Sunday, April 21, 2013

Daily Drabble (Day 6 & 7)

Really stuck to my guns on this one, didn't I?

I thought, for my final two, I'd do Bad Space related drabbles, to save me the trouble of inventing more characters and situations. The first one is an extremely direct sequel to Hull Damage – in fact, it picks up chronologically one paragraph after the ending of the book. (Spoilers, I guess?)

decamp [dih-kamp] verb
1. to depart from a camp; to pack up equipment and leave a camping ground
2. to depart quickly, secretly, or unceremoniously

The ensuing drink is enjoyed in silence, one last brew before they decamp away for parts and piracies unknown. Nemo finishes first, simply dropping the empty tankard onto the table with a clatter. Odisseus comes second, accompanied by a ribald Ortoki belch. Two-Bit Switch nearly can't swallow his entire share in one swig and only by repeatedly slapping the table does he manage to see the beverage through to the bottom. It's Moira Quicksilver who cares nothing for speed, who savors each gulp, until the anticipated bolt of ditrogen streaks across the Afterburn and strikes her square in the shoulder.
The second drabble is a prequel to GALACTIC MENACE (June 2014) and occurs some forty-eight hours before the book begins.

verisimilitude [ver-uh-si-mil-i-tood] noun
1. the appearance or semblance of truth; likelihood; probability
2. something, as an assertion, having merely the appearance of truth

When the door lock is overridden and the Imperium response squad, led by their Jhironese bounty hunter escort, swarms into the motel room, the moment's grim verisimilitude is broken mostly by the culprits' utter willingness to surrender. As expected, there are four present – two men, an Ortok and a woman – their eight hands upraised in compliance. Crates upon crates upon crates, each bearing the condemning “DOXYCHORAPHUM” label, are pushed into every available corner. The outlaw in the duster, the evident leader, steps an innocent inch forward and spikes an eyebrow. “Did you find the place alright?”
Come back tomorrow for the return of Iconine Iconine!

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Daily Drabble (Day 5)

Getting a leetle behind on these. I'll try to catch up.

quell [kwel] verb
1. to suppress; put an end to; extinguish
2. to vanquish; subdue
3. to quiet or allay (emotions or anxieties)

Here's the drabble!

This freetling made a dismal drinking companion. This mule-piss wine, this mule-piss winesink seemed an almost rich reward for a decade paid to the Pits of Punishment; at least when compared to the pleasure of Hariqa Fireskin's company. Already he'd quelled half a dozen of her epithets for him – “Tasque the Tall”, “Tasque the Towering”, “Tasque the Tried and True” – but couldn't, ultimately, shake the name the crowds gifted him: “Tasque the Troll.” Let her scribble her words, let her rhapsodize his heroism; Tasque was a free man and Tasque was going to drink.

 Come back tomorrow for more!

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Daily Drabble (Day Four)

Apologies about the tardiness of the post. Yesterday's word was, well, very limiting. Today's was much easier, however.

chuffed [chuhft] adjective
1. delighted, pleased, satisfied
2. annoyed, displeased, disgruntled

Which, of course, I needed to have some fun with:

Quite frankly, Mr. Yeboah was rather chuffed about this entire mess. On the contrary, Mr. Wugford was really rather pleasantly chuffed about this turn of events. Certainly both men could agree upon the matter of the London Zoo requiring its replacement hippopotamus and they could also certainly concur that their counterpart was acting rather like a persnickety ninny or an ignorant buffoon, respectively. The issue that divided them, Yeboah in favor of zoological advancement and Wugford in favor of selling more admission tickets, was the fate of this bright green hippopotamus the Zoo of Samarkand had delivered them that morning.

Come back tomorrow for something (possibly) less silly!

Friday, April 12, 2013

Daily Drabble (Day 3)

Tell you the truth – this one was a toughie. I specifically didn't wanna do anything genre-related for this one, plus I had a tricky word today.

percipient [per-sip-ee uh nt] adjective
1. perceiving or capable of perceiving
2. having perception; discerning; discriminating
noun
3. a person or a thing that perceives

And here's the end product; sorta a new riff on an old story I wrote in college.
Of course I fuck up – a perfectly placed fuck-up has quickly become the hallmark of all my interactions with her. Damage control; a simple misspeaking, an ill-chosen word at the absolute caboose end of my previous sentence. I ramble forward, undeterred, banking on the wonton-and-a-half I'm currently chewing to camouflage my indiscretion. Even clicking her chopsticks calculatedly together across the table, she is far too percipient a conversationalist to be fooled any such amateurish tactic of mine. “Was that something you weren't intending on telling me?” is her question, a fair question, one I'm devastatingly unprepared to answer.
Come back tomorrow for more!

