This one started out as a sort of dare from my writers' group. At our last meeting we participated in a "thousand ideas in an hour" exercise led by my friend Dale Emery. We did the exercise twice, once to produce a general story idea, and once because I'd mentioned I was coming up short on ideas for Story of the Week 50. Not much story was developed, but we came up with an interesting character, and that character was Thelma.

I quickly realized that Thelma's story, though, was larger than I'd originally anticipated. I hereby post Part One of her story here, and hope to complete the story in one more part. I'd hate to end my Story of the Week project on a cliffhanger. That would stink for both my regular readers, I think.

Anyway, here's Story of the Week 50. Enjoy. Only two more to go!

( PUSHING DOGS (PART ONE) (about 1,400 words) )

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Originally published at Bloginomicon. You can comment here or there.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. For more information, visit http://www.mossroot.com.

It's nearly 110 degrees here in Sacramento, which might help explain why my brain is working so slow. My brain works at optimum capacity when it's about 70 degrees out. But at least the bulk of this story was written while I was in Monterey, where it was a bit cooler.

I'm really not sure what to say about this story. I don't dabble in science fiction very often, nor do I dabble in Shakespearean fanfic. I know that the end is a cop-out; but there was a time crunch, and, well, these things happen.

Fun fact: with this story, I officially break 100,000 words on Story of the Week.

Enjoy!

( THE WALLS OF ELSINORE (about 2,300 words) )

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Originally published at Bloginomicon. You can comment here or there.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. For more information, visit http://www.mossroot.com.

I never finished running The Hole, a D&D adventure that I started a few years ago. It was meant to be a one-session dungeon crawl, though, as usual for the games I run, it ended up not finishing in one session. And, unfortunately, we never got a chance to finish.

So I want to run that game again. Any players interested? Even if you played in Part One the first time around, you never actually got to any of the real secrets, and besides, the play will undoubtedly be vastly different a second time around.

The novel I wrote for 2003's National Novel Writing Month was called The Road to Gilead. It was a post-apocalyptic western featuring a caravan of travelers making their way from one end of post war America to the other, following the vision of their leader, Aleksandr Hope. One of the main characters, Joseph Blaylock, was a gunslinger from Chicago who had been hired to help protect the caravan.

I ended up abandoning The Road to Gilead (though I will probably return to it soon) but the character of Joseph Blaylock stuck with me. I wrote this little snippet awhile ago to sort of get at part of his past. Enjoy!

( BLAYLOCK - A SNIPPET (about 600 words) )

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Originally published at Bloginomicon. You can comment here or there.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. For more information, visit http://www.mossroot.com.

Daikaijuzine 4.5 (King Ghidorah) is finally live! Spread the word!

I need an opening line for Story of the Week No. 49. Anyone got one?

Today we harvested seven cherry tomatoes out of what will doubtless end up being several hundred. I've already eaten two (delicious!) and packed these away for lunch.

It's coming down to the wire here; after this, there are only five more Stories of the Week to go, and believe me I'll be glad to see the end of them. Not that I haven't enjoyed the process, but there have certainly been times when I wanted to pass on one week, just because working on this project has gotten in the way of other projects I've wanted to work on. I've got Big Plans as to what to do after I'm done with this, mostly involving my novel and various programming projects.

This, of course, is the fifth Little Fluffy Wiggletoes story. You can find the others by clicking here. Enjoy!

( LITTLE FLUFFY WIGGLETOES CONQUERS THE WORLD (about 1,100 words) )

Originally published at Bloginomicon. You can comment here or there.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. For more information, visit http://www.mossroot.com.

If looks could kill, this cat would be put away for three hundred years.

You may have noticed that I didn't finish up my story of the giant monster invading Sacramento yesterday. I'm afraid I just kind of ran out of steam. I like the story though and I intend on following up on it; maybe one of the last Stories of the Week.

Anyway... To those of you who were hoping for a dramatic, world smashing conclusion to yesterday's rampage, I'm sorry. Let's just say that Sacramento's gone, but the rest of the world is still here.

In other news not related to zombies or giant monsters, a very happy birthday to slobbit! I'm pretty sure that's today. I'm right, aren't I?

A few years ago I read an article about how the larger a creature gets, the less it is able to maintain its structural integrity; the volume of a creature cubes as its surface area squares. In other words, the bigger, the heavier. Take an ant, make it a thousand times bigger, and its legs will have to become a lot stronger, proportionately, to handle its increased weight. This is called scaling, and it's mathematically complicated, and it boils down to one basic point: land animals can only get so large before they become unstable and collapse under their own weight. This is why the biggest animals are in the oceans and not on the land.

