Writing

Story of the Week #6: Trying to Stay Dead

FORWARD

This is probably the most pretentious story I’ve written yet. But I’m not letting that stop me.

There are many reasons why I didn’t move on to a Master’s program in philosophy after I completed my Bachelor’s degree. One of them is a profound lack of sympathy. I read Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, for example, and thought, “Yeah, I’ve felt that way from time to time myself.” I just didn’t whine about it for seven hundred pages. In French. My response to Nietzsche less nuanced, and I was just afraid that Heidegger was going to give himself a coronary, given how hard he tried define “to be”. The poor fellow never succeeded, either.

Still, there are some areas of philosophy that continue to intrigue me. The nature of consciousness is particularly interesting, and I’ve spent a lot of time wrangling with the difference between consciousness and highly developed responsive behaviors. If we split open my epistemology professor’s head, for example, and instead of brains a million trained fleas poured out, and it turned out that he had just been a flea-controlled automaton all along, who’s to say he wasn’t conscious anyway? Philosophers  worked on this question long before Alan Turing came along and named a test after himself. The answer — “Fuck if I know” — continues to inform philosophy and psychology to this day.

So inevitably I began to wonder whether the people around me actually had consciousness at all. Were they conscious entities, like me (I decided they were, by the way, just to soothe your possible concerns)? Or just very sophisticated flea machines? You can’t ask them, “Are you conscious?” because they would answer “Yes”, regardless of whether they were or weren’t because the fleas in their heads would be programmed to. But I continued to think about it, because it was an interesting way to frame questions of consciousness, epistemology, ontology, and ethics. I imagined a procedure which could take a conscious person, remove their consciousness, and yet retain their ability to interact fully with the world, and a world full of people like that. I even wondered what it would be like to be a person who interacted with the world but had no true sense of self. Well, of course, the answer is that it wouldn’t be like anything, because with no self that can experience the lack of self, the lack of self cannot be experienced.

I discovered, to my dismay, that there has already been a lot of work done in this field, though the philosophers who work with these concepts have the decency to use the term “zombie” to refer to de-consciousnessed people who continue to behave as though they were conscious. Technically, the term is “philosophical zombie”. Or, to those with a more Simon Peggish bent, “P-Zed”.

So anyway, I decided to deal with these issues in this week’s story of the week. I decided to use the term “animus” to refer to the consciousness, because it can act as such a cool root to a number of different related terms. I had fun playing around with point of view and tense as a way to express varying levels of experience of self; so any violations of rules related to these concepts were perpetrated deliberately. I’m interested in feedback to this story, if only because I want to know how well my messing around worked out.

Enjoy!

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Story of the Week #5: Sangrilicious

Here it is, folks, Story of the Week #5.

I hate vampire stories. I mean, really hate them. I know, it’s a weakness of mine, but I can’t seem to find any vampire stories that do anything original with the trope. I mean, there are a few vampire stories that are good, as long as the story is about the characters surrounding the vampires, rather than the vampires themselves. I really enjoyed Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, after all, because the vampires were really just sort of peripheral to the whole show. Angel was okay, but Angel’s brooding got more and more annoying. Quite frankly, I preferred Angelus to Angel. Evil vampires out for some serious blood and mind fuckery I can take. Brooding and depressed vampires are just dull. “I’m immortal,” they say morosely. “Allow me to whine about it as I seduce you.”

So, anyway, given my hatred of vampire stories, I figured it was high time I wrote one of my own. I’m sure there are some elements of vampire mythology I’ve gotten wrong here, and some purists may dislike it. Whatever. The vampire mythology is really wide open. If Brian Lumley can make vampires the victims of some sort of space parasite, then I can do whatever I want to.

I will say that this story is extremely rough. Most of my stories of the week get at least half a revision, just to clean up some major continuity bugs, but I don’t have time to do that with this one. So you get to see it as is. I’m not all that thrilled with this one, but I suppose it could be worse.

The two of you who are my regular readers will recognize a couple of elements from my earlier stories. You might recognize a name from “In the Living Room, a Painting”. And, of course, the story takes place in Roosterville. Here I tried to pull a Suzuki, and recast that first story in a way that lets it stand alone as its own story, yet still expand on it, just as Koji Suzuki did with his three Ring novels.

One final note: I know that my Latin is completely off base. Sue me.

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Story of the Week #4 - Floaters

Well, here it is. Story of the Week Number Four: “Floaters”. Like all the other stories I’ve written for this little project, this one is inspired by true events.

Anyone, have fun with this one. It’s a little bit gruesome toward the end, so if you have a weak stomach, you might want to avoid this one. Because I believe this may be the first story I have ever written in my entire life that might have some disturbing content.

Enjoy!

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Story of the Week #3 - Roosterville

This is my third Story of the Week, and this one was by far the hardest to write. I think it’s because I actually had a plot that I wanted to use, and a pretty complicated one (by SOTW standards, at least). It has issues, but I think it has, at least, a lot of potential.

I took my first Story of the Week, “On the Road to Orlgrunt”, to my writers’ group this past week. The consensus was that while it wasn’t a great story, no one would become upset if they saw it in a fantasy magazine. They did give me some solid ideas for improvement, though, which makes me happy.

It was my online buddy zarchasmpgmr who pointed me at this article, and suggested that perhaps I could do something with it. This is the story that resulted from that. It’s another bit of backstory for one of the main characters of The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster, and I think it shows that I’ve been watching a lot of The X-Files lately. The story’s beneath the fold, and commentary follows the story.

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New online story

I’ve just added one of my older stories, “Thanatotherapy”, to my website. This is not this week’s Story of the Week. It’s just a story that was on my website a couple of years ago, released under a Creative Commons license, and is now back.
Enjoy.

Two Rejections in One Day

The editor at Asimov’s Science Fiction rejected “Padma”, saying it was “…sweet and evocative, but… not right for me.” I find that an interesting comment. I’m not sure I would ever describe that story as “Sweet”. Still, kind words, so the story bounces off to another market like a cat I’m trying to shoo from [...]

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 [...]

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?

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.

w00ts required

I just got notification that my short story "The Bride Price" has been accepted for publication. I’m especially pleased with this, since the prompt for the story came from my good friend RM Solberg and my local writers’ group had a good chuckle over it as well.
I think that this acceptance is particularly instructive for [...]

A review is in

"The Fix", a website that reviews short fiction, has a review of Issue #33 of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Of "A Most Heinous Man", the reviewer says this:
[The illustration by Lewis Morley] appropriately meshes with the humorously pulpy monster tale by Richard S. Crawford. A bit longer than flash, this fun bit of fiction makes [...]

New stories on my website

I’ve just added a couple of new stories to my website, so please share and enjoy.
First is "writing down some", a story I wrote when I worked at a local newspaper, hating every minute of it, delivering newspapers to the racks and repairing racks whenever they broke down. It really wasn’t that bad a job, [...]

Don’t taunt the fear demon.

So the other night I was in bed, trying desperately to let go of the day and fall asleep, and I was almost there when a little tiny voice broke in and said, "Maybe… maybe I’m just a boring writer."
There’s nothing better for waking you as you’re drifting off to sleep than a good shot [...]