Category: writing

My hopepunky space-opera novelette Bearly Believable is now available at Hexfiled. When the Volpex Picnic Park ranger and his owl companion need a biological android to offer a fire-safety program, it’s gotta be a bear, right? Enjoy!

I wrote a bit about it when it was accepted for publication. I’m really excited that it’s finally coming out! But I wanted to share a few more details of how it fits into the other stories I’ve written about the setting. And some of the other characters that appear in the story.

Bearly Believable is set on Volpex, a planet that was first introduced in The Better Angels and the Very Scary Halloween. That story was originally released in 2022 as a Halloween promotion for the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy and subsequently included in Better Angels: Tour de Force. It’s a terraformed world that has a single developed continent with the rest of the world left fallow to provide ecological services and replicator feedstock harvesting.

I’ve written more about the ecology of terraformed worlds in You Can’t Change Just One Thing that features my characters Totemo Isogashii and the NeoBoxer Lambda. They first appeared in The Better Angels and Lambda and Tau, in Better Angels: Tour de Force, but they also appear in Bearly Believable where they play a small, but crucial role.

In 2023, I wrote a story about a group of girls who run a cooking show on Volpex called The Butter Angels. The humor of them getting mixed up with The Better Angels is played for laughs a time or two, but it was the beginning of several ideas I’ve explored over several stories. The Butter Angels also appear briefly at the beginning of Bearly Believable, so this is their public debut.

The Mayor was just arriving in a SkyStretch with a large police escort. The SkyStretch landed while the police vehicles orbited the site.

When the door opened, a bodyguard exited first, carrying a compact railgun, then the Mayor, and then they were followed by a crowd of young women wearing some kind of costume.

The young women were all matching: cute red tops with long, open sleeves; short, checked skirts; and patterned bandanas to tie back their hair. Plus each had a pink ribbon tied crosswise to hold back their sleeves. They chattered cheerfully among themselves, self-evidently excited to have gotten a ride in the Mayor’s luxurious SkyStretch.

The Mayor led them forward to the ribbon where attendants handed each a pair of scissors. The crowd caught sight of the women and someone yelled, “It’s the Butter Angels!” A huge chorus of shrieks and cheers erupted from the crowd. The Angels offered broad smiles and waved to their fans.

I wrote the original story about the Butter Angels that I had hoped would be published as part of a Truck Stop anthology and, when the publisher proposed doing another Halloween promotion, I wrote a little piece of flash fiction to go along with it. It was around that time that the publisher stopped developing the Truck Stop series and so the stories were never published. I set them aside and turned my attention to other things.

Since it doesn’t appear the Truck Stop is coming back, I’ve started shopping some of these stories around to other outlets. But the Halloween promotion story doesn’t seem like it would ever fit anywhere else, so — since it’s almost Halloween anyway, I’ve posted it separately on my blog: An Anomalous Aggregation of Angels.

I hope you enjoy the stories. I look forward to sharing more stories from Volpex in the coming months and years.

a foo dog

Community is important for writers. Today, Cory Doctorow talked about the need for writer community in Critique and Writing. Especially for new writers, “[b]eing part of a group of writers who expect you to regularly turn in new work adds a very useful bit of external motivation that augments your still nascent self-discipline.” So it was with me.

I struggled largely in isolation until I found a publisher that was interested in my work. Perhaps as important for my growth as a writer, was a bi-weekly Zoom meeting where authors with the publisher got together to talk about what they were doing. They just called it the “Virtual Writing Group” but I called it the Island of Misfit Toys. We were all so different. And odd. And we each brought different strengths and weakness to the group. It was very helpful as I struggled to get my feet under me as a new writer.

For four years, we met regularly to discuss things. We talked about writing and publishing. We planned for upcoming conventions. We shared triumphs and sorrows. It felt like a helpful, supportive community to me.

Then, suddenly — without announcement or discussion — after the Seattle Worldcon in August of 2025, the publisher abruptly cancelled the meetings. We haven’t met since.

As I had described, I had a mixed experience at that Worldcon due to an unfortunate interaction with another author. Did that event contribute to the collapse of the writing group? No one has ever told me.

From my early days as an author, my writing community has broadened considerably. I belong to several writing communities now in SFWA and Straw Dog Writers Guild. I started attending the SFWA Writing Date. Then I started my own group, Straw Dog Writes. Most recently, I was invited to join the Procrastinating (aka Bearded) Writers Group.

