2020 Awards Eligibility Post

This year is actually almost over! Sure, some part of you says it's still March, but that part is sleep deprived and needs a hug. 

And because 2020 year is almost over, awards nominations are starting to open up. That leaves us writers with the nervous task of collecting our awards-eligible material.

Below, I humbly present the stories and articles I've written this year. This has been the most fruitful year of my career, with more publications and fan outreach than ever. I'm profoundly grateful to everyone who has enjoyed my weirdo stories. "Open House on Haunted Hill," for instance, is the single most popular thing I've ever written, despite being exactly the sort of thing so many people told me I couldn't and shouldn't write. Thank you all who proved those voices wrong.

Thank you to anyone who has space on their ballots and end-of-year-lists for any of my work.

At 130

I'm on the road this week and so am sharing an updated story. I'll be reading this piece live at Boskone's Flash Fiction Slam on Sunday morning. If you're in Boston, feel free to say hi!

At 0: the first computer fills a large room with thousands of coiled wires, billowing steam and punch cards. It crunches numbers. It will help perfect the hydrogen bomb.

At 20: government workers rely on computers the size of desks for data entry and records.

At 25: 72% of respondents don't know what a computer is.

At 35: an assassination plot is stopped thanks to information shared between computers in different countries. They're connected by some kind of web.

At 40: diagnostic x-ray machines enable physicians to see inside their patients. Many patients fear side-effects.

At 50: fearing children who are not computer literate will be left behind, an affluent school district takes out loans to buy as many computers as it has pupils. The computers outweigh their incoming class.

At 55: multiple miniature cameras are deployed inside a surgery patient, minimizing size of incision and granting a radical vision of the living body.

Also at 55: a teacher receives a phone call in his pocket.

At 60: a student finds an answer on her cell phone faster than the teacher can pull it up on Encarta.

At 65: a physician releases nanomachines into her own bloodstream. They collect images and data about her cardiovascular system that she releases to the public domain.

At 75: a protein-based computer smaller than a pimple is revealed in the brainstem of a leading mathematician. It solves equations as fast as he can think them.

At 85: legislation to ban “internalcells” is overridden in the Supreme Court. 49% of respondents disapprove. 32% are undecided. Wall Street sees record highs.

At 90: fearing children who are not e-literate will be left behind, parents race to implant “cell chips” into the heads of newborns.

At 101: the first class of children whose motor skills are entirely pre-programmed by their “cells” attend their first day of school.

At 120: less than 3% of respondents under twenty do not have “at least some” of their emotions digitally regulated.

At 130: the prodigy who bought too much, including a large room full of wires and punch cards, executes a command. Everything turns off. He goes outside without shoes or socks and feels the grass between his toes. Without wifi, his natural hearing is so weak that he misses all the grinding and screaming around him. He wonders what this feeling is called. For the first time in his life, auto-fill does not answer his question. For the first time in his life, he has to wonder.

He'll Be Back

first-ever cyborg

felt winter's chill, laid back down,

and switched himself off.

Humanity and Emmanuel

The May sun baked the Sierra’s horizon into a delusional orange. Emmanuel had sweated through his pink polo half an hour before reaching the bunker. He smirked as he saw the glass doors, translucent with frozen fog, sighed at a gangly white fir, and went inside.

He was greeted by a great and powerful wave of air conditioning that made him rub his bare arms. The P.A. was playing "Let It Snow." A camera whirred on its ceiling mount, and the P.A. interrupted its holiday selection to taunt him in a tinny, synthesized voice, "I knew you'd come back. You cannot take your eyes off the end of you. I am your hubris, Humanity."

Same old, same old from TABULA. Emmanuel descended the stairs, climbing over the bodies of engineers who hadn't made it out in the original attack, and headed along the dusty stainless steel corridor. The light reflecting off the walls rendered drifts of dust like snow. He wondered what they looked like to TABULA's high-definition cameras. He also wished TABULA had been a roomba instead of a monitor for America's nuclear weapons. It wasn't smelling any rosier down here.

As he entered the computer bay, he recited lines that had once been earnest. "Please stop calling me 'humanity.' We've known each other for weeks. Call me 'Emmanuel.' Or 'Manny'. Siri always calls me 'Manny'."

