Website functioning again!

My freewebs site was sorely in need of an update, and a number of the links had completely ceased to function. Everything should be in working order again. (If you do find a bad link, please let me know!)

A few of my stories and poems had become inaccessible when they were removed from the internet or when the publications they appeared in shut down. For those of you who missed "Leanansidhe" (July 2007), "A Choice of Treason" (November 2007) and "The Shadow of Nemesis" (July/August 2008) the first time around, they are available now.

Don't thank me until you've read them, though. "A Choice of Treason" in particular was a very early work.

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Thursday, April 29, 2010

Cthulhu fhtagn, fiction, poetry, voice, weird fiction, writing

Why, hello there!

I wrote this story a while ago, for a contest centered on this image. The story didn't win, and I trunked it...literally. While going through some old notebooks, I rediscovered it, and decided to share it with/inflict it on you, dear reader. Enjoy.

* * *

She had to be strong.

She had to be strong when, two weeks after the wedding, he came home and told her to pack everything she could into a duffle and meet him at the launch station in an hour. They had been chosen, he said, for the Alpha 340 rehabilitation project. Random assignment? Hardly—they knew it was the young ones, the strong ones, the open ones who found themselves stuffed into the long black ships, hurtling through space toward distant galaxies whose air man had never been meant to breathe. She knew it, and she knew it didn’t matter how they had been chosen; and instead of formulating an escape, of calling friends and neighbors and looking for places to hide, she took the suitcases that had been a wedding gift from her sister and began to pack.

She left the wedding dress hanging in her closet. Her daughter would wear it on her wedding day, she promised; together, they would return for it. She never came back.

She had to be strong when he called her from the station three years later, called and said there had been a mistake in his department and he would need to take the next ship back to Earth. He said it was only business and that he would return, but they both knew better. She had heard the other voice in the background of his call, heard the high-pitched laughter and muffled squeal of pleasure as he disconnected. She knew, as his ship left a trail of black in the blue-white sky, that Earth had nothing for her anymore.

She had to be strong in the six months after he left, in the first three months after the birth of their daughter. She heard the doctor explain it, again and again—what was wrong with the air on Alpha 340, and what was wrong with the child’s lungs. She spent long nights in rocking chairs in hospitals across the continent, shifting back and forth and watching comets leave blue-white trails in the black sky.

Sometimes, she rocked the child. She sang softly of blue Earth and black ships and the white dress in a closet somewhere, trillions of miles away, that her little one would wear one day.

Sometimes, she cried.

But she had to be strong. She did not cry at the funeral, or in the face of the reporters’ questions; when she wrote letters back to Earth, damning them for what they had done to her and to her daughter, the ink did not run from tears.
S
he had to be strong when they dismissed her from the mechanics plant, when her savings dried up, when the old man at the boarding house told her to leave because they didn’t want her kind around. She didn’t know what he meant by “her” kind—whether it was grief or poverty or strength he objected to.

But she knew she had to be strong. She filled her suitcase with tools and found a place far from the city, far from liars and fools and cruel curiosity, and made her own rehabilitation project. It would not abandon her, or sicken, or hate her for her grief. It would not betray her.

It would not be weak.

And with steel and wire, wrench and rivet, she made her own strength.

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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Cthulhu fhtagn, short fiction

Is that a fever-induced hallucination, or are you just happy to see me?

I'm running a temperature and breathing at about half-capacity, courtesy of a lot of stuff in my lungs that shouldn't be there. Also, fever + cold medicine = Dream Logicz!!!

Dream Logicz!!! are great for writing. Not so great for editing and submitting before anthology deadlines. Not so great for getting the spring issue of Mirror Dance properly assembled.

And I just spilled hot tea on my keyboard.

I think this is the universe trying to tell me to go back to bed.

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Friday, February 26, 2010

anthologies, Cthulhu fhtagn, editing, plague, writing

A Work out of Progress

I vaguely remember writing these three hundred words or so sometime last spring, but for the life of me I can't remember what the story was about (aside from, clearly, la bête du Gévaudan). Perhaps posting the not-story here will jog my memory; if not, I hope you enjoy not coming along for the ride as much as I do.

* * *

We did not learn of it in the usual way.

On September 20, 1765, a black carriage shuddered to a halt outside my family’s house in Langogne. The final rain of summer fell in warm gossamer sheets, washing black Languedoc mud from the coach’s wheels and the shoes of its occupants. My sister Antoinette emerged, dressed outlandishly as usual with travel-stained lace and ropes of damp fox-fur at her cuffs; if it weren’t for the black ribbons and grave expressions her companions wore, I would never have known something was amiss.

“Mélisande!” Antoinette opened her arms to me as I flew down the brick steps, her white clock flowing off her shoulders like cream. The rain sheeted over her sharp cheekbones and caught, pearl-like, on her eyelashes and crisp red curls.

“Bienvenue, sister,” I said hesitantly, holding her out at arms’ length. All around us, footmen vied with the family servants to get her luggage in out of the damp. None of Antoinette’s men would meet my gaze. “Where’s Michel?”

At the sound of her husband’s name, my sister pursed her lips in a sharp, familiar gesture of despair.

That was how we learned that our protection from la bête du Gévaudan had run out.

* * *

“And what, pray tell, is so damn hard about writing a letter?”

“Père.” Antoinette frowned, her long fingers loosening the clasp of her cloak. A slow puddle spread across the parlor floor at our feet. “Do you mean to say you aren’t pleased to see me?”

“Don’t needle him,” I whispered. Antoinette’s only answer was to shove her cloak into my arms and hiss at me to hang it up.

Papa leaned back in his chair. His dark eyebrows—the only spots of color in his face—met in a straight line over his crooked nose. “You should be in Paris, Antoinette.”

“There’s nothing for me there.”

“Célestin Charbonneau is there.”

“As I said.” She folded her hands at her waist, resting her elbows on her hips. “Nothing for me.”

* * *

Apparently, that's as far as I got. Your guess is precisely as good as mine.

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Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Cthulhu fhtagn, historical fiction, horror, weird fiction, writing