The poll results are in, and this month it’s a blowout — 81% for an excerpt from Dragon Stones. It looks like my advice to “vote early, vote often” was really taken to heart by readers in April! So, without further ado, here is a randomly-selected scene from Dragon Stones:
Category: fantasy
Short Story: The Patter of Little Feet
No random rejections, reviews, or scans of early childhood scribblings this week — it’s the last day of my vacation! But rather than let Sunday go home empty-handed from Scribblings, here’s a randomly selected short story from the unpublished archives. Any resemblance to Night at the Museum is purely coincidental, as this story predates it by many years; any resemblance to the “Zuni Fetish Doll” episode of the old Trilogy of Terror television movie, on the other hand, is less coincidental, although I play the scenario more for comedy than for horror.
One interesting thing about this story is its reliance on the Internet for a few plot points, making it probably one of the first stories I wrote that did so. Another issue that befell this story is that, as I used to do with all my books and stories, it was originally stored in Microsoft Binder format — a format that has since been abandoned. Although there is an extractor that is supposed to be able to pull the contents of a Binder file out into their component files, it didn’t work all that well on this file, and I was forced to reconstruct it by looking at the binary (gibberish-filled) Binder file itself, and piece the story together that way. I think I got all of it, but I’m not completely sure (although I do know that the ending that’s there is original and complete). The moral of this story is to be wary of weird minor proprietary file formats, or else to make sure you always keep (and can run) a copy of the original software that created the files.
And now for our feature presentation, “The Patter of Little Feet”!
“The Lord of the Rings” Film Trilogy
This isn’t actually going to be a review of The Lord of the Rings films, for a couple of reasons:
- It’s common knowledge that LotR is the Best. Movie. Trilogy. Ever.
- Everybody has already seen them anyway.*
*If by some misfortune you haven’t seen them and haven’t read the books, this post will contain major spoilers.
So, no, this is not a review. Instead, it’s an anecdote, which I hope you will find amusing, about what happened when I finally managed to get my wife to sit down and finish watching the films.
The Early Years: Jack-O’-Lantern
A while back my parents sent me a big package full of old school papers and such, whence I got the, um, amazing space battle drawing that I posted a few weeks ago. Reaching into this package today, I discovered this small exercise in giant block-letter printing, in which the moon has what may be an overly familiar relationship with a pumpkin:
Review: “The Graveyard Book”
As you can see by my sidebar, Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors; I’ve loved all of his books except one — his children’s book, Coraline, pretty much left me cold. I can’t really explain what I didn’t like about Coraline; it just didn’t grab me the way Gaiman’s books usually do. I was interested to see if The Graveyard Book would be different, and it sure was.
Okay, So I Lied
Earlier, I wrote a brief story about how I got into the horror field; now, as promised, is the story of how I got out.
Random Rejection: E-scape, “Comfort”
I got started submitting to online magazines way before they became mainstream, and had a number of short stories published by e-zines. E-scape, however, was not one of them, as they declined to accept my short story “Comfort”.
Random Rejection: “On The Eighth Day”
Back in the 90s, there was a lot of concern about the “Year 2000”, and this translated into a large number of film and fiction projects that dealt with the upcoming inevitable apocalypse. One of these was an anthology called On The Eighth Day, which almost included my short story, “Love and the Tides of Darkness.” Almost.
The Early Years: Rabbit’s Journal
A couple of weeks ago I posted a scan of an old story I wrote for school when I was a kid of somewhere between six and ten (depending on who you believe). That turned out to be pretty popular, so I requested more scans from my suppliers of embarrassing material from my younger days (i.e., my parents). Behold: Rabbit’s Journal.
Continue reading “The Early Years: Rabbit’s Journal”A Portrait of the Artist as a (Very) Young Man
So my parents like to find old examples of things I wrote when I was a kid and send them to me, just to remind me that I, too, was once a child. I thought it might be interesting to post one or two of them. With that in mind, I present my classic tale of horror and suspense, “The Great Beast Invasion”. If we assume that the date in the story is about when the story was written (which it probably is, given that kids are pretty much creatures of the “now” — just like dogs!), then I would’ve been six when I scribbled down this masterpiece.
Continue reading “A Portrait of the Artist as a (Very) Young Man”
Viscosity 