Story of the Week

Story of the Week #19: Thanksgiving with my Family

This is me, cheating, and hoping that I don’t therefore violate the integrity that I, as a storyteller, have developed with you, the half dozen or so loyal followers that I have garnered over the years. If you feel like mocking, stoning, or otherwise berating and vilifying me in public, well, I thoroughly understand.

At any rate, this story is actually an old one which I’ve revised a touch for this project. I didn’t want to cheat, I promise, but what with us leaving early this week for Thanksgiving without guaranteed reliable Internet access and NaNoWriMo having already consumed my soul and not enough stories in reserve, I’ve had no choice. I first wrote this story a few years ago, but I haven’t shared it around for quite awhile. In years past it was well received. Particularly by members of my own family… which, I suppose, should probably give me second thoughts about spending the holidays with them.

Enjoy!

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Story of the Week #18: Terrible Tales for Tiny Trolls - Creepy Beauty

Yet another Terrible Tale for Tiny Trolls. Enjoy!

November’s stories are all going to be very short. After all, it’s National Novel Writing Month, which I participate in each year.

Enjoy!

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Story of the Week #17: Little Fluffy Wiggletoes and the Big Revenge

This week’s story is a sequel to a story I wrote a few years ago, “Little Fluffy Wiggletoes“, which proved to be one of my most popular stories, for some reason. I’ve been asked for a sequel for some time, so here it is.

I’ve got a whole cycle of stories for Little Fluffy Wiggletoes in mind. He’s got quite the adventure ahead of him.

November’s stories are all going to be very short. After all, it’s National Novel Writing Month, which I participate in each year.

Enjoy!

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Story of the Week #16: Terrible Tales for Tiny Trolls - Moldylocks

Not much to say about this one. It’s another of the Terrible Tales for Tiny Trolls, which is turning into an ongoing series; I have a couple more in mind, and when I get around to cleaning up some of the language and removing some of the more adult components, I think these might actually work as children’s stories.

November’s stories are all going to be very short. After all, it’s National Novel Writing Month, which I participate in each year.

Enjoy!

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Story of the Week #15: The Prince’s Challenge (Sangrilicious II)

This is me, drinking the Kool-Aid, and continuing with my vampire story. “The Prince’s Challenge” is Part Two of “Sangrilicious”, which was Story of the Week #5 (on a side note, I’m rather impressed that I’ve been doing this for fifteen weeks now; that’s probably some sort of milestone).

My feelings about vampire fiction haven’t changed. I still don’t like the vast majority of it. And I’m therefore surprised that I’m finding myself drawn to Delilah’s adventures as she, a newly embraced vampire fully schooled in the traditions and culture of her species, enters and tries to take over a town which is full of what you could basically call redneck vampires. I suspect that there will be two more stories about Delilah in the next few weeks. I already know what the title of each story will be, but I’m not going to tell you what they are ahead of time.

Enjoy!

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Story of the Week #14: Emissaries

This is one of those stories that I read after writing and go, “Huh? What was I thinking?” Seriously, I know this story is about something, but I’m not entirely sure what. I invite your speculations.

Fair warning: I know that some of my regular readers are disturbed by some of the more visceral imagery that can show up in my stories from time to time. Bear that in mind should you choose to proceed…

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Story of the Week #13: Ghoultown

This is a story I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. Honestly, who doesn’t want to write a story about zombies and cowboys? No one, that’s who. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.

This story, though, got started as something else. I was going to write a haunted house story. I had the plot and the details of the house all ready to go, and I was excited about the concepts. Then something happened, and the story derailed big time. But that’s okay. This story, I think, in spite of the fact that it’s rife with cliches and anachronisms, has a lot of potential.

