Once up on a time in a land far away there lived a little girl who loved to dance. She danced wherever she went, and she even danced in her dreams when she was sleeping. The only problem with dancing all the time was it made everything very hard to do. Dancing while you ate made a very big mess, and dancing while you dressed made putting socks on take a very long time. Dancing while in school got her in trouble more than once. She often thought that what she really needed was a world where everyone danced and always had danced, that way she and everyone else would be used to dancing all the time and would just know how to dance in bed without falling out at night.

Now, this girl, besides being a very enthusiastic dancer, was also very smart and very determined. The idea of a world where everyone danced seemed like a very good idea, and the more she thought of it the more she figured that such a place must actually exist, she just needed a way to find it. So every day after she came home from school she would sit in her room and draw up plans to find her dancing world. When her plans were complete she spent days making trips to stores and junk yards and borrowing from friends. She spent all the allowance that she had been saving for years for her one special thing. She figured that her project was special enough to spend it on. Now when she came home from school she would sit in her room and screw pieces together, it was like doing a really big puzzle.

Soon the day came when she had run out of pieces to put together. She sat back and looked at what she had built. It looked like a very complicated chair. It had wires and tubes and sparkly lights. She looked at her plans and looked at the chair….it seemed that she had everything right, but would it work?

Now she was nervous, she didn’t know if she wanted it to work after all. She was just a little girl, and going to a strange world did seem like it could be slightly dangerous. However, she hadn’t spent every day after school for months and nights when she should have been sleeping studying the physics of neutrons for nothing.

And so, the little girl slowly moved over to her invention and gingerly climbed up onto the seat. She turned on all the switches and turned a few dials and on the small keyboard typed in the letters D-A-N-C-E. Then she put on her goggles, (safety first!), though how well they’d protect on this maiden voyage there was no way to tell….as far as she knew she could arrive without a head. Taking a big, deep breath, the little girl grabbed the big red lever, closed her eyes, and pulled.

All of a sudden she had a sensation of falling and twirling. She was dizzy like she’d never been before; like she had done a million pirouettes without stopping. The world felt like it was tilting on it’s side, and she felt like it would fling her into the dark void of space. Then, with a sickening lurch everything righted itself. She was still again and the dizziness began so subside. She began to panic because it was so dark, but then she realized she still had her eyes squeezed tightly shut. With a nervous laugh at her bravery, or lack thereof, she very slowly opened her eyes.

The world looked exactly how she left it. She was sitting in her chair and her chair was sitting in her room. Her dancing posters were still on her wall, her dancing clothes were still in her closet, her dancing music was still playing on her pink music player (with ballerinas on it). Nothing appeared to have changed. Fighting a wave of overwhelming disappointment, the little girl climbed out of her chair and waltzed over to her plans to try to discover just what she had done wrong. She just didn’t understand, it felt like it had worked, so what had happened?

Like all little girls, this girl thought better with milk and cookies in her hand, so she opened her door and rumbaed into the kitchen. With a couple twirls and plies she had managed to get the cookies out of the cupboard and the milk out of the fridge and into a glass much easier than she normally would have. She didn’t even spill a drop. Thinking only that she was finally getting the hang of this dancing while doing thing, she tangoed over to the window and stood gazing out, brooding over her problem.

It wasn’t until she saw the mail man two stepping up to the mail box that she began to think that something was a little odd. Jazz stepping out the door she gazed around the neighborhood. The neighbor was leaping while watering his flowers, people driving their cars were grooving to their radios, the woman walking her poodle had apparently taught him how to do the Macarena. Not only that, but everything in the neighborhood, and even her house, she now noticed, was subtly different. It was like the world was designed for dancers. Dancing back into her house and around the living room she discovered that she no longer knocked her toes on the end tables, or her hands on the lamp shades, everything was arranged just perfectly.

Completely stunned and amazed the girl glided back to her room and stood staring at her machine. She did it, she actually did it! And the world she was presented with wasn’t some strange menace. How could dance be horrible after all? Then she began to think again. If she could create a world centered around dance, what other worlds could she create? She loved cats, what if the world was centered around cats? Hmmm no, she thought, there’s too much of a risk of the world being taken over by giant, pant wearing, talking cats. I love cats, but I don’t think I’d want to be one, I just don’t fancy licking my own butt to clean it. Okay, so what else? How about a world centered around the color pink! Pink was a wonderful color, and how I hardly doubt that a color could go wrong.

So, climbing back into her chair, she flicked the switches and turned the dials and on the little keyboard typed out the letters P-I-N-K. Then she put on the goggles, grabbed the lever and pulled.