For the past year, I left the recurring event for the Virtual Writing Group in my calendar wondering if it would start back up again. Every couple of weeks it’s reminded me of the community of people that I once belonged to. In August, I watched the anniversary of the last meeting come and go. But tonight decided it was time.

Tonight, I removed the recurring event for the Virtual Writing Group from my calendar. I don’t understand what happened. But it’s time to quit dwelling in the past and look forward.

distorted image of girl's face

A few weeks ago, I got a private message from someone I didn’t recognize on Discord. They’re a member of the Western Mass Writer’s Guild Discord server. I don’t normally chat with random people on the Internet but I thought I’d see if they were a local writer or what. We exchanged a few messages. They said they were an artist and asked if I wanted to look at their portfolio. They had a dozen or more pieces of digital art where you could see both the original line drawings and the finished, full-color artworks.

I’m not sure why they messaged me. I think they may have seen the posts about starting Elegant Lich and hoped that maybe we would be in the market to purchase artwork. They never really said.

We exchanged a few dozen messages during the following weeks. I made it clear early on that I wasn’t in the market to purchase artwork. But, during the conversation, I also was trying to suss out if they were a human being or a bot.

I asked how they were. “Sad” because they didn’t have any commissions. I asked what they were going, “Nothing much. Trying to get some work.” I made a point of sharing public aspects of my life: the same things I was posting to social media: hanging out with Tanuki, getting a flat tire fixed, getting vaccinated, etc. They said nothing to suggest they had any kind of human life.

Finally, I admitted that I was trying to tell if they were a human being. They haven’t contacted me since.

This was all before SFWA ran their panel discussion today: I Swear I’m Not a Robot — How Publishers Are Handling the Pressure to Confirm Human Authorship. It was very helpful and I took careful notes. The panel included a number of editors that are struggling with the problem of identifying AI-generated manuscripts.

They pointed out that the problem is not just manuscripts. The entire ecosystem is under attack. It includes reviews and artwork and correspondence. “In every space there might be writing, people are using these tools to conduct scams” — M.L. Clark.

All of the editors reported a significant amount of trauma over the experience of having accepted, nearly published, or published AI generated manuscripts — and only learning they’d been scammed through reports from readers. It’s a struggle to extend and maintain trust — especially with new authors who most need to find a receptive, supportive community. What is the community’s role? What is the responsibility of the staff? Where does the buck stop? What do we do? “Dealing with not being able to know is the challenge” — Michael J. Deluca.

There is a substantial debate about the potential role of using automated tools to identify AI-generated manuscripts. Some of the tools seem quite good right now. But it’s an arms race between the AIs and the tools. When do you use them? As a first line of defense, to protect your slush readers? Do you really trust the machine to make these decisions? There’s not a clear answer.

One editor said they might engage the author in a series of questions about their writing process, e.g. “Why did you use this PoV?” I thought, “Oh, no. I’m fucked.” I don’t know why I write the way I do. I’ve never taken any writing classes so I don’t even have the language to talk about why I write the way I do. But other people were careful to point out that the burden of proving they were human should not be on the author but on the editor. Still, retaining artifacts of the writing process, like outlines, rough drafts, revision histories, could all be useful to help demonstrate human authorship.

The moderator commented that Yog’s Law should still hold: Authors should certainly not have to pay to prove that they’re human.

There were a few encouraging points. First, Gen-AI is not good at generating long manuscripts. It can write good flash fiction but, the longer the manuscript, the less likely the AI is to be able to develop and maintain a complex narrative. Many of the people using AI are fundamentally lazy: simple checks can catch many of them. Also, current models are being funded by venture capital. As the true costs shift to the users, it may well not be economically viable to generate AI for the meagre pittance that short fiction writers earn, and discourage scammers from pursuing the “market.”

In the end, the recommendations were for editors to educate themselves, talk to each other, and build stronger networks of human connection. All good recommendations.

a fawn boxer dog

People who follow me on social media are already familiar with my characters Totemo Isogashii and Lambda. Lambda, of course, is a NeoBoxer.

I write about them pretty often. I’ve just finished a new novelette that features them and, since I’ve been thinking about them a lot, I thought I might offer a little background for fans.

Note: The picture is of my son’s boxer dog Tanuki. For some reason, the description of Lamba is nearly identical.

