Clarion West

I'm currently sitting at an internet cafe in deepest, darkest Trinidad, W.I., surrounded by jungle, under a palm-leaf covered shack looking out at boats at anchor, under a hot, hot sun. 

The challenge for me will be to fit my wordcount in before the insects find me.

So, here's me, waving 'hello' and getting myself ready to commit to a great six weeks of dedicated writing.

Cheers all,

Lyn Aspey, 

onboard sailing yacht "Haven" 

 I've been collecting story seeds and girding my loins! What are people doing to get ready?

 -Cat

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Read the best of today's fantasy short stories in award-winning Fantasy Magazine:http://www.fantasy-magazine.com

Is this the place we post whether we met our goals?  Assuming it is, then I've written one podcast script and one piece of flash fiction, putting me one ahead of my current goal with 40 more pieces yet to come.

Today's short-short was a commissioned Tuckerization called . . .

                                          Queen of the Pirate Galaxy 

One day, Pat Cadigan snapped.  She’d seen one too many websites selling pirated downloads of her books and decided that the time had come to take action.  It wasn’t difficult for her to break the pathetic security measures the pirates had taken, identify them, hack into their bank accounts, and one by one pauperize the lot.  But it also wasn’t sufficiently satisfying.  So she bought a few dozen airline tickets and spent an invigorating and blood-soaked month making clandestine visits to hobo camps and homeless shelters around the world.

Thus it was Cadigan’s strange fortune to be in possession of a great deal of money
and a very good motivation to get off the planet the day that Keely Motors
announced the invention of the hypersuperluminal drive.  She bought the first ship that came off the assembly line.  For no better reason than that she liked its looks, she headed for the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300.

Everybody knows the strange events in prehistory which led to the human colonization of
the entire universe.  Since she was the first off Earth in millennia, however, Cadigan was astounded to fiind her galaxy was full of people.  And then she learned that (for reasons we today understand all too well) her novels had preceded her and were being sold by the billions on every populated planet
there was.

With not a penny of the profits going to her.

Cadigan had spent all her money buying a ship faster and hotter than anything in NGC
1300.  She had no choice but to become a freebooter.  Within ay ear, she was the scourge of the space-lanes.  Within two, she owned a fleet of pirate ships.  Within ten, she owned the galaxy.

Recently, a sycophantic reporter was granted an interview with the great lady on one of
her pleasure planets, where she was taking a brief respite from planning the takeover of several neighboring galaxies.

“Most people would find it difficult enough running a single planet, much less a
galaxy,” the reporter gushed.  “And yet you obviously intend to conquer the entire universe.  However do you manage?”

“You think this is tough?” Cadigan snarled.  “Try making a living writing!”

.                                                         *

Haikus for Swanwick!    

To honor the fact that Michael Swanwick provides inspiration to us all, I will write a haiku every day, inspired by every piece of flash fiction that Michael posts.

A haiku, as we all know, has 17 syllables. A piece of flash fiction may easily have 100 times as many, which, as it happens, is about the ratio of my lifetime output to Michael’s.

This will, of course, be in addition to my personal goal of 250 words a day of fiction: no prose will be harmed in the making of this poetry.

Eileen Gunn

Greetings from deepest Wisconsin!

I had a great first day of Write-a-thoning. I knocked off 6 of my remaining 41 (now 35) edit notes on my way to completing Channel Zilch.

I look forward to spending July agent-hunting!

---------------------------<>------------------------------

Old-school game programmer currently rewriting a novel, Channel Zilch.

  Double posted.  My bad.  Technology does not love me.

 M. 

Okay, a slow start today.  I wrote Eileen's Tuckerization and then lost the file.  So I had to start over again from scratch. 

Here's the story:

                                                  Abandoned Objects

Each year 40,000 tons of matter is added to the planet Earth's mass.  It came from intraplanetary space, from the Oort Cloud, from the dark spaces between the stars and the darker spaces between the galaxies.  It was Eileen Gunn's strange fate to know where it all wound up,  in jumble shops and second-hand stores, where it stayed because nobody wanted any of it:  A broken umbrella designed to shed methane rain which melted in the presence of water.  A globe of Venus with Lakshmi Planum inexplicably transportred to Ishtar Terra.  A gribbik, an eleven-fingered glove, and two zorches only one of which could speak.  A Kyrellian space-time pocket device in need of a plonk, two beeblefroxen, and an infinite power source.

Junk.

Gunn felt sorry for them all, and bought them, and brought them home with her.  Very soon her house was filled to bursting with sneebles and pramps, transdimensional crutches, unmated socks, hyperbarrel organs, and an uluua'i-a-ouia in bad need of temporal rectification.  Her friends and loved ones staged an intervention.

