Here is a story I wrote for my Off Topic Literary Festival talk. It's untitled at the moment but I wanted to use the principles I developed to write something to show that they work. I kind of want to call it Forgotten Past after a deep track on Death's classic 1988 album Leprosy, but maybe a better title would be  Paradise City. Hmmm. Ok stay tuned at the end because that's a better spot to show the skeletal structure:

No one was looking so I ran out and kicked the tire of our U-Haul. I knew it was a futile gesture but it was the only outlet for my fury. Besides, this rental van was trying too hard to win me over- it was one of those new ones they’d rolled out recently with the fancy graphics on the side- ours had a dinosaur on it. Albertosaurus, a locally grown T-Rex lite. I wasn’t falling for it, and anyways I was damn near fifteen, way too old to care about dinosaurs anymore. I kicked the tire again. 

The dinosaur just stared at me, frozen in a roar as ineffectual as, well, as a kid who didn’t want to move away from his hometown.

The window for sabotage closed, as my dad and mom emerged from the house with another load of boxes. The moving van was pretty much full. 

It was time. 

Dad jumped in the van with me getting in the passenger side. He smiled and turned the key. It … definitely tried to roar to life like an Albertosaurus on the hunt, but only if said dino was gaseous and unwell. It belched and blew black and blue smoke. Not inspiring. There was a knock to the engine too, perfectly acceptable for a diesel, only the rental wasn’t a diesel. I side-eyed Dad. Maybe he would see reason and call off this whole “adventure”.

But no. He didn’t seem troubled at all by the van’s obvious mechanical unsoundness. He just seemed eager to go. “Our new life awaits,” he said, and I looked around at our old life, the only life I’d ever known, and I was struck by how normal the day was. Just any old day. It felt like the last day before the end of the world, but it looked like Saturday. There were no fireworks, no parade in our honour. Dad shifted the van into drive.

“Wait!” I shouted. “Not yet. I gotta . . . I gotta say good-bye to Duncan.” Duncan was our neighbour's cat. I unbuckled my seatbelt and jumped to the sidewalk, running up our neighbour’s walk before my dad could say anything.

I knocked on the door. No answer. I sighed. Not like I actually needed to see Duncan, or Duncan’s always angry owner. What would I even say? “I’m moving away forever, bye!” I stuck my hands in my pockets and got in the van. I was all out of delaying tactics.

Dad shifted the van into drive and pulled away from the curb. From our house. Behind us, in our car, my mom and sister followed. Dad turned on the radio just as Axl Rose started singing the smash hit of the summer. Dad exclaimed, “Paradise City! What are the chances? That’s a good omen if I ever heard one. And if I’m wrong I’ll eat Slash’s hat. Take me down to the paradise city…Edmonton is the paradise city, buddy. Trust me. You’ll love it.”

I looked in the rear view mirror at our rapidly receding house. I wasn’t so sure.

*

Maybe it wasn’t Paradise City but Edmonton wasn’t all bad. It wasn’t even all that different than home, just more of it. Lots of things to discover and learn and see. I don’t even mean the big touristy things like the Mall or whatever. For me it was simply exploring my new home, figuring out how things work. Streets go North-South, while Avenues go East-West. Kind of mind blowing. And the numbers made a grid that, once you understood the code, meant you could find your way around much easier than in Hinton, where all the streets were named after trees or people or who even knew. 

Armed with this knowledge I was able to navigate the transit system half-decently. I felt confident enough in my new skillset that I took the bus to my first day of high school, a few weeks after we moved. Couldn’t be seen getting dropped off at school by my mom on the first day, right? But I missed a connection and wound up being a few minutes late. Clutching my schedule, which told me English 10 was my first class, I searched the unfamiliar halls and found a closed door.

I knocked.

Teacher answered, and I apologized for being late. She checked my schedule and pointed out that I was in the wrong class- this was Physics 30, a Grade 12 class. All those adult-looking grade 12s laughed at me. I scurried away in embarrassment.

The day didn’t get much better after that.

*

Edmonton was scary as hell. And high school- I didn’t know the rules the way I did back home in Hinton. Back home. Edmonton was my home now, and I needed to get used to that. 

