I’ve been tidying the story descriptions on my fiction page, pruning the dead links, etc.
Quite a few of my early stories appeared at The Fortean Bureau, which stopped publishing in 2006. That’s something like an eon and a half in internet time, so I’m really grateful it remained as an online archive for several years, although it’s gone now.
On the bright side, a few of my stories are still online at this point: “Vortigern,” “Sunfast, Shadowplay and Saintswalk,” and “Details from a Painting by Hieronymus Bosch.”
For some reason, the ones with the wordier titles seem to stick around longer.
There probably is no scientific reason for this.
Until recently, I was writing short flash fiction stories every week or two for The Daily Cabal.
Now that the Cabal’s wrapped up, I figured I’d get back into the swing of blogging again with a couple debriefing posts on the Cabal experience.
Here are my favorite twelve of the stories I wrote for the project. I don’t know if these always succeeded in doing what I was hoping they’d do, but each captures something that I don’t think I could have communicated any other way.
If you want to read more, here’s an index of all 119(!) of my Cabal stories. And here’s a post with links to lists of all the stories by all of my very talented co-Cabalists.
Paul Pope’s Adam Strange serial was my favorite part of DC’s Wednesday Comics this summer.
From what he says on his blog, those single-page installments shaped his approach to the bit of Dune that you can see full-size here.
Among the things that I particularly liked are Lovern Kindzierski’s desert sky colors and the ornithopter’s squiggly shadow on the rocks, and the way Pope’s paced the anecdote. Great stuff.
I’m always a sucker for some revved-up, reimagined folk music, and have been checking out what I can find online by The Imagined Village, who do some great versions of English folk music. (It’s basically Eliza and Martin Carthy, plus assorted members of Afro-Celt Soundsystem, plus Sheila Chandra, plus Billy Bragg, plus even more folks with whom I’m less familiar.)
For example:
This video of Cold, Haily Windy Night.
This video of Hard Times in Old England
The Day of the Dead is on my list of festivals I’d like to go to one day.
They seem to do a pretty good job of it in Tucson, witness this picture.
And what’s in the photo isn’t half as interesting as the context as described in the caption:
…An undulating snake of skeletons, bogeywomen and the deceased wend their way beneath a phalanx of stilted, Ram-headed giants glowing red with roadflares. When the train passed everyone screamed with glee. To the right you can see the gynormous pumpkin of wishes pulled by the Horned Man.
(More cool stuff on their gallery.)
Came across a reference to an interesting-sounding book, the Codex Seraphinus, an encyclopedia from an imagined world, in a cryptic alphabet and unknown language, but copiously illustrated.
Wikipedia explains, and here’s a site by an enthusiast.
I tried to summon one up via interlibrary loan, but (alas) the only copy in Maine is apparently non-circulating.
However, a Google image search turns up lots of scans of random pages. (Including some by someone much luckier at the interlibrary loan game.) It seems like the kind of book that fits well with seeing only a random assortment of pages, and I think I’ll be doing some random paging over the next few days.
I came across the Codex via a comment on Boing Boing to a John Hodgman post on gnomes. Which I mention because of the inherent humor value of Hodgman+gnomes and because the post contained the following great quote: “Like the best books, it is unclear exactly who it was meant to reach.”
Hodgman, of course, is known for being a PC, a resident expert, and the author of The Areas of My Expertise, which won the Sidewise Award in all the more enlightened alternate universes (as I’m sure his new one will as well.)
…it’s my new website. Jeremy‘s brought over the dusty remains of my previous site, and I’m working on updating the new site here. But, as you can see, there isn’t much to see yet. There should be more by, say, the middle of June.
Or, say, the end of October.