"This is nothing but useless crap," Lucius began.

"Hey!" said a zorch.

"Present company excepted, of course."

"The gronkilizer scares me," John said.  "I think it's plotting something."

"What on earth is this for?" Leslie asked, holding up something purple and glowing.

"That's used on Rigel for coming-of-age rituals," the zorch said.  Its companion nodded.

"You see?" Gunn said.

"It's to ensure that none of the sexual partners get to plant more eggs in the body than -"

"Ew!"  Leslie dropped it.    

"Does any of this stuff even work?" Nisi asked.

"The vrombler does," the zorch said, "and the garbage disposal."

"Garbage disposal?" John asked.  "Will it get rid of all this junk?"

"Oh yes.  Just push that red button."

After brief consultation, and over her fervid protests, Gunn's friends did exactly that. 
The black hole that the device generated took care of her trash problem in nanoseconds. 

And the rest of the Earth in not much longer.

.                                                                 *

So, considering that I've laso written another podcast script this morning, that's four so far and the weekend is mine to do with as I wish.  That leaves the rest of the day free for writing!

Day three.  This is the fifth item I've written and the third I'm posting.  It was commissioned by Kelley Eskridge.

.                                          The Warp and the Weft

The weaver (sometimes she used threads and other times electrons) was standing in her back yard one day when a raccoon came out of the woods and said, “Are you Sharon Woodbury?”

“Yes,” she said, too astonished to doubt what was happening to her.

“Come with me,” the raccoon said, “you’re urgently needed.” And it led her into leafy darkness, muttering, “The problem is that She’s been called away on serious business,” as they hurried through the woods. “But time and tide, you know. There’s work that absolutely must be done.”

“What are you – ?” Sharon stepped into an unexpected clearing. “Oh!”

The thing in the clearing looked a little like a harp. It looked a little like a threshing machine. It looked a lot like God’s own loom.

“What is this?” she asked breathlessly.

“Don’t ask questions. Just weave.”

She did.

Sharon Woodbury wove as she never had before. She wove beads of dew on spider webs and strings of stars in the sky. She wove a cascade of sunrises over the Rocky Mountains and one long slow sunset over Lake Champlain. She wove the triumph of sparrows in dusty streets and the fall of kings in palaces guarded by troops with Uzis. The birth of colts she wove, and the death of butterflies, summer afternoons and winter blizzards and tangles of autumn smoke in the evening air. She wove it all.

When she was done, back she was led, all in a daze, to her own back yard. The raccoon bowed deeply and, handing her an acorn, a dead minnow, and a rusty tin can lid, said, “You’ve earned this.”

Sharon went indoors and into the kitchen. Her husband was waiting for her there. “Where’ve you been?” he asked.

But the memories were fading fast and by the time she could answer nothing remained but a sense of something too vast, too intimate to be put into words. “Oh, Art," she said. “Life is so . . . so . . .” She burst into tears.

Her husband took her into his arms. “Hush,” he said. “I’m a jazzz musician. I understand.”

.                                                           *

Greetings from Wisconsin, Write-a-thoners.

I've been a good little scribbler today. Knocked off 3 more Channel Zilch rewrite notes and am down to 26. Tonight I work on the query letter. But first to some trail hiking and a canoe trip around my lake.

Hope you are all laying down serious wordage.

Doug

Today's story started out as a Coyote story.  But I'm reluctant to use Coyote without a very good reason ("Coyote At the End of History" had a very good reason) because he is a religious figure to a lot of people.  So I changed the protagonist to one of my own tricksters.

I kept the storyteller voice, though.

The story is called "Nobody of Any Importance" and here's how it goes:

Jack Riddle was walking up and down the world. This was a thing he liked to do. He came to a garden full of dahlias, tomatoes, and pumpkins, and stopped to admire them. “Those are very nice pumpkins, and tomatoes too,” he told the gardener. “But I think you waste too much space on flowers.” Then he asked, “What is your name?”

“I am nobody of any importance,” the gardener said. Her name was actually Pamela Rentz, but she did not trust this sweet-talking stranger.

“Nobody Of Any Importance!” Jack said in astonishment. “I just now met a man who had a message for you. He said to tell you that your goat has fallen sick. You should hurry home to take care of it.”

“I don’t have a goat,” said the gardener.

“Not a goat. I meant the other kind of animal. The one you have as a pet.”

So the woman hurried home to look after her sick pet. As soon as she was out of sight, Jack Riddle ate all the tomatoes he could, and several pumpkins as well. He didn’t even chew them up, just swallowed them whole.

Of course when the gardener found out that her pet animal wasn’t sick, she came back to her garden, mad as blazes. But Jack never looked that far ahead. So she found him lying on the ground with a bloated stomach, groaning because he ate too much. Seeing the damage he had done, she seized a rake and began beating him with it.

