Thursday, September 16, 2010

Prose Summer Update

It's been a slow summer for prose, but slow doesn't mean completely unproductive! I've written about 8k in my WIP, Kindred Spirits (a rewrite of Adopted). Add to that these drabbles:

"It's my Job to Bark"
Charlie isn’t Charlie any more. It’s my job to warn Pack Leader. I bark and bark, but he commands me to sit and be quiet and I obey. He is very disappointed in me.

New Charlie offers me a treat, but the treat is tainted with her different smell. I growl and won’t eat it. When no one is looking she growls back. I bare my teeth. I think I’m a brave dog. Then her jaw unhinges, wider, wider! Her pupils turn to cat-slits and she hisses!

My tail tucks under me and I slink away. I don’t bark again.
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"Quarantine Fever"
The quarantine means that I’m stuck with you.

Remember how I held your hand when we heard the news? I had spent all that week packing and working out how to tell you that I don’t love you any more, but then I chickened out.

At first it was your pig-squeal laugh. How I hated your laugh and the way you pick your toes and how you roll your eyes at me and so many other petty things.

Now it’s your cough. The stuffy nose. The puffy eyes.

There are sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet and I’m still packed.


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“For Safety’s Sake”
The minuscule, pliant mammal did not squeal as most beasts its size did when caged between Milipine’s scaly claws. “What are you doing in my nest?” Milipine growled, filaments of smoke not coincidentally escaping from her nostrils.

“Divining,” came the reply in a soft, light timbre.

“I didn’t know your kind could divine,” she sneered suspiciously. Then Milipine noticed the hallmark eyes, dead-white.

“Your first born son will cause your early demise.”

There was a faint cracking noise and Milipine’s slitted eyes slid down to the mauve egg at her toe. The mammal also slid, out and down and away.
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"Minions"
By the time the faces appeared, Henry had had enough of their whispered taunts. “Here comes our slave, now,” one especially aggravating pansy snickered.

Henry leaned over the windowsill pot, contorting his brow as ominously as he was able. “I can hear you, you know.”

The pansy stretched up until its grin was obscured by Henry’s nose. “Yeah! We know!”

Henry clenched his teeth and raised the watering can, meaning to smash his tormentors into pulp. Instead, he found himself tipping the can forward until a caressing trickle escaped the spout. The pansies tilted their heads back as they cackled.
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"BANG"
The Makers hid the Apocalypse inside a statistical improbability. In order for that particular universe to reach the point of Critical Coincidence, two beings on two separate planets had to have the exact same thought and say it out loud at the exact same time.

It must have been a psychic link -- no one had time to analyze the details.

One night, Elizabeth Crowning, mourning the repercussions of her bad grades, glared up at the stars and screamed, "I hate this place!" Meanwhile, off in the Andromeda Galaxy, Yctct Roctl prodded yet another piece of trash down the killt's gullet...

http://dribblecast.posterous.com/bang-223
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"Barking Mad"
"He's not a dog," Melinda laughed when her husband gave the baby a squeaky bone.

"He's not a dog," she chided when he set a bowl of water out on the floor.

"He's not a dog!" she cried out when she caught the two playing fetch. Someone was going crazy, and Melinda wasn't so sure that it wasn't her.

Michael tented his fingers together as the baby panted at his feet. "I've been pondering this problem," he rumbled authoritatively, "and I believe that he is not a dog. He is a poorly informed extraterrestrial mimic."

"Bark, bark!" the baby said.
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Podcast Summer Update

Pendragon Variety has been going strong, and I've done readings for it and some of my prose has appeared on there. I enjoy participating in the discussions and working the technical side of getting the episodes released.

I've been listening to Escape Pod and the Drabblecast regularly -- and I've even appeared in two episodes of the Drabblecast! (1,2) I love frequenting their forum, too.

Unfortunately Dear Editor has been on hold all summer, but we hope to start it up with a new format next month!