Story of the Week #2 - Jenny Goes Home

Second Story of the Week, and two days early. This one goes into a little bit of backstory of one of the characters in The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster, the novel I’ve been writing for… well, forever at this point. I hope to finish it soon.

Anyway, those precious few who’ve read early drafts of the novel who have asked, “Who is Jenny lying to?” Well, the answer should be pretty obvious by the end of this little story.

See if you can catch the geek references! There are at least seven different movies or television shows referenced, some blatantly, some not so much.

Enjoy! Or, as always, not.

Oh, one last special note: the main character is NOT named after my wife.

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Could be interesting…

Mahalo.com is looking for freelance writers to help them build up their search results. From their website:
Mahalo is a human-powered search engine dedicated to delivering carefully curated search results featuring the highest quality, spam-free links available, alongside helpful and informative Guide Notes and Fast Facts about these search terms. Our motto is ”We’re here to [...]

Fully Degreed

As of today, I have my degree in Horribleness from the University of Evil-Doing. Next up is my application to join the Evil League of Evil.
Behold, and shudder; click on the thumbnail to see my degree in all its horribleness. It’s a great honor, although I think my friend Jeff probably deserves it far more [...]

Who Wants to be a Superhero, Part III… Or not.

My sources — otherwise known as Google — inform me that there will not be a Season Three of the Sci Fi Channel’s epic series event, Who Wants to be a Superhero? I’m feeling just a tad ambiguous about this. On the one hand, I enjoyed the first season quite a bit, and was happy [...]

Why I don’t read much modern urban fantasy

Some may complain that I’m not being totally fair. Well, in all fairness, this sort of dynamic permeates every fiction genre, so I’m not being exclusionary at all (if you don’t believe me, go hang out with some horror authors sometime… or even worse, a passle of science fiction authors, and then ask them “So, [...]

Remakes that don’t need to be made but are being made anyway

I offer the following as proof that Hollywood not only does not care about us, but actively hates us with an intense fiery passion, and laughs at us because we continue to fall for their shenanigans.

V. Apparently NBC has been working on a remake of the brilliant 80’s science fiction invasion miniseries, only this time [...]

Book Review: “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by Mark Haddon

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon
ISBN: 978-1400032716
Published May 2004 by Vintage
Rating:
I first saw this book on the shelves when Jennifer and I visited Ireland in May 2006. When we got back I started seeing it on the shelves in America as well. Everybody kept recommending it to me. [...]

Fly Me to a Flying Suborbital Space Platform…

Today, Virgin Galactic unveiled their new spacecraft: the WhiteKnightTwo, christened “Eve” in honor of company founder Sir Richard Branson’s mother. Eve is the ferry craft that will deliver SpaceShipTwo and its passengers and payloads into space. Or at least to very high altitudes.
Naturally, I think this is damn cool. I doubt that I’ll ever get [...]

Plants with Eyes

Inspired by our recent trip to Safari West (where we got to play “Keeper for a Day”, which is why I got to hand feed a giraffe) and by watching The Mist, I’ve been amusing myself lately speculating about future directions of life on the surface of the Earth. Mostly I’ve been thinking about how [...]

Anyone want to play along?

In all the excitement about revamping my website, enjoying our soon-to-be-completed kitchen, working on a website for a local choral group, and everything else, I completely forgot to ask if anyone else out there wants to play along with the “Story of the Week” torture. Come on, it’ll be fun!

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Book Review: “Infected” by Scott Sigler

Infected by Scott Sigler
ISBN: 978-0307406101
Published April 2008 by Crown Books
Rating:
I picked up this book with some pretty high expectations. I’d listened to two of Sigler’s podcast novels, Earthcore and Ancestor, and thoroughly enjoyed them both. They made my daily commute not just tolerable, but something I actually looked forward to. I knew that actually [...]

Story of the Week #1: On the Road to Orlgrunt

Here’s Story of the Week number one. I was pretty surprised at how easy it was to write it. This Story of the Week thing is going to be easy!

Anyway, this is “On the Road to Orlgrunt”. It’s got a couple of in-jokes from my days as a Dungeon Master but I think it’s nicely accessible to everyone. Enjoy. Or not.

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A bold new idea in self torture

As I’ve mentioned a few times already, I’ve been monkeying around with my website a bit. I’ve fully upgraded WordPress and all the plugins I’m using, cleaned up the code, reorganized the pages, and cleaned up the look. I still haven’t created my cool bunnies-vs-Cthulhu graphic or accompanying theme, but I think what I’ve got is much better looking now and loads faster and scrolls better.

To celebrate just a bit, I’ve put a new short story, “Joe’s Salvation“, up on my online stories page. It’s not my best story, and I think the satire is a bit blunt, but I enjoy it and I hope you do too.

And also to celebrate I’ve decided to create a brand new painful challenge for myself: the “Story of the Week”. The plan is that for the next year I will write a short story of at least 250 words every week. The rules are that they will be at least 250 words long, will be complete stories, and they will be due on Saturday at midnight each week. No breaks. No excuses. Beginning this week, which means I have between now and Saturday at midnight to come up with the first story. I also have some ideas for audience participation, as it were. I intend to post the stories on my blog, just to keep myself accountable. If anyone wants to play along with me, feel free!

After the year I expect to have at least fifty-one short stories that are pure crap. Maybe one or two of them will be okay. Who knows? But I also don’t intend to let these one-off stories interfere with my other writing. November, with NaNoWriMo, will be interesting, I think.

So, enjoy the (somewhat) leaner look of my site, enjoy the new short story, and when I start posting my story-of-the-week stories, I hope you enjoy those as well.

Dust

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve decided that it’s time to do a revamping of my website. I’ve cleaned up quite a bit of backend code, fixed up some issues in my stylesheets that were slowing things down, and did some work at replacing some tables with stylesheets, and so on. So the site’s going to [...]

Website Update Coming

 The current version of my website (http://www.mossroot.com) is pretty JavaScript and CSS and table heavy, the result of tinkering and bludgeoning I’ve done on it for the past decade. As a result, even though I’ve done my best to keep the code lean and XHTML compliant, it’s burdensome and slow-loading; and if one little part [...]