Tag: fiction

  • Notice of Discrepancy II

    The chime promised fresh coffee. Reconstituted, and pleased to be.

    The grog was hair-of-the-dog strong — except there’d been no dog, and no drink. Just the memories, still settling, the way a hangover settles. This wasn’t a rub-your-eyes morning. Ellison sat on the edge of the bed and let the coffee burn his throat into submission anyway, as if the body’s problem were anywhere near the throat.

    He put on yesterday’s clothes, scratched his ribs, and tried to shake the memories loose. Both the scheduled and the recurring.

    The chime dropped all cheer and turned to chide. Ellison checked his watch. Half past fourteen. Late on the skip again, and his boss was past words now, moving to the file itself.

    He made a gesture for the chime’s eye. Late, and logged as such. It had decided his fate beforehand.

    Feedback, then office chatter, the voice punching through it.

    you’re late ell. again. and it looks like you haven’t done your paperwork on the jacobs write-off.

    i came in late from the skip. i’ll get to it.

    get to it now, accounting is already breathing down my neck about their assets. and…

    The and hung there, unfinished, and Ellison winced into the gap. Then the voice came back.

    it looks like recovery went tits up as well. can you remind me what i’m paying you for, ell? burning assets and dropped recoveries? that in your job profile? or did they change it?

    Ellison did not reply. It was not on-plan.

    get to that paperwork. london office asks about their asset at sixteen, and i need something to tell them. gimme a preview in case they call sooner.

    Ellison shrugged for the eye. It was logged. Brook did not care about performative gestures, but it was better to have a shrug on file. The chime rewarded Ellison with a happy ding.

    he was an idiot.

    Brook waited until Ellison could not wait anymore.

    he skipped out of shadow. the target took offense. he died for it.

    no one checked for an eye?

    Ellison thought about it. And then made it a second time.

    we scanned. nil. oldtown, though. there were windows.

    It was Brook’s turn to pause.

    fuckin’ limeys. all cock, empty cranium. gimme that report, stat.

    A last screech of feedback, and the line died. Ellison sat with a punch-list gone long and that dog barking in his head.

    So he did the only sensible thing: He lit up.

    It was logged.

    Note: These “Notice of Discrepancy” titled posts are an attempt to step well outside my comfort zone when it comes to narrative framing. I have strict rules that I’ve established for myself that I follow on these pieces, although it may often seem scattershot. I apologize in advance if something doesn’t work as intended. It is still an interesting experiment, regardless of the ultimate success.

  • Remember the webring?

    Depending on when you showed up on the internet, you may or may not recall a little something called the webring. For the uninitiated:

    A webring (or web ring) is a collection of websites linked together in a circular structure, usually organized around a specific theme, and often educational or social. They were popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly among amateur websites.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

    I was just thinking about how to bring that back interconnectivity and make discovery less reliant on algorithm. Digging into it, it looks like a fairly simple thing to add on as code and host in a subdomain (basically for the php “guts” to make it work) and, unlike the old-school webring, can be designed to be randomized with a cookie that gives preference to sites that having been visited that are part of the ring, rather than a next/previous circular arrangement. Yes, it puts the thumb on scale of sites you haven’t visited yet, but that is the only algorithm I would employ. Nothing directed.

    The nice thing, I can design it to be purely HTML, which would work on most sites, including WordPress and other blogging services.

    I was thinking of maybe doing a curated fiction writer’s ring, but I don’t want to do it if I end up being the only one participating (it kind of ruins the point). Are there any fiction writers who follow me interested in something like that?

    All you would have to do is add a simple bit of HTML code in your footer or sidebar to call the style sheet and the curated list.

    Let me know if you are writing fiction and are interested. Maybe I could cobble something together on the quick if enough hands are raised (meaning five participants, minimum).

  • Upcoming gothic western serial

    base art generated by Gemini; text and design by michael raven

    While Sunny Day Parasol Co., the serialized noir I’ve been posting, has been “in the can” for about a week now and the publication of the story has been winding up, I have not been idle with the spare time I have had at my disposal.

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  • Writing Hooks

    Some writing thoughts from a diseased mind before they drag me off-stage…

    Something I learned today: The “Vaudeville Hook” was not just a cartoon trope, but was used in real life. The “hook” (akin to a shepherds’ hook) used to pull off performers who had gone off the rails, were unpopular with the audience, or had overstayed their welcome. I had suspected that these were not a complete fantasy, having managed my own poetry “vaudeville” in the 90s and having occasion to wish for such a device to move things along for those very reasons.

