Christmas Tale, the Second

And here's another one, a wistful little tale of a big man in a red suit.

Lonely This Christmas

Three small creatures, dressed in green and red, stood on tiptoes, their hands holding them up to a frosty windowsill, their faces just high enough to peer into a window ringed with condensation. Their grip was precarious; every so often, one of the elves would lose his balance on the snow below, or feel his fingers sliding off the sill, and would tumble to the ground. This brought forth laughter from his companions - elves find nothing funnier than other elves falling over - then hurried shushing as they tried to stay hidden from the man inside the house.

Watching for a while, they were intrigued.

"What's he doing now?" asked Torven, the elf who had fallen most often and so could see the least of what was happening inside.

"He seems to be… moving." Heggle replied, in a not very helpful way.

"That's not very helpful," pointed out Mishi, for elves cannot help but state the obvious.

"You're stating the obvious," Heggle answered with a smile.

 

Christmas Tale, the First

Here's a little something wot I wrote, drawn by the inimitable Conor Boyle (see more of his genius at http://pencilmonkeymagic.blogspot.com) 

It's a one page story about a 2000AD character called Dirty Frank; if you don't know who he is, I don't have time to explain, but you might like the jokes. Or just skip to Story Number 2 :-)

http://www.2000adonline.com/forum/index.php/topic,31127.msg565548.html#msg565548

Steampunk

A little something I entered into a steampunk writing competition, prompted by the Emperor, one half of Paragon and the wordsmith behind Fractal Friction.

The first sentence was given, the word limit was 500, the rest was up to you. Sadly, I didn't get anywhere, but thought I'd share the musings anyway. This one's called The Memory Of Horses: