,” “Novels,” “Reed Dolls of the Soul,” “Not Quite to China”
Nokin Kobayashi (小林) is a native of Tokyo prefecture who divides his time between San Francisco, Seoul, and Hong Kong. A graduate of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and a trained technical writer, Kobayashi maintains a keen interest in geography, the supernatural, and the history of East Asia, all of which he seeks to synthesize in his writings. Speaking through a translator, Kobayashi asserted that he writing is in equal parts “a product of the social-technological-historical milieu in which I am immersed” and “a cosmic song issued from the holy sun god of cats crowned with ten thousand chrysanthemum blossoms.”
Irene York has served as Nokin Kobayashi’s personal translator, literary executor, live-in maid, tutor, and lover for more than thirty years. A graduate of the University of Michigan’s prestigious far eastern linguistics program, she first encountered Kobayashi during a research trip to Saigon when they met in police custody coincidentally wearing the same Jade Monkey Emperor of the North Star t-shirt. Irene insists that all literary merit in Kobayashi’s stories comes from the author himself, and that she is merely “the conduit through which his song may be heard by fresh ears.”
Anonymous
“Stepping Out,” “Satire on the Big House,” “A Gamer’s Thoughts at 5am,” “Portal of the Infinite”
While some of our editors felt that Anonymous did not represent a single author, EFNB’s patented word pattern analysis software has determined that the various anonymous submissions have a 98.72% similarity in tone and writing style and were likely penned by the same person, perhaps a person attempting to present themselves as a group of individuals. As emails seeking comment were not answered by press time, our editors can only speculate about the author’s origin and nature. It seems clear that he is a native of Michigan or at least lived there for a time, and evidence indicates that he holds himself and his “art” in unnaturally high regard, has underdeveloped social skills, and can’t take even the mildest criticism without pouting like a small child.
Jeanne Welch
“Locke’s Specter,” “Locke’s Phantom”
A Batesville Mississippi resident, Jeanne describes herself as “obsessed with the explosion of personal information online” and a “relentless, remorseless, wonderful addict to any and all social media.” Always looking for the next big or unique thing in social media sites, Jeanne maintains a blog about them entitled “Who Is jeannew85 On Your Site?” when she isn’t working as a cart maintenance technician at the Batesville Public Library. Her current goal is to knit her short works into a “tapestry that asks deep questions about identity, information, and Web 2.0 in the context of death and/or online stalking.”
Joe Kull
“Fortress Gilvery,” “Soulstorm”
Self-professed history buff Joe Kull lives in Greenville, South Carolina where he works as an archivist and rare document conservator. His stories form part of a larger tapestry that he describes as “spanning World War I to the Jazz Age and investigating the fearsome power of the souls of the dead.” Joe regaled us at length about why World War I is his favorite military conflict, noting that it’s “more complicated, more moody, and more exciting” than its better-known sequel, and was at pains to describe the art noveau and art deco movements as “the shiznit.”
Calvin Higgins Joachimthal
“Rejected!,” “Reboot This”
A native of Chicago, IL, Joachimthal attended UCLA Film School before working in the film industry on what he describes as “either really shitty movies or really boring porn.” The hats he’s worn include director, producer, composer, editor, casting, makeup, lighting, star, and extra–often on the same production. He is currently working on a series of books and short stories about the foibles of behind-the-scenes movie production based on his own experiences in which “the names have been changed just enough to avoid getting sued.”
D. P. Patterson
“Healing Visions,” “Sara Dinch”
Dona P. Patterson, hailing from Kent County Michigan, is a self-professed fan of “the weird, the wonderful, the twisted, the dark, but especially all of the above.” She shuns the term “writer,” preferring to describe herself as someone who “has cool ideas and writes them down for close friends.” Her work is dedicated to her twin schnauzers, Galaxian and Jaina, and her betta fish Leviathan.
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