First thoughts ...

FAIRBANKS, Alaska - Alaska State Troopers are puzzled by a gruesome discovery in the city of North Pole: 26 headless chickens carefully arranged at a coop.

Oh, Santa, what have you done this time?

Witches and familiars

(via the morningstarr)

Word quickly spread amongst the villagers that the mystery child rapist was a tokoloshe, a hairy dwarf zombie created by witches for sexual purposes by removing the eyes and tongue of a human corpse. According to African legend the corpse then shrinks, grows hair and is reanimated to life to act as the witch’s familiar and sex toy.
A tokoloshe cannot be seen by adults, it carries a magic pebble in it’s mouth to make it invisible to grown ups.

Keeping this critter for possible (modified) use in something down the road. It makes for a fascinating mythology and, really, if one is going to have witches as evil, then this makes a hell of a lot more sense then black cats and the like. If a myth has witches as evil, then make them be evil. (I'd personally nix the child rape, for obvious reasons, but the idea of a familiar that is a witch's sex toy is amazing.)

Facebook Status Updates

I've fallen into the habit of posting bits of writing on facebook as status updates. Some are just lines jotted down in a file, others are bits and pieces that may (or may not) end up in a current WIP and some are short stories seeds for stories I will never actually write.


Bob knew he was being fired if he didn't upgrade to BrainBot 6.0, but all his education and programs worked with 4.0. Her'd avoided 5.0 by claiming it was too buggy, and now it was too late. Pushing thirty, he didn't even know if his brain could handle the upgrade. But he had no choice.

He told everyone he was a paranormal detective, but really he just liked seeing naked ghosts. Almost as much as watching them have sex.

He stepped out of the time machine, staring at his mantle clock and thinking it had worked, that he had moved an hour into the future and time would be his for the plundering. And then he read the paper, and damned daylight savings time with a heartfelt bitter sob.

"Why did you invent the time machine? To see the battle of Waterloo? The birth of Jesus? To meet Genghis Khan? Find out about the dinosaurs?"
"I wanted to go to my high school prom."
".... For the record, I'm writing down Jesus."
"I can't visit Jesus with a death ray!"
"What death ray?"
"The one I'm taking back with me."

The secret of magic is this: every work of fiction is really a travelouge. Understand that and you know all of magic you need to learn.

"Sanity is nothing more than proof your mind is a virgin," the man in the lab coat said with his cheery smile. "It will all be better soon. Scapel."

Cassie shrugged away Terry's question, her response light and dismissive: "We have an infinite capacity to bear the pain of others."

Jared smiled crookedly. When he spoke, his voice was terribly gentle. "To forgive requires a kind of judgement too."

"College girls?" The vampire managed to look paler than normal, like wamed-over oatmeal. "You don't go after them, little fledgling. What do you mean, why? They have mace! You want to know what it will feel like when the sun burns you to a crisp, get some mace in the eyes."

"Catching the pack of werepoodles was quite easy," Detective Christensen told the press conference. "We just went to pet stores and found out who was buying an excess amount of flea collars."

"You have to understand, mom and dad. I paid Joe Chill to kill you. I had to. There was no other way to become the Bat. The Bat needed your sacrifice for me to grow strong, to become the Batman, to fight crime. Because I couldn't do that with the vast fortune you ... left ... me. Oh."

"It is not that the dead don't wish to return; it's that they lose their way in the other world, lost without a Starbucks to guide them back through the darkness to the day."

There is a moment before the burning begins. The brief, fragile hope that you might escape, might not burn, that even fire can be kind.

"I don't think I get it," Terry said. "I mean, you've helped create a goddess. Doesn't that make you spiritual more than, you know, religious?"
Jared grinned. " Spirituality is just the privatization of religion."

A ghoul and his mother, a conversation

"This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes."

Terry held the phone in his hand and said nothing. She always answered the phone like that, a family joke that now seemed strange, forced now that her husband was dead.

"Terry, I know that's you," his mother said on the other end.

"How?" he whispered.

There was a brief pause. "Call display. What did you think?"

"I don't know. Sandra called, about dad."

"And?"

"You know." Terry took a breath. "His body was missing."

"Ah. Missing."

"Mom," he began, the urge to confess choking his voice.

"Don't," she snapped. There was a longer pause. "I did tell you this call may be monitored, didn't I?"

"That's always a joke," Terry said reflexively, mind racing over the conversation; he didn't think he'd said anything incriminating yet, and nothing to tell people he'd eaten his father's corpse. He remembered to hang up a moment later, fingers trembling a little. Real police work wasn't hollywood; Ethan had told him that long enough. They'd have traced him, if they wanted to.

He set his phone down on the counter carefully and turned. His fist hit the wall before he'd consciously considered it, drywall cracking as he hit it again and again until bones broke, the smell of his own marrow easing something inside him. Terry shuddered slightly and watched the hand mend itself and pretended his tears were only from the pain.