Meanwhile…

Occasionally on Facebook I post these little “historical” factoids as my status for fun. I like to think they’re more interesting than “OMG I hate Mondays” or whatever. Some are funny, some are simply dramatic. I’m obviously not the first to do this, but they’re fun to write and make nice little exercises to keep the brain working.

There’s more room there than on Twitter, so I can do things a little more involved without that shorter character limit. But even then, sometimes I don’t have enough space. Today’s was one of those where I wanted to embellish more, but didn’t have the space.

At any rate, I thought I’d start posting those here, and more of them, as regular content. With any luck, some will grow into fuller stories. Also, here they won’t eventually vanish into the Facebook ether at some point. You guys can let me know which ones you think are cool and which ones are dead ends.

So here’s the first.

This day in history, 2108: Begin the great Cephalopod Invasion. By midnight, Octopus Prime conquers Manhattan, his enormous tentacles cutting a swath of destruction across New York and New Jersey. His amphibious army seizes ports throughout the Eastern Seaboard. They retreat a week later, leaving behind cities completely depleted of human life. Typed missives inform the beleaguered nation that they attack only to remind us why the month is named October – and to replenish their supply of human slaves.

(I have some totally awesome ideas about the Cephalapod Marine force, so I’m looking forward to expanding this one.)

This morning I found myself thinking about my abandoned Scarlet Ranger novel (begun in a NaNo event a couple years ago). Maybe I’ll give it another go. Is there a point? Even if I finish it I’ll almost certainly have to self-publish. Maybe I should do it just to get it out of my system.

My Daily Sketches don’t seem to be updating properly. This is annoying.

Heading out this afternoon to see Scott Pilgrim vs The World again with a couple guys who haven’t seen it yet. If you are among those who haven’t seen it – well, I don’t want to say you’re a bad person, but, well. Here we are.

I wrote this little bit over the weekend. I think if I can hit the right tone with it this may turn into a fun dark humor piece. We’ll see.

Continue reading

I wrote the first paragraph of this not too long ago, then wrote a bunch of paragraphs after it that weren’t really going anywhere and seemed destined for a way longer story than I wanted to mess with. So I went back to the first paragraph and took it in a slightly different direction that may be more focused. I don’t know. We’ll see if anything comes of this. I think it is a crackerjack of an opening, if nothing else. Here’s the first 300 words or so, let me know if this is actually an interesting beginning. Continue reading

Or whatever day we’re on.

Not really sure where this one was going, but I kind of like the beginning. I was up late watching Whale Wars the other day. People that feel so strongly about issues that (ultimately) don’t affect them interest me, regardless of the cause. I have no idea what it’s like to be that passionate about anything, unless we’re talking about casting Summer Glau in a Scarlet Ranger television series.

At any rate, here’s what I’ve got.

Continue reading

This might be another solid one, though it’ll need a lot of polish, it’s quite rough. An early adventure of a certain masked heroine. Perhaps the most fun writing this was coming up with her terrifically horrible early ’80s costume (the Doc Martens go without saying, of course). Brief excerpt after the jump.

Continue reading

I may have something with this one. Finished with literally about 30 seconds to spare. Here’s a bit. Exciting!

Continue reading

I almost forgot, but the writing group is doing our annual Story Every Day contest this month. For the next couple of weeks we’ll be churning out a short story every single day. It is crazy!

Thanks to some forgetfulness and a minor communications snafu, we’re actually starting today instead of yesterday like we’d originally intended. But no biggie. So I’ll be trying to post excerpts of my attempts each day.

This is a little of what I wrote last night at the write-in to kick things off. I thought this might serve as a good companion piece to a story I’ll have appearing in A Thousand Faces later this year.

Continue reading

I’ve historically been reticent to write much fantasy. I was raised on fantasy, reading lots of bad (but fun) Dragonlance novels and playing D&D and watching Willow gods’ know how many times and what not. The Hobbit was the book that inspired my love of reading to begin with. But every time my mind wanders to writing fantasy I tend to shy away from it, primarily because I have a hard time coming up with ideas that don’t feel like they’ve been done a billion times before by writers both better and worse. How many times does a reluctant hero need to be yanked into the world to find some magical whoosit and rescue what’s-her-name so they can become the new king of wherever? The world doesn’t need it.

(To be fair, I could certainly say the same of any other genre, so…Also the likes of China Miéville and Gene Wolfe have considerably expanded my idea of what fantasy can be, so maybe I’ll start foraging in this direction more.)

But I had a fun image in mind and thought I’d play with it a bit. So here’s the beginning draft. It’s kind of stalled out a paragraph or so after the clip here, because it started to veer in the direction of another Allanah story, but then I realized it would be virtually the exact same story, but with some fisticuffs. So maybe this will go nowhere. But it’s kind of a nifty beginning, I thought. I think adding a technological element makes it easier for me to identify with the characters, and juxtaposing that with an old-world aesthetic is interesting and offers possibilities that don’t exist in other genres. Then again, maybe I’m just a fan of guys in armored suits. Continue reading

Good news – A Thousand Faces accepted a new flash piece from me! I had a lot of fun writing this one. Look for that later this year.

Tuesday evening I pounded out more than I’ve written in a while. Perhaps I’m getting back on track after a pretty dry couple of months.

I’m a fan of writing these interview-style works. I enjoy writing dialogue, and the form really lets you explore the character and how they see the world and interact with others. Don’t have to worry about advancing a plot or framing an action scene. The story is in how the characters reveal themselves through their speaking. Just a couple of people sitting around chatting. It also makes me feel like I’m working on a Christopher Guest-style mockumentary (though I’m not nearly so talented as those guys).

There’s great poetry done in this style, too. So I thought, more as an exercise to get my brain going again more than anything else, that I’d write a few interviews with my fictional alien rock band, Virtuoso of the Serious Combat. By the time I got through the first section, the spark of a fuller story had ignited.

But do these sorts of things work as prose stories? I don’t know how entertaining they really are to anyone other than me. It may be that this will make a great screenplay for a short film, but not a short story. We shall see! I understand Script Frenzy is next month, too. Perhaps this will give me a chance to break in my copy of Celtx.

Anyway, here’s the rough first part of the interview series. Let me know if this looks like something that might be entertaining, in any medium. Continue reading

So as I mentioned last time, I’ve started work on a new superhero story. This is a character I’ve had floating around for a while and I think I finally came up with a fun angle from which to tell his story. I like this beginning. Now that I reread that earlier post I see that apparently I had decided against trick arrows, but why the hell would I do that? When I sat down to write I immediately started coming up with ridiculous and fun trick arrows for him to employ.

Anyway, here are the first few hundred words of an as-yet-untitled Quivering Jack story.

Continue reading