United States
Alex Puncekar is a writer, game designer, and editorial assistant for both Lightspeed Magazine and Nightmare Magazine. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine, with author spotlights appearing in Lightspeed Magazine. He lives in Cinncinati, Ohio.
Fiction
Master of Fine Arts thesis, completed and approved in 2017. Calli Hayford lives on Kipos, a recently colonized planet far from Earth. Amongst the jungles and ravenous animals that threaten the various settlements across the planet's surface, Calli is dealing with something much more dire: her sick mother, who is slowly dying from an unknown sickness. With funds scarce, Calli decides to do the impossible: to locate auracite, a rare mineral native to Kipos, in the hopes that it will provide her...
Third place winner in the Jenny Magazine 2017 Flash Fiction contest. A game of poker turns deadly when telepaths are at the table.
Published in Jenny Magazine Spring 2014 Issue. A letter from a past lover has Ben questioning the idea of immortality.
Games
FINAL ROUND is a one-page tabletop RPG where you can create interesting, rounded, and over-the-top warriors and pit them against other players in one-on-one fights. Use dice to determine hits and dodges, break deadlocks, and use signature moves, ultimately telling collaborative stories between two fighters. In the final round, who will be victorious?
Author Spotlights
I love fiction that explores spatial, dimensional, and time travel. However, each has a different effect on a story. They explore different themes. Teleportation worked for these characters and this story because it is fleeting, over in an instant.
I still see so much epic fantasy centered around soldiers and royalty, chosen ones and dark lords, assassins and magicians. And that's not to say any of those are bad, far from it! But I've always wondered, where were the stories of the epic fantasy interns? The postal workers?
True fact: when I first read Orwell's 1984 (back when I was a tiny!Merc and didn't quite get a lot of the political commentary), I was miffed that things like the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love were not literal. Tiny!Merc was outraged that these names were, in fact, hiding something quite different.
Podcasts
Featured on the Botch Games podcast and played Millennial Apartment Hunters, an RPG created by James D'Amato.
Articles
Investigates the literary open mic traditions taking place in Youngstown, Ohio.