She was so excited to see the results of her pink world that she forgot to be scared at all and this time her eyes were open when the twirling and tilting began. With her eyes open she wasn’t nearly as dizzy as she was before, and it was amazing what she saw. The room around her blurred as it spun faster and faster, all the colors ran together into a psychedelic rainbow. But then something odd began to happen. The colors slightly shifted the blues and greens and purples gradually fell away, and the reds started to bleed out. Before she knew it the chair stopped with a jerk, and he eyes struggled briefly to focus on the site in front of her. No color existed besides pink. There were no blues or reds or browns. There was no white or black or grey. Everything she looked at was pink. Gazing at herself in the mirror she was almost horrified to see that she was various shades of pink; from pink hair and skin and eyes, even, to pink clothes and shoes.

She ran, this time, forgetting to dance for the first time in years, to the door of her house, passing by the pink couches and barely glancing at the pink throw rugs over the pink hardwood floor. She flung open the door and was confronted with a horrible gaudy sight. Everything was shades of pink; trees, grass, sky, houses, cars, even the water the neighbor was spraying out of his hose! If felt like a big pink bubble gum bubble had exploded over the entire world. She could even imagine that she smelt bubble gum.

Eww, this is not what I could ever image, she thought. The world is not fun pink. Hurrying back to her chair she climbed aboard and switched switches and turned dials and into her little keyboard she was poised to type. But what did she want? She should try another world or just go back to the plain old boring, normal world where she just didn’t feel she fit in? Slowly she came to a realization that what she really wanted was the familiar. It wasn’t the world that wasn’t accommodating her it was her who wasn’t accommodating the world. Her hands began to type, N-O-R-M-A-L. She threw the lever, the world spun the colors blurred and and blues and reds and greens returned. When she came to a halt she sat and looked around her, with new appreciation of what she had.

Then she rolled over and opened her eyes and found she was comfortable in her bed. She was just a little girl, and she had to go to school. She jumped out of her bed and for the first time in months she walked over to her closet. Today she decided she didn’t need to wear her tutu, and put on jeans and a shirt. She walked out of her room and into the kitchen where her mom was preparing breakfast. She sat at the table and ate her eggs and drank her juice, and for the first time in months didn’t have to change again because she got food all over her clothes. Her mom stared at her like she had grown an extra head. “Are you feeling alright hunny?” she asked.

“Oh yes mom,” she replied as she grabbed her bag and left the kitchen to go wait for the bus. That day in school she didn’t get in trouble once, for dancing, and she was glad.

Yay!  It’s time for another contest!  This one is rather intriguing, as it’s not your typical write a story, win a prize contest.

Raw Dog Screaming Press is having a contest based on three of their releases, 100 Jolts by Michael A. Arnzen, Sheep and Wolves by Jeremy C. Shipp and Worse Than Myself by Adam Golaski, which they are bundling together on their website for the month  of August.

Anyway, the contest is a short story contest, all stories must be no more than 1000 words long, and each person can have one entry per book; there are 3 different prize packs to win.

Here’s what you have to do:

1.  Begin a short story with one line found in 100 Jolts, or alternatively with the line “Knowledge of the circulatory system can save time.”  Also, the story must build to an ‘outrageous conclusion’.

2. Write a story about a traditional monster (besides zombies), and have the reader come away with a new understanding of the misunderstood creature.

3.  Write an episode of “Weird Furka” (true ghost stories) in script format.

Deadline for entries is October 1st.   Go here for more submission details, rules and prize pack information.

It’s odd that my favorite novel is a book I’ve never actually read. Hows that? Well, for a while I was on a kick where I was listening to audio books and one that I picked up that sounded interesting was I Am Legend. Boy was it a doozy. This was long before the Will Smith movie came out so I’d never heard of it but from it’s opening stanzas with main character Robert Neville wandering his property checking his fortifications it had me hooked.

If you’ve only ever seen the latest Hollywood rendition of this classic you owe it to yourself to read the story. It’s an easy read, coming in at a mere 160 pages — more a novella then a novel — and if you’re determined can be easily powered though on a warm summer day. Trust me you’ll want to read this in the day light. It’s a strongly written and tense tale of, presumably, the last man left alive in the world after the rest of the population has been turned into quasi-animalistic vampires.

Neville has fortified himself in his home and spends his nights fending off attacks from the hoard of his former neighbors and spends his days hunting down their lairs and killing them while they sleep the days away. Of particular significance is his former friend and neighbor Ben Cortman who comes to Nevilles home each night yelling “Come Out, Neville!”. He forms a sort of bond with this creature that is used to tell the story of Neville’s past though flashbacks. Eventually he pulls himself out of his routine and, even though he has no real science background, attempts to find the cause of the plague that has transformed humanity and reanimated the dead as vampires.

To detail anymore of the plot would spoil it, and this book is far too good to spoil, but I will say that the ending brings the title I Am Legend full circle and is remarkably powerful. Matheson does an excellent job of building a setting and making you feel for the character of Robert Neville, you feel his hopelessness and his loneliness and as the story plays on and the world around him is reveled you can really relate to the corner he’s drawn into. By the end I felt a similar sort of acceptance of fate that Neville was feeling in the novel.