Three years ago, when I was writing Better Angels: Tour de Force, I wanted to write a story about Tau that was inspired by Lady and the Tramp, I called it The Better Angels and Lambda and Tau. Tau has learned that a girl NeoBoxer, Lambda, has come to the Truck Stop, but he’s depressed because she says she’s too busy to go on a date. The Better Angels and their allies wage a campaign to keep her partner, Totemo Isogashii, occupied for long enough for Tau to put the moves on Lambda. It’s the sort of fluff that led me to call the Better Angels stories fluffy military space opera.

In the years since I wrote that silly little story about Totemo Isogashii and Lambda, I’ve written dozens — maybe a hundred — little bits of microfiction about them. Here’s one example:

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Totemo said. She and Lambda were laying on the floor in a sunbeam.
Lamba lay on her back with her muppies splayed out. She wuffed, softly.
“I can’t relax,” Totemo said. “I’ve got so much to do and, instead, I’m just laying around here.”
Lambda had persuaded Totemo to sign up for a day-long cat-guided* rest day. Their facilitator was Tama, a fluffy, white cat with blue eyes.
After going out at dawn to hunt voles, they had spent hours just laying in the sun, moving periodically as the light moved across the floor.
Someone rang a triangle in the other room. Tama sprang to her feet and ran toward the sound.
“I hope it’s lunch!” Totemo said.
They arrived in the kitchen where three bowls were set on the floor. Tama was already eating out of one. Lambda took the second.
Totemo considered her options.

*Note: this was inspired by seeing an ad for a “cat-guided field trip” where people would pay money to go follow a cat around in the forest. Really.

Totemo and Lambda also show up in my novelette Bearly Believable, which is scheduled to appear in Hexfiled this month. As I’ve learned more about the characters, I decided to finally write the story of how they meet. It’s set, appropriately enough, on the planet Holufinia, the origin world of NeoBoxers.

I originally wrote about NeoBoxers in the same time frame as some of my very earliest SFF writing, more than twenty years ago. The first working title was “Happiness is a Warm Puppy.” As I was writing Better Angels, I pulled out that old manuscript and reworked it as a Truck Stop story. I added some stuff and cut a lot of stuff, and retitled it Hope is a Cloned Puppy. From that manuscript, here is my earliest description of a NeoBoxer:

Tawny, with a black face, Beta was the NeoBoxer that had been provided to assist the crew. Beta was a dog, but not just any dog. NeoBoxers were the product of hundreds of years of selective breeding and not a small amount of genetic engineering. Created to lend their keen noses and stout hearts to any adventure, they also sought to forge strong bonds of loyalty among the crew. Beta gamboled among the crew members nudging them with his muzzle to encourage bonding.

Pascal admired his ability to work with both sides of the crew and his single-minded focus when he found a problem that was within his range of capacities. Beta could sense that there was division in the crew and he worked tirelessly to bring both sides together into a single pack with a common purpose.

The setting, Holufinia, is a distant world in the galaxy that got cut off after a disastrous civil war took down their advanced technology and the wormhole that connected them with galactic civilization. In Hope is a Cloned Puppy, we learn how the planet gets reconnected to the larger galactic civilization, we’re introduced to NeoBoxers, and we learn the origin of Tau, the NeoBoxer that lives on the Truck Stop.

I offered the manuscript as a story for the Truck Stop. But, after Better Angels came out, the publisher seemed to abandon the Truck Stop universe. I don’t believe any story has come out since. He never explained to me why. I was disappointed because I thought the shared universe idea was fun and wrote several other stories for it, including at least three more Better Angels stories.

The working title of my new story was “Totemo and Lambda Save the World.” The finished title is You Can’t Change Just One Thing. I would classify the story as Hopepunk. The book is primarily about the ecology of Holufinia. The title is a riff on Garrett Hardin’s Iron Law of Ecology, “You can never do just one thing.” Anything you do in an ecosystem touches everything else. We also learn how Totemo and Lambda meet, and the ways that meeting changes Totemo’s life.

I really love the characters. Totemo is an earnest, take-charge scientist. She’s abrasive and hard-driving, always working harder and smarter than anyone else. Lambda is the one with a sense of humor. She’s equally smart and capable, but she is always looking out for her human partner and not above using subterfuge to get her to take better care of herself and attend to her own needs. And she’s happy to have a little fun while doing it.