So, aching and bruised, Jack ran off down the road.

Later in the day, when he came to a town, Jack Riddle was interviewed by the local radio station because of course he was a famous trickster. “How has everybody here been treating you?” asked the reporter.

“Nobody of Any Importance treated me badly,” Jack replied. And the interview ended with the interviewer thinking Jack had been treated well and Jack thinking that the gardener would now be shunned by all her neighbors for the injuries she had done him.

But Pamela Rentz, who listened to the show at home, sitting with her pet animal – the one that was not a goat – lying at her feet, cut herself a big slice of apple pie and smiled.

Three days, 3000 words on the novel rewrite, and right on track. It's easy going at the moment, but will be trickier when I hit the road to visit the youngest in South Dakota via Yellowstone. (Although campgrounds these days have wireless. Who knew?)

I also snagged a couple of donors by promising a mini applique landscape of their choice--kind of along these lines: http://www.marshasisolak.com/wordpress/?p=315 . I've almost finished the first one, and I'm looking forward to the second.

Well, I'm half-way through the first week and I've already drafted one complete 800 word story and half-way through next week's target. How can this be possible? It helps that the average readership age is 5-7 years. ;-) 

Short Story Number One Begun 

I'm a few hundred words into my first short story for the write-a-thon, "Shall I Die, Oh My Daughter, Shall I Die", a near-future scifi piece set in Kenya.  I'm working on my YA novel at the same time, so I anticipate finishing the short story next week some time.

I'll post excerpts at a later date.

Cheers, 

Randy 

All right! Time off from work, and 2k this week towards my first story (of the 3 I promised myself during the Write-a-thon.) Pressing on :D

faith rockets through the universe

it feeds the lies and fuels the curse

believes we could be glorious

I'm playing hooky today!

 Off to the beach I go and I won't write a word until I wend my weary way home tonight, full of seafood and alliteration.  That's playing it close to the edge, I know, because I'm pledged to write a tuckerization by midnight.  But deadlines are part of hwat makes writing so much funh.

For rhe record, I did finish a new story yesterday, after I got back and before midnight.  I didn't post it, however, because all New Media hate me and a simple cut-and-paste of a story involves something like a half-hour dealing with frustrating formatting issues.

But Kate has agreed to post my stories (and comments on them) here for me.  The story is in her mailbox and she'll have it here soon.  

And I'd better write another story for today, hadn't I?  I'll wait until yesterday's is posted before putting it up.

I hit my first week's goal of making progress toward finishing Channel Zilch. I am about 2 days away from finishing so will finish by the end of the month. I made my 3 weekly blog posts.

I've been working on Channel Zilch since 1992 (it started out as a story-telling screensaver) and am rather looking forward to finishing the danged thing!

It felt great to get my hands on a copy of Eight Against Reality, the Panverse Publishing anthology that contains my story The Flying Squids of Zondor: http://www.panversepublishing.com/8AR.htm .

Next week I finish the book and hit the query letter hard.

Happy scribbling!

Doug

G'day everyone,

I was interrupted by the necessity of doing some paid work (annoying but necessary), and now I'm running behind my own schedule. Anyway, one kiddies story down and another one half-drafted, kind of. Next week, I get to write a story for my friend and class-mate, Adrian, in return for his sponsorship. I hope he likes the idea of being five years old again. ;-) Hope everyone else is doing well and enjoying themselves. 

I finished my danged book! My Write-a-thon goal was to finish it by the end of June so I feel great about hitting it.

I started Channel Zilch in 1992 as a story-telling screensaver.  I finished the 4th draft yesterday and blogged about it.

Now to write a query letter and find an agent!

I am loving Michael's stories, but missing all the WAT chattter. Is it very quiet, or am I just hanging out in the wrong place?

Not much of an update for me anyway. I'm still working through to an ending on week2 story (Adrian, I will get you to the end!), and mid-draft on week three. I think I've been left behind, but fortunately my goals were achievable and I will earn my l'il bit'o sponsorship. ;-) 

-L. 

I've been posting my progress over at livejournal. My original goal was 1000 words a week (a realistic goal considering the constant interruptions I get from my three year old). This weekend, I went to London to meet up with CW classmates Derek and Siobhan and on the train journey home managed to pound out three thousand words to a story with sf and mythic elements. Long live the Eurostar...I think that will be my choice of transport next time I go to London.

Discussing the novel with Siobhan helped me move past a hard point in my novel, so I'm moving forward again and hope to put in more wordage on that this week. I can't wait for the two weeks that hubby is free. He can take the kids away while I write.  I've also polished and sent out two stories, as I pledged to do during the Write-a-thon week.