Name: Kelly C. Stiles

Age: 23

Author of: “Relevant Information From the Tel Najmah Site”

Current Geographic Location: Luray, Virginia

Twitter: @Ladykuro

Website: http://ladykuro.wordpress.com/

Recent publications: “The Natural End of a Clockwork Boy” appeared in With Painted Words. Poetry has appeared in SNM Magazine and Night to Dawn magazine.

Do you think alien life exists in the Universe? Against all odds, we exist, don’t we? Who’s to say we’re the only ones that beat the odds? To someone out there, we’re the aliens.

If you could travel off Earth, would you? What if it meant you could never come back? I would love to travel off planet and see the rest of the solar system, maybe even the rest of our galaxy. I’m pretty sure I’d be okay with not coming back for a while since I’d have an internet connection (hey, if aliens can get me off planet, they can get me an internet connection). I think I would want to come back one day, though.

What inspired your essay? My story was inspired by two classes I took in college. Both were taught by the
same archeology professor and provided me with different bits of inspiration. From the Celts class I took the burial mounds in the near east, and in the Archeology of the Near East class I read an archeological journal on which I based Finnegan’s personality.

What music or movies helped you to write this essay? I listened to Within Temptation’s album “The Heart of Everything” for background sound while writing.

How many rewrites did you do before submitting? I didn’t actually do any major rewrites to this piece. While I did edit the wordings, and reorder the ending, I had no problems hearing Finnegan and his blustery ways in my
head.

What is your favorite bit?

“I have removed several paragraphs of nonsensical hypotheses as to how Martha could have removed the monument. His theories include American spies, Papal conspiracies, teams of magicians, or perhaps angels or some other supernatural phenomena. These theories transition back to the day’s events when Mr. Fletcher recalls how one of the hired men tells him a native story of strange occurrences all over the region.”