None of the movie versions of this story have done justice to the powerful and stunning ending that Matheson wrote in his original work so I feel this this novel is a must read for any fan of end-of-the-world or horror fiction. Since it’s a novella it’s often bundled with other of Mathesons work and in fact the version I’ve linked to contains a couple of other short stories as well, I can’t comment on their quality but I’m sure they’re good.

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I Am Legend

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series is an old favorite of mine, that I’ve already discussed in a Sunday Favorites post, so I won’t go into the series here.   An Echo in the Bone is the seventh book in the series, after a four year break, and to be honest it had been so long that had forgotten a lot about the other books, much less the fact that the story was left open for another novel.  So, when I discovered this book on the store shelves I was both surprised an excited to get reading and be reunited with my favorite characters again.

The four year break really worked against me, however, and it really would have been to my advantage if I was able to pick up the entire series and read it over again to refresh my memory.  However, seeing as how I’m trying to read as much as I can, as quickly as I can, in order to keep posting fresh reviews, that wasn’t really an option.  As such, while first getting into the novel I ended up feeling like I was missing a lot.

Unlike a lot of authors, Gabaldon doesn’t spend a lot of time recapping what happened earlier in the series.  On one hand, this is a good thing, because recaps can get annoying, especially when an entire chapter devoted to it.  On the other hand, this left me feeling lost.   I had completely forgotten the back story of many characters,  and even the existence of some, and so when their names were brought up I was left confused.  However, lucky, there were enough small hints and memories shared throughout the novel that the rest of the series very slowly came back to me, with great feelings of relief.

One of these characters is that of William Ransom.   I had forgotten entirely that he existed and was very confused, in the beginning, when it was suggested that he was Jamie’s son.  I had no recollection as to how this could be possible, and had completely forgotten the entire story line of Jamie as an indentured servant in England and his relationship with William’s mother.

The reason why this was such a glaring omission of my memory is that half of the chapters taking place in 1777 were told through the perspective of William, and his adoptive father Lord John, as he fights in the Independence war on the side of the British.  It took me a very long time to figure out how this was significant or even necessary, before being led to remember his history.  In the end it made perfect sense, as all of their stories converge, but at the time I found it difficult to care about his story.

One of my favorite aspects of this series is the whole idea of time travel, however some people have said that this leaves the novel feeling disjointed.   I can understand that view, as half the novel is written about Brianna and Roger, in the 1980s while the other half takes place during the latter part of the American Revolution.  The switch between time lines can be a little jarring, as it brings you out of the action, but its also necessary to further the story, as it reveals how much the lives of this family revolve around the phenomenon, and how history is affected by small changes, which is a key theme.

In the end it all comes down to the characters and their relationships.  Jamie and Claire’s relationship is as intense as ever, and as usual frought with tension as Jamie continues to fight in the war and get injured (he loses a finger, this time).  Roger and Brianna are back home with their children and experience a little bit of marital tension as they each try to define their roles back in the 20th century.  Ian is reunited with his parents again, just in time for tragedy, but he also finds love, again.  In the end everyone is brought back together through extraordinary circumstance and we are left, with bated breath, waiting for the next installment.

*sigh*  To be content, but wanting more, is always the best way to end a novel.

You can find this one, here:  An Echo in the Bone

One of the advantages of having so many reader/writer acquaintances, (three cheers for Facebook and Twitter!) is that they’re always finding new blogs, websites and books and posting about them, saving me from having to spend my day searching aimlessly through the internet in search of post-worthy subjects.  Instead, I get to spend my day reading novels, twitter posts,  and Facebook updates, and playing too much Frontierville.

Props today to go a very amazing lady, and awesome writer, named Sarah whom I met through NaNoWriMo; she has been running the whole show in Edmonton for years now, and just recently took a job working with the people who run the entire thing, the Office of Letters and Light.  Anyway she’s a big Harry Potter fan, but also knows good humor when she sees it, so decided to pass this little gem on:  Mark Reads Harry Potter.

The purpose of this blog, as stated is, “Mark reads Harry Potter so you don’t have to.” So, basically, Mark starts at the beginning of the novel and , with quotes included, slowly dissects what makes the novel both good and bad, with his interpretation and witty thought process about the characters, setting and plot.   In the very first post, he seems pretty scornful of the entire Wizard/Muggle world that Rowling sets up, but by the last post he seems pretty enthusiastic about the story and some of the themes that come up (like slavery).   To be honest though, half the time I can’t tell if his praise is sarcam or not.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to read more than the first and last post because I couldn’t find the second without a lot of digging; it took me a lot of digging to find the first post.   Basically, the setup of this blog is horrible and unless you started reading from the beginning, it’s a pain to try to find posts in any order.  An easily found archive would be really nice!

