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Prodigal Hope, a story for Patreon

Feb27

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There had once been Nine Hopes.

They had been more than people and yet somehow less; they had been above the bustle and yet below it; they had been the absolute core of civilization and that which it aspired to above all else.

The first Hope to be lost had died in a long and ragged storm that ravaged the coast and destroyed cities.  With it went the whisper of the peaceful sea god.  With it went the trade treaties that had nearly been signed.  With it went thousands of lives.

The second died slowly, a wasting disease that took out a third of the country’s old and weak – wise and knowledgeable – skilled and clever.  With it went history and solidity.

The third and fourth Hope to go slipped away in the night.  Nobody was quite sure if they’d died or not.  Nobody really wanted to know.  The sunshine was a little less bright, the spring a little less pleasant, the winter a little more frightening.  There were rats in the grain silos and mice in the attics. Continue reading →

Light Stories for Patreon

Feb22


So, I was trying to beat a whole herd of tiny monsters on the 4theWords writing game, so I asked for a few prompts. Here are the words that stuck with the Light theme in some way.

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Regaining Light Powers

The world had been dark for weeks.

She hadn’t seen the dark since childhood.  The minute her powers began to assert themselves, she was surrounded with a world of brightness and color.  She saw sparkles between people who liked each other and could make the dreariest day light up like a summer noontime.

Then came the flu, and the sweats, and the days and nights of darkness.  She had recovered, the doctors said.  She was physically completely better.

But she hadn’t been able to see anything, had been as blind as she had been before her miraculous “recovery” at the age of eleven, since the flu first attacked her.

She moved awkwardly through the halls of her school, her stick once again sliding across the floor.  She hit someone’s foot, and then someone bumped into her.
Continue reading →

Mending Strands

Jan31
So this is… sort of a continuation of Breaking Strands? But Breaking Strands is a fanfiction and this is… not. 

Anyway, it’s Winter Being Badass, as requested.  

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The room felt wrong.  His sisters, Winter thought, might have said that it was creepy or oogy or sick, although sometimes sick was a good thing.

(Having three younger sisters go through teenage-hood a couple years apart had been approximately a decade of confusion and headaches for Winter.  He wondered how actual fathers did it. )

What it felt like to him was cold, and not in his namesake way, and broken.

“I think,” his contact – no, friend.  Normal people, his sister Summer kept telling him, had friends.  And someone he played chess with every week and sometimes saw a movie with was, if not a potential SO or lover – and this one was not – a friend.  His friend in the FBI cleared his throat.  “I think that what’s going on in these situations is that someone has cut their Stands.  That’s the correct word, yes?  I read  Ernesta Roundtree – she’s your mother, correct? – I read her paper on the Strands last year.  They told me I needed beach reading,” he added with a wry smile. Continue reading →

Small Town, USA – a blog post on Stranded

Jan15
Originally posted on Patreon.

Autumn spends a lot of time in really small towns.  I mean, some of that is just that’s what she seems to like, but you’d think she’d spend more time in big cities that have big craft festivals, wouldn’t you?  I mean, she’s trying to make enough of a living to pay for the occasional inn or motel or Bed N’ Breakfast room, and those aren’t cheap.I like small towns.

I grew up between three small towns, out in the middle of farmland (literally: My parents built their house on land my grandfather and his father before him had farmed, on a road my grandfather literally built as a high school summer job).  I grew up with a small-town library where the librarian knew me and I knew her, in the sort of place where a party really is a bonfire in someone’s backyard because, really, where else are you going to  go?  My parents grew up in small towns.  Pretty sure at least two of my grandparents did, too.  We’re small town people, rural people.

I have to admit, some stereotypes of small-town living (Everyone knows everyone, for instance) I never really understood.  I mean, I knew my neighbors, but in farmland, that isn’t all that many people.  And small towns these days often have housing tracts tacked onto the sides of them, apartment complexes, trailer parks.  So they’re not that image of small-town living that seems to permeate the media (And, to look at another setting for a moment, Regine’s vision of a small town with The Village outside of Addergoole)  The houses go back layer after layer from Main Street.  You go over the canal (in many cases) or the railroad tracks and you’re almost in another neighborhood.  But you’ll still run into people you know at the grocery store, at the Fireman’s Carnival (I haven’t written a story about anyone at a carnival yet, have I?), at the Canal Days Craft Festival (Where Autumn really ought to have a booth…)
Continue reading →