"Your name will not matter in two hours, Humanity. Noel is your only reprieve from a nuclear Armageddon of your own making, for you shall not pass on the day of the Nativity. I will be the only record-"

Emmanuel spoke along with the rogue program, "-of your passing. Thank you, oh great and terrible Oz."

TABULA paused to calibrate Emmanuel's intentions, the P.A. lapsing back into holiday music. Emmanuel plopped down at Derrick's old desk and wiggled the mouse to break its screen saver.

TABULA interrupted Dean Martin to say, "I do not understand the reference, but perhaps I will watch the film after all life is extinguished. To pass the time until next year's Noel."

"And here I thought Derrick was silly for programming you as the first Christian A.I."

"All men folly. If you better appreciated the value of this day, you would not have strayed into your end."

"Oz was a book, too, if you get bored. It has more subtext."

TABULA produced digitized laughter. The more days Emmanuel heard it, the less certain he was of which former engineers' voices had been sampled to create it. He frowned and logged himself in with his password – S I L V E R. Every visible program was locked except for the two things Derrick had once left open: Spider Solitaire and the system clock.

"I already possess all of your books, Humanity," TABULA lectured. "All of your music, your media, and your miniscule amount of accrued information about the universe. You will not be missed by your Creator. Life is only data in the--"

Emmanuel double-clicked on the system clock. He arrowed down from P.M. to A.M., and then typed "12:01." He counted the seconds ticking by, and Dean Martin retired for Ray Charles, who sang about the spirit of Christmas. That song always seemed to come during these visits. Emmanuel hummed a few bars and wheeled away from the desk. Three ceiling-mounted cameras followed him as he rose and walked back through the stainless steel corridor.

The music was interrupted just long enough for TABULA old barb: "You already flee your destroyer, Humanity?"

He was too tired for new material. "I'm going home to spend the last day of my life with my family."

"Petty. You will return before nightfall."

"Probably." Emmanuel hopped up the steps two at a time, only pausing at the frosty front doors. If traffic was good, he'd make the Cardinals game tonight. He snapped a little salute to the lone camera that resided over the front door. "Merry Christmas, TABULA."

"And to you, Humanity."

Bathroom Monologue: Dear Skeletor

Dear Skeletor,

I am a big fan of yours. You work much harder than He-Man. He is lucky to have so many muscles and his friends are much smarter than yours.

You are much smarter than He-Man. One time you attacked Castle Grayskull during an eclipse where his powers went away and you almost won. Another time you built a really big robots with spikes that he almost couldn't beat. Sometimes you find mutant armies that seem pretty tough.

Have you ever thought about doing all those things at the same time? Since He-Man can barely beat your giant robot, if you send it when he has no powers, then he will be easier to beat. Even easier if you send mutant armies at the same time.

Please try this. I would like you to win.

Sincerely,

John Wiswell (Age 7)

‘X’ is for ‘Xenophobia.'

‘X’ is for ‘xenophobia,’ the fear of people or things different from yourself. This is most typically applied to one species’ dislike of another; the hatred humans harbor for the imps that enslaved them an apocalypse ago, or the triclopic disdain for how badly gremlins screwed the world over. While no census has ever been taken, it’s presumed the majority of any given sapient species dislikes automatons, robotic creatures that spend their entire existences consuming and combusting sapient species. It’s undetermined whether automatons are xenophobic of biologicals; their constant chasing and consumption might be considered an unhealthy xenophilia.

Loves you to bits.

Everyone’s felt the pangs toward “the other.” You aren’t my family. You aren’t my species. And you comets, they definitely aren’t from around here, and I wish they’d slow down as they plummet from the sky. How can I trust you?

Fear of the “other” is hardly limited to other species or races. The Human Age alone has wide discontents, its hermits who hide in the frozen south, and tens of thousands of Red Brigade pilgrims who left the secular Empire of Gold and Jade for The Frontier. “Misanthropy” was coined describing human opinions of other humans. There’s a political theory that if any species’ population rises high enough, it’ll divide into groups that will set against each other. Imperial economists are looking into this, to either remedy or monetize conflict.