Daily Drabble (Day 2)

D&D was on my mind today, so I immortalized a scene from today's session in the drabble. Here's the prompt:

lilt [lilt] noun
1. rhythmic swing or cadence
2. a lilting song or tune

Aaaaand here's the drabble:
The tracks are no younger than the sunrise. One set of footprints, broader and deeper than its four contemporaries, clearly belongs to a goliath. Another two wear campaigner's boots, the first bearing the distinct tread of a habitual marcher, the second being far more diminutive, childlike. The final two barely qualify as footprints at all; mere scuffs on the surface of the stiff savannah soil. Cutter glances between each of her four comrades, awaiting the verdict amid swaying waves of red dzhate grass. “It's a cliché,” she reports, in her affected elven lilt. “but we're going in circles.”
Thanks for reading! Come back tomorrow for more and check out more exploits from the Nameless Company at the campaign's Obsidian Portal page!

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

And Now For Something Marginally Different

Sick of Iconine Iconine? Too bad; she's back in seven days, but until then, you might be relieved to know that I'll be running a similar, if not quite so library-themed, writing exercise on the blog. Voila!

Seven minutes in OpenOffice Paint. I'm an artisan.

Every day this week, while I recharge my Thousand-Name Town juices, I'm gonna be writing a one-off drabble (hundred word short story, for the initiated). They'll probably be random, non sequitur and not necessarily of particular quality but, for the sake of variety, I'm figger it's worth a shot.

To further mix it up (and to give myself a flotation device), I'm gonna add one condition to each day's drabble. It must include the "Word of the Day" featured on Dictionary.com, my preferred internet definitionary. Today's worth, for example, is "ingress".

ingress \ IN - gres \  , noun
1. the act of going in or entering
2. the right to enter
3. a means or place of entering; entryway
4. Astronomy; immersion

And thusly, I wrote this drabble:

The once trustworthy wood of Ran's naginata is made treacherous by sweaty palms. She maneuvers to stand between the child and the doorway, the shrine's single point of ingress, at once urging the boy to cease his mewling and praying to any attentive gods to grant her fighting skill to match thirty some men. These Purple Sparrow clansmen ransack each of the temple's rooms, door by door, and it's to be only a number of breaths until they find hers. As she counts each exhale, Ran wonders absently how much rice the boy's head might fetch from a grateful shogunate.

Come back tomorrow for another!

Past Due (Part 10)

Here's the complete first section of "Past Due!"