It turns out that Mark has also taken the time to sit down and read the Twilight Saga, so you don’t have to, in Mark Reads Twilight.  After much digging (same horrible blog design) I managed to read the first post, the last and a couple in between and it’s safe to say that there isn’t a single line in Stephanie Myer’s books that this guy enjoys.  He hates everything about these novels, the characters, the plot and Myer’s writing as a whole, and feels her editor should be ‘put out to pasture’.   Unfortunately, this means that by the end of the series, most of his posts consist of quotes followed by “OMG WHY?!” which gets a little old.  Although, in his defense this was after discovering Midnight Sun, after thinking he was free of the whole series, so he was a little pissed off.

I don’t want to leave this post on a negative note, so I’d also like to share a little gem that I found.  Despite the massive sales that Stephanie Myer managed with the Twilight series, perhaps Mark would feel she could have benifited from the writing advice of Ask Allison.

The blog of New York Times best selling author Allison Winn Scotch (who’s novel Time of My Life is being turned into a movie)  Ask Allison gives advice and anecdotes on the writing and publishing process, based off of her own rise to success, to aspiring authors in a ‘Question of the Day’ format.  She admits that she no longer has the time to answer a question every day, however, her archives, going back to 2006 are full of great answers and advice.   Thanks, Allison!

It’s #teasertuesday again, and I’ve brought back another snippet of For Love of Brian.  I haven’t decided yet if I’ll be bringing it back next week, or moving onto something else, so if you want to read more let me know!

Since last seeing Julia, she has tracked down her sister, who has graciously lent her some clothes and toiletries, so Julia is on her way to feeling normal again.  Except for the whole zombie thing.

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When she walked back into the bedroom Rachelle was gone, the door between the two rooms shut, and just her sister and brother in law were waiting for her, sitting on the bed beside each other, staring at the entryway. Upon seeing her emerge from the bathroom, they both tensed, but when she walked into the room, looking marginally less like death than she had when she entered, they both relaxed, by a fraction.

“Thank you,” she said to break the ice, “I really needed that. And the clothes, too, thanks.”  She pulled at the bottom of the shirt, then wiped her hands nervously on her jeans. Then her stomach rumbled. They were still watching her, and Darla seemed about to say something before Julia interrupted. “Do you have any food?”

Darla glanced at her husband, then rose from the bed, and walked over to the little table with chairs arranged beside the window. On it was a basket similar to the one that had been in her room. The contents were already half gone, but there was still a bran-raisin muffin and an apple left. She handed them to Julia, who immediately took a large bite of the apple and nearly swooned at the pleasure of the sweet juice running down her throat.

Darla cleared her throat and glanced at her husband again, “So, you’re okay?” she asked.

Julia swallowed, “well, okay as I can be considering.” She answered.

“Considering what?” Darla asked.

“Considering I’ve been locked in my room for the past five days with a zombie.” She said, taking another large bite of the apple and chewing loudly, hardly containing her groans of delight. “God, this apple is divine!” she said.

Darla’s eyes were wide as she stared at her sister. Her mouth was doing the open-closed, fish thing, again.

“You, you what?” she stammered, not sure if she was supposed to believe what her sister had just said.

Julia had moved on to the muffin, a day old and already going dry so the crumbs stuck to the inside of her mouth; she had to work up enough saliva to swallow it all. “I said,” she answered around half a mouthful, before swallowing, “that I’ve spent the last five days locked in my bedroom with a zombie on the other side of a closed door. I ran out of food, I ran out of everything but tap water, and I ran out of soap and shampoo. So nice of everyone to come see if I needed anything, or at least…I donno, tell me the world hadn’t ended after all.” Then she sat down on the chair, stared out the window and continued to eat her muffin. “Is there any butter?” she asked, “this is dry.”

Darla reached into the basket and pulled out an individual serving of butter and handed it and a small plastic knife over the table to her sister. “We thought you were dead,” she said.

Julia spread the butter on her muffin and took another bite, seemingly not hearing, or ignoring, what her sister had said.

“Really, Julie,” Darla said, her tone pleading, “We thought you were dead. When we connected what was happening to what happened to Brian at the wedding…well, we all put the pieces together and just figured…” she trailed off and looked at her husband for support. He just shrugged.

Julia swallowed and put the rest of the muffin down on the table. Then she looked at her sister, her eyes beginning to mist. She was determined not to cry again, she had to be strong, she told her self. She swallowed the lump in her throat, took a deep breath and said, “I really wish you would have come to see, to just check on me, to make sure. You have no idea what I’ve been through.”

“I’m sorry,” Darla sighed, taking the chair next to her sister, and reaching out a hand to touch her knee. “I would have, I swear I would have, but we’re not allowed to leave our rooms. Once word spread about what was going on, and then with everyone knowing about how Brian was so sick, everyone who was still in the hotel who was at the wedding was quarantined. They said that they were allowed to shoot us if we came out our rooms. Every day someone, in a freaking hazmat suit, no less, brings us a basket of food, but that’s all we get.”

“Oh,” Julia replied, now feeling guilty for her anger.

