Things the story I have been working on for ages has that don’t belong in fantasy:

• Giant Robots (The Loska use scavenged mechs for siege weapons and whatnot.  Sort of like MBTs for a new era.)
• Colony Drops (well, asteroid drops, but the principle is the same)
• Wormholes (okay, shut up, I know there’s fantasy equivalents but fuck you.)
• Aliens (well, in the universe anyways – not necessarily in the story itself)

Sometimes i wonder if i shouldn’t rework the fundamental conceits of my, uh, work-in-progress.

Unlike most of the later kings of Dyrene, August II did not seem to be especially concerned with the further dissolution of the kingdom of Dyrene under his reign.  Indeed, in many respects his reign would become the nadir of the regal power in Dyrene, as August II proved to be completely incapable of standing up to the Sothi Lords on any issue of sustenance, and may have been assassinated four years into his reign by his brother, who took the title August III and proved to be so unruly a king that the Sothi eventually felt obliged to go to war against him in an attempt to contain his power.  While August III, like every king before him since the dissolution had begun, ultimately failed in his attempts to reunite the kingdom, August II’s nephew Auvias II would eventually be the first king to reign over a newly reunited Dyrene [...] (more…)

I just want to let everyone know that the fantasy brick i’m currently chipping away at passes Bechdel’s Test with flying colors!  It’s a nice feeling when you check your work with something like this and pass.  That’s not to say that I don’t have work to do if I want to develop and handle my female characters in the way they deserve, but I think that my deep aversion to writing a sex-scene of any kind is going to help me avoid overtly sexualizing my female characters, and giving them deep and living characterizations is going to be hard (I’m not a girl anfer all) but I believe I am up to the challenge, and have been doing well so far.

Also, I like my female characters.  They deserve effort from me.

Because why not?

It was easy to mistake the Kafkan ships for lots of things that they weren’t.  Free-floating sculptures, for example – enormous constructions of steel and glass, floating in the depths of space.  Or maybe giant, glittering swords.  Cities in flight, maybe.  That UFO you saw one night after a particularly bad trip, when you were out of your mind on bad peyote and malt whiskey you had snuck on-planet.

Whatever you decided they looked like, it was hard for you – for anyone – to admit how jealous you were of these ships.  Humans went to the stars twice, and both times the ships they reached out in were workmanlike cans, flying bricks with no more beauty than a well-built garbage truck – that is to say, they had a shape only their builders could love.

But here were the Kafkans – a species new to the stars, strange and alien, with too many limbs and too many eyes and not enough fleshy bits that produced milk for a human’s comfort.  Here these inscrutable, eager aliens were, with their self-chosen name (a name so ill-fitting the cheerful, curious people as to be absurd), and their ships were gorgeous.  They were free-floating sculptures.  No, worse than that.  They cathedrals for the new millennium, spacecraft that symbolized everything beautiful about the culture that had built them, everything beautiful about the universe they found themselves in.  They were so beautiful you could cry.

(You did cry, once – but it was a long time ago, and you were very very drunk.  No peyote that time, but then, the experience with the UFO had turned you off of that forever.  You tell yourself, quite often, that it wasn’t the ships, but the grubby part of your soul, the part that seems bigger and louder every day, knows this isn’t true.)

And that made you angry.

Worse, that made you jealous.  The Kafkans were ugly, and their ships should have reflected that.  They should have been nightmarish, almost organic things, all low corridors and grasping, waving antennae.  They should have been a reflection of their people’s physical states, not this achingly beautiful reflection of the fundamental good nature of these strange creatures, these bug-men from beside the Aquila Rift…

And so, one day, in the dark, ugly corner of your mind, you decided that these ships were too beautiful for the Kafkans.  You resolved to take them away.

400

It’s easy enough to say to yourself (and maybe to your parents) I am going to finish a short story and then submit it to a professional venue and hope it’s good enough that they’ll pay me moneys for it, thus ensuring my future as a writer by proving to myself that I can, in fact, write short fiction that other people want to read.  This is an easy thing.  It doesn’t even cost me a full calorie to say it, I bet – certainly there’s no horrible disfiguring punishment for saying this.  I still have all ten fingers, all ten toes, a nose, two ears, a mouth, two eyes, eyebrows, a remarkable lack of cigarette burns.  I have not been waterboarded, or given electroshock therapy, or locked up in a tiny cell with no food and little water for weeks.  I am every bit a healthy as I was when I made this claim.

It’s easy to say it.

It’s a lot harder to do it.

since saying to myself that this was the summer I make it, all of my short stories remain embarassingly unfinished.  Oh, the one with the working title “of tombs and spiders” is almost done, but it’s been almost done since freshman year of college.  I honestly just can’t imagine finding the inspiration, at this point, to write the missing chunks of story, edit the story into something resembling coherence, and then having the fortitude to send it off with a cover letter.

I hope I can finish it someday, though – because, for all its faults (and it has a lot, I doubt it’ll ever be published), I like it.  I like the character it focuses on.  He deserves an end, even if it is a Bad End.

But then, with a beginning like this, how can the end be anything but bad?