I keep coming back to NeoBoxers. When my oldest son was in first grade, he had an assignment to write every day. And after he’d written something, he was allowed to illustrate it with a picture. The first day, he wrote, “SUPER DOG SAVES THE DAY!” and provided an illustration of a boxer dog wearing a cape. The next day he wrote, “SUPER DOG SAVES THE DAY AGAIN!” and drew a similar picture. He did the same for every day that followed. Like father like son, I guess.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with the story and will shortly start submitting it for publication. I’m hopeful it will find a home soon and I will be able to share it with you.

a house near fredricksburg

I have been looking for books to help improve my background in literature and was excited to find The Emerson Circle that talks about important early-American writers who surrounded Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although this book dwelt a bit longer on their personal histories and less on their writing, it was still a useful introduction.

A number of years ago, an Esperanto friend from Chile and his wife were visiting the Boston area. I drove in to spend a day with them and do a little sightseeing. I thought my friend, who is a bibliophile, might appreciate visiting Walden Pond and the Thoreau museum. I didn’t know much about it, but I had seen signs driving past Concord.

When we visited, we also drove to the Old North Bridge to see some of the Revolutionary War sights. I was surprised to see signs for Emerson’s house. And Louisa May Alcott’s house. I was completely unaware of the connections among these authors.

I did know a bit about Thoreau. My father had read his work and I had at least a passing familiarity with it. But I didn’t know anything about the museum. Or his life. Or the other people in Emerson’s circle. Some, like Nathanial Hawthorne, I was aware of (We read The Scarlet Letter in high school). Others, like Margaret Fuller, I was wholly ignorant of.

After my visit to the museum, I read some of Thoreau’s writing and wrote about it in my blog. I think that post still stands up pretty well, thirteen years later.

I was a bit disappointed with the first half of Nichols’ book. Partly, I think it assumed the reader would know more about the authors than I did. It also had a tendency to dwell on the minutiae of their lives: How many times this child was struck on the palm with a ferule. Which house they lived in this year or that. I found a lot of that pretty tedious.

I was looking for the ideas in their writing and how those ideas were passed back and forth. But the book seemed to expect that of course the reader would have read all their works beforehand. Since I had not, I needed to read between the lines quite a bit until I had picked up enough background knowledge to begin to fill in the gaps.

The second half of the book was closer to what I was looking for. There was more discussion of how the writers were responding to the important issues of the day: suffrage, abolition, the Civil War, etc. And it contrasted the types of writing that the different authors were publishing on the issues.

The book also got me to reflect on the various author’s communities I belong to. This fall, I’m hoping to spend more time reading the works nominated for the Nebula Awards which will help me gain a better understanding of the people in my community. Now that I’m retired, I finally have more time and energy to devote to reading. And I’ll also look for more books like The Emerson Circle to provide me with introductions to other important groups of historical authors.

My brother shared a post that used the word “eigentlich” (which in German just means “actually”). I said it looked like “elegant lich.” And then a few minutes later, we both said, “That would make a great name for a fantasy magazine!” So we decided to start one.

It also gave me an excuse to try blogsh.app. It’s a static site generation system that runs at the command line. You can do all your editing in markdown using vim and the system builds out static web pages. But it also can post announcements at either Mastodon or Bluesky and direct readers there to leave comments. It’s got a bunch other bells and whistles too.

As an aside, the blog.sh system was primarily designed as a way to gather together all of your old content spread across different services so that you can archive it all yourself in one place. It’s a really cool idea. I’m interested in doing that myself. But this seemed like a low-stakes way to try the system out.

I only ran into one really difficult problem while setting it up. I didn’t uncomment one line in a configuration file and it took me several hours to figure out what the problem was. Other than that, it was just figuring out how things are set up and where the things are. For someone without a strong background in unix, it would be a lot more difficult. But both my brother and I are old hands with unix, so it felt very comfortable exploring and using the system.

It’s been a busy couple of days as we set up the DNS, hosting, software, and social media accounts. I registered the domain name elegantlich.com and we put a placeholder there, where the magazine will actually go. Then we set up a blog at blog.elegantlich.com that we can use for testing and planning. We also created accounts at bluesky and mastodon.

We wrote a few posts. Phil wrote an introductory post and a post about what kinds of fiction we might look for. I wrote a post about creating the graphic identity for Elegant Lich. I was very pleased with the woodcut I found that seems like a good place to start.