At least I learned where and when all my classes were. But even those were strange and unfamiliar. The kids all seemed so grown up and mature compared to me. Like they took school seriously which was kind of a foreign concept to me and everyone I went to school with in Hinton. It made me want to do better but it also just kind of exposed to me how terrible my work habits were and how ill-equipped I was for a school where the students actually gave a fuck.

I was falling behind fast, which had a sort of negative feedback loop effect since I felt less and less comfortable taking part in class discussions. I hated feeling like a small-town hick in front of all these strangers. So I learned to keep my mouth shut, but I listened intently.

“Anyone read the newspaper this morning?” Mr. Brownstone, my social studies teacher asked. Many hands shot up, but not mine. My family didn’t get the paper.

“Last night some racist shitheads- excuse me- skinheads knocked on the door of K___ R___ and viciously assaulted him with a baseball bat. They were mad about some antifascist things he’d said on his radio show. He’s alive but in intensive care. Police have the perpetrators in custody.”

Fuuuck. Edmonton was scary as hell, see what I mean? Dangerous! There were literal neo-nazis walking around attacking people in their homes. How could you ever feel safe in a place like this? The discussion carried on without me, as my stomach had tied itself up into such a dense knot it actually turned into a black hole, swallowing me whole. At least, that’s what it felt like. I thought back to Hinton and wished I could be back there, playing outside with my friends.

I hid on the bus ride home. Not like under the seat or anything, but I wrapped myself in my jacket and didn’t look at anyone. I didn’t want any skinheads following me home.

The next day I had to run my daily gauntlet yet again, ducking past the headbangers smoking outside the main entrance, arranged on the steps like the lion statues outside marble buildings. They utterly ignored me every day, but I didn’t like taking any chances, and always tried to scurry by as quick as I could hoping to avoid any attention whatsoever. On this day, though, they were all focused hard on their stereo system. I found myself- inexplicably- slowing down to listen too. Such a pretty song! What was it? I had to know. Against my better judgment I approached one of the, uh, music aficionados, a tall muscley guy with super long hair and a t-shirt that said “Metal Up Your Ass”.

“What are you listening to?”

“This is Knocking On Heaven’s Door. Bob Dylan wrote it, but this version is a cover by GnR.”

Of course- who could mistake Axl Rose’s voice for anyone else? “I like it. Bob Dylan, hey? Did he write Paradise City too?”

The metal dude laughed. Then he popped the cassette out of the deck and handed it to me. “You can borrow it if you want. I think I prefer the Dylan version. GnR’s a little light for me. Here, take this one too, it’s way heavier. Fucking insane but catchy as hell. You’ll like it.”

I was gobsmacked. This guy had no idea who I was and he was just lending me tapes! I looked at the fucking insane one and the garish, almost cartoonish painting of a guy wracked with disease stared back at me. Death. Leprosy. I’d never seen anything like it.

“You’ve never heard anything like it. Tell me what you think of it, ok? Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. Ok.

On the bus after school, I pulled out my yellow Sports Walkman and the tapes. I meant to put the Guns N Roses one in but the bright pink Death album pulled at me like a corpse dragging me to hell. I put my headphones in and pressed play.

It was loud. It was heavy. It was chaos. It was awesome. It was just like how the metalhead described it. If this was hell I wanted to live there. The songs were not just noise, they were melodic and catchy. Kind of surprised me. And the singing . . . if you could call it that. It sounded like a ghoul that had been dead for a thousand years, screaming and growling about being left to die. I was so enthralled I almost missed my stop. At the last minute I pulled the cord requesting a stop and ran off home.

I listened to Leprosy a hundred times that night. No, six hundred times! And sixty-six. I couldn’t wait to go to school in the morning and see what else my friend listened to. Maybe he would lend me more tapes!

*

“Empire Strikes Back is on tv!” my Mom called to me. I was in my room listening to Sepultura. But I couldn't pass up a chance to watch my favourite movie. Maybe not the most exciting Friday night but far from the worst, right? Anyways I loved the opening scenes on Hoth so much- reminded me of Hinton.

The Imperial Walkers were making a mess of Echo Base when there was a knock at our door. Mom said, “I wonder who that could be?” and she peeked out our front curtains. “Oh. There’s a scary looking guy out there.”

My heart skipped a beat. I thought about the radio announcer who was still recovering in hospital from the skinhead attack.

