Archive | March 2016

Freewriting to 7th Sanctum Prompt: Martyr

Written to a prompt from this page, which is the first sentence of this storylet.

I will be a noble, with my weapons and my bracelets, and it is disgusting.

I had planned to be a martyr. A martyr was an honorable thing to be, even if it made one’s father weep and one’s cousins nervous. Martyrs’ names were written on the great wall – or so we called it, though it was sun-baked mud and when the rainy season came, the names tended to bleed away down into the gutter. But so did we, and so we pretended it was poetic.

And yet when the fight came, I found myself doing the unthinkable. I saw a noble, a man no more than twenty years old, barely worthy of either the words “noble” or “man” and I threw myself over him, protecting him from the blast. I had meant to die on their soldiers’ bayonets, and instead I lived, and he lived. And worse, he thanked me, thanked me publicly.

I would never be able to show my face in the slums again, and so when his mother offered me a bayonet by the handle and not by the blade, when she offered me the wristlets of service, what could I do? I will be a noble, no matter how disgusting it is, and I will serve this man whose life I saved.

I might have meant to be a martyr, but there is no point in dying at the hands of my own people, and so my sacrifice will have to wait.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080292.html. You can comment here or there.

Woo

Bloodlines won the Best Anthology Award at the Aurealis Awards!
https://aurealisawards.org/
http://amzn.com/B018CIJOZS
(includes my story Lifeblood of the City!)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080020.html. You can comment here or there.

A short fic of an ocean planet

As far as they’d been able to tell, the land masses on Esto IV consisted of three archipelagos, none of which had a single island larger than a square mile, and one single island of about two miles square with erratic volcanic activity.

It wasn’t an ideal situation – their colony ship had been packed for farming a temperate, land-locked area fed by several rivers – but it was far better than eating vacuum, which is what they’d been looking at when the ship developed a critical flaw halfway through their trip.

If they ever regained contact with the home company, Martina might have something to say to them about their ship construction. Right now, she was far more focused on an entirely different sort of ship and its build.

There was room for them to live across the bigger islands, all thousand and seventeen surviving colonists and ship’s crew, and there was room enough to grow some sort of crops, but most of their livelihood was going to have to come from the sea, and only a few of the islands were close enough to connect by bridges. Boats were going to be a large portion of their lives.

Martina studied the pieces of ship she had managed to pull off with a blowtorch, and contemplated shapes. The seas’ tides were like nothing at all on Earth, unbroken by continents, shifted by two small moons. Their boats would have to be steady and resist tipping; their sailors would have to have stomachs of iron.

Nearby, Sim and Imp were working on a series of stilted houses just a little off the beach. Martina swallowed a wry grin. She’d been thinking about a tropical vacation for years. Now she was going to live it.

more: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080400.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1079721.html. You can comment here or there.

Wish List – clothes to fill out my wardrobe – for my own edification

Wish List Clothes
Things I should look for whilst shopping

Tops, no-tucking:
* Black short or 3/4 and long sleeved

3/4 or short sleeves
* to go with wheat pants
* to go with blue pants

One to three bright short-or-3/4-sleeved shirt, may be one of the above shirts.

—-

Black skirt, long
Black skirt, short, straight.

Blazers or structured cardigans, esp. see pants above.

Something navy in re. bottoms.

Open-toe nice shoes

The Perfect Mary Janes, Black

Scarves? To match things.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1079018.html. You can comment here or there.

New Wardrobe! Stuff I bought yesterday with the help of Freosan & T.

I got three pair of Basic Dress Pants in black, grey, wheat. (same exact pant)
I got a cute dress that will be cuter when I lose 10 lbs but is pretty cute now
I got a nice little sleeveless shirt I have to figure out how to tuck in.
and and
a “ballet cardigan” which is one that comes to the waist and then ties, no buttons.
and a nice scoop-neck shirt.
and a couple plain shirts.
also, a bottle of wine for my soon-to-be-former boss-boss, a bottle of wine for my Awesome Reference co-worker, & 2 bottles of wine for my wine cellar.

Good haul!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1078597.html. You can comment here or there.

A New World

Kael was one of the most-know potion-masters of her time.  Too well known; she spent far too long dealing with would-be heroes and others who didn’t really need her help.  So she brewed up a potion to put her outside of the world for a while.

It would prove to be one of a very few potions on which she made a mistake.

All The Stories

The World

Kael’s Tower – a Patreon perk Map

“Waterwoman Can’t,” a short story, now available

Check out “Waterwoman Can’t,” a short story of love and trouble, in Unconventional Love, available here – http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01D5BPDQG/ref=cm_sw_su_dp – from Amazon!

It has been years since Celia Brookes first starred as Waterwoman, the iconic TV superhero. But when her Liquid Lad hops up to her convention booth, things have just begun to be interesting!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1078287.html. You can comment here or there.

Job Interview: a tiny-fic of the Apiary

(The Apiary is – or will be – the companion university and surrounding town to Cloverleaf and Doomsday Academy)

The chair was singularly uncomfortable. Augustinus did his best not to shift and squirm.

The woman in front of him was lush, far too lush, and something about her scent just made her beauty even more uncomfortable. And she was smiling at him with a wide grin that looked a little too predatory.

She glanced down at her notes. “Now,” she purred, “why don’t you tell me about your experience with chemistry?”

Augustinus cleared his throat, not for the first time, and tried not to make an absolute fool of himself.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1078210.html. You can comment here or there.

Inter-universal Women’s Day: Empress Edaledalende

for [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt here. Written last week and then forgotten in Written?Kitten!.

“This can’t be right.” Edaledalende leaned down from her saddle to study the map. “They’ve got us boxed in? When we have bridges here and here,” she pointed, “and a pass here?”

“The problem is, Kalōkāt Lady Edaledalende, that our bridges cannot hold the weight of our soldiers and our pass is not large enough.”

“And our engineers didn’t think about this?”

The adjunct coughed. “We don’t have any engineers in this unit, Kalōkāt Lady Edaledalende. There weren’t any available.”

“Well then.” Edaledalende pursed her lips. “We should do something to fix that. But first, we have to win this battle.”

(ED-ull-ED-ull-END-day)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1077907.html. You can comment here or there.

The Serial Islands, a profile

I’m trying something new with the upcoming serial – essentially asking the prompter-level donors to fill in parts of the serial description.

Clare filled in the first blank, giving us the Serial Family of hikers.

MB & @Dahob filled in the next two, so now I have: Once, there was a [(Family of Hikers)] who lived in a [(tropical)] [(sky island)].

Here’s your tropical sky island: https://www.patreon.com/posts/serial-islands-4839730