So… I have committed to record myself reading one story – I’ll stretch it and say any story written for the January, February, or December Giraffe Calls under 750 words.
What would you like to hear me read?
Side note: Does anyone anyone have tips on doing those lovely text animations?
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/296032.html. You can comment here or there.
The forest was still that day.
Not silent; the world was never, no matter what the city-born would have you believe, silent. The trees made their own noise, the animals theirs, the insects their own. The light breeze touched them all, and the hint of rain brushed over them. Quiet, yes, by the standards of the city’s cacophony, but never silent.
But still… that, the forest was. The wind did not rock anything but the smallest twigs. The earth did not shake or shift. The trees stood, as they had stood for aeons, as they would continue to stand, still, when everything else had fallen.
The trees were still there. Still there, much the same they had been when she was a child. Still taller than her, when everyone else had grown short. Still wide enough that she couldn’t wrap her arms around the biggest of them, when sometimes it seemed as if she was holding onto everything. Still quiet, if not silent, and still standing, strong enough to hold her when she leaned, strong enough to cradle her in their branches.
She leaned against Grandmother Oak, the oldest, the quietest, the still-est in all its meanings. She had never failed to find peace here. She had never failed to find strength in the old tree’s solidity, never failed to find a moment of quiet and relaxation leaning against her smooth bark.
And today, today in the quiet of the peaceful day, far from the noise of the city, she did so, again. Still.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/295706.html. You can comment here or there.
It occurred to me that I had never said so explicitly, so I am saying it explicitly:
I can be commissioned at any time to continue any piece of fiction, or to write any new piece of fiction for you.
My non-giraffe-call rates are $5 for each 300 words. We can, if need be, discuss rights to any piece commissioned, but otherwise I retain e- and print- publication rights.
No money? I can also be bribed with character art, for which I have an inordinate fondness bordering on addiction. Contact me to work out a reasonable rate.
No art skills either? Contact me. We can work something out!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/295364.html. You can comment here or there.
Stolen from ![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
recessional
Give me a character and I will tell you:
Why I like them
Favorite line
Favorite outfit
OTP
A wish
An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen
5 words to best describe them
My nickname for them
Any char I write is fair game.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/294489.html. You can comment here or there.
If you don’t have a DW account, please feel free to vote in the comments!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/294083.html. You can comment here or there.
I’ve been dropping little feedback requests in between stories; here’s a roundup list if you’ve missed them!
Poll Which JANUARY Story do you want to see continued?
“Exterminator” and “The Silver Road” are tied for first place.
Reconsidering Giraffe Incentives (LJ) in light of time crunching.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/292251.html. You can comment here or there.
For YsabetWordsmith‘s prompt,
after:
Out of Their Minds (LJ)
All in Your Head (LJ), after
From the moment they breathed our air (Lj) after: Staying in the City (LJ) and Spooks vs. Bugs (DW)
Paula moved among the surviving bug-hosts, those that were still hosting a symbiote, those that were either too stable or too gone to reject their rider, those who simply didn’t want to, those who couldn’t bring themselves to kill another living being, even if it had taken over part of their mind.
There weren’t many left, fifteen of them out of two hundred in this camp, maybe more, in other camps. Her symbiote had stopped talking to her. She was pretty sure it was angry. But it gave her, still, these half-hours at a time when she was still herself, and she took every minute of them.
She sat down next to Fallon, who had found another bottle of vodka somewhere and was nursing it quietly. He blinked at her, human eyes replaced by bug pupils, and the bug belched and giggled.
“This stuffff,” it chittered in Fallon’s voice. “You humans. You humans, this stufffff, you poison-on-on yourselves so nicely. You poison yourselves so many waysss. How? How-how-why?”
It had asked that before. She had answered before. This time, instead, she handed it a cup of thick hot chocolate, the best she could find. “This,” she told the bug in Fallon’s body, “this thing is poison in large doses. Chocolate. Cacao. It’s a stimulant, among other things.”
Fallon’s shaking hand took the drink, while the bug’s eyes watched her. “It is good?”
“It is wonderful,” she assured it. “We poison ourselves, my friend, because it feels good. Because we can. Because we are allowed to do what we want to our bodies, and revel in that.”
Her half hour was nearly up; she could feel the presence of her symbiote crowding in on her consciousness. She took the bottle from Fallon and swallowed down a long burning gulp. “We poison ourselves…”
The symbiote took over “…becaussse their bodies are wired to accept it as good. These creatures. These creatures.”
“These creatures,” Fallon’s bug agreed drunkenly. “They cannot be defeated. Their biology has already done that.”
In the back of her own mind, forced into silence, Paula giggled. How little they understood.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/291504.html. You can comment here or there.
The list of stories is here on LJ, here on DW.
If you do not have a DW account, please feel free to vote in the comments.
Please let me know if this is an inconvenience for you.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/289993.html. You can comment here or there.
For fflox‘s commissioned continuation of
All in Your Head (LJ), after
From the moment they breathed our air (Lj) after: Staying in the City (LJ) and Spooks vs. Bugs (DW)
“You’re not real. You’re in my imagination.”
“I don’t believe in you.”
“I can live my life without you just fine.”
“Aah-choooo!”
“I’ve never seen this many fair folk. I’ve never seen anything like this many so close to a city.”
“Or ghosts. It’s like everyone who ever died here is back…”
Paula was, generally, a well-grounded, sensible, rational young lady, or so her bosses had said, so her teachers had said, so her friends had believed. She had her feet on the ground and she didn’t, as a general rule, believe in things she couldn’t see.
She was also, and had been for several months now, infested with an alien symbiote that read her mind and sometimes controlled her body.
The bugs had invaded dozens of planets, some successfully, some failures, but none, she was getting the impression, as big a failure as Earth was becoming for them. Their system of bonding with native hosts had, she had been told, served them well even on planets where they couldn’t manage a full-scale invasion. They could sit undetected that way, breed that way, and conquer large parts of the planet from “on the ground.”
They had, she was pretty certain, never faced this sort of resistance, a two-front rebellion from the un-infected outside their walls and from their hosts, the hosts they needed to survive the pollution, in their very homes and bodies.
And Paula, the sensible one, the one who didn’t believe in, say, faeries and was a fan of pharmaceuticals to help the unstable, found herself slipping from host to host, suggesting that they look at the fae, asking how they dealt with the voices in their head, reminding them to forget their allergy meds.
She was too practical and too calm for any of this to really work for her, sadly; she couldn’t really see the fair folk or ghosts that well, and she had never heard another voice in her head before, except her conscience and the echoes of her mother.
But she could help the others. She could sit down with a new friend and talk her through a panic attack, talk her through a dark moment until the friend could look up and say “this isn’t real. That’s not me saying that,” and have control of her head again. She’d done that before, for college friends, bad acid trips or just bad brain chemistry, more than a few times.
She knew it was working the day that three of her friends, all at once, sat down and said “You’re not real. You’re not real. You’re not real.”
And it was, finally, too much for the symbiotes, as all three fled their hosts and lay choking, dying on the ground like so many ant-fish looking things.
“You’re not real,” another friend said, and a fifth said “the ghosts are really thick here. Do you think bugs have ghosts?”
And that was it. AS their non-symbiote family watched helplessly from their controlled-environment ship, well over half the hosted bugs fled their clearly-insane human hosts, as unable to handle the strange brain chemistry as they were the atmosphere.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/288957.html. You can comment here or there.