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:

Shortlisted!!

No story this time, but a bit of self-puffery (which is a neat trick if you can do it)....

Entered the Meridian Short Story Competition (www.meridian-writing.co.uk, I think) and have managed to get myself shortlisted. If you look down the rather long shortlist, you'll see one called The Ride. Who knows what will come of it, but if it doesn't win, it'll be published here first!!

Have a bunch of other things out in story competitions at the moment, hence holding off publishing them, but there'll be some more new stuff very soon.....

A story about darts. Honest.

A short and not so sweet story, perhaps a little more gritty than previous?

Click here to read more

And she tries her hand at something romantic....

So the next one word theme was spinster... A little snippet below or follow the link for the full thing -

http://tinyurl.com/3ae9to7

Love

Four heads leaned towards each other over a small round table. A conspiracy of drunks, Friday-night triple-distilled drunks, fresh off the sites and out of the offices, shirts ironed and tucked into their jeans, trainers clean, the world at their mercy. They leaned in, forehead to forehead, the moment before the decision was made.

“I bet you I could make any woman in this town fall in love with me.”

Cries of “yeah, right” and “bollocks, mate” in response. The peacock mocked but undeterred.

“No, seriously.” The peacock shuffles his feathers, swigs from his pint. “There's these two girls at work practically fighting over me... my sister's mate who can't leave me alone... your Mum...”

“Fuck off!”

“I bet I could!”

A look circulates the table. The three conspirators understand, wordlessly, what is about to happen. With a silent nod, their spokesman says:

“Alright, Dave. You're on. We name the woman, you get her.”

Unidentified

An interesting challenge - someone gives you one word as the theme for a short story. Two weeks later, what have you got?

As a teaser, here are the first few lines. If you want to read more go to: http://tinyurl.com/ydu87mm

Unidentified

About three years ago

"Deke. C'm'nd have a look at this."

"What you got?"

"Not sure. Need you to take a look."

They look. On the fizzing screen in front of them, ahead of the Lander, is a strange, bulbous outcrop.

"What's the scale here?"

"Close. Close in. Thing's about five, maybe six inches across."

"New?"

"Tracked this quadrant before and no record of it. Could have blown in on a wind, 's small enough."

"Composition?"

"Haven't probed it yet, but it doesn't look like standard Mars rock. It's kinda shiny. Waxy."

"OK. Approach. Have a dig. See what it is."