“And how do you think it’s been for Rachelle?” Darla asked, feeling the anger raise in her at the accusation that she’d been uncaring, “Do you think it’s been all sunshine and lollipops for a four year old to be cooped up in a room with nothing but the stupid Cartoon Network for entertainment?  Do you have any idea how stressed we’ve been? How hard it’s been for US to survive?” She was yelling now, and Jordan stood up from the bed, and crossed the room to wrap his arm around his wife. He said nothing, but his accusing look at Julia spoke volumes.

Julia could do nothing and but stare at her sister, who was breathing heavy, her hands clenching and unclenching as she tried to gain control over her emotions. As much as she wanted to, she could not bring herself to go comfort her sister. Despite everything Darla had been through, Julia felt that she was still more deserving of outrage than her sister was. Darla had been able to eat. Darla had been able to sleep. Darla hadn’t been living with a zombie.

It was as if they both had the same thought at once. Darla’s breath caught in her throat and she turned to her sister. “You did say that Brian’s a zombie?”

Julia sighed, “Yes,” she said, feeling it unnecessary to expound on her answer.

“Don’t be ridiculous.  There’s no such thing as zombies.” Darla replied.

Julia looked at her sister in exasperation, “tell that to the zombie in my room.”

“Julia,” Jordan stepped into the conversation, after it was evident that his wife could only stare, in shock, “there was a serious pubic health scare that the government is gaining control of. Brian’s sick, and he might be crazy like those people in the streets.
There is even a chance he might die. Yes, the virus is that serious.” It was as if he was speaking to a child, “But Darla’s right, there’s no such thing as zombies.”

“Jordan,” Julia said sweetly, smiling. It was obvious from his expression that he thought he had gotten through to her, for just a moment, “do you honestly believe everything you hear on television?”

“No, I…” he started, but she interrupted.

“Yeah, obviously you do. Just because the news hasn’t used the fucking Z word, doesn’t mean I don’t have a fucking zombie in my room!”

They just stared at her. Both of them were doing the fish thing, now. “Now, if you don’t mind”, she said, “I haven’t slept in five days and I could really use a couple of hours.”  Then she walked over to their bed, climbed under the covers and in seconds was fast asleep.

Around eight years ago (wow, how time flies!) I was living in the Caribbean on a tiny little island that didn’t have very many amenities.   There was no book store, besides the tourist shops that sold Harlequin romances, and the library was the top floor of a house about 500 sq ft in size, and frankly, scary to go into.   All of my books, therefore, were passed down or borrowed from friends; it’s how I came to read the Harry Potter books, and this one, Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden.

I can honestly say that I didn’t have very high hopes for this novel, mostly because it just wasn’t my type; At the time drama wasn’t really my thing and I hadn’t discovered my affection for historical novels yet.  I was pleasantly surprised, however, when the novel drew me in from the very first pages.  Part of this was because the narrative of the story makes it seem as if it’s a true story, after all, crediting a fictional person as the translator and author of the story.  It actually took me a long time to figure out that it was in fact fictional, it was so well done.

Secondly, I enjoyed how the beginning of the novel focussed on the main characters childhood and family; it establishes where her personality and perseverance comes from.  Throughout the novel it is said that she has ‘too much water’, which is evidenced by her blue eyes, but it is always said in a derogatory way.   Her mother, before her death, however, is the only person who refers to her ‘water’ as her strength, and tells her it’s a good thing.

The character is very strong and it’s what makes her enjoyable.  She may be sold and stuck in a situation beyond her control, but she doesn’t let it defeat her, she always tries to gain the upper hand and take control of her life.   The entire premise of the novel – from her being sold to a geisha house, to her determination to become the most popular geisha in Japan, to her life during the war and comeback afterwards – is a testament to her strength and determination to survive and make her life the way she felt she deserved it.

When the movie came out I was satisfied by the way the novel was represented on screen, however I felt that it lost some of it’s heart.   Without the personalization the narration provides, and with only a minimal of time spent on Sayuri’s the history, her motivation is lost and she is seen only as a character that is strung along in the stream of events, rather than dictating their direction.   Instead of having the strength of character of the novel, she is turned in to the typical female heroine.

Besides the treatment of the main character, the majority of the novel is covered in the movie accurately enough that none of the plot is lost.  I also have to commend the directors for not ignoring small details and actualy focussing on scenes that might seem insignificant, such as Sayuri’s first time pouring tea for the Chairman, only to find the pot is empty.

I’ve enjoyed the movie and have even watched it more than once.  I feel that a person could watch it in place of reading the novel and not lose too much.  However, I do think that to really understand Sayuri, to really feel for her character, the novel needs to be read.

You can find the novel here: Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

and the movie here: Memoirs of a Geisha (2006)

I have to apologize for my lack of presence this past week, but I felt like death warmed over and after diverting my energy to keeping myself and my children alive, there just wasn’t any left to fuel the creative process.   I’m feeling almost normal, today, however just in time for another Sunday Favorite.

