February 5, 2008

Unpleasant realization

Posted on by Patrick

From the front mat­ter of Steven Brust’s Fire­fly fan-fic(ish) nov­el (found via Scalz­i’s What­ev­er):

For peo­ple who care about such things, the book was writ­ten in emacs on a box run­ning Man­drake Lin­ux, then I used OpenOf­fice to for­mat it for print­ing. The final lay­out for online pub­li­ca­tion was cre­at­ed with Microsoft Word and Adobe Acro­bat. Peo­ple who care about such things need to get a life. 

I got to the last sen­tence and thought, Aw, that’s me.

(Of course, when I read the first sen­tence, I thought, Good heav­ens, man, there’s One True text edi­tor, and that’s vi. Go go gad­get :%s/]*>//gi .

It would seem that I’m a nerd.)

Some fiction for you

Posted on by Patrick

One of my recent ficlets, one that I’m par­tic­u­lar­ly proud of:

The Trick

“You want to see a trick?”

Her eyes nar­rowed. “What kind?”

“Like noth­ing you’ve ever seen,” he said, and took a swig straight from the bot­tle. Red wine stained his teeth. “Promise.”

“All right.” She leaned back in the chair as he stood up, crossed to the cen­tre of the room, and did some kind of odd shoul­der-shrug­ging warmup dance. He’d left the bot­tle on the table, and she took it, wrapped her lips around it, and chugged what remained of the wine. She had a buzz going and wasn’t about to lose it.

With­out pre­lude, with­out scream­ing, with­out any warn­ing what­so­ev­er, he burst into flames. In per­fect silence he burned, star­ing into her soul with those intense grey eyes he had.

She dropped the bot­tle. It shat­tered, green shards every­where. She want­ed to scream but could­n’t. She stared as he was consumed.

There was a pile of ash and a black spot on the hard­wood, and no oth­er evi­dence he’d ever existed.

#

The door opened and he walked in. She leapt from the reclin­er, embraced him, and said, “How’d you do it?”

It’s not always easy, fit­ting a com­plete sto­ry into 1024 char­ac­ters, but this time it just sort of happened.