morvashepley

You know things are going well for writers when you don't hear from them much. That silence is a good thing.

At my place, though, the silence is noisy because of the music I play loudly to keep me on plot.

What I'm procrastinating about is Nanowrimo. The way I rationalise it is that I need to get the feel of the keyboard for a bit before I start churning out great literature, or even just churning. At least I have a bit more faith in my story this year. On the other hand, this year I am one of those people wondering why their characters are sitting around and talking over coffee when they could be out having an adventure. Even a car accident, a kidnapping, a gun and a syringe, all in the one scene, didn't make anything exciting happen. It reminds me of the Very Slow Chase scene I wrote last November. That chase scene was so slow the participants stopped for lunch on the way and eventually caught up with each other while picking fruit. I was perversely proud of that chase scene. I'm not very pleased with my chronic coffee drinkers this year.

Meanwhile, I'm researching air-conditioners. I never saw the need for one before. In the good old days, weather here didn't last more than three days, usually less than one day, and I could keep the house cool for that long. A few hot days here and there in January didn't seem worth the cost of an air conditioner. Last February, though, we had weeks of abnormally high heat, and of course the world caught fire.

That reminds me, as long as we're looking for alternative energy schemes, why not use Hell as a source? The Devil is into buying things, so I'm sure he wouldn't mind selling some heat. We could pipe it out with interdimensional cabling and use the resulting energy to run the air conditioners. This is where the beauty of my plan comes in: Normally, this would only exacerbate the global warming, but not this time. We clever monkeys have learned a thing or two from the Devil. We sell the resulting heat back to Hell. The Devil won't have to worry about failing to fry his demons. Everyone's happy. Infinite energy loop.

Cheers
Morva Shepley

What I enjoy most these days about weekends is sleeping in. It's not that I necessarily sleep in, it's the joy of not having to remember to set the timer the night before in order to wake up in time to get master high school student up and moving, as well as the pleasure of knowing that no one's day will be ruined if I don't get up early enough to make it all happen.

The story of Thorion is so sad.

I've been re-reading the Earthsea series, and enjoying it, and as a by-the-way piecing together the story of Thorian. In Tales of Earthsea, we learn that Thorion helped Ged prevent another wizard from wreaking evil in the world. That in itself is a nice story having, as it does, way in the background, a story of men being supportive of each other. During that episode, Thorion lost some of his power. In The Farthest Shore, Thorian was the wizard who sent his spirit into the underworld to see if he could find Ged there, for Ged was missing and the wizards were worried. Thorion got a bit stuck there (that was my impression) but Ged saw him there and told him that he could go back.

That turned out badly, which was sad both for Ged and Thorion. In The Other Wind, Ged learns that Thorian turned to evil himself, having lost something during his journey in the underworld, and had to be destroyed.

It was sad that this had to happen to someone who had been a good friend. It is also sad that anything Ged did, however small or kindly meant, could turn out badly.

Still, I'm getting far more out of this little thread of a story than I did from the whole of Gregory Maguire's book Wicked (another book where bad things (evil?) happen because of unintended consequences)

Cheers
Morva Shepley

Is there such a thing as a dream job? Of course there is. I still have nightmares about it.

Yippee! The frabjous day!

Over at Morva House I have reached the 100 mark in my list of short stories. The one hundredth one is "Images of Anna", by Nancy Kress. Actually, I was happy when I found a link to Saki's famous story of "Tobermory", the talking cat who let too much out of the bag. Grant Stone's story "The Salt Line" from the Wily Writer's site, is another good one. Like Kress's story, it is low key but strangely engaging. There was no plan in my choice of these stories. Lately, I have stopped trying to find one a day and instead gave myself plenty of time to just enjoy them. However, these three stories have something in common in that they each show life as we know it, all very normal, except for one little thing. In Stone's story it turns out to be a large thing, but you don't know that until the characters look at it.

Cheers
Morva

That publishers will never buy anything I write.