It took me a while to decide on this series, but I decided to go with this one because it’s unique in its scope. Anne McCaffery’s Pern universe spans novels, novellas,  short stories, anthologies and companion books written over a period of over forty years, from 1968 to 2007.  It has also spawned  a comic, two games and a CD.

One of the features of series which often frustrates me so much, is the fact that the reader  has to wait for the next piece of the story.   If they’re really unlucky, they have to wait for years before the next comes out, meaning by the time it has, they’ve forgotten what came before it.   This is exactly what caused me to give up on the Wheel of Time series;  I just stopped caring because I forgot what the story was about, and the series was just too long to go back and read over again.   In some way I wonder if this delay between books is intentional, in order to sell more books, because it forces people to buy and read again, before they can go on.   But I digress…

The Pern books are an exception to this, and it’s one of the reasons I like them so much.  The series is not written in chronological order, so if you can’t find the next in the series or you forgot what happened in the previous one, it’s okay.  Anne McCaffery suggested the books be read in the order they were published, but I took great pleasure in reading them in chronological order, starting with the discovery of Pern by the original settlers and the creation of the Dragons.  I found a great website which helped me out with this, and turned to it whenever I wanted to know which book to read next.

Anyway, while there are some novels which continue the story of Pern (settlement, Dragonrider origins, Life on Pern and discovery of settlement history being the major story themes), a lot of novels, particularly the Harper and Dolphin novels, are simply stories about people who live on Pern, with the Pern universe as it’s background.

The Universe itself is fantastic, and the concept is brilliant.  At first, the novels appear to be a fantasy; it’s the typical pre-industrial age that is seen in most fantasy novels.  What makes it a fantasy is that there are teleporting dragons and dragon riders that protect the settlers from ‘thread’ a horrible parasite that falls from the sky and strips flesh instantly as it falls on you, and kills all life.  However, as the novels slowly delve into the history of the planet and settlement, you discover that it’s really a science fiction as the dragons and their riders discover the old settlement, links to the space ship above, and machines that teach them how to use them to save the planet.

The combination of fantasy with science fiction is something that I really enjoy, and I’ve been searching out other novels which combine the genres.   I have a vague memory of a fantasy novel I read as a teenager; the main character could use magic, but there was a scene where the group explores a tunnel and finds old parking meters.  I can’t remember the name of the novel, but the idea has intrigued me ever since.

The first three novels, Dragonflight, Dragonquest and The White Dragon can all be found in The Dragon Riders of Pern and all the other Pern books can be found on this page.

Alrighty folks, here’s my entry for #shortstorysaturday, a sci-fi/space horror yarn that I wrote a few months ago (yeah, okay, I cheated a little for the first SSS but I really like this story so I wanted to share) called Eulogy. I hope you enjoy, please post yours and let us know here or on Twitter under the tag #shortstorysaturday. Thanks for reading!

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**** TRANSMISSION C-101-988F ***START***START***START

Source: SS VALIANT – SECTOR 9F/11 ASTRO. REF. 2C – OFF MISSION – TRANSCRIPT.

(static)

Sig said we’d make it. All along he maintained that we were well trained, our systems were the best ever built and our resolve as unshakable. Even when everything started to go to hell he kept it up, reassuring us all that we’d be okay. We had food stores, water, air, everything we needed for them to mount a rescue mission and come save us. He really helped keep our heads on straight.

(coughing)

I ate the last of Sig a while ago. The hunger gnawing at my gut makes it hard to maintain the disposition he always tried to instill in us. Sig lasted almost as long as I have. It took me three months to eat him. The long term exposure to weightlessness had wasted his muscles away, made them tough and chewy. By the end it was like eating beef jerky, at least that’s what I try and tell myself. Does it shock you that I ate my commanding officer? What did you expect when you left us alone out here a hundred million miles from civilization?

After we ran out of food and ENCOM stopped answering our pleas for help Conners wanted to just vent the ship; said that it’d be best if we all just died together in the cold; said it would be fast and easy. Sig didn’t let him do it. I wish he had, Conners had the balls to do, not like me. I sit here every day now, alone, staring at that airlock; staring at the gun. One button push; one pull of the trigger, that’s all I’d have to do and end it but I’m a coward. Conners wasn’t a coward. He volunteered for an EVA and never came back. He just unclipped himself from the ship and pushed away. We watched him float off for a week before we lost sight of him, I still dream about him floating out there on a near parallel course with the ship. Just a tiny frozen ghost forever chasing a ship full of bones.

(silence, 154sec.)

I don’t know what they told you back there at home. Maybe they made up some story of us going down in the Martian atmosphere in a blaze of glory. Or maybe we suffered a massive catastrophe after we made orbit. The truth is we just plain fucked up. Dr. Bally made a mistake in his conversions, our approach slope toward Martian orbit was wrong, instead of falling into a nice parabolic orbit we slipped right out of the gravity well and slingshot ourselves toward the edge of the solar system.  It only took the boys back home in Houston twenty five minutes to deliver what we already knew: there was no hope. Even with a full burn of all the fuel we had left we couldn’t halt the momentum we had and get us turned back around to make Martian orbit, or any other sort of orbit. We were lost out here in the cold.

