May 2006

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).