    What I didn’t know was that the hooks were part of the stage equipment, used to pull back the stage curtains at the start of a performance. Huh.

    (more…)

  • Half-penny Thoughts — 09mar25

    Photo by Bharath Kumar on Unsplash

    As I delving back into the habit of writing prose versus my habit in recent years of writing almost exclusively poetry, I’m tossing around several ideas to bounce around my largely empty cranium.

    Okay, it’s more like dumping a large bucket of superballs at this time.

    Or, if I’m more upfront and honest about what I’m doing, throwing the whole bunch of superballs all at once as hard as I can and see what comes out of the bouncy mess.

    (more…)

  • Subdomain progress

    black wooden fence on snow field at a distance of black bare trees
    Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com. I know, this image has nothing much to do with this post.

    I know, yawn, blow-by-blow accounts are so dull and so very much not droll (let us not confuse the two “d” words, please), but I’m going to natter on a bit about it anyway. It would possibly be wise to skip this post unless you are somewhat interested in the process.

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  • Strife | a fragment

    Photo by Marjoline Delahaye on Unsplash

    The following is a lightly-edited fragment of a what was intended to be a longer bit of fiction I wrote in January 2015. I found it while looking for old files on a portable HDD to see how hard it would be to recreate “Rust” from my post yesterday. No dice… yet, anyway. I may be looking for the wrong filename and it could be under another name entirely. The song I referred to as “Myrrh” (which is only one of many “Myrrh”-titled songs I’ve worked on) is actually fully intact and on my modern DAW, so I might have to share that (with vocals!) once I decide what those lyrics should be. But, on with the story… I’ll say a bit more about this piece after the fragment.

    Strife

    The smell of excrement, rot and chemicals rose from the waters as the barge Vivienne and Llewellyn were riding floated across the River Strife to the slaughter yards south of the river. The copper smell of fresh blood drifted over the other smells and Llewellyn had to choke back a the bile that threatened to add to the miasma of roiling in the dark twilight waters below.

    “Good gods, how does anyone deal with this stench on a daily basis?” he asked no one in particular, and didn’t expect to get a response. He covered his face with a handkerchief.

    (more…)

  • In the evening

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    Ed watched his neighbor undress in the moonlight in the window in the apartment across the way. He dimmed his reading lamp so he could better appreciate the natural contrasts of the moon against the inky blackness of her room, put down his book on Celtic mythology filled with more fiction than the latest bestselling high fantasy novel. It was truly awful scholarship, if there was any scholarship involved in its writing at all. The lack of references and indices told most of that tale.

    It was not the first time he had played peeping tom and he doubted it would be the last. Although he suspected his neighbor knew full well that he often watched her in the semidarkness, her eyes never once stole to the window framing her slow dance from clothing to skin. That his neighbor had never once drawn her curtains in the name of modesty, Francis Edward Carlisle (“Ed” to most folks) was damned if he was not going to allow himself to take in the show visible in varying degrees of light as the moon waxed and waned throughout the year. His neighber was “a looker” by his book and Ed was not exactly flush with offers from women willing to share their naked bodies with him at fifty-two. That had stopped happening someplace in the last decade or so and, to be honest, he had never had all that many offers in life but it still happened on the rare occasion before he had acquired his permanent beer belly and man tits.

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  • Chipped nails

    conceptual portrait of hands with red thread
    Photo by Amirhossein Kianbakht on Pexels.com

    Her matte-black nail polish was chipped again, a detail she had grown used to. She knew she was rough on her nails, using them for everything from a makeshift screwdriver to a replacement for the worrystone her grandmother had given her and that she had lost. Instead of rubbing a smooth stone to assuage her nerves, she taken up nail-biting. Or, rather, she had taken it up again. The stone was her grandmother’s way of trying to break of the nail-eating habit. And it had worked, until she went and lost the stone one night out on the town. She kept hoping the stone would show up but considered the possibility unlikely. And she had yet to get around to replacing it.

    She ran a ragged fingernail over her lips, drawing a pinprick of blood where the rough edge accidentally caught a ridge of flesh. When she thought about it, she found that she did not care. Maybe he would think that was sexy. If not, she had other ways of getting his attention.

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