“What’s he look like?”

“He has really long hair and a leather jacket.”

I jumped up. “I’ll get it! It’s for me. That’s my friend. We’re going to go listen to heavy metal. Bye!”

I closed the door behind me before she could object. A small gesture of defiance - more symbolic than anything else especially since I knew the door would be unlocked when I returned.

*end*

Alright. I only snuck in the names of two Death albums and one of them was Leprosy which isn't really a sneak. It was hard to casually drop the phrase "Individual Thought Patterns" into this story. Or "Scream Bloody Gore." Next time. 

But yeah. My talk was all about mining our pasts to find things that resonate, and using those resonances (or dissonances too) to create a story. Couple that with the idea of discontinuities which is a geological term to show when rock strata aren't continuous, but I use here to express any kind of state change, preferably a sudden one or one where an event clearly delineates a before and after. Alive/Dead is an obvious one. Singe/married. Married/divorced. Healthy/sick. Or, in the case of this story- small town/city. 

I realized that I've written a ton of stories about growing up in a small town, but almost nothing at all about living in a city. When I saw that on paper it really struck me- like, why not? What's going on there? I have lived in Edmonton for over 2/3 of my life now, so why do I keep going back to that first third? With the idea of exploring for the future I decided I would write a story primarily on the other side of that discontinuity. 

So, knocking is a recurring motif here, did you notice? The skinhead attack really happened like that, and I remember being kind of freaked out about that. And I really did see the metalheads all gathered around listening to Knocking on Heaven's Door. And most resonantly for me in real life, it really is true that I was watching ESB with my mom on a friday night when there was a knock on the door. In real life it was my two best friends, Travis and Jon, sneakily brought to Edmonton by my mom to surprise me for my birthday. And in fact Travis and Jon saw us off on the day we left Hinton in that U-Haul. But for story tension fictive purposed I realized I had to cut my two besties out of this story altogether and instead talk about the awesome power of heavy metal which helped me cross over that crucial discontinuity of going from being afraid to being unafraid in my new home.  And then there never was a Duncan the cat and the U-Haul probably didn't knock when it fired up. Anyways thanks for coming it was tons of fun! 

I love how zoom or remote conferences and such have been normalized in this deeply unnormal time we are still in the midst of. Yeah, zoom can be quite awkward and frustrating but I love that we can just say, "Hey let's do a literary festival this month, it will be fun" and no one expects you to buy an airplane ticket or anything. You just show up. I think that's really cool. Anyways all that is to say I am . . . presenting? ... speaking? ... teaching???? I dunno the best term but I am one of five featured writers taking part in this litfest on November 27th. It will be fun!

I definitely feel impostor syndrome for this one. I've been writing for a long time but I don't know that I have anything very useful to offer to other writers, many of whom are way more accomplished than I. But, this topic is shaping up bit by bit so I am looking forward to seeing how it goes.  I might not know the most about writing but I do know the most about mining! Although my old coal mine isn't returning my calls a bout me borrowing some shovels and trucks for the seminar. Hopefully I'll get that sorted out before the 27th. Hope to see you there!

 Happy Halloween! Oh and also, I think today or maybe yesterday was the 19th anniversary of this blog! I have coworkers who are younger than this site. Anyways I totally forgot about this bloggiversary, as we used to say, but even so to celebrate, here is a new volume of The Ursus Verses! The Halloween themed volume!

If you are asking yourself how you missed volume II, don't worry, it isn't out yet. It's ready to go, I just don't have a clear idea of the path forard with it as far as print edition and whatnot. I'd like to do a Kickstarter but I'd also like to not do one. You know? But with Halloween fast approaching I wanted to get volume III out as soon as possible. So, enjoy!

 It's Read In Week! I get to zoom or google meet into Naia's class and read to them. The theme for this year is "To Each Their Own Story" so, I wrote something especially for them today- last year I had just written the story "Curse of the Dad Joke" and read it to the class, and they loved it. So, in a similar vein, here is

The Portal To, Uh, Some Other Place

 

Every day Pallas and Naia walked to school with their Dad, and every day their Dad warned them about the hole in the path. Now, ‘hole’ is kind of a strong word- maybe ‘slight dip’ would be more accurate. Nevertheless, their Dad always shouted a warning- “Girls! Watch out for that hole!”

