Great news! OG’s Speculative Fiction, Issue 24 has been released! It is a special double issue full of great speculative fiction stories from authors such as Darien Cox, D. Thomas Minton, David Tallerman, Jeremiah Hawkins, S. Hutson Blount and Travis Heermann as well as poetry from Bruce Golden and G.O. Clark. It is one of our finest issues with over 100 pages of great reading. Let us know what you think of the issue! Don’t miss our other issues of OG’s Speculative Fiction if you haven’t read them.

I am just about to own my own home and it has made me realize a few things.

As a boy I did all sorts of things to earn money. I collected soda cans along the side of the road. I did odd chores. I mowed lawns. When I did earn money, I was something of a saver and a spender. I liked the idea of having a bin full of coins. It made me feel good. I would throw all the coins and dollars into that bin and every so often take it out and count up all the money, feeling a bit like Scrooge in Duck Tales or a bit like a Monopoly Boss, slowly building an empire. But inevitably, my saving mentality would dissipate and I would spend those hoarded coins and dollars on a pack of baseball cards or a new video game. Then I would have to start all over saving up coins.

Every year the baseball season starts with a homerun from someone. It doesn’t always come in the first at bat, nor is it always the first hit. But in some stadium across the United States (and a few times in Puerto Rico or Japan) there is that inevitable moment when someone hits the first homerun of the new season.

That’s the thing in sports, there is always a new season. The New York Yankees won the World Series last year, and while that was a lot of fun when it happened and there were parades and lots of media attention and a World Series’ ring to show for it, a new season came. A new season always comes. Players have to lace up their cleats and pick up their bats and run out on the diamond all over again. It’s a fact of life; champions can never rest comfortably.

I have always enjoyed where I live. It is a dusty single lane road that seems to stretch for miles in both directions. The neighbors are quite a ways away and the house is tucked away in the middle of soaring pines and spreading hickory trees. More often than not, the only company we get are the animals in the forest. When a plane passes miles overhead, I always turn to look, because the sound is foreign; I am used to birds and crickets.

In spring the geese flock into the swamp and set up gosling factories. The turkeys are out picking at the newly turned fields looking for bugs or corn from the previous year. The deer are teaching their new fawns the safe paths through the woods.

by Reggie Aquilina

There is no doubt that to truly succeed in life you need to learn how to properly manage your time.

One thing is certain: the most effective and successful people are experts in time management and they have the same number of hours in the day as you do. So time management has nothing to do with magically expanding time to suit your needs, but of using it effectively. It is a question of self-management rather than time-management.