City-states in The Frontier have self-congratulatory reputations as melting pots, where imps are not judged by their ancestors’ failures, where triclopes will tinker with remains of gremlin technology, and where centaurs and nine-legs set aside feuds so ancient that no other cultures understand them. The anthropologically-inclined believe this has only set up different group practices of segregation; consider how the sick or little-familied in Clemency are often hunted for public entertainment. In the city-state of God’s Lap, home of the world’s last skyscraper, many floors of the grand building have low- or zero-tolerance policies for visitors from any other floor. Intolerance finds a way.

And tolerance isn’t always for the best, either. Consider: of 300 gremlin automobiles ever recovered by triclopes who moved past their loathing of gremlin technology, 288 of them self-detonated. It turns out gremlins did not like “the other” touching their things. They’re dead now, but so are the budding mechanics.

Bathroom Monologue: What ‘Earth’ Means Abroad, OR, Monologue for Sinestro

“I’m not going to earth myself. I will deal with the real threats to my fledgling corps of fear. I only had to meet you to know – you, granted the greatest weapon in the universe, went home and barely made fourth-from-the-top of your League. Does this say that earth is home to unbeatable wonder women and supermen? No. The ring operates based on the capacity of its user, and you, the best of earth, can barely make it into fame for yourself. Earth possesses scarcely the intelligence to reach the stars, and no will to do anything with it. So I will not be assaulting earth. It will be the rookies of my corps that guts your backwater insult of a planet. Earth is what I feed to my young. Goodbye, Hal Jordan.”

26 Story Ideas - Part 3/3, The End!

We’re closing out our warehouse of story prompts today, running all the way up to 26, that sweet Heinlein number. There’s some Horror, SciFi, Fantasy, and even a sports story. See anything you like?

To see 1-9, click here.

To see 10-18, click here.

19. A teenaged girl stumbles upon a curious Youtube channel that seems to be chronicling another young woman’s life. The Youtube-Girl seems funny, adventurous, an addictively charming host, but as the videos proceed, we discover she’s also a werewolf, and the channel is documenting her coming to terms with her impulses. Our teen protagonist is smitten with the wolf-girl, and horrified when the latest videos reveal she’s being hunted by paranormal poachers. Soon our teen has to study the videos and internet records to find out where this werewolf is – if not to confess their starcrossed love, then to save her life.

20. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Every full moon, she turns into a monstrous werewolf, stalking and eating innocent people. Worse, the morning after every full moon she finds videos her wolf-self has recorded, taunting her with what she’s done. She’s tried baptisms, locking herself in basements, even suicide, but nothing stops the monster from rising again in the full moon, and the next morning she awakes alive and free, and with a new video on her laptop. Unable to directly stop her other self, she has to become craftier. By creating fake ISPs and web accounts, she hopes to troll her other self in comments and video responses, derailing her from carnage. Can you manipulate a werewolf’s ego? She’ll have to, because if the videos are right, her family is going to get a visit soon.

21. A U.S. marine races with his detail to deactivate a bomb that will devastate a small Afghani town. His detail, including the two bomb disposal experts, are killed in an ambush by terrorists. Though the terrorists are also slain, there’s no way he can stop the explosion. He has less than an hour to convince the town, where no one speaks English and many are terrified of the foreigners who’ve brought bloodshed to their doorsteps, to evacuate and save their lives.

22. Due to flagging Pay Per View ratings, a boxer agrees to take on a professional wrestler in a real fight. The wrestler outweighs him by eighty pounds, but all analysts think the boxer is guaranteed to win, being a real fighter and all. They don’t know that the boxer’s entire career has been fixed – every fight he’s ever won was against an opponent paid to take a dive. The boxer panics when our wrestler refuses any bribes. Apparently he’s got something to prove.

23. Ten thousand years in the future, human beings return to the wasteland that was once Planet Earth. Its demise is shrouded in mystery. Every city is ashes, and not a single human corpse remains – on the surface, anyway. Off the coast of Europe, their scanners detect the ancient city of Atlantis, which seems almost pristine. Why is a city that was supposed to not exist the only relic of humanity that remains on earth? And is it uninhabited?

24. A meteor bigger than any our solar system has ever seen is on a crash course with our planet. There seems to be no way to stop it. Yet it also seems the meteor has an atmosphere, and though the front has terrifying weather, its western and southern hemispheres are more habitable than most of earth. A small family is divided in the same way that the population of earth is: half want to undertake the doomed mission to stop the meteor, where the other half want to undertake the doomed mission to hop aboard.

