Category: People
Story Fight!
Miranda sits at the table and turns the ring over and over. “You should have called me,” she says.
“Of course I called you.” He blinks and frowns. “I called you until your mailbox filled up. I called out the window and I called 911. I called, I–I called you names–“
“Please don’t take that tone,” she says.
“Why not?” he asks coldly. “It’s not as if I can make you upset.”
But Miranda loves him, loves him like chocolate and heat and really good pop songs. She can’t speak. She slaps the table and all the windows blow out.
And it’s a bit of an in-joke, but William’s allegory for my occasional struggles with syndication is unfairly rich.
Remember when I said my family was pirates again? This year I had a camera. Coming soon: proof.
My family was pirates again! Brenna had to go to the hospital! But she’s okay! My embarrassingly bare portfolio site went live! Ben wrote another LJ-feed story!
Mario and Tessa sit at the machine.
“What do you think these knobs do?” Tessa asks. Mario responds in the most natural manner possible.
The machine will hum. Tessa will say “Wait, did you hear that?”
Mario will nod. “Yeah. It’s tensokinetic, all right.” He’ll twist another knob.
The machine will have hummed. Mario will have said “Now that’s just weird. Let me try and find another tense.”
Tessa will have said “Yeah, I don’t think we want to get much more esoteric than this.” Mario will have spun another knob…
But the past tense setting [error: tense not found] broken!
You can tell it’s not canon because it’s in the past tense
Spurred by my threat to kill off Marlo and saved from the LJ feed, Ben bends Anacrusis to his will:
Suddenly Millicent started moving again!
“Awwwww” said Cosette, lovingly. She squeezed her sweet adorable fuzzy wuzzy kitten with marble eyes tightly. Millicent purred.
Rob cheered up!
Holly cheered up too!
South settled down!
The Chosen Ones remained awesome!
The Justin finally defeated The Man!
Everyone danced for the next fifty words!
Story fight!
Last week, William challenged me over the Miranda story; took a while to figure this out, but I got it. Your serve, sir.
They don’t even check whether you’ve got an emergency shunt or cutout: either you do or you’re here because you don’t. Took Miranda months to find them. They don’t exactly advertise.
It smells like smoke and nerves. “Ready,” says the tech, then kicks the starter and scrambles back to his place in the circle. Miranda’s already got a sweaty hand in each of hers. The multiplier cycles up, rattling, as the tech leans forward for a bite of chocolate.
Overload. Miranda gasps in joy, in pain, in joy, in /
/ the bathroom, at home, Zeke shakily cuts her ring off his finger.
My mother actually WASN’T very educated when she came up with this. UNH.
All the nine-planet mnemonics you learned were dumb, because mnemonics are dumb, period. Purge them from your brain. Good!
My mother taught me the planets in kindergarten or something, using a song she and her friend made up on the playground when they were in elementary school. It goes like this:
“Mercury, Venus, Earth
dah-dah nanananah
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn
dah-dah nanananah
Uranus, Neptune and–
Plu-to.”
And I have never forgotten them since. The best part is that now that the list has been shortened, it’s more easily converted than your elevated mastodon who just served you divorce papers or whatever.
Uranus, Neptune and–
That’s all.”
Other people that write good
UJ wrote a fantastic response to my “Christ of the Barricades” challenge, and Will wrote a prequel to Beloit, saved here from the LJ feed:
Tarnished as it is, the dirty chrome armour of the Heliocrashers shines as they blast through the wall: Erythrophobia zaps at a guard, but canon says that sonoluminescence doesn’t cause bubble fusion. So she punches him through a wall.
The other ‘crashers are covering her while she sets a charge against the generator’s critical weak point when canon oozes out of a grate and tears Erythrophobia in half. The charge doesn’t detonate because canon says they use fusion to fly, not fight: instead, her top half flies into a duct and her suit’s failing containment does the job just as well.
And then there’s stuff like Sumana’s MC Masala, which… you know about MC Masala, right? And Leonard is getting the kind of rejection letters most of us would kill for, for a story you will (when you get to see it) kill to have come up with.
There’s no unifying characteristic between the amazing writers with whom I associate, no New School or Movement, even though I keep trying to assign one. I guess I’m just going to have to publish all you guys?