I freefall, plummeting through an alien sky. Clouds obscure my vision. Tears and mucus smear across my helmet to obscure it even more. I shut my eyes—such fickle and sensitive sensory organs—and imagine the equations of the forces acting on my body. I try to rearrange their values: my version of praying, I suppose. But the laws of physics will not bend just to save my life.

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In this sparkling debut novel, Mary Ann Marlowe introduces a hapless scientist who's swept off her feet by a rock star—but is it love or just a chemical reaction?...

Biochemist Eden Sinclair has no idea that the scent she spritzed on herself before leaving the lab is designed to enhance pheromones. Or that the cute, grungy-looking guy she meets at a gig that evening is Adam Copeland. As in the Adam Copeland international rock god and object of lust for a million women. Make that a million and one. By the time she learns the truth, she s already spent the (amazing, incredible) night in his bed.
 
Suddenly Eden, who's more accustomed to being set up on disastrous dates by her mom, is going out with a gorgeous celebrity who loves how down-to-earth and honest she is. But for once, Eden isn't being honest. She can't bear to reveal that this overpowering attraction could be nothing more than seduction by science. And the only way to know how Adam truly feels is to ditch the perfume—and risk being ditched in turn.
 
Smart, witty, and sexy, Some Kind of Magic is an irresistibly engaging look at modern relationships: why we fall, how we connect, and the courage it takes to trust in something as mysterious and unpredictable as love.

About the Author

Adventures in Zookeeping and Domesticated Velociraptors authors and fans mingle in the ConSuite

Listening raptly as Adventures in Zookeeping authors read their stories aloud

Ever wonder how much fun it would be to be a zoo keeper if your wards included the strange, the supernatural, the not-of-this-earth? This collection of speculative fiction ranges from were-lemurs to a breeding program for a Lovecraftian horror. Edited by Sam Knight. This anthology evolved from a panel at MileHiCon in Denver, Colorado, titled "So You Want To Be in an Anthology?" The stories contained within were contributed by attendees of that panel. All net proceeds are donated to support MileHiCon.

My dad and my cousin Brooke were fighting about the thermostat just before the power went out. Rather than weather the blizzard alone, I had abandoned my apartment and come to my dad’s house, and had convinced Brooke to do the same.

“You know what a crazy survivalist he is,” I told her. “We’re safer there than anywhere.”

He did have a stockpile of food and wood, but even in the midst of a blizzard, Dad kept the house only slightly warmer than a walk-in refrigerator. He’d done that my whole life, and though I didn’t like it, I was used to it. Brooke spent the whole first two days we were snowed in trying to get him to turn it up.

“Great,” Brooke yelled when the power shut off. “Now we get to freeze our asses off even more for the next two days.”

Only, the snow piled over the roof, and we were snowed in for two weeks.

Cassie went blind the day before the asteroid struck.  There had been no warnings from NASA or the White House, just as Cassie's loss of sight had not been foreshadowed by blurriness or headaches.  Once blind, though, Cassie warned our mountain town about the asteroid.  No one believed her, of course.

"It's projection," my brother said at the dinner table.  "Blindness is the worst thing that could happen to her, so she's coping by imagining the worst thing that could happen to the rest of us."
           
My brother and Cassie had dated in high school, until he left to study psychology at the state university.  Now they worked together at the grocery store on Main Street.  He'd been there when her sight disappeared.
           
"Right in the middle of a sale," he said.  "She was handing Mrs. Ross her change and all of a sudden she dropped the money and started feeling around."
           
My father took a second helping of mashed potatoes.
           
"See now, if you'd stayed here and married her, that would be your problem.  Probably have to bring up blind kids too.  I always knew something wasn't right with that girl."
           
"Is she okay?" I asked.
           
"She's home now," my brother said.  "Her parents don't want visitors.  Especially after she started with all that crazy talk about the asteroid."
           
But we knew the next day it wasn't crazy talk after all.