Too bad no one schooled the creature that emerged from the Sacramento River in this basic academic concept.

I feel like I'm being inappropriately academic. It's because I'm a bit on the panicky side, and when I get on the panicky side I get wordy. There are some who say that I'm wordy anyway, but that's just me. And I digress.

Okay. Here it is.

This thing came out of the Sacramento River. It stands probably fifty feet tall and is estimated to weigh several tons, according to the news reports I've seen. God, how did it even fit into the river? Where did it come from? Not much is known about this thing. It looks like a cross between a squid and a Jerusalem cricket. It looks like it grew inside a deep cave in the ocean. It's completely black, and looking at it is like looking into a giant shadow. And the main thing it loves to do is destroy things. It flails its limbs around and smashes them into buildings, smashes cars and other structures. The Tower Bridge is destroyed. Most of Old Sacramento is in flames. Smoke fills the skies. And the roars of the creature can be heard everywhere. I can't find any pictures of the thing, and I'm certainly not going to try to get close enough to snap a photograph of my own.

Sirens have been blaring all day. An hour or so ago the helicopters began flying overhead, and the government seems to have given up on any discretion as they fire bombs and missiles at the thing. I just looked out onto the highway and saw a convoy of the National Guard or some other branch of the military driving past.

We've just heard that Sacramento is to be evaucuated, so I'll probably be updating this by mobile phone for the rest of the day. I just hope this day doesn't end like the end of Cloverfield, with a huge battery of bombs being dropped on this thing, and talk of atomic weapons. Let's hope they can stop it before then.

I've also heard rumors about other parts of the country.

If the rumors are true, then there's definitely something rising up out of the Sacramento River near Old Sacramento. The Delta King has been destroyed, and so have a number of buildings in the area. From my house, almost three miles away, I can hear sirens blaring down the highway and the streets of the city; and there's something like roaring going on.

This shit is scary. How long until East Sacramento is evacuated? Anyone know what's going on?

I have no idea what this is, but I found this picture of the Sacramento River online somewhere. It's obviously taken from a mobile phone. I have no idea what that black blob is:

The aftershocks from last night's earthquake have been coming in fast and furious, it seems, much more rapidly than they should. Or so it seems to me at least. I've lived in California all my life, and I've been through many earthquakes. I still have vivid memories of the Loma Prieta quake that took out the Bay Bridge and several other landmarks, and I don't remember the aftershocks being so close together, and I certainly remember them being weaker than the original quake. But these aftershocks are growing more powerful, and coming closer together.

More reports of road closures as well. Rumors say that Highway 80 between here and Davis is closed, but I don't know anything for sure about that -- maybe someone in the Davis area could confirm that.

The news is silent, of course. Which is odd, because the news is normally all over earthquakes, especially ones in major metropolitan areas. Thus, I have no idea how much damage has been done or how many injuries or even deaths have been sustained.

It's a weird day altogether.

A quick side note for my new online friends, especially on Twitter and Facebook: Today is "Blog Like It's the End of the World", a challenge for bloggers to spend the day blogging as though the world were coming to an end for whatever reason. Traditionally (at least as far as something in its third year can be said to have a tradition), the theme is a zombie attack. I'm zombied out this year, so I'm doing something with Sacramento, beginning with an earthquake and rumors that Old Sacramento has been evacuated and shut down.

So if you see any posts of mine today that are tagged with "bliteotw 2009" or "#bliteotw", then those are part of the game. You can either ignore them, or play along. Just don't take them seriously. There was no earthquake, and Old Sacramento is, to the best of my knowledge, still open and unevacuated.

One of my favorite places to go in Sacramento is Old Sacramento. I love the old buildings, the cobbled streets, and especially the Railroad Museum. I was planning on going there today, in fact, but apparently Old Sacramento's been evactuated and closed down. I'm not exactly sure why, but I've heard rumors that there's something going on in the Sacramento River. Maybe some sort of toxic spill or something, I don't know. Trouble is, I can't find any reliable information online anywhere, which is troubling.

I'll keep posting as I find out more.

The USGS is reporting that a 4.3 earthquake struck the Sacramento region at about 11:30 p.m. Did anyone else feel it?

Tomorrow is Blog Like It's the end of the World, a day where people all over the world conspire to write their blogs as though the world were coming to an end. In 2007 and 2008, the world was under attack by zombies, and according to the folks who are putting it together this year, it's going to be zombies again.

Sigh.