            The girls never fell in the hole. Sorry- slight dip. In fact, even if the girls had tried to fall in the hole they would have found it very difficult to do so. They would have had to put on a show worthy of grade 5 boys playing soccer, trying to convince everyone that they had just been fouled. 

            One day Naia decided to just that- pretend to fall in. “Argh! Ouch!” she cried, and Dad almost jumped out of his pants.

            “Naia! Eyes on the prize or everyone dies!”

            Naia just looked at Pallas and winked. Somehow they managed to make it to school safely every day.

            But then one day- the day of the Halloween party at school- Dad said, “Hey, I know! Why don’t we take the puppy to school today. It’s getting closer to Halloween and pretty soon it will be too dark and cold to take her.”

            “I don’t know, Dad,” said Naia, “every time we’ve tried it before it’s always turned out to be a bad idea. A really bad idea. Remember that time she chased that rabbit and dragged you by your face down the road? What if she chews on my Halloween costume?”

            “Nah! It will be fine,” said Dad, with all the confidence of a middle-aged dad who obviously didn’t remember all the times before when it most definitely was not fine.

            But you know what? It kind of was fine. At least as far as the Remedy. “See?” Dad said. “She’s not a bitey little foofball anymore. She knows how to act right. Wagh!!” Their puppy- Ahsoka- chose that moment to lunge for the hole, yanking Dad’s arms badly.

            Ahsoka disappeared down the hole.

            Dad’s mouth fell open, kind of a black hole not unlike the one on the path, only deeper. Naia called out to him, “Dad! Do something!” 

            When Dad just stood there, staring open-mouthed, Naia and Pallas grabbed the leash and pulled as hard as they could.

            Ahsoka popped out of the hole, tail wagging. There was something in her mouth.

            “What the heck is that?” Dad shouted.

            “Leave it!” Naia said, and Ahsoka dropped the thing that was in her mouth. Which immediately wiggled away in a disgusting, slithery, slimy sort of way that didn’t quite make sense to the eye. But Naia saw it had a face full of tentacles and eeny weeny wings probably too small for flying. Decoration, maybe. It was kind of green, and kind of not. It was definitely gross, though, and if it had just slithered away that might have been the end of the tale- just one of those weird things that happened as one walks to school, kind of a shruggable “what a strange day” sort of story you tell your friends when you’re bored in math class.

            But Dad decided to give the thing one of the treats he had in his little fannypack he used for training Ahsoka. The thing caught the little chunk of hot dog in its tentacles, and Naia was sure she saw its eyes glow red, and it jumped up much higher than you would expect, and flapped its widdle wings and attached itself to Dad’s face. Then it grew humongous, and then it swallowed Dad.

            This was no longer just a strange day. This was a bad day.

            The thing looked down on them with its red eyes. It spoke. “Hear me, mortals. I am a Great Old One, and this whole world belongs to me now.”

“Wrong!” said Naia.

“Wrong!” said Pallas.

“You don’t look so great to me,” said Naia. “But you definitely look old.”

“Yeah and anyways we are even greater young ones and we banish you to, uh, some other place as long as it’s far away from here!” 

“Either that or you can just explode, we don’t really care. But let our dad go!” Both girls held up their Halloween costume props, which were just sticks they had found at the park and stuck some glitter gems to make them like wizard staffs or whatever.  The sisters had coordinated their Halloween costumes so that they looked like twin sorceresses, Naia in a black robe, Pallas in a white. They had planned to be superhero space robots but had run out of time, so. Witches! Or whatever.

The Great Old One shrank back from the dual assault. “The Staff of ulhuhtC- where did you get that??? How dare you command me? Ouch! Ok ok just don’t poke me with those staffs, they are very poisonous to Great Old Ones.”

Naia and Pallas looked at each other, with their sister power looks that only they knew how to read. They winked, and together they threw their staffs at the monster. Who exploded. Such a mess- Esther Starkman School and the Remedy café, and everyone in the vicinity -including all of grade 5- were covered in chunks of brown-like green-tinged goo. And at the centre of it all sat Dad, nearly unrecognizable beneath all the slime. He looked at his daughters. “What just . . . did that… that thing didn’t just poop me out did it?”

“No Dad,” Pallas replied. “Naia and I made it explode. We rescued you!”