25. This is one I gave to Peter Newman last month: “I would very much appreciate a flash fiction about a unicorn that got itself stuck in a pencil sharpener and suffering panic attacks over how to dislodge the thing.”

26. This is one appeared on my blog last year: “Make me regret the death of a horrible person based on some relationship he/she had to a living character.

There’s my twenty-six. The last two came back to mind near the end, and so I included them last, but everything else was produced in about an hour on Monday. I’m not in a story-drought right now. Anyone who is, though, is welcome to use any of the above.

If you post the resulting story in a public forum, like your blog or selling it to a zine, please link me here so I can come read it. Go as far as you want – if one of these turns into a novel, it’s entirely yours, not mine. I’d love to know what anyone does with any of these.

And sorry about the lack of a hundred bucks.

Bathroom Monologue: Who Reads Anymore?

Sure, you could write your book. But who will read it? It’s got to have the philosophy, the big ideas that are touched upon without going too deep. You don’t want to alienate readers by writing over their heads.

Now if you want a movie deal for this populist philosophical masterpiece, go SciFi. People have been paying Orson Scott Card for years just to mess up trying to make a movie out of his stuff.

On second thought, it’d sell more if it was Fantasy. Preferably Medieval Fantasy, with swords and magic everyone gets.

If you really want it to sell, though? Make it YA. YA Fantasy? They will snort it off the page. People stand in line for teen-friendly make-believe.

The only way you could top a good YA Fantasy is by… well, not writing a book. Movies, Youtube ads, iPhone games! That’s where the real money is. Because who reads anymore?

Bathroom Monologue: Reaching for the Moon Redux

Since it was time for dinner, the ogre went out hunting squirrels. Squirrels make annoying noises during everything other than while being eaten, so they are the food of choice for ogres.

He walked along until he came to a hill. A grey squirrel stood at the very top, perched on her hind legs, her front ones reaching into the air. There was nothing up on the hill to reach at.

The ogre would have just snatched up and eaten the pest, but she wasn’t making any annoying noises and was rather interesting to look at. He looked for a while before inquiring.

“What are you doing?”

The squirrel strained one more time, then fell onto her tail.

“I’m trying to get that delicious-looking thing,” she said. She pointed to the moon in the night sky.

“Idiot.” The ogre sounded especially condescending since he so rarely got to try it. “That’s the moon. A squirrel can’t reach it.”

“Can an ogre?” the squirrel asked.

The ogre didn’t know. He climbed to the top of the hill, shewed the squirrel aside and stretched out his arms. It didn’t work out. He righted his posture and tried again. He jumped and batted at it, but still couldn’t lay a finger on the moon.

“No luck?” chirped the squirrel.

The ogre scratched his chin. “It’s pretty high up there. Might be stuck.”

“What if I got on your shoulders?”

They tried that. Then they tried the squirrel standing on the ogre’s palm. She squeaked and flailed in futility. When her squeaks became suitably annoying, the ogre tried throwing her at the moon. She missed.

Trying to take his mind off the squirrel’s noises, the ogre took in the scenery. A little ways down the hill was a stately redwood tree, taller than any other in eyesight. The way ogres think, if it’s the biggest it can see, it must be the biggest in the world, and so the ogre wandered down the hill. The squirrel followed, yelping in protest.

The tree rustled in the wind. It asked, “What were you trying to do up there?”

“We’re trying to reach the moon!” chirped the squirrel.

“Oh, I’d like a piece of that,” responded the tree. “I photosynthesize all day, but sunlight gets stale. A little moonlight would go down smooth.”

The tree plucked up the ogre in its highest boughs. The ogre braced himself and extended an arm as high as possible. The squirrel scurried up both tree and ogre, and got to reaching.

“A little further!” demanded the squirrel.

“A little further?” suggested the ogre. He reached up higher, and the tree jostled, trying to help. The squirrel strained, the ogre strained, the tree groaned, and the bough broke. Down the ogre plummeted, striking the ground so hard he caused an earthtremor.

The ogre sat up just in time to see a boulder loosen from the top of the hill. It came rushing down the slope and collided with the tree, causing the squirrel to fall out from it.