Now we can actually start thinking about our project to make plans, timelines, and budgets. We could probably self-fund a very minimal publication, but I think we’re going to explore running a kickstarter. We attended a workshop on running kickstarters at the Nebula Conference and I think this might be a good fit. We’ve already identified a bunch of tiers that we could go for: dedicated web hosting, paper publication, and pro rates for authors.

Feel free to follow along as we conduct our planning in public. And, if you’re an author, start thinking about what kind of fiction you might want to submit to Elegant Lich. We’re having fun and we hope you will too.

a bound journal with a book mark ribbon and elastic band.

When I was a graduate student, I read a book by Wittgenstein: Notes on Logic. It was just a series of brief notes, few of which I can now remember, that represented reflections that Wittgenstein had made on observations, insights, and contradictions related to logic. One was meaningful enough, I used it as my .sig for a while back in the 1990s: “If someone says, ‘I have a body,’ then one can ask, ‘who is speaking here with this mouth?'” This book has the same kind of feel, with many pithy observations, insights, and contradictions about writing fiction.

It’s not a book you can sit down and read straight through. At least, I could not. I would read a handful of notes (they’re numbered from 1 to 280) and then I would need to put the book down for a while.

I got my copy from the library. If I had owned a copy, I would have used a highlighter every few pages to keep track of the bits I agreed with or disagreed with. Or had no frame of reference to understand.

I don’t know whether I would have found the book useful as a beginning writer. And I’m not sure how useful I find it as an experienced writer. I’m not sure “useful” is quite the right word. It reminds me a bit of someone who said that the rules of Esperanto are all permissions. This book is largely about giving you permission to do it your way. She tells you how she does it, but makes it clear that she doesn’t think that’s the only way to do it. Or even the best way. It’s just what she does — your mileage may vary.

I never took a class in writing, in spite of teaching writing for 25 years. Indeed I never took a class in many of the things I became expert at. I never took a class for computer programming, or unix, or the web, or technology of any kind. Yet, I became a kind of computer guru. I never took a course in Esperanto, yet I became an award-winning author and poet. It isn’t as though I never took classes: I did a bachelor’s degree with two majors, a masters degree, and a doctorate. But I always was an autodidact even when taking classes: I looked at classes as an invitation to develop expertise in whatever I was studying. Sometimes the class helped, sometimes it didn’t.

I think this book helped.

As I was thinking about writing this review, I kept thinking of things I would want to argue about. Or agree with. Or highlight — if I’d had a highlighter, I might have done that. But I’m not sure that’s really the point.

278. It’s a long game. That’s all I ever want to impart to my students. What matters is that you learn to get work done in the way that is possible for you, through consistency or panic. Through self-recrimination or self-delusion or self-forgiveness: every life needs all three.

Just keep writing about the stuff that’s important to you, however you can make it work for you. It’s good advice.

rock

On September 27, 2021, I submitted a new story, The Silver Tongue, for publication. And on September 28, I received a rejection. I submitted it several more times in 2021 and it got rejected as well.

My brother Philip was surprised. He said that if Gardner Dozois were still around, he would have accepted it instantly. Having never met Gardner, I couldn’t say. But it is kind of weird story and probably needed a weird editor to appreciate its merits.

I generally try to avoid editing manuscript after I’ve written them. I try to use whatever energy I have for writing new stuff. But at some point, I went back to look at it to see if there were obvious defects or changes I might make. I was kind of shocked to find that it really felt like a pretty tight story to me, without much additional cruft. It was good!

After a while, I gave up trying to keep it out to markets. A lot of the the top markets turn manuscripts around pretty fast and notify you when they reject stuff. Others take a long time and/or never get back to you. Every so often, I’d remember it and send it out. I submitted it twice in 2022, twice in 2023, twice in 2024, once in 2025. Then I saw The Freak!

“Huh,” I thought. “The Freak! They might like it.” And I sent it off.

It got accepted!

You can now read The Silver Tongue in Issue 4 of The Freak! Enjoy!

rosary

Most mornings, I write a brief story fragment for Wandering Shop Stories as a warm-up for my day’s creative activities. Sometimes, I use these directly as a rough draft or outlining tool for my current works-in-progress. Often, they’re just one-offs or fan fiction/literary canon of my existing work.

Since January, however, I’ve been struggling. I really haven’t hit my stride writing since my son was hospitalized. We’ve had a lot of stuff going on and my head just wasn’t in the right place. Some days, I couldn’t post anything at all. When I could, it often wasn’t until late at night. And I was frequently dissatisfied with the quality of what I was writing.

