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.

I’d been a player in my youth, patching together my first drysuit out of old inner tubes, insulating it with hand-me-down sweaters and sealing the seams with wax from the stub ends of a dozen candles. Of course, as soon as I went out, the seals had leaked– so I got wet; I got cold. Darkness seemed forever coming.

Now, years later, I was back for one more game, and regretting it already.

The spiders come and go. They bring me the bricks with which I build the castle. From the silk litter they leave behind on the grass, I knit a dragon. So far, all I’ve got of the castle is a shin-high parapet sketching out the footprint of the walls-to-be. And of the dragon: no more than one clawed and gnarled foreleg. By the time the castle’s finished and furnished, I hope to have the beast complete as well, a giant balloon-skin. I plan to hold it over a bonfire on top of one of the towers I’m envisioning, let the silk swell with hot air and blood-colored light.With any luck, I’ll have all this completed before the king comes back.

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.

1. On the Monorail
2. Ghost Dancing the Cemetery Mile
3. A Few Words Concerning B.
4. Sea of Crises
5. The Transdimensional Traveler’s Guide to Which Alternative Reality is Which in 10 Easy Questions
6. The Slow-time Man
7. Doppelganger
8. A Winter’s Fantasy
9. In the Night Market
10. Papa November
11. Fragments of a Distant Future
12. The Third Golem

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.

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.

For example:

This video of Cold, Haily Windy Night.

This video of Hard Times in Old England

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.)

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.)

Or, say, the end of October.

This story originally appeared in issue 11 (fall 2001) of the print magazine Conduit. The painting in question is The Temptation of St. Anthony (left panel), a nice large image of which can be found at this online poster store. Our hero is in the lower right corner of the painting, and is the only one of my characters who has been made into an action figure.

I am a small, bird-headed demon, skating.Gliding up a frozen river, I totter from side to side to side; my legs are short and my crotch is low. In my crossed beak, I carry a letter. I have not read the letter.

I am coming to a bridge. I will pass under the bridge and go on.

I pass fields mummified by winter, all snowless rows of frozen mud and broken stalks of grain. A town is nearing on my right, an abandoned place, curtains flapping from the windows. Smells like plague to me. The evening is clouding up, bringing an unhealthy damp, and I skate a little faster.