"Spidersong" will be published at Daily Science Fiction tomorrow. Or a week from now, depending on how you look at it.
DSF offers an e-mail subscription service. They'll send a shiny new story to your mailbox 5 times a week. Four of these are flash stories, short enough to read on your cell phone or during a lunch break. On Friday you get a longer story to enjoy over the weekend. If you don't subscribe to their mailing list (and there's really no reason not to, it's free and the fiction is of excellent quality), you can read the same stories on their web site. The only catch is that they are posted online a week later. So if you want to read "Spidersong" it'll be in your inbox on October 17 and then posted on their front page on October 24.
"Spidersong" was originally written for a flash fiction contest sponsored by the Shock Totem magazine. The prompt for their contest was a number of photos of trees shrouded in spiderwebs, like this one:
This surreal image is a result of heavy flooding in Pakistan. Thousands of spiders escaped the rising water into the trees, and made a home there. You can see more photos over at National Geographic or read about it at Gizmodo.
So, of course, after looking at the photos what immediately came to my twisted mind was giant alien spiders. Giant alien *telepathic* spiders. Who sing.
I had a lot of fun with this story along the way. I chose to write it in plural first person AND in present tense, which is a very unusual format in which to frame fiction. Hope you like the end result!
Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction 
