Side note for those of you reading One Among the Dead: a bunch of the posts between day 88ish and today were missing their sketches. This oversight has been corrected. So if you like seeing horrible sketches of Minecraft-like characters terrorizing a confused protagonist, go reread.
What I wrote in 2017
It’s yes, I should write an eligibility post season again.
Short stories published in 2017
“Rudy’s Revenge”, published by Alliteration, Ink in No Shit, There I Was. This anthology is a collection of stories all beginning with the phrase, “No shit, there I was…”
No shit, there I was, trying to get one of the new clowns—guy who called himself Rudy—to back down from an ace-high straight. “Dude, don’t bet a witch doctor your immortal soul,” I warned. Most of the new guys would have listened. Most of the guys in the room were shaking their heads in disbelief.
Rudy scoffed. “What kind of witch doctor goes by Donald?” he said, waving his hand in the middle-aged man’s direction. “This guy’s a joke.”
“The Smell of Home”, published by Dreaming Robot Press in 2018 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide. This anthology is the fourth in its series. Each year the publishers collect science fiction stories appropriate to middle-grade readers regarding exploring. They emphasize diversity in characters and situations.
I knelt on the porch, the bare pads of my toes cooling on the cement. The late summer sun hadn’t made it around to this side of the house yet, and the roof kept the porch a good ten degrees cooler than the grass, except where the shadow of the cable bisected the field.
Caroline said our house needed guarding because of the cable. It was slate grey, wider than an oak, and it soared through our roof into the sky and out of sight. Caroline said thousands of lives depended on it.
Other stuff
If you’re more of the User Experience or Design wonk, you may be interested in:
- Saving the future, one interface at a time on Skrift (issue 29) where I discuss user experience and the lack thereof in Star Trek interfaces.
- My list of posts on The Interconnected, where I’ve published numerous articles on UX, Design, and being a human in the internet age.
Day 103: More and more duckens
Day 103:
I have so many birds that I can’t open a door without birds moving in or out.
We will not discuss the droppings.
Day 102: More ducken tales
Day 102:
Once upon a time there were twin ducken babies (chicklings? chicklets?) named Move and Get Out Of The Way who lived deep in the tunnels of Serendipity Plains.
One day the two babies decided to stand in the way of absolutely everything their nearby human did, until she accidentally tapped one of them with a shovel. Not hard enough to bruise, even, just hard enough to get their attention.
Then the creatures let up a wail that would set even the sternest and most uncaring heart ablaze with pain and sorrow of their tiny fluffy broken hearts.
And the human ended up serving the tiny chicklets the end of her bread off her sandwich.
And they were best friends again for at least ten minutes at which point the human started yelling at them by name all over again.
The end.
Day 101: Getting Deeper
Day 101:
In addition to turning toward the giant mountain (a direction I call “east” based on the sunrise) I’m digging deeper than ever before. The deeper I go, the higher the quality and volume of valuable stone like granite and andesite I’m hitting. I’m finding more iron ore, too.
I’ve got two baby chicks following me around as if somehow we’re going to find a corn cavern or something down in the lower ends of the pit. They’re much more eager than Bobby is… Bobby just kinds of lolls about as if to say “yeah, sure, let me know if there’s something interesting going on,” while the two chicks are like “HEY WHAT IS THAT WHAT ARE YOU DOING HOW ABOUT IF I STAND HERE IN THE WORST PLACE POSSIBLE WHILE YOU DIG?”
Babies. Ugh.