Item 839-T was missing from the shelf. Item 839-T was missing from the cart. Cross-referencing the infallible clay tablet that dangles off the frontispiece of every such re-shelving cart, one might be shocked to discover that Item 839-T was not currently on loan. That one in question, the first staff member of the Aacrospon R. Faragav Municipal Library to discover this anomaly, wasn’t a Reference Prefect or a Knight-Retriever or even the High Director himself but instead humble Iconine Iconine, Circulation Acolyte, and never, in Iconine Iconine’s two short years pushing the cart, had she encountered a book wholly missing. 
Surely its absence would have evaded her notice entirely, were it not for the makeshift lean-to, the telltale black triangle, created by one book reclining unfairly onto another, when they all should stand erect in solidarity. A thickish volume, to judge by the shadowed lacuna left in its place, neighbored by Items 839-S (My Husband, The Saftplau by Jaydmasha Rajus) and 839-U (Mycomancy: A Study of Saftplau Fungiculture Methodology by Nikdor Hadikinn), the book had vanished so perfectly that Iconine Iconine actually glanced about her for where it might have flown to, only to chasten herself inwardly for an idiot. 
With Item 839-T nowhere in sight and no means immediately to hand to remedy the situation, Iconine Iconine was forced to trundle onward in her duties – climbing ladders, shelving books, negotiating her cart between incommodious aisles. It is possible that she dawdled; she relished not the opportunity to inform her direct superior, Circulation Adept Izcabode, of Item 839-T's evaporation. Izacabode, yet another champion of the popular internal opinion amongst the interlibrary elite that anyone not possessing a formalized education in the Apocryphal Sciences must needs be either a bumbling incompetent or a babbling ignoramus, bore Iconine Iconine only disdain. 
Before any conclusions be drawn about wicked old bureaucrats inappreciative of perspicacious underlings, the narrator would ask that you don, if only for a moment, the snug slippers of this Circulation Adept. Imagine one of your Acolytes – timid, overmodest, unassertive, devoid not only of all ambitions, not only of any interest in those librarical hierarchies that form the nexus of your everyday life, but more importantly, of that all-important education that, to your thinking, separates worthy from unworthy – and you may begin to visualize the picture presented when Izcabode and his narrow-minded ilk thought on poor Iconine Iconine. 
Add the fact that she was quite visibly Uzire, a member of one of the misunderstood and unmistakable human ethnicities amongst all of Patchwork's manifold minorities, and it should come as little wonder that unassuming little Iconine Iconine only gained traction with her supposed “betters” with great difficulty. Izcabode, as pureblooded a Romádri as he was a pompous popinjay, had yet to acknowledge the long-standing animosity their two cultures shared in any verbal way, but Iconine Iconine harbored no illusions that her turquoise makeup and complex hair-knots endemic to the Uzire endeared her to the supercillious Circulation Adept any. 
For herself, Iconine Iconine would hardly describe her work at the Patchwork Branch, the more palatable name attributed to the Aacrospon R. Faragav Municipal Library by its staff, as anything resembling her true calling. Academic fervor and religious erudition seemed to be the order of the day for many of her more esteemed colleagues but, for Iconine Iconine, the library fulfilled only her simple love of books and the income necessary to provide for the infirm ancestra waiting at home. However, a love of books, as Iconine Iconine was quickly to discover, did not necessitate a love of library politics. 
The library she loved was the night library, the ill-frequented library, the library of re-shelving and solitude and the occasional devoted reader. In the fashion of a true libratical purist, the High Director instated a moratorium on all natural light within the Patchwork Branch (to “best preserve the texts”) but, nevertheless, during the daylight hours, the insidious sun still diffused himself in, heedless of smothered windows or the Director's decrees. Only after sunset was the library truly dark, though, by Guild custom, it remained publicly open. In these hours, Iconine Iconine's hours, a lantern provided the only companionship required. 
It is this image of Iconine Iconine you must conjure, leading her empty cart back to the Desk to report Item 839-T's disappearance, her swinging lantern playing havoc with shadows and candlelight, the benighted library mimicking the true night without, when she first heard the voice. Her solitude suddenly snatched away, her lantern's halo of meager orange was without warning besieged by darkness now home to some unseen speaker. The voice, prissy, feminine, swollen with sham authority, was at once familiar and unrecognizable; having never met the speaker, she would recognize the Library's brand of hauteur from a thousand paces. 
...three summers in my Father's conservatory...” the voice recalled, echoing off stone walls and stone shelves. If the speaker made any more cryptic comment about nine months spent amongst her Father's greenery, Iconine Iconine cannot discern over the distance. With lantern in hand, she probed only the smallest perimeter around her cart and, upon discovering nothing untoward, ventured a quavering “Hello?” This entirely reasonable word echoed much the same as the speaker's nonsensical phrase, and even a polite, if half-hearted, “Can I help you?” elicited no response; only the faintest grinding of metal-on-metal and a subsequent silence. 
When no sound, shape or sensation reached her, save one shivering down her spine, Iconine Iconine trepidatiously returned the lantern to its crook, took the cart in two unsteady hands and started her slow sojourn back to the Circulation Desk, imagining with all her might what innocent source – a nocturnal reader she'd somehow neglected to notice on her first pass, a colleague amongst the library staff, one whose voice she admittedly couldn't place, about library business after nightfall – might have uttered that eerily senseless phrase, or whether she'd just had the misfortune to hear the book thief speak.
 That's the end of the section! Thanks for reading, everybody, and come back tomorrow for a brief change of pace before we continue with the story of Iconine Iconine.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Past Due (Parts 8 & 9)

Double header!

It is this image of Iconine Iconine you must conjure, leading her empty cart back to the Desk to report Item 839-T's disappearance, her swinging lantern playing havoc with shadows and candlelight, the benighted library mimicking the true night without, when she first heard the voice. Her solitude suddenly snatched away, her lantern's halo of meager orange was without warning besieged by darkness now home to some unseen speaker. The voice, prissy, feminine, swollen with sham authority, was at once familiar and unrecognizable; having never met the speaker, she would recognize the Library's brand of hauteur from a thousand paces.

...three summers in my Father's conservatory...” the voice recalls, echoing off stone walls and stone shelves. If the speaker makes any more cryptic comment about nine months spent amongst her Father's greenery, Iconine Iconine cannot discern over the distance. With lantern in hand, she probes only the smallest perimeter around her cart and, upon discovering nothing untoward, ventures a quavering “Hello?” This entirely reasonable word echoes much the same as the speaker's nonsensical phrase, and even a polite, if half-hearted, “Can I help you?” elicits no response; only the faintest grinding of metal-on-metal and a subsequent silence.

I'm thinking another paragraph until the end of the section? Come back tomorrow for more!