Bally was inconsolable. All he could do was apologize. We didn’t really feel any animosity toward him, we knew this could happen. We all came out here knowing it might be a one way trip. He stopped eating after the first month, just hung there in the now useless science lab. After a couple days he stopped talking, wouldn’t respond to much of anything. We hauled him into the crew living areas but he was catatonic. He was the first to die. During the sleep cycle he pried back a panel on the HVAC system and cut his wrists on the sharp metal. We found him floating in a sea of his own blood. He’d written ‘I doomed us to darkness’ on one of the walls in his blood. It’s still there, faintly, but I can read it. I’ve scrubbed it off countless times but it keeps bleeding back through.

(silence, 12 seconds)

There are a lot of things that I can still see that I shouldn’t.

(silence, 215 seconds)

(sounds of someone moving about, unidentified items crashing around)

(silence, 2143 seconds)

The ship is full of ghosts. They talk to me in my sleep, whisper things in my ear that I don’t want to hear.

(silence, 7 seconds)

I know.

(silence, 14 seconds)

Not yet, I have to finish the story.

(silence, 8 seconds, sound of metal scraping on metal)

We put Bally into the science module then sealed it and shut down the heating system in there. It was my idea, even then when we still had a vain hope of someone coming for us and months of food left I knew there might come a day that we had to do the unspeakable. I didn’t intend to just starve to death once the food ran out. I don’t know why I wanted to live; even then just a month after we’d overshot the target I knew there was no hope. ENCOM was still talking to us, the delay getting longer and longer, telling us that they had some ideas for firing off a fuel system to us. Then something about firing the science module off back toward Earth. I could see they were all totally infeasible solutions; they were just paying us lip service to keep us from going off the deep end.

Sig held us together when ENCOM stopped responding after month 3, and until the food ran out at 4 months. We shared the last ration in the crew module, it was beef stroganoff and had too much salt in it. It tasted like ashes in my mouth but I’d give just about anything right now to have real food.

After it was gone Dr. Enbridge pleaded for Sig to do something. It was the first time he didn’t have anything to say. All he could do was hang is head and turn from us. That’s when Conners had the idea to flush us all out the airlock. We voted it down 4 to 3 after I made a somewhat impassioned plea to keep us alive. Conners took his little stroll amongst the stars the next day when the auxiliary water pump needed a filter change.

(static)

(silence, 118 seconds)

I killed Dr. Enbridge in her sleep five days after Conners went out the airlock. I held her nose and mouth shut with my hands. As badly atrophied as my muscles were I could still hold the small woman and keep her from thrashing about too much. I didn’t want her deteriorating too badly, the more muscle mass she lost the less I’d have to eat.

I let them find her the next morning. She was the only trained medical officer so nobody else noticed the signs of a violent end to her life. They figured she just expired from lack of food and the stress we were all under. That night as we drifted about I made the suggestion that we should eat Dr. Bally. Dr. Ko and Dr. Canton both disagreed. Ko made some sort of speech about us not being savages, that he wouldn’t go out like that. Lt. Kershner and Sig were both with me, survival instincts are bred a little better in the military men it would seem. We hauled his body out of cold storage and started taking it apart.

Eventually hunger overcame Ko and Canton and we managed to make Bally last for almost a month and a half. Dr. Ko wept every time we ate and while Canton held it together better it was very clear he wasn’t feeling very good about himself. When we pulled Dr. Enbridge out a couple days later Ko finally lost it.

Lt. Kershner and I were bringing her body out and found Ko waiting for us. He had an animal look in his eyes and was even gaunter and then I remembered him looking from that morning. He screamed something about us being animals, said he’d show us how animals acted. Before I could reason with him he launched himself at Kershner in a savage attack. They slammed into the side of the module and blood started leaking from Kershners head as they spun around, fighting in the weightless environment of the ship. Finally the young lieutenant screamed and Ko pulled away from him with a sizable chunk of Kershners neck between his teeth.  Arterial blood sprayed the hatchway to the cold science module. Ko seemed to stare though me as he slowly started chewing the lump of bloody ragged flesh he held in his mouth. By this time Sig and Canton had heard the commotion from the command module and arrived on the scene. Canton did what he could to stop the bleeding but Kershner died quickly.

Sig tried to talk Ko down but he just hung in the corner of the room, coiled up against the hull looking like a snake about to strike. There was little humanity left in him, all he’d respond with were angry snarling sounds. We had a gun on board; Sig used it on Dr. Ko.