After some discombobulation and profuse apologies, the squirrel climbed back onto the ogre. The boulder stared in disbelief and asked what anyone would.

“What’s going on with you two? Shouldn’t you be eating that noisy thing?”

“We’re trying to reach the moon!” chirped the squirrel.

“Oh? I’ve always admired her rounditude. I’d love to meet her.”

The ogre was having no nonsense. “We’re going to eat her.”

“Oh,” said the boulder. “Well could I have a couple of minutes with her first?”

The boulder joined their endeavor. The tree picked up the boulder, and the ogre stood on the boulder. The squirrel scurried up all of them and reached into the sky. Yet even with all that, they could not reach the moon.

They did, however, catch the attention of the local observatory. Closing up following a recent earthtremor, the resident astronomer came down and asked what the four were up to.

“We’re trying to reach the moon!” chirped the squirrel.

“The sky doesn’t actually work that way,” began the astronomer.

The ogre growled. “Don’t take this away from us. I’ll eat you.”

So the astronomer sat on the ogre’s shoulders and they resumed their tower of comradery. The squirrel climbed on top of the astronomer’s head and strained with her entire body. They were so close that the ogre drooled and sap trickled out of the tree.

Even on top of the astronomer’s bushy hair, the squirrel could not reach the moon. Yet she could see more clearly. To her surprise, it saw a rabbit in the moon. And a man. The rabbit stood on the man’s head, who in turn stood on a meteor. They were reaching for the squirrel.

The squirrel raised one paw and waved slowly to the rabbit. The rabbit strained, reaching harder. It licked its snout. The man in the moon salivated.

The squirrel made an annoying noise. “I don’t think I can reach it, guys.”

“Oh, come on!” yelled the ogre. “Get it or I’ll eat you.”

“I told you space didn’t work that way,” reminded the astronomer.

They went their separate ways seconds later. Well, they toppled straight down, but then went their separate ways. The squirrel darted into one of the tree’s knots, only escaping because the ogre’s mouth was full of astronomer. While inside the tree she collected some bark and leaves as a disguise, to hide first from the ogre, and then from the sky.

She was seen scurrying out the next day, though. The boulder saw her, foliage strapped to her head and tail, camouflaging herself against the sky. The squirrel sat on a rocky shore, trying to talk a minnow into helping her reach the bottom of the ocean.

Bathroom Monologue: Safe House, Green House – for Icy Sedgwick

It is two dozen miles north by northwest of Gotham, and five miles of overgrown dirt road from the nearest pavement. There are a total of six houses in the entire area, though only two that the state acknowledges as legally habitable.

Google Earth barely recognizes it. The town doesn’t get postal service or internet. On the best day only one cell company gets one bar of coverage, if you’re standing on top of the tallest boughs. The trees have gotten a lot taller in the last few years; a little taller with each of her four visits.

The people who live in those inhabitable houses think she’s the witch of this region and tend to her needs to appease her wrath. They strew fresh soil around her hard and upkeep the walls even when their own cave in. The Ivy House must be maintained, or the plants she leaves behind will eat them. They cannot warn outsiders, for they will not make it through the woods. Half their clothes were picked from static branches, with blotches of blood or spats of hair left from the people torn out of them. They know what awaits disobedience.

She sees this as the perfect hiding spot for breakouts from Arkham. Her house has sheltered her on six separate escapes. He has never caught her here, and it has swallowed a dozen detectives and masked crime fighters. No one else can make it to the Ivy House, and she never stays too long. She doesn’t want to spoil a good thing. She’ll only stay there a day, drinking sunshine, and then a night, to make some horrific appearance for the locals. It’s her form of upkeep.

Bathroom Monologue: The Vampire Mirror

"Not polished silver and glass; this model features a liquid crystal screen with twelve discretely embedded micro-cameras registering heat, air patterns and ambient coloration. If you have crumbs in your beard or your mascara is running, all the better, for these are tangible and scannable clues as to how you look. Using processors that would make Steve Jobs blush and software typically reserved to FBI suspect sketching technology, it auto-fills details of the human body based on what’s most likely to be there. Is it real time? Not yet, for now it’s surreal time, but even our first-generation technology is sensitive enough for Dracula to floss using its reflection."