Dear Diary

After falling a little behind (I was doing a story every second day; it was six days since the previous one) I sat down and did up a new story last night. The generator gave me The theme of this story: tragic mystery. The main characters: confused cab driver and pious rogue. The start of the story: dream. The end of the story: discovery.

Here's the start of the story:

"I don't get it," said Sammy. Mist rolled away from him in all directions, pale and formless.

"There's nothing to get," the woman said. "Please, I need silence." She knelt, her body taking on a perfect stillness, the breathless waiting of a stone being worn away by the sea. The mist climbed her body like a thing alive, tendrils coiling snakelike across her shoulders, her back, the tattooed nape of her neck. Sammy felt a scream crawling up his throat, watching the only other person in this dreamscape being eaten by fog, like something out of a horror movie.

He swallowed, hard, and looked away, his gaze searching for a horizon that wasn't there. Grey sky, grey mist, and it all met at the vanishing point, a roiling nothingness that had overwhelmed sense and knowledge.

This is a dream, he told himself. This is a dream, and I can wake up anytime I want—

Only he couldn't. The formless scream was clawing its way back up his throat. With an effort that was enough to put sweat on his brow, he forced it back down.

For more: The complete story (password-protected: the password is abigail <— highlight to read.

So far I have five stories out of the ten I've said I would do this month. Tonight or tomorrow I'll be doing another one.

Probably tomorrow, since I'm mildly hooked on CSI, and it's a new one tonight.

Here's a snippet from the latest story, "Star Light, Star Bright":

If the hot worlds shuffling their feet on the sun's doorstep were the rejuvenated core of a city, then the cometary haloes were its dock district, full of rough-and-tumble vigor, transient labor, and the hopeful mad looking to score a ride out-system on vessels that more often than not would never leave. Tumult and catastrophe had rocked the Proxima colonies, both attempts at reshaping extrasolar worlds ending in riots, civil war, megadeath.

…in the May Challenge on Forward Motion. Snippets from each one:

Lost and Found

She rubbed [her jaw] absent-mindedly with her free hand, careful to keep the knife as far from her carotid and jugular as possible. She'd sliced herself open once, and the house had chided her to take more care as it glued the wound shut and cloned up a fog of nanites to clean the blood off the floor and counter and walls.

Fiona

All these years and he couldn't remember the name of the city, couldn't even remember for sure if it was north of the equator or south, but he remembered those lions, great marble beasts carved with such fine detail that on windy days their manes seemed to stir. It was said that a man with avarice in his heart had strayed too near one of the lions, and that his bloody bones had been found the next morning, picked clean and swarmed with flies. It was a pretty story, but Riley was sure it was a local myth.

Pretty sure.

After the Missile Rain

Miko hadn't yet been made when the bombs arced across the sky, so she didn't have a lot of the memories that John did. She didn't remember the worm-tracks in the night sky, for instance, the fine white etchings that the missiles made as their fist-sized cybernetic brains plucked random numbers from the pop and hiss of interstellar radio and dodged spaceborne X-ray lasers, railgun ordnance, fine sprays of metal pellets traveling at twenty times the speed of sound. She hadn't seen the flashes, brighter than a hundred suns, that had burned out one of John's eyes and left the other one scarred so that everything he saw was bent double around a flaw he couldn't directly see.

Feeling accomplished…

I've taken up a challenge at Forward Motion to do the "Apprentice" level for their May challenge. Basically what it boils down to is that I've said I'll try to write 10 short stories (more than 500 words) in May. If things go well, I'll up myself to "Journeyman" (15 stories instead of 10), but we'll see how it goes.

The other thing about the challenge is that at least 80% of the stories must come from topics/themes/characters suggested by one or another of a handful of online generators. Because I relish a challenge, I'm going to try and do all my stories from generator suggestions.

The one for May the first was:

The story's protaganist is female and a gardener. A knife plays a significant part in the story. The story is set in a kitchen in the future. The story is about deception.

And the story for it is here (password: fm <— highlight to read).

I've sent "Outside, Looking In" to a magazine, and I'll be sending "Heat Death" to another one once their reading period opens up (May 1st, so, really, tomorrow). I had some encouraging words this weekend from a friend who read "Heat Death" at the tail end of a party, and proceeded to gush about my writing talent as he read it. He was a little drunk, but hey, in vino veritas, no?

Wish me luck!

So I picked up a short story I'd started in December, found an ending for it, and put it all together in less than 1,000 words. It's called "Heat Death" and I think I'm going to submit it. If you're interested (it's short—989 words by the counter in OpenOffice, 982 by the counter on the BBS), drop me a line.

This one came to me yesterday on my way home at lunch. I've written the first 200ish words, but I don't yet have a satisfactory ending.

Everyone in the entire world sleeps a deep, 24-hour sleep, and experiences the same dream. When they awaken, night has been banished forever. Someone or something has turned the Earth inside-out, placing a small sunlike body at the center of the hollow sphere. What comes next? Guess I'll find out as I write.

Title: DAY.

So I'm going to have to put my current project on the back burner for the time being. I need to do a lot more research, it looks like, before I set a story aboard a 17th-century ketch. What with being a child of the landlocked prairie, growing up in the late 20th-early 21st centuries, who'd'a thunk it?

But that's okay. It'll give me a chance to return to a couple of science fiction projects, Earth Fleet and Salyx (this last being my Nano project for 2005).

Off to write!

New short story (less than 1500 words)—Three Months and Two Days. I'll be entering this in the Manitoba Writers' Collective short fiction contest. If you have any comments, now's the time; I have to have it postmarked no later than April 3rd.

Oh yeah, you'll need a password. Highlight to see it —> tommy .

Later—The story is in the mail. Here's the story that I entered a couple years ago, which won me first prize: A Map to the End of the World.

It seems I have a great deal to learn about sailing ships in order to grant my NiP the desired degree of versimilitude. Good thing I have the Nonsuch book from 1970ish. It seems to have a wealth of detail. And where it may falter, Wikipedia can pick up the slack.

Off to write and do research!