(silence, 168 seconds)

Ko, Enbridge and Kershner lasted the remaining three of us just over 6 months. It would have been longer but both Ko and Kershner had suffered from pretty severe atrophy.  They all tasted different. I wish I didn’t know that that Enbridge had an almost spicy flavor to her, whereas Kershner’s flesh was plain and slightly greasy. Ko almost tasted like chicken.

(laughter, 47 seconds)

Ironic isn’t it?

(silence, 92 seconds)

I wanted to do it the day we finished Ko off. By that time we were all keeping to our own parts of the ship. Sig had mostly barricaded himself in the command module and I left Canton to the crew module while I keep myself company in the aft near the science module/food storage. None of us had talked in weeks, it was clear the others had gone mad.

Canton talked to himself full time. He drifted around muttering about environmental readings, something about plant life on the surface of Mars, and strange little rumblings about gas ratios in the air in the crew quarters.  I was afraid he was going to do something stupid like vent the atmosphere into space so I figured I’d just get rid of him right away and get Sig and me something more to eat.

He was hunched over one of the computers in the crew consol and I was hanging on to the wall by my feet with a metal bar poised to crush his skull when Sig came out of the command module and caught me. Canton was oblivious as Sig pulled me in to the command module and gave me a stern talking to.

(laughing, 4 seconds)

He went on about chain of command and acting like a good officer. We’d been alone for over a year now. Everyone had to assume we were dead. I didn’t see any point in chain of command. I just drifted away from him and left him ranting to himself in the command module. Sig watched me after that so it was hard to kill Canton but I finally got him a week later. Malnutrition was getting to Sig more than it was getting to me so when he finally fell asleep one day I took the opportunity to slash Cantons throat with a scalpel from the medical kit. Sig awoke to the aroma of baked environmental specialist.

(silence, 1248 seconds.)

(unintelligible, sounds of whispering – see auxiliary audio analysis 1B)

Sig talks to me the most. I guess that makes sense. We were close; he’d been my commanding officer on several missions before this one. He always tried to keep the men and women under him safe so it only makes sense that he was the one that told me to cut off my leg. It was yesterday, or the day before? I can’t remember. Before I started broadcasting this tale.

He told me how to tie it off so I wouldn’t lose too much blood. Told me what saw to use that would best get though the bone. It was his idea to use the sample oven to cauterize the wound. The leg had almost wasted away to nothing anyway. It was hardly worth the effort in the end. At the most it has gotten me two days worth of food. I’ve been thinking about taking the other one off but I’m past the point of caring about staying alive.

(silence, 19 seconds)

Okay, okay, just let me finish

(clicking sounds)

Sig and I shared the last of Canton the same way we shared the last of the real food. We hung in the crew module for a long time him and I, just looking at each other. He finally asked me if I had the greater will to survive. I said I did, I couldn’t lie to him. He pulled the handgun that he’d been keeping on him since Ko lost his mind and just left it hanging in the air between us. He told me to end it, put him out of his misery he said. I couldn’t do it just then, it seemed too soon, too cold a thing to do. Truth is, I didn’t want to look into his eyes when I did it.

He went back to the command module and I took the gun. Sometime later that day cycle the acceleration hit me. Sig had fired the engines. Full blast. I was pinned to the wall for almost ten minutes before the fuel finally ran out and weightlessness returned. I rushed to the command module and found Sig with his head on the engine controls. The last thing he said to me was “there’s really no going back now”. I put a bullet though both his head and the console, I didn’t need either anymore.

(silence, 128 seconds.)

They’re all talking to me now, all at once like a mad jumble of words spinning though my head.

(silence, 12 seconds)

This ship is full of blood.

(silence, 37 seconds)

Dr. Xian Ko, Dr. William Canton, Dr. Taresa Enbridge, Dr. Enrico Bally, Lt. Marc Kershner, Lt. Gary Conners  and Commander Sigmund ‘Sig’ Rasmussen. This is their eulogy.

(silence, 93 seconds)

Okay, okay, I’m doing it.

(silence 5 seconds)

(sounds of deep breathing)

(gunshot)

(silence 97 seconds)

(inaudible, whispers – see auxiliary audio analysis 3F, 4J and 12B)

***** TRANSMISSION ENDS *****

DATE: 8/18/2033

RECORD SEALED

I had an idea last night. I enjoy writing and wish that I had the motivation to write more. For the past three years I’ve done NaNoWriMo and in prep for the November madness I write a short story or two. I rather enjoy writing short stories, more so then full novels even, so I figured that now that we’ve got this website I’d start a little segment called ‘Short Story Saturday’. Like Teaser Tuesday it’ll be a way for writers to get writing on a consistent basis and for all of us to hone our chops a little, and to help motivate me to do a little more writing myself.

Here’s how it works. On Saturday I’ll post up my short story here and tag it on Twitter with the #shortstorysaturday hash-tag. You do the same, post it on your blog or here in the comments then tweet it with the hash-tag and we’ll all enjoy each others fiction.

Start writing now and join us this Saturday for #shortstorysaturday!