Things have been getting better. And just recently, I’ve finally felt like I’m starting to hit what I’m aiming at.

Last fall, before things went south, I wrote a few story fragments about the Hero and the Demon Lord. Here is the first series:

“What’s even the point of this?” the Demon Lord said.
“Ssh,” said the Hero as he cast his line out again.
They sat together at the shore of the lake. There was a quiet plunk as the bobber landed in the water. Ripples radiated out and then settled down.
“You know I can just cast death on the fish and…”
“You shall do no such thing.”
A ripple appeared around the bobber. Once. Twice. Then it dove under the water.
The Hero pulled back on the rod. The bobber and hook popped up, bait gone. The Hero pulled another worm out of the bait can.
“At this rate, we’ll never get lunch,” the Demon Lord said.
“Look in the basket under your seat,” the Hero said.
The Demon Lord pulled out the basket and opened it.
“Sandwiches?”
“And beer. Isn’t this better than fighting to the death?”

“What kind of sandwich is this?” the Demon Lord asked.
“It’s a tasty sandwich,” the Hero explained helpfully
The Demon Lord unwrapped it and inspected it skeptically.
“Try it!” the Hero encouraged.
The Demon Lord took a small bite. And then a larger one.
“An interesting flavor…” he said, as he chewed.
“Right?”
“So what is it?”
“It’s bang bang chicken.”
“You made this yourself?”
“Oh, no. My mother made it.”
“Your mother!?”
“Only the best for my friends.” The Hero smiled. “At least I hope we’ll soon be friends.”
The Demon Lord scowled.

“Well,” the Demon Lord said, getting to his feet. “It’s been fun, I guess…”
“You’re not going to eat and bolt, are you?” the Hero said, pained.
The Demon Lord settled back into his seat, grumbling.
“Look!” he growled. “Maybe you don’t have anything better to do all day, but I…”
“Pish posh,” the Hero said, casting the line again. “Your minions can run things just fine without you for an afternoon. When was the last time you took a day for yourself?”
“But…”
“Besides, you haven’t had dessert yet.”
“Dessert?”
The hero gestured and a group of people approached.
Carrying a cake with candles, they began to sing Happy Birthday.
“It’s not my birthday!” the Demon Lord barked.
“Do you even have a birthday?”
“Well, no…”
“So, today is as good as any.”
“What kind of cake is it?” he said, eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“Why, devil’s food. Of course!”

“Blow out the candles! Blow out the candles!” everyone called.
The Demon Lord scowled, but then blew out the candles and everyone clapped.
“Are you really sure that’s sanitary?” he mumbled, as they produced a stack of paper plates and plastic forks.
“Well?” asked the Hero.
“Well, what?”
“Aren’t you going to cut the cake?”
“With what?”
“Ah! I thought you’d never ask!” the Hero laughed. “Here!”
The Hero offered the Demon Lord an elaborate knife. It seemed to glow blue with an inner light.
The Demon Lord eyed it suspiciously.
“What is that?” he asked.
“It’s Cakecrist,” the Hero said. “The Frosting Cleaver — Made by the elves, you know.”
The Demon Lord extended a finger and tentatively touched the knife. There was a spark and a curl of smoke rose up. He jerked his hand back.
“I think I’ll let you cut the cake,” the Demon Lord said.

The Hero stood on the dock and watched while the firemen worked to contain the raging inferno where the lake cabin had once stood.
“I’m afraid it’s a complete loss,” the Captain said.
“It’s not a complete loss,” the Hero clarified. “We learned a lot.”
“What did we learn?”
“Well… We learned he doesn’t like fishing and he likes cake. Oh! And that he hates surprises.”
The Captain stared at the Hero for a moment, then sighed and looked away.
“It was bound to end this way,” he said.
“What do you mean?” the Hero said “End? We’ve got another date next week!”

The Hero and Demon Lord are tropes from Japanese manga. They appear constantly in all sorts of different forms. I’m by no means the first to “ship” the Hero and Demon Lord. In Gachi Koi Maou-Sama, for example, the Demon Lord is a cute girl that has a crush on the Hero. There are undoubtedly dozens — or hundreds — of manga that have the Hero and Demon Lord as characters. Sometimes they act according to their stereotypical nature but, just as often, they’re used to subvert the standard paradigm and do something unexpected.

Just recently, I decided to pick them up again and I’ve been pleased with some of the results — as pleased as with anything I’ve written for a long time.