The main character, Zoe Garrick, is one that I’ve been holding in my head for awhile now. At first, having been inspired by The X-Files and an on-again, off-again interest in the Western genre, I thought I’d write a story, or even a series of stories, about a government agent investigating paranormal and unusual cases in the Old West. The FBI didn’t exist back then, but the Secret Service did. I figured it would be fun, kind of campy, and full of mad scientists and other great villains. Then I remembered that The Wild, Wild West already existed. Ah, well. So I made my character a US Marshall (an anachronism there; the first woman Marshall wasn’t appointed until the mid-50’s, though a woman Secret Service agent at that time wouldn’t have been any more accurate) and took her out of the loop of the paranormal and unusual investigations. And then this story took a darker turn than I had expected, and to my shock, some sort of theme emerged. I’m not sure what it is. And I’m not sure I approve. But that’s not up for me to really judge. That’s for you, the reader, to decide on your own.

So here it is, “Ghoultown”. It’s not affiliated with the band Ghoultown in any way, though I did listen to them a lot while writing this story.

Enjoy!

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Story of the Week #11: Sir Reynold Fights Another Ogre

It was my friend Ed Gyles Jr. (edgylesjr) who gave me the first line of this story. It was a challenge. Or possibly a dare. Maybe a double dog dare. The point is, he gave me the first line and said I should write a story with it.

So. Here it is. It’s a weird one (as opposed to everything else I have written). So enjoy.

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Current Mood:  chipper

Story of the Week #11: Terrible Tales for Tiny Trolls: Blood Red Riding Hood

Not much to say about this week’s story of the week, save that it’s not quite a children’s tale. It’s also part of a series, Terrible Tales for Tiny Trolls, that my wife suggested. Maybe at some point I’ll clean them up and make them appropriate for children.

Also, by popular demand (well, per a suggestion by one of my three or four regular readers), I’m making these stories available for download in PDF and plain old HTML formats.

Enjoy!

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Story of the Week #10: The X of Doom

Here it is, Story of the Week Number Ten: “The X of Doom”.

Here’s what happened. I have a habit of adding the words “of Doom” to certain words (a habit which my wife says is “highly annoying”, but which I know is merely Jennifer-speak for “quite, quite charming”). Cat, for example, becomes “Cat… of DOOM!” The word “bunny” becomes “Bunny… of DOOM!” And so on.

I don’t know why I do this, save that it amuses me to do so.

One day, as we were driving around, I was observing cats of doom, trees of doom, dogs of doom, etc. My wife finally said, “Fine! I dare you to title your next Story of the Week, ‘The X of Doom’”. So I did. Though it’s not quite the way that Jennifer meant.

For this story I decided to see what would happen if John Irving and Stephen King got together with H. P. Lovecraft and wrote a story about pirates. And the character Nigel Livingstone has been floating around in my head for awhile, so he finally got to come out and claim his destiny (”of DOOM!”). This story is vaguely peripheral to The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster, as just about every single story I write is. I’m also posting it early, since tomorrow night and Saturday night I’ll be at the local con, From the Land Beyond. It’s going to be a blast.

I would greatly appreciate feedback on this story, especially since I deliberately wrote it in a style which is very different for me.

Anyway. Enjoy my little story… of DOOM!

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Story of the Week #9: The Ants from Mars

Just in the nick of time! Still playing with notions of consciousness and philosophical zombies, plus obsessing over that newly discovered species of unusual ant from Brazil.

Posted with no revisions, and with barely a minute to go. Enjoy!

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Story of the Week #8: Beach Wish

I think this is one of my weaker offerings. Still, enjoy!

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Story of the Week #7: TeH K1nG in y3ll0W (Part One)

This week, some more backstory for The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster, focusing on an entirely different character. I’m enjoying this because it’s helping me come to grips with some of the elements of that novel that aren’t quite working for me yet.

But I realized about halfway through this story that it’s too ambitious and complex to fit into my normal “Story of the Week” slot, so I’m breaking one of the rules I set for myself with this project: that each story be a complete story. This is Part One of an anticipated two parter. Part Two might not show up for a few more weeks, though, because I have a few others in the works.

It occurs to me that some Lovecraftian purists — and their are many, of various types — will probably object to how I’ve portrayed several of the entities from the Lovecraftian mythos. The thing is: Lovecraft himself never really wrote anything down in stone. And when he alllowed other writers to use the deities and characters he created, he essentially gave license to other writers to mess around with them as much as they pleased. So I like to think that Lovecraft would have appreciated this little parody.

Anyway. Enjoy! As always.

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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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