Three hundred and sixty-four years, two months, nine days, six hours, fifteen minutes, and thirty-four seconds after the death of the witch-queen Kharani, one Shaden Shadwell Lenden awoke screaming in a black stone coffin buried somewhere inside Vaangenfing Castle.

“Aaaaaaaaaaa!” was his greeting to the impenetrable darkness that met him when he opened his eyes. Shaden didn’t much like the dark.

“Aaaaaaaaaaa!” Shaden continued as he tried to bring his hands up to check that, yes, his eyes were open, and yes, he still had eyes. His knuckles smashed into the sides (or front, it was hard to tell) of the coffin. Here the scream changed timbre, becoming a wail of pain. “Auuugh!”

Through trial and error, Shaden managed to get his knuckles (by this time horribly battered and bleeding) to his mouth. He continued to moan even as he sucked on the damaged knuckles, alternating between hands. Occasionally he hiccuped.

The thing about writing fantasy is that it lets me write things like this:

The captain of the ship was a vile little man, an expatriate from the free city of Lagasham in the east. He wore his forehead shaved, but the rest of his hair was bundled into a long thick queue. He had silver bells tied to the end of it, so that whenever he moved his head sharply they tinkled. Liran thought privately that the bells sounded more like silvered tin, tinny and cheap.

His name was Shian. At least, that’s what Liran thought he said; his Dyrenan was so thick as to be unintelligible (though Liran suspected it made a great dip for fried tortillas), and Liran’s collection of languages did not include much in the way of minor tongues. They communicated haltingly in a pidgin of Southric, Northric Trade, and something that might have been High Ashindas but probably wasn’t. A lot of confusion had been had at the beginning of their business relationship when they established that Liran thought the word “Nas” meant very, while Shian believed firmly that it meant “not.”

Upon reflection, telling a man he was “very much able to pay” in a language he didn’t speak fluently was probably a bad choice on Liran’s part.

The ship in question, the Unquestionable Mercy of The Lady of The Sea, was a Fluyt – scarce worthy to cross open ocean. It was a good thing the Isle where the Circle had been built was nestled firmly in the bosom of the calmest sea in the world. Liran wouldn’t have trusted the Fluyt otherwise; in addition to being a large, top-heavy ship with barely enough maneuverability to get out of port, the specimen in question was dilapidated and shabby. It sails were patched, its railings splintered, and its hull badly in need of a scraping.

A floating deathtrap, in other words. Liran, already suffering from a pathological fear of the sea, was certain he was going to go insane during the voyage.

The other thing about writing fantasy is that i like fantasy, and I want to write what I like.

…

I have in my posession the Ghost in the Shell O.S.T. 4 which is a single track, 49 minutes long.  It’s an interesting listen.  Not as good as O.S.T 3, though which I think might be my favorite.

Jhorang found what he was looking for in the city of Amh-he: A way out.  The Dun Men had not caught up with him yet, and indeed he might have lost them in the city of Grajh-he, but that did not lessen his desire to escape the Vale by any means necessary.   Better to be a live man somewhere else – somewhere beyond the reach of the Dun Men – than to be a dead man in the Vale.

The caravan master shook his head wryly.  “I do need guards,” he admitted.  “It’s a long dangerous road ahead, and that’s before we cross the crescent.”

“I’d heard you wanted to push beyond the crescent,” Jhorang said.  “It’s true, then?”  (more…)

September 9, 4702
Olympus Shipyards
Speech given by the Honorable Representative Gordon H Washington of Geneva on the event of the retirement of the GCM-X Gustavus Adolphus.

Ladies and gentlemen, members of the press;

It gives me great honor to be standing here on the eve of the retirement of this fine ship. Obviously we’re doing things a little differently with this ship – part of it is because the crew has specifically requested it, and part of it is that there have been some new laws enacted which have led to official recognition as warship AIs as sentient, conscious, and worthy of citizenship in the Confederacy.

The Gustavus Adolphus is one of the most famous ships in our fleet, and it’s only fair it receives more recognition for its service.

Most of the ladies and gentlemen gathered here know the history of Gustav, as he’s chosen to be named. On Sepetember 9, 4660 Gustav was launched as the lead ship and test bed for its class of missile destroyer, and almost immediately was hijacked by our very own Kadeshi Ikaya, Special Agent to the Confederacy Office of Naval Intelligence.

Yes, I can see you laughing in the audience, Kadeshi, but we both know that if it had been anyone else who pulled the stunt, they would have been court-martialed in a heartbeat. (more…)

…and this is the last day of the thirty days thingy.  Hurrah.

For a thousand years, mankind spread across the galaxy, relying on the nearly miraculous Hauser dive to fling them faster than light. The United Nations metamorphosed, taking on more and more and more authority. The single, unified UN government at the height of mankind’s expansion reached some two hundred and fifty worlds scattered across a region of space that stretched as far as the Aquila Rift.

And then it came crashing down.

The human intergalactic civilization was tenuous at best. Worlds were easily isolated, lost, forgotten. Records were scarce, and the precise region for the collapse was unknown. It could have been plague, or war, or any of another hundred reasons. Within a century the home world had been lost, and the colonies of humankind began to forget about their brethren.  (more…)