New Fiction: “The Tyrant Lizard (and Her Plus One)” at is live at Drabblecast

 I've got a new story for you today! It's about dinosaurs and disability. 

Ms. Plover (as she likes to be known) is a deaf security guard on an abandoned island colony. She's got no way off, and it just trying to stay safe and mentally well. She spends her days painting, distributing food to her fellow stranded expatriates, and fending off the dinosaurs.

Yeah, there's a bit of a dinosaur problem at her compound. Even giant herbivores are dangerous, especially when you can't hear them coming. And there's one critter in particular that is about to change her life - by stealing her painting supplies.

"The Tyrant Lizard (and Her Plus One)" is one of my weird relationship stories, when two figures you'd never expect to meet have to get along.

I'm also tickled that it's available in both text and audio. The Drabblecast is a zine I tried to get into for years back in the day. This is actually my debut there. Let me know what you think.

You can read (or listen to) "The Tyrant Lizard (and Her Plus One)" for free right here.

New Story Live at Robot Dinosaurs!

I'm thrilled today to announce the publication of "Buyers’ Remorse and Seven Slain Cause ‘Adorable’ Robot Dinosaur Stock to Plummet Tuesday."

It's part of a series of stories on the theme of robot dinosaurs edited by the wonderful Merc Rustad. My story follows a company that promises to turn unwanted electronics into adorable baby robo dinosaurs.

Naturally, nothing goes wrong.

You can read the story for free by clicking here.

Great Things I Read in June, 2016 Edition

June is over! It has been conquered, and there is no more of it. I'm back from the first of three conventions this summer, and had a wonderful time on panels at 4th Street. While I was on the road, I read some fantastic shorts and non-fiction that I'll share with you today. As always every piece is free to read, no pay wall or anything. If you like what you're reading, though, please consider sharing it, or tipping the zine or author's Patreons.


Flash Fiction and Short Stories

"Other Metamorphoses" by Fábio Fernandes at Lightspeed Magazine
-The third paragraph positively killed me - one of the funniest reveals in any flash I've ever read. This flash is a great twist on Kafka's classic novella, and as badly as I want to discuss Fernandez's worldbuilding, it'd spoil the reveal. The story is too short to give away. Just click and come back when you hit "dreamtime."

"The Blood That Pulses in the Veins of One" by J.Y. Yang at Uncanny Magazine
-A vicious piece of second-person narrative, explaining how you are being physically cut out of the narrator's body, and then dissected. The most uncomfortable story Uncanny has yet published, dark and ponderous, where the real game is figuring out the context for why all this is happening, and what you and the narrator are.

'V' is for 'Vampires,' their dynasty and apocalypse.

'V' is for 'vampires,' that mildly evolved undead. An executive zombie, really. According exclusively to one series of accounts from the annals of the triclopes, this strain emerged shortly after an apocalypse of meteors wiped out all dinosaurs and most plant life. The skies were blotted out by seemingly eternal clouds of ash, which were the perfect circumstances for vampires to give living a shot.

A vampire's best friend.

So you knock off most of the sauropods, and most of the giant plants. That left the mammals in control, which is when vampirism really took off. The World of Night, where rats and fanged birds carried the plague across the entire continent. Tribes of infected centaurs and humans laid waste to any straggling healthy civilizations.

It was vampirism like the world has never known since. There were so many that they were forced to hold each other back and let blooded critters breed. They farmed people, region by region. The imps and centaurs still live where vampires stuck them, claiming ancestral birthright, even though that birthright was a nightmarish pen. The wars of that period were of impatient vampires against cultured ones, killing each other over the expiration dates of mammals. And then there was the apex predator.There’s the legend – the awesome legend – of the infected tyrannosaur rampaging the south coast. It never spread the disease because it just ate anything it came across – centaurs, dorads, anything. Your people hid in a cave? Then a bat flutters in, and before you realize it, the bat turns into a vampire tyrannosaur and he’s eaten your entire tribe. I love that people believe it’s still skulking in the volcanoes of the south. I don’t even care if it’s real. Who doesn’t want to believe in a vampire tyrannosaur, blending in with lava mist or drinking sharks at the bottom of the sea?

Surprisingly unsafe from inventive vampires.

If it’s still swimming around, it’s almost all that survived. Because under the torrents of dust, they were unbeatable kings and queens, spreading their disease at will and treating the planet as a buffet. Then the planet closed for business by clearing its atmosphere. It was the first morning in nine hundred years. The sun crawled across this continent, frying skinny-dipping biters, their ranchers and warlords, some fleeing in the forms of bats or wolves, though still more standing slack-jawed in awe. They’d thought the sun was a fairytale.