“OK, um, thank you. Uh. Wow. Anyways. We are late for school so we should probably get going.”

“Sure, Dad.” Naia said. “Just watch out for that hole. It’s deeper than it looks.”

 

 

            

 

 

An almost perfect Sunday morning- five stars! But the smoke takes away a star, maybe two. Three? A two-star Sunday morning! Ahsoka liked it fine though. We always stop at this bench in our neighbourhood and sit and look out on the little lake and watch the birds. There's bluejays and meadowlarks and redwing black birds and all kinds of waterfowl. Sometimes waxwings. And there's coyotes and jackrabbits and muskrats... I just love it. Five stars! Just thinking about it has moved me to tears. No, wait, that's the smoke. Two stars!

 

I'll be hanging out at my neighbourhood flower shop- over on 23rd ave you know, Swish. Selling my book and chatting with anyone who comes by. I hope YOU come by! See you there!

Clearwater

Here is a story I wrote a couple of months ago for a monthly contest called Furious Fiction. It's pretty fun and free and open to anyone in the world, so, you should enter!  This was for April's contest, I believe. The prompts were- in 500 words or less, write a story that begins in some kind of queue;  have the words CROSS, DROP and LUCKY; and it must include a map. Oh and you have like 55 hours from the time the contest opens to close. I basically wrote a fictionalized version of some true stories that happened to me back in my hitch-hiking days. At the end of the story I'll show how I changed things up:

Clearwater

Two days of not seeing a soul, and now there was a queue to thumb a ride. Where did they even come from? We were in Northern British Columbia, far away from anything except bears and trees. I’d slept late, in my little tent, off in the bush, and now I returned to my spot on the side of the highway to discover that I was third in line.

And number one didn’t look eager to share.

“You have to wait your turn,” he said. “I was here first.” There are many beautiful adjectives one could use to describe this man, but in that moment I could only think of two: big and scary.

“Actually, this is my third day here. It’s really dead. I had to strike camp so...”

He strode over with calamitous fury, grabbed the cross hanging around my neck and snapped it off. Shit. I held up my hands. “You’re right. You were here first. I’ll wait.”

I took my backpack and sat down a short distance away. The other guy, number two, had watched the whole thing impassively. 

A truck approached, and my ‘friend’ stuck his thumb out. The truck pulled over. Unbelievable. How lucky could you get? That should’ve been my ride. Number two catches my eye, and we shake our heads.

“You’re up,” I said.

“There’s a Greyhound due, I’m gonna flag him down. Driver takes cash if you wanna come.”

“Thanks, but I’ll wait.”

The bus shows up as promised, and number two exits stagecoach right.

Eons later, a ride. Young guy, rusty Datsun, loud music. Perfect. Immediately he started talking as if resuming a conversation we’d been having for years. I did my best to keep up.

“Space elevators presuppose a technology that doesn’t exist,” he said. “But electromagnetic catapults could drop shit right on the moon for a fraction of the cost.”

“Very true. Yes. I agree.” And so it went. Finally he remembered to ask:

“Where you headed?”

“Edmonton.”

“You’re going the wrong way!”

My stomach dropped for a second, but no, east is east and west is west. I knew the way. Space Elevator was equally convinced he was right.

I pulled out my map. “You came from Clearwater, yeah? Here. And picked me up by Vavenby. East. See how the river is to our right, just like on the map?”

He didn’t see. He careened around a slow-moving tractor as if he had been catapulted to the moon. I wrestled with my conscience. Every minute he remained unconvinced was another minute closer to home. But. Poor kid. He was heading away from his spaceport.

I tried one more time. Karma. “Look, that sign says Avola, 23 kms. The map shows Avola east of Clearwater.”

“Oh shit, you might be right. Hey, there’s another hitch-hiker, let’s ask him!”

It was my old friend Number One. 

“You know what? My mistake. We’re going the right way.”

I smiled and waved as we passed.