After vanquishing the dread Spectre of Despair, the hero was feted with a parade through the town. As he passed by, a boy called out from the crowd.
“Hero! Hero! What’s the name of your sword?”
The hero paused a moment, then replied, “It doesn’t have a name. It’s just my sword.”
“Awww!” the boy said, disappointed.
“I’ll tell you what,” the hero said. “If you think of a cool name, I’ll name my sword that in your honor.”
The boy’s face lit up with excitement.
The hero waited while the boy wracked his brain for a cool name. The crowd grew silent with anticipation.
“I’ve got it!” the boy crowed. “Swordy McSwordface!”
“Swordy McSwordface! Swordy McSwordface!” the crowd chanted.
The hero drew Swordy McSwordface and broke the blade over his knee.
“I’ll get a new sword,” he said.

The Hero arrived to visit the Demon Lord for coffee. He was ushered into the Demon Lord’s breakfast nook. The Demon Lord looked up from his paper and warmly greeted the Hero.
“How would you like your coffee?” asked the maid. She was a charming lass of 16 or 17 with rosy cheeks.
“I’ll take it with a little cream,” said the Hero.
“And would you care for some coffee cake?”
“Yes, thank you.”
She made a bob, backed away from the table with her eyes downcast, then turned and left the room.
“So…” the Demon Lord asked. “What do you think of my new monster?”
“Monster?” The Hero regarded him quizzically. “What monster?”
The Demon Lord pointed after the maid.
“Her? But she’s just a girl!”
“Exactly,” the Demon Lord exulted.

“What!?” The Captain of the Holy Order of Knights was incredulous. He stared disbelievingly at the knight who had just delivered the report. “Did I hear you correctly? You’d better repeat that.”
“I said,” the knight reiterated, “that the Hero is having breakfast with the Demon Lord.”
The Captain rubbed his hand all over his face as he tried to digest this.
“Who told you this?” he asked finally.
“The Hero told me.”
“The Hero told you? Himself?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say, exactly.”
“To the best of my recollection, he said, ‘I’m having breakfast with the Demon Lord.'”
“Hmm. No chance of a misunderstanding? He didn’t say, for example, ‘I’m having breakfast with the semen gourd’?”
“No. I also saw him go into the Demon Lord’s castle.”
The Captain sighed.
Just then the Hero entered.
“Did you really have breakfast with the Demon Lord?” the Captain asked.
“Yes,” the Hero replied. “He showed me his new monster.”
“Oh! You were collecting intelligence! How scary was the monster?”
The Hero caught sight of his reflection in a mirror and wiped a bit of lipstick off his cheek.
“Terrifying!” he answered, in a low voice.

The Demon Lord chuckled, rubbing his hands together. The Maid touched up her lipstick using the mirror in a compact.
“Did something good happen?” asked Jaygor.
“Everything is going according to plan!”
The Demon Lord clenched his fist. “Soon the Hero will be on his knees, nothing more than a quivering mass of gelatinous slime!”
“Pardon me, Demon Lord,” the Maid said. “I think your plan will have a better chance of success if I can make a few purchases.”
“Oh?” he said, interested.
“Yes. Just a few details, really — to enhance the effect.”
“How much will all this cost?” asked Jaygor.
The Maid batted her eyes. “Hardly anything!” she said.
The Demon Lord got out his billfold and began to extract some bills, but the Maid reached over and pulled out his credit card.
“I’ll be back later,” she said, and blew him a kiss. She slipped out the door toward town.
The Demon Lord replaced his wallet. “This is going to be great!” he said as she left.
Jaygor just rolled his eyes.

“Hello?” the Hero called. His voiced echoed through dark, empty corridors.
“This way,” said Jaygor, unexpectedly from the side.
The Hero jumped, but then followed Jaygor through the twisting passages of the dungeon.
“Say…” he said, after a short time. “So why are you all down here?”
“I’ll leave that to the Demon Lord to explain,” said Jaygor. The Hero detected a note of bitterness in his tone.
They arrived in a dimly-lit chamber carved out of the living rock. The Demon Lord was seated, uncharacteristically, at a small wooden table.
“Would you like some coffee?” asked the Maid.
“Yes, please,” the Hero said.
There was silence for several moments, as the Hero struggled to articulate the question.
“I had to rent out the Black Castle,” the Demon Lord said.
“Oh?” said the Hero.
“I became over-extended on my credit card,” the Demon Lord said.
Jaygor stared daggers at the Maid.
“How was I supposed to know that magic beans were so expensive?” the Maid said, pouring the coffee.

