Jun
25
2009
Here, have a story!
(originally posted on ficly)
—
You haven’t come home since the supernova.
I can’t say I’m surprised.
In our living room, the contents of our storage boxes radiate out around me in my own shabby reenactment of the event, books and decorations strewn about like stellar debris. I might have grown a bit frantic, looking for the star chart; the telescope was a casualty of my search.
We don’t need it anymore, anyway.
Our star hangs low in the sky, brighter than the moon. I could take our wedding vows out of their silver frame and read them by its light.
On the tv, newscasters natter on about the Chandrasekhar limit, pretending they understand what little science they cram into their heads during commercial breaks.
All that matters to me is the name of our star, the one I wished on ten years ago, asking the heavens to make you love me.
Stars get new names when they go supernova. Did you know that?
I wonder if the shock wave is comprised of broken wishes, if nebulae are the stuff of dead dreams.
It’s been three days. I wish you’d call.
Jun
21
2009
“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
Go read the rest.
Jun
11
2009
For the longest time, I’ve been making noise about turning one of my ficlets (from the now-defunct AOL ficlets site) into something longer. This afternoon, I finally sat down and did it. Then I stepped away from it for awhile, to eat dinner and watch an episode of Jeremiah. When I came back, I expected it to have morphed into some kind of gibberish on my screen, and, upon rereading, to go “What the hell was I thinking? I’m such a hack.”
Except… it hadn’t and I didn’t. There were parts of it that needed shoring up, certainly. Words needed to be rearranged, sections moved around here and there, things added and subtracted for clarity and flow. But I didn’t close it in despair. I don’t hate it.
I think I might submit it somewhere. Not right away, not tonight. I need to throw it at a few people and see what they think. But, yeah. I have a better feeling about this one than I did with “Kate,” (which, yes, I know. I still need to revise and resubmit. That probably won’t happen until Hill and I finish our other project. SO THERE.)
Anyway. Victory. I think.
(Oh, also. Ficlets is gone, but some hard-working people have resurrected it as ficly. I’m there. One story up so far, a repost of my first submission to ficlets. Huzzah.)