END

Alright, so. Let's see. I really did catch a ride with a guy who was going the wrong way, and I really did have to pull out a map to show him. But I didn't do any dick moves, I just was honest, which kind of bit me in the butt actually. Lol. He picked me up in Clearwater and wound up dumping me on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, which is where I was stuck for a while. Eventually I caught a ride up a ways to the next exit, which is where I did find myself sharing the road with two hitch-hikers in front of me. But the highway was so dead I wound up going into the bushes and setting up my tent. And later that night the much bigger of the two fellow hitch-hikers stomped into the bush and loudly tore off a branch of a tree and I thought for sure he was going to club me to death. Instead he . . . didn't do anything that I could tell. I have no idea what he did because I was hiding in my sleeping bag and never heard or saw from him ever again. Phew! So in real life he never got into any kind of altercation with me but I definitely remember that feeling of helpless terror.

Oh! And the conversation about the space elevator- a version of that really did happen with a hitch-hiker that I picked up one time near Houston, BC. See, the teeny tiny BC town Houston has the same name as the huge Texan city where they do space stuff so buddy thought Canadian Houston should contribute likewise.

 Air and Nothingness' new anthology opens for submissions today. Are you going to send something? I can say that I am working on something. I think I will be able to finish it in the time allotted- although it's a little more ... ambitious ?? maybe than anything I've attempted before. Kind of space operatic, and as much as I love space opera, it's not something I've really tried to write before. But I have a pretty cool alien organism and setting and even a way to fit the spiritualism aspect in, so. Just do my best, right? 

I've been running again, back up to 10 kms now. I've found that running that distance is pretty consistently reliable for activating the really good creative mindflow that happens sometimes, where you're not fighting it, where the words just come. You can see the story, and how it needs to be written. I wish that could be done with just having a second cup of coffee, and very occasionally it does- but not in any predictable  or reliable way. And so I run. Urg! No, it's good. It's got all the benefits right? It's just so hard. Like writing. Urg!

I wrote a story earlier this year for an open call that didn't get picked up. It was for the theme of Industrial Revolution. Industry is a thing I know about, right? And my mind was kind of thinking about the River Styx and Charon because of Megaflora, so I wrote a story about the Styx and stuff. It was fun to write, and I think successful, and it was about a very specific thing- should I talk about a story that is unpublished and unavailable? I see how that isn't the most useful thing to read about. Hmm. Well, you can always stop reading right? No trouble at all. Ok, I will keep writing about this. I guess spoiler alert for a story you have no way (currently) to read. 

The theme of this story is very easy- it can be boiled down to a thesis statement: progress should have cured death but instead it optimized killing. I even say that right in the text at the end, disguised as poetry. I bring this up because it's useful to have such a thesis for a story, it points you where to go and how to write it, but sometimes I don't always have a theme, or at least something that can be said in one simple statement. This current story, doesn't have that. But it does have a central big theme. It's just too big! How to boil it down. Or how to figure out if it needs to be boiled down, or is just asking some big questions ok? I know the answer to that one. Urg! The answer is the same as it always is- write the damn story and then rewrite it so it's good. Sometimes I wish it was just easier! 

Urg!!!

Here is my modest little Nathan Waddell shelf in my library. The Nathan Waddell Library! More volumes coming soon, I hope.

I reviewed Upon A Twice Time on Goodreads which I'll copy and paste here- feels weird to review a book I'm in but I don't mention my story so:
 

Quick- name four fairy tales! Don't google it, just off the top of your head. Goldilocks and the Three Bears? Sure! What? Frankenstein is not a fairy tale! It's tricky, a little, right? How about just two? That's the impetus behind Upon A Twice Time. Take two fairy tales and mash them together, and also add the genre of your choice. Science fiction? Check! You like fantasy? It's here! What about culinary memoir? Didn't see that coming, did you? But it all works wonderfully well. So so good, this whole collection. Full disclosure- I wrote the story Megaflora in this anthology, so I won't discuss that one. And indeed I can't discuss every story here but there are some amazing and fantastic and beautiful stories here. Some should be nominated for awards in their genres. What is the governing body for the culinary memoirist's guild? They need to be contacted! (The Gala Tea Celebration Cake, Milton Rockwood)

There's dark fantasy here as creepy and lush as Neil Gaiman's Snow Glass Apples - Jenni Meade's A Dance of Birds and Men.
An aching and hauntingly romantic tale called The Swan and Bellerophon, by Leo Otherland.
A story about Pinocchio that I don't want to say anything else about, but it's brilliant! The Queen of Hearts Interrogates Pinocchio by Gabriel Ertsgaard.
Goldilocks is represented as well, with a big bad wolf chasing her. Rule of Threes by Rebecca Hardy, a story that hopefully will be expanded into a novel at some point. 
A pleasure to read and an honour to be a part of. 16 stars actually, but Goodreads limits me to 5.