Funny that they all turned to fairy dust. I hear faeries eat vampire bones, and pay handsomely if you can find some.

Hands-down, the best apocalypse. It was just a sunrise. A little twinkling of a nearby star, checking to see how we were doing and eradicating most of the undead in existence. If only it was that easy to get rid of tentacle monsters.

'U' is for 'The Uncanny Valley.' You probably saw this coming.

‘U’ is for ‘Uncanny Valley,’ something you’ve doubtless heard of by now. The Uncanny Valley is a titanic canyon dividing the continent, running from the north-edge of the ocean and splitting into three smaller valleys at the most southernly border. It is so vast that it is the only thing that has prevented The Empire of Gold and Jade from colonizing The Frontier in the west.

The Uncanny Valley sports several unique features. Its basins are notoriously warm, supporting multiple broad jungles that themselves are home to most of the world’s deluxe-class sauropods like brachisaurs and tyrannosaurs. The northern region is the exclusive home of gryphons, and the world’s only manticores live in its southern region. These large biological creatures have also attracted most of the world’s remaining automatons, holdovers from the Gremlin Age, who hunt sauropods and manticores alike. In addition to its vastness, these dangerous inhabitants make it still harder to cross. There are families of triclopes who advertise their ability to help you cross, though it is some of the most hazardous work in the world.

A unique geological feature, The Uncanny Valley is believed the result of an apocalyptic quake that split the continent, but it predates any written history. It has famed depths, creases and cracks in its basin allegedly running deep into the core of the planet, or to the origin of the World-Ocean. He first succubae were discovered slumbering deep within its crevices, along with structures like underground temples that also predate any doradic or impish culture. Optimists believe answers to the world’s apocalyptic cycle could be down there. Pessimists think succubae are the beginning of the awful things you’d be better off leaving alone down there.

Though a wonder of the world, most cultures stay away from The Uncanny Valley. Its wildlife is too dangerous to approach unless you’re deliberately rustling sauropods or farming gryphon feathers for all-chemistry. The Empire of Gold and Jade have plans to build a bridge across its gap, yet no structure of such a size has been erected for the entirety of the Human Age. Humanists consider that a good reason to build one.

UPDATE: This addition is for Larry Kollar, who in a previous post asked why the Uncanny Valley doesn't flood. After all, if it's a canyon stretching from ocean to ocean, it ought to be wetter than it is. I meant to be ambiguous about this, but not so ambiguous as to not answer it at all. The Empire of Gold and Jade has charted the southern end on the Uncanny Valley, which terminates in a half-frozen ocean, and found it mildly above sea level, and usually quite waterlogged, if not lake- or river-logged. Their attempts for expansion in the south have mostly been ocean-based with their fledgling fleet. However the northern edge has never been charted, in part due to the extremely hot climate, and in part due to the high population of gryphons. Human eyes may never have laid upon the northern opening of the Uncanny Valley - something my fiction is going to go into, and which makes a little mum about.

'S' is for 'Sauropods.'

‘S’ is for ‘sauropods,’ the great beasts of burden in The Frontier. They were considered either extinct or purely mythological for much of pre-history, until that one apocalypse where millions of them returned from the dead. Where exactly they’d gone or how they’d returned is still a mystery, the very answers trampled beneath their titanic feet. And while they wiped out a few minor civilizations with their come-back, they’re generally easy to cohabitate with today.

‘Sauropod’ is a wildly misunderstood word that is often used to refer to all dinosaurs and anything dinosaur-like. Even dactyls, which have more in common with giant birds than anything, are referred to by the name.

"No, you tell her she's not a sauropod."

The most famous strain are deluxe-class sauropods. Convoys moving between city-states will often purchase brachiosaurs, using their sheer size to scare off raiders. Ankylosaurs, too, are favored by impish convoys, as their tails double as defensive weapons in skirmishes. And though not technically “sauropods,” would-be heroes have been trying to saddle tyrannosaurs for a thousand years. No one’s made it work, but the first one to succeed is going to be famous, and probably win their first war by intimidation alone.

Sauropods are generally misunderstood by those who don’t directly deal with them. Often theropods are lumped in with them, and because of the fame of brachiosaur and hadrosaur pods, they have a reputation for gigantism. In fact most sauropods and theropods are smaller than humans; compsognathus is so insignificant that, even though numerous, it is considered a common pest or food source in much of The Red Crescent. Most cultures are plentifully exposed to sauropods and ought to know they range wildly in size, but they simply don’t care. They only care when they’re being attacked by them, or betting on the hadrosaur races up north.