It's not that I'm not in favor of a good ol'-fashioned zombie apocalypse, mind you. It's just that I've done zombies two years in a row; in 2007 I did the story of zombies taking over Dixon, CA, (complete with tragic ending), and in 2008 I had zombies take up political activism in California's capital city. And zombies remain the best symbol of the dehumanizing elements of our modern culture, and thus legitimately the target of fear and fun. So a good zombie apocalypse can be a frightening and funny thing.

It's just that I'm zombied out, so to speak.

So this year, I'm going to do something else. While the "official" theme for tomorrow's Blog Like It's the End of the World (at least as official as these things can get) may still be zombies, I'm going to do something else. I'm not entirely sure yet; half the fun will be figuring it out as I go on. Let's just say, though, that it's going to start in the Sacramento River, near the Delta King...

My writers' group met last night, and since we had no manuscripts to review this month, we decided to simply have a small potluck get together, and probably just chat for awhile. One of our members suggested that we all bring in some of our earliest writings, just for the sake of a laugh or an appreciate nod, or possibly a nervous glance or two. So since I was working at home today I took my afternoon break to go through my oldest writing files to dig up a series of stories I wrote when I was eleven to thirteen years old about a private investigator named Fizziwinker.

I don't know where the name Fiiziwinker came from. I didn't know when I was a kid, and I certainly have no clue now. I think it's a cool name, though. In fact, these stories are full of names like that: Fizziwinker; Foithbinder; Whicklewrecker; Brad Bockley, Thirty years later I still have fun saying these names out loud.

Fizziwinker worked alone, but he was also part of an international organization of private detectives called the Polties. Every now and then he would get together with one of them or even a team to solve crimes together. And while lawyer Brad Bockley was usually the criminal mastermind behind the mysteries, I did at one point have the criminal mastermind turn out to be Robert Phalen, the head of the Polties himself. Not to blow my own horn, but I think that my little thirteen year old head was pretty darn sophisticated.

I wrote nine of these stories overall, including a few that are sadly missing completely:

• "Fizziwinker and the Case of the Missing Turkey" (1978) was written for a class assignment, and is gone forever. I remember that it was heavily influenced by the Encyclopedia Brown mystery stories, though.


• "Fizziwinker and the Case of the Teddy Bear with a Hole in its Head" (1978) is the oldest one I have. In this story, mischievous lawyer Brad Bockley attempts to intimidate the widow Whicklewrecker into signing her inheritance over to him, by shooting her son's teddy bear. The most frustrating thing about this story is that the last page is missing, and I have no idea how it ended.


• "The Maltese Chicken" (1978). I don't quite recall what this one is about.


• "The Mystery of the Paw Print in the Jell-O" (1979). In this one, Brad Bockley returns with a nefarious plot to take over the world with his army of mutant toy poodles.


• "The Mystery of the Empty Suits" (1979). Another one which I remember writing, but I have no idea what it was about.


• "A Scandal in Disneyland" (1980). My sister Leona suggested the title and the plot for this one, but again I don't remember the plot. I do remember that this is the first one in which the Polties show up.


• "The Fortune Cookie Scoundrel" (1981). Another missing one. In this one, I believe Brad Bockley tried to take over the world by inserting depressing fortunes into fortune cookies, thus depressing people into submission.


• "The Theft of the Declaration of Independence" (1981). Another one whose plot I forget, but the title is probably self-explanatory.


• "The Hopeless Diamond" (1981). Obviously a missing diamond caper.


• "The Secret of Foithbinder Manor" (1982). In this one, Mrs. Whicklewrecker inhereits a house from her late husband. Unfortunately, the house appears to be haunted, so her plans to tear it down to replace it with a parking lot are foiled. It turns out, though, that a mysterious figure named Joe Feegan was behind the haunting, because he knew that Abraham Lincoln had originally owned the house. Mrs. Whicklewrecker decides not to turn the house down. And in a startling twist, it turns out that the house is really haunted after all.

In addition to the stories above, I also had a novel planned, The Mystery of Captain Hawk's Treasure, but I never got around to writing that.

I tried getting these stories published in venues like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but, unsurprisingly, they never sold. I couldn't understand why. At the time I thought I was writing serious crime fiction, possibly with a comic element or two, but serious overall (did I mention I was eleven when I started writing these)? When a friend of my grandmother's said that these stories were among the best children's stories he'd seen I was outright insulted.

For years, these stories have sat in my files, unlooked at and unorganized. Looking back at them now, though, I'm kind of wondering if there might be a future for these stories after all. They would need some editing, but just maybe my grandmother's friend was on to something after all.