 

It came! Started to see some Americans say they got their copy of Upon A Twice Time but I just figured mine would be a while yet. Did you know Americans get mail on Saturday? Weird! I think we did too but not in my lifetime. And my lifetime stretches back a ways now. Anyway, I took a themed photo of the book next to a flower to go with my story, Megaflora, which is written in the genre of Victorian travelogue and  mashes together Jack and the Beanstalk with the creepy and relatively unknown fairy tale "The Queen of the Planets". 

I originally had the idea of mixing Jack and the Beanstalk with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the genre was still the Victorian travelogue idea. I’ve always had this thing I would say at work when someone was tempted to do something stupid (that someone was often me)- Some things aren’t worth going to hell for.  Seemed like a good idea to explore in the context of Orpheus, and I wanted to mix it up and make Eurydice the brave soul who goes to retrieve their lover. But a quick check with Air and Nothingness confirmed that myths didn’t count as fairy tale, and so I was happy to move on with my life. Oh well, right? 

But. 

The editor tweeted at me that he was eager to see what I came up with. Urg! Now I had to write something! Urg!!! But also, so thankful. Let me say working with Todd Sanders, the publisher and editor was absolutely wonderful and a real pleasure and honour. Without that encouragement I would never have written Megaflora. And it was relatively easy to reconfigure as I just imagined that this was the next episode in that same travelogue, so that Orpheus- Sir Orphean here- had already had his misadventure and Lady Eurydice had decided to travel on. It took some digging to find a good fairy tale to use as the second ingredient for the mashup, but a friend pointed me to the whole online catalogue with ATU numbers and everything and I found The Queen of the Planets and …. Voila! Megaflora.

Oh- and that first story never got written but I did scribble a few things down as a rough prototype and one paragraph I did like and regret not getting to use - 

The locals have a name for the type of cloud that obscures the top of the beanstalk, in translation the expression loses something, but it is rendered, roughly, ‘Steam from the giant’s cauldron.’ They say that the thickness of the clouds is an indicator of how many Englishmen the giants are cooking.

And finally, the name for this fictional country they were traveling in, where the beanstalk is situated, I don’t think it made the cut, but it made me laugh. So, for posterity, I can tell you it was Hanselvania. Enjoy!

Update: another of the authors in the book, Rebecca Hardy, made a playlist for every story in the anthology! Very cool!

New phone! Got a tax refund so I spent it on something I sorely needed. Back in October my front camera on my iPhone 7 stopped working, probably for no reason whatsoever, but possibly because I dropped it. That seems unlikely but the only other thing I can think of is ghosts so. 

Anyways so taking pictures has been a challenge- the zoom lens still worked, so as long as I was at least ten feet away I could still take a photo. But only if I opened Twitter and used the camera icon while tweeting. The Camera app would just be a black screen.

 Yeah. I made do but it is so nice to be able to take pictures again! Nice ones. Yay! Here is Ahsoka looking like an instagram influencer. 

I missed Star Wars day but honestly, every day is Star Wars Day over here at the Woods. I did start building a V-19 Torrent micro fighter, which was super easy to build once I found all the parts. Microfighters are tons of fun, love the chibiesque aspect. I have a bunch that I bought, but also some that I cobbled together out of spare parts, hence the whackadoodle colours on some of these. The instructions for all Lego sets are available on their website, so as long as you have the parts (and for bigger sets you almost never do!) you can build them. And the V-19 as seen here was never put out by Lego so I found a great YouTube channel and followed his instructions.

The V-19 Torrent is one of my fave Star Wars ships. Introduced in Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2D Clone Wars micro series which is now available on dsnypl+s. It also showed up in the 3D Clone Wars show, but has never made a live action appearance as far as I know- could be an Easter egg in one of the new movies idk. I have a 3.5" scale Hasbro version as well, not Lego. Lego did make a non-microfighter of this ship but I don't have it. And they made a sort of microfigher but not in this style, so. I need some Clone Pilot minifigs!