You are labouring under the delusion that we care about celebrity's lives. We're really not that stupid. We know that the rise of the celebrity cult is part of the desperation of the ad men to get us to buy stuff. We're supposed to shop for that bag, that coat, those jeans that the celebrities wear. We're supposed to focus on the material side of their success, wish for the big house and the flashy car. We're supposed to get sucked in by following the soap opera of their lives.

But, really, we're just not that stupid.

For a while, I had to stop watching music clips. This was because I had young boys running in and out of the room where I was trying to educate myself about the latest music while waking myself up on weekends with a coffee. Why, I used to wonder, did they bother screening sexy clips at such ungodly hours in the morning? Who did they think was awake and watching? Surely the teenagers had finally gone to bed with the dawn, and it was the preschoolers and exhausted parents who were looking at the screen in the hope of finding something that would either entrance the kids enough to let said exhausted parents get more sleep, or at least have something worth keeping their eyes open for.

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If I were to open a restaurant, the theme would be books. I would have one of those restaurants that is crowded with book shelves and low tables surrounded with sofas and arm chairs, with a few tables for people who want to sit up and eat properly. I'd serve breakfast all day, and there would be constant hot drinks available, cakes and wine, and music quietly playing in the background just for atmosphere. The music would be whatever I felt was right for the moment. All day, people could sit in my book cafe and read and eat and drink.

Have courage.

Heavenly Ladder

294 words

 

The ladder goes a long way up. It leans against a satellite and is not a place for people who have a fear of heights, or who are not warmly dressed. Extreme hikers like to climb the ladder. They have to carry safety straps, which makes the climbing tedious. Reach up, hook the strap on the rung, step up, unhook, reach up, step up. Reach, hook, step, reach, hook, step. They stumble up against the sky. If they get the order wrong, they stumble. They don't usually fall, though, because the thing that has made them stumble is the safety strap. They've forgotten to unhook and reach before they step and the safety strap has tugged at them.

 

 

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Today's funny bit of news: For exercise to be really healthy for the brain, and produce stem cells, it has to be voluntary, not forced, and it has to be in groups. There has to be a community involvement. In short, it has to be fun.

This morning I heard a tale of tipsy wallabies. It seems that they jump into the opium farms in Tasmania and feed on the crops. Then they get stoned and start jumping around in circles pushing the crops flat. When people see these circles in their crops, they think aliens have landed and start getting into a panic.

Hearing this story was an amazing coincidence because only yesterday I happened to read a similar story about marijuana. The story went that some crooks tried to grow marijuana on a reasonably remote farm, but the sheep broke in - they like green food - and ate it. Then the sheep were stoned.

I wonder what stoned sheep look like.

However, it should be said one of the presenters on the opium story suggested that poppies as such wouldn't be enough to stone the wallabies.

Three hours later I'm still waiting for the tradesman who insisted he'd be here at nine am.

On the upside, I found Nathan Crowder's story "Deacon Carver's Last Dime" in Crossed Genres. It's a gem. Check it out.

Cheers

At Morva House I've been building up a link list of all the sf&f short stories I've recommended this year. Yesterday I added another twenty to the list, taking the total to 56. Shortly I'll go and add some more while I wait for a tradesman who, I hope, will turn up today as promised and not next week. We've already waited three weeks longer than originally intended.

One of my favorite short stories that I've located recently is "The Big Deal" by James Brindle. One reviewer said you can hear John Cleese's voice when the main character speaks, and this is absolutely true. Once the story gets going, it is very like a Monty Python sketch, only with a plot and a conclusion, etc.

There is also Shirley Jackson's famous story, "The Lottery", which was first published in the New Yorker in 1948. If you check out the audio version of the story, you can hear a discussion in which someone mentions that had the story been published today it would have been consigned to the SF ghetto down the back of the shop. Go figure.

I also came across a couple of stories by Terry Dowling, a writer whose language is kind of surreal. He seems to make up words like hierocantrics (stone singing) that I can't find in  google but which explain themselves if you think about it for a moment.

Take care of yourselvs.

Morva Shepley

Free flow. 10mins. 199 words.

What, you think you're just a tourist here? You think nothing can touch you because you've got the crappy shirt and the expensive camera, you think just because you're just watching, nothing is going to watch you back?
 

 

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