Bathroom Monologue: Tripping Brachiosaurs

You can rob a person, you can rob a party, you can even rob the military up north – and if you can get away with it, go ahead. But if you wanted to score a decent haul this age, you hit convoys. It’s been the way since the first time some farmer bought up enough hadrosaurs to drag his stuff across the desert and sell at an indecent mark-up.

Their investment invented my economic class, vis-a-vie, the entrepreneur. Us. They buy hadrosaurs, and I buy a bunch of sleeker sauropods that can outrun them, get my people onto the wagons, and overtake them. Presto: I’ve got enough food to last the frost and can sell the rest at whatever mark-up I deem appropriate.

We inspired a third economic class: the security guard. That’s our natural enemy, or some would say predator, though one hasn’t eaten me yet. These were triclopes and satyrs the farmers hired to ride with their convoys so that I could sneak up behind them, knock them unconscious, and toss them overboard. That is, to my experience, their only function. I always considered them overpaid.

The farmers eventually agreed with me, and put their pay to buying bigger sauropods. The brachiosaur was the worst invention I ever met. They carry so many goods that there are few to a fleet, and thus no stragglers for us to pick off, and they’re so big that it’s very difficult to sneak up to one and climb aboard. They also absolutely always crush you if you slip when you’re climbing. I muchly prefer the security guard to the brachiosaur.

Still, brachiosaurs were a depression in our economy, not an apocalypse. Deluxe-class sauropods are superstitious and spook easy. First time I ever successfully robbed one, a monsoon did all the prep. No sooner did lightning strike the coast, then that big lizard dumped its load and stampeded off. After that, my fellow entrepreneurs and I took to setting off explosives, unleashing deluxe-class carnivores in the area, or one time, climbing all the way up to the brachiosaur’s peanut of a head and banging a gong in its ear. Scared the sin out of it, and we picked up what they dropped.

But farmers are hard people. After a year of what I deemed a spirited enterprise, they began loading their brachiosaurs with fake cargo. We’d spook the critters, they’d drop their loads, and we’d rush in to crack open containers full of zombies. Half of my associates were devoured in the first of these practical jokes.

The farmers began sending two fleets a week, and we had no idea which had goods and which had biters in them. It was supposed to scare us off. We’re entrepreneurs, though, and refused to submit to temporary market forces. We jumped as many as we could regardless, and you know how the farmers responded?

They sold tickets. We struck in a few regular zones, you see, and the farmers had them scouted such that they put in seats and made twice as much as they would off of their crops from all the well-to-dos who thought’d be funny to see my fellow businessfolk devoured. Last week, as I sprinted from a fresh crate of zombies, I spied a woman in a flowing white dress on the ridge above. She was applauding the zombie team.

So tomorrow we’re taking the next step. We’ll ignore the brachiosaurs, and the cargo. We’ll still show up on time, though, because we’re going to rob the damned audience.

Bathroom Monologue: Zhanjee Vs. The Dactyls

No sooner were the Greater Sauropods pacified, then the Dactyls emerged. Previously Tyrannosaurs had frightened them from hunting the plains; now, without the king lizards, the winged beasts descended. They roamed in flocks, each able to carry off a bison or hogbear for its lunch. They possessed ceaseless hunger and soon ravaged Frontier farms and set about eating Munenori platoons.

Zhanjee the Butcher was already in the Old Valleys for the incursions against the Sauropods, and so he intervened. He climbed to the tallest peaks to observe. The Dactyls nested low rather than high, cherishing water sources. Above human or khimeric flesh, they loved the fat of the Cloud Seals who played along the high waterfalls. Whenever a Cloud Seal would dive from a waterfall, a Dactyl would swoop in to snap her up.

Zhanjee waited atop the most popular waterfall. He watched as one Cloud Seal dove, and a young Dactyl struck. He watched as a second pup dove, and was similarly struck. He bided his time until all the young had Cloud Seals, and it was only the mother who remained hungry in the skies. Then he flung himself off the falls.

When her jaws attempt to catch him, he jammed the great Deviltongue between them and propped them open. Sheathed as not to slay the beast, he rested the endcap into the soft flesh of her lower mouth, digging it deeper whenever she resisted his steering. Then he mounted her neck and forced her to ground her young. Within the evening, he became the first human to break and teach a Dactyl mount.

It was ironic that he seldom rode them, preferring the company of horse or bison. Yet the Munenori army was eternally grateful for the gift of war from the sky.