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Past Due (Part 7)

Posting from sunny San Fran. (Is that taboo, by the way? To call it San Fran?)
The library she loved was the night library, the ill-frequented library, the library of re-shelving and solitude and the occasional devoted reader. In the fashion of a true libratical purist, the High Director instated a moratorium on all natural light within the Patchwork Branch (to “best preserve the texts”) but, nevertheless, during the daylight hours, the insidious sun still diffused himself in, heedless of smothered windows or the Director's decrees. Only after sunset was the library truly dark, though, by Guild custom, it remained publicly open. In these hours, Iconine Iconine's hours, a lantern provided the only companionship required.
Come back tomorrow for more!

Past Due (Part 6)

Heading to San Francisco this afternoon; updates may be delayed, but I'll keep writing, so if I miss a posting, you'll be rewarded with double the word count!

For herself, Iconine Iconine would hardly describe her work at the Patchwork Branch, the more palatable name attributed to the Aacrospon R. Faragav Municipal Library by its staff, as anything resembling her true calling. Academic fervor and religious erudition seemed to be the order of the day for many of her more esteemed colleagues but, for Iconine Iconine, the library fulfilled only her simple love of books and the income necessary to provide for the infirm ancestra waiting at home. However, a love of books, as Iconine Iconine was quickly to discover, did not necessitate a love of library politics.

Come back tomorrow (hopefully!) for more!

Friday, April 5, 2013

Past Due (Part 5)

Poor Iconine Iconine.

Add the fact that she was quite visibly Uzire, a member of one of the misunderstood and unmistakable human ethnicities amongst all of Patchwork's manifold minorities, and it should come as little wonder that unassuming little Iconine Iconine only gained traction with her supposed “betters” with great difficulty. Izcabode, as pureblooded a Romádri as he was a pompous popinjay, had yet to acknowledge the long-standing animosity their two cultures shared in any verbal way, but Iconine Iconine harbored no illusions that her turquoise makeup and complex hair-knots endemic to the Uzire endeared her to the supercillious Circulation Adept any.

Come back tomorrow for more!

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Past Due (Part 4)

Here's the next hundred. This Izcabode guy's a dick, huh? Maybe he took the book – 'cause he's a dick.

Before any conclusions be drawn about wicked old bureaucrats inappreciative of perspicacious underlings, the narrator would ask that you don, if only for a moment, the snug slippers of this Circulation Adept. Imagine one of your Acolytes – timid, overmodest, unassertive, devoid not only of all ambitions, not only of any interest in those librarical hierarchies that form the nexus of your everyday life, but more importantly, of that all-important education that, to your thinking, separates worthy from unworthy – and you may begin to visualize the picture presented when Izcabode and his narrow-minded ilk thought on poor Iconine Iconine.

Come back tomorrow for more!

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Past Due (Part 3)

Apologies for the lateness of the post.

With Item 839-T nowhere in sight and no means immediately to hand to remedy the situation, Iconine Iconine was forced to trundle onward in her duties – climbing ladders, shelving books, negotiating her cart between incommodious aisles. It is possible that she dawdled; she relished not the opportunity to inform her direct superior, Circulation Adept Izcabode, of Item 839-T's evaporation. Izacabode, yet another champion of the popular internal opinion amongst the interlibrary elite that anyone not possessing a formalized education in the Apocryphal Sciences must needs be either a bumbling incompetent or a babbling ignoramus, bore Iconine Iconine only disdain.

Come back tomorrow for more!

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Past Due (Part 2)

Hey, that rhymed!

Surely its absence would have evaded her notice entirely, were it not for the makeshift lean-to, the telltale black triangle, created by one book reclining unfairly onto another, when they all should stand erect in solidarity. A thickish volume, to judge by the shadowed lacuna left in its place, neighbored by Items 839-S (My Husband, The Saftplau by Jaydmasha Rajus) and 839-U (Mycomancy: A Study of Saftplau Fungiculture Methodology by Nikdor Hadikinn), the book had vanished so perfectly that Iconine Iconine actually glanced about her for where it might have flown to, only to chasten herself inwardly for an idiot.
Come back tomorrow for the next installment!

Monday, April 1, 2013

Past Due (Part 1)

Today begins my newest experiment – a story set in Thousand-Name Town, the setting I unfolded, drabble by drabble, over the past week. Enjoy part one, and swoon to the thrilling adventures contained within!

Item 839-T was missing from the shelf. Item 839-T was missing from the cart. Cross-referencing the infallible clay tablet that dangles off the frontispiece of every such re-shelving cart, one might be shocked to discover that Item 839-T was not currently on loan. That one in question, the first staff member of the Aacrospon R. Faragav Municipal Library to discover this anomaly, wasn’t a Reference Prefect or a Knight-Retriever or even the High Director himself but instead humble Iconine Iconine, Circulation Acolyte, and never, in Iconine Iconine’s two short years pushing the cart, had she encountered a book wholly missing.

Come back tomorrow for the next hundred words!

(Also, check out this short film I directed!)