Every now and again I get the urge to dash off a short story. These are usually quite short, and it seemed sensible to collect them here. So far, the stories I’ve put up are:
Agent J
As part of a writing challenge, I was asked to write a dialogue where no sentence was longer than three words. I hadn’t planned to accept, but then the phase “The fish thing” suddenly appeared in my head and this story just wrote itself around it.
Can I Play With Madness?
I chose a random topic and I ended up with ‘insanity’. I chose to write about the inherited kind. I was inspired by an old album cover with the same name, and a line from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
Caruula
This story is based on an item I wanted to place into an RPG. There is a related story in how, exactly, Reynald learned so much about Caruula, but it will have to wait for another time.
The Church of The Fourth God
This was actually written by sps. The idea of the three gods were mine and I recounted their origin story to him. He then pointed out the need for a fourth god and the next day he presented me with this marvelous story set in my world.
Nothing
This is a second story in the world of the Four Gods, but this time the writing was entirely my own.
Dream Love
A true story, or mostly true. My wife claims her hair is more brown than black, but she doesn’t see herself through my eyes.
Dinner Conversation
The challenge I was set was to write a conversation between several characters, happening over dinner. As I find the concept of eating far more interesting when non-humans are thrown into the mix, I decided to go with a Science-Fiction setting.
This story uses player-character races from an RPG campaign that I’ve been working on, and a variation on one of the possible scenarios I’ve been thinking of throwing at my players (if I ever get any).
Going Too Far
This was my reaction to a exercise in which a short story was written starting with “He wished the phone would stop ringing.” I’m only including it here because its the first time any of my characters has spontaneously decided to be gay. Not that its a terribly sympathetic gay character mind you, but I figure I shouldn’t feel any more hung up writing about an obnoxious gay man than about an obnoxious straight man.
A Hero is Born
I’m not sure where this came from, other than too many cartoons and cartoon parodies.
Hyperdrive
Often for me, a story gels around a number of pivotal scenes that come to mind and that the plot threads through. These scenes are often major events or turning points of the story and as such seldom make much sense without the context, much like a punch-line without the joke.
Then again, I often don’t seem to give my readers as much credit as I should to work things out. This story is a perfect example. I wrote three pages of context so that this would all make sense, but never actually got to this part. Read if for yourself and see if you miss the context.
Ill Wind
I had tried to get to sleep early, but this story, which wouldn’t gel enough all day for me to write it down, suddenly decided it wanted to be written. This story was introduced into an RPG years ago, but it was never heard by the players as they chose a different route. Always before I had thought to tell it from the sailor’s perspective. It changed in strange and interesting ways when I shifted the POV, and it turned out that much more was going on than I had imagined before.
“Ill Wind”, by the way, was the original name I had for the boat, named by the Sailor because of the old saying that “Tis an ill wind that blows no good” and the good that had come to the Sailor due to the curse on his ship.
Investigation #861
I’m not quite sure what inspired this. I wanted to write a paranormal story with a twist on the “all is not as it seems” theme. This was the result.
Jasta
Sometime around 1995 I was inspired by the idea of writing a fantasy novel with the working title of “The Hollow Man”. This was one of the first scenes that came to me and was to take place somewhere near the middle of the book. Jasta was to be the main character and the “Hollow Man” of the title despite being neither male, nor even human.
The Large-Scale Stellar Observatory
This is not the story I wanted to write. This is mostly the context that one would need to know in order to understand the story I wanted to write, which was mostly a dialogue on political and economic topics surrounding the LSSO. I decided to just write the context and see how big it was. All this would have to somehow be worked in the story I did want to tell.
Monosyllabic
Here’s another story written under constraints. Its a dialogue consisting entirely of one-syllable words. Its strange that I find writing under that kind of constraint so much easier than normal writing.
Oblivious
Like AgentJ, this was a writing challenge to produce a story in dialog. This time no line could be more than five words long. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. Writing what you know is sometimes a bit disturbing.
Omissions
I was given a writing challenge of producing a paragraph of text without using the letter ‘E’. This was my submission.
Philosophy
I was thinking about philosophical systems and the rigidity of some kinds of thinking and this story came to me.
Rescendant Prologue
“Rescendant Tales” is to be a book of post-singularity fairy tales told by folks who’ve seen the unseeable, and returned to talk about it. This is just my first stab at the prologue.
Randal and Pepper Inc.
This is one of the ideas I’ve had for a possible start to a novel I’ve been thinking about. At first I considered it for my 2006 NaNoWriMo novel, but I know so very little about Georgian England or the Pepper Trade that I fear I’d keep getting bogged down in desires to do background research rather than just sitting down and writing, as NaNo requires.
Salmonella
This is the first in a proposed collection of “Twice Twisted Tales” that were intended to start familiar, quickly get strange, and then have an extra-strange twist ending. Currently this is the only finished one, although I have some notes put together for a second.
ShowerTrek
This short story was based on an actual incident in the shower where I accidentally turned the hot tap way too far up and, as I quickly jumped out of the shower to avoid a scalding, nearly tripped over some cleaning supplies I had put there to remind me to clean the shower afterwards. Later that day, I started wondering how that scene might have played out in a Star Trek universe. Note that grammatical and spelling mistakes are all deliberate.
Stream Of Consciousness
There was a writing challenge to write for 10 minutes whatever came into my head. That scared me a bunch because there are many things in my head that I don’t plan to let out any time soon. Anyway, here’s what I ended up writing.
The Sword
This short story is a condensation of the ideas for the first few chapters of a fantasy novel I’ve been thinking about writing. This is the only part who’s plot is clear in my mind though. I know where the rest of the story needs to go, but I’ve never quite worked out how it would get there.
The Warrior
The intent with this piece was to write a Conan pastiche from the point-of-view of a Cthulhuesque monster. It didn’t really come out as I hoped it would.