The Demon Lord came to his breakfast table in the dungeon. The Maid poured coffee while Jaygor brought him his morning paper. He unfolded the paper, then squinted, trying to read the indistinct print in the dim light.
“Why do you still read a paper, Lord?” asked Jaygor. “Why not use a magic scrying glass or something?”
The Demon Lord smiled.
“It’s something you young people can’t understand,” he mused. “The sound of the rustling paper… The feel of newsprint… The smell of the ink…”
He unfolded the paper the rest of the way, then scowled. Inside, there had been a print registration error and the text was unreadably blurry.
“Jaygor!” he barked.
“Yes, Lord!”
“Bring me my scrying glass!”
“At once, Lord!”

Just recently, I introduced a new character: the Saintess. The Saintess is also a tropey character from manga.

The Hero and Saintess were deep in the Forbidden Forest.
The Saintess pulled out the map and studied it for a minute, then finally threw her hands up.
“This is hopeless!” she said. “Admit it! We’re lost!”
“What do you mean?” asked the Hero.
“We have no idea where we are!”
“We’re right here!” the Hero said, pointing down.
“But where is ‘here’?” she pressed.
“The Forbidden Forest?”
“Argh!” She gnashed her teeth.
“Look!” the Hero said. Up ahead, they could see a sign.
The Saintess made a glad cry and ran forward to see what it said.
The Hero strolled up to the sign. It said “Forbidden Forest.”
“See?” he said. “I was right!”
“I hate you,” she said.

The Hero and the Saintess followed a dark, winding path under a canopy of immense trees draped with moss and vines.
“Why do they call it the ‘Forbidden Forest?'” asked the Hero.
“The Forest is a queer place,” the Saintess said. “Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak.”*
“So it’s ‘woke,’ is what you’re saying?”
The Saintess started.
“Well… That’s not really…”
The Hero stretched his arms. “It sounds like my kind of place!”

*Note: The statement by the Saintess about the Forest is a direct quote from Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, when Merry and Pippin are talking about the Old Forest.

“Do you even know what direction we’re going?” the Saintess asked.
“Sure,” the Hero replied. “We’re going this way!”
“No!” she said. “Which of the cardinal directions? Are we going north? Or east?”
“I know how we can tell,” the Hero said. “Moss grows on the north side of trees.” He pointed at a nearby tree.
“There is moss on every side!” she snapped.
“Ooh! So that means that every direction is north. Now we know exactly where we are: We’re at the South Pole!”
“I hate you,” she said.

I was particularly pleased with these last two. They’re short and punchy with a clear sense of story: a clear problem with a satisfying resolution — though perhaps not so satisfying for the Saintess.

I’m finally starting to feel like I can be productive writing fiction again. As I said at LOSCon, I’ve always found that my creative output is extremely uneven. But maybe it’s time — time to get serious about getting some new work done.

a group of dice

Since January, I’ve a lot of extra Tanuki Time, but I haven’t had the focus to work on my longer fiction. I have several projects that are essentially completed, but it’s beginning to look like I’ll need to find a different outlet for publishing them. While I’ve had less focus, I’ve been working more on shorter fiction.

What’s For Breakfast, Toasterella is about a wizard who patented a method for contracting with sprites to compel them to work for you, but he discovers a limitation when he needs to change the contract. It’s been rejected twice.

A Persistent Curse is about a dog caught between his owner and his witch grandmother regarding a particularly nasty curse. It’s also been rejected twice.

Exit Interview is my newest complete short story. It’s what happens when the entities that are running the simulation your universe is in decide to shut it down. It’s been rejected once.

Jimmy and Coral is a work in progress that’s not actually speculative fiction. It began as a series of vignettes posted to Wandering Shop Stories but, now that I’ve figured out the rest of the story, I’m just writing the rest in a document. It’s about a young woman whose mother is kidnapped and has to turn to her estranged father to try to get her back.

Now that the semester is over — and once I’m through the Nebulas — I’m hoping I’ll have time to get back to the business of writing. I plan to start querying to look for a new publisher — or maybe self-publish my current book projects. I also have made arrangements to use a recording studio to try to create an audio book for Revin’s Heart. I’ve had a lot of interest in have an audio book available, so I’ll see whether I can do a good enough job myself. It will be fun to try.