2018: Mar. and Apr. Status Updates

Mar. 2018

Writing drafts of stories on a phone is, well, this:

“Oh.” I reach, and pull the dog out of her head.

The knight came down the hill slowly. He was alone, limping painfully. His horse had long since been lost, his armour was singed by fire, his ancestor’s spear broken in his shaking grip.

“Was there a princess?” his faithful retainer asked, visions of reward dancing through his young mind.

“No.”

“How many carts do we need to bring the hoard back to -.”

“The dragon had no hoard. For tax reasons.”

“I don’t understand?”

“The hoard was flown overseas to some other kingdom years ago. Every other noble knight, every warrior of the crown who joined me. All the battles, all those deaths, the rewards we had envisioned: it was for naught.”

“But you killed the dragon,” the retainer said timidly.

“It was old, and laughed at us the entire time. Laughed,” the knight repeated, in the tone of a broken man.

“I had the most brilliant idea yesterday. So now I’m spending today trying to work out whose idea it really was.”

I told you I wasn’t afraid but even that truth was born out of fear.

No war shaped human history quite as much as the Calorie Wars.

You never show up in pictures of us. Everyone think you’re a vampire when I know you’re just shy.

You told me that your life was an open book. Only I realize too late that you meant ebook - and one with a proprietary format.

I erased you from my life but the smudges remained on the paper of my heart.

The monsters never lied to us; it was how we discovered what they were.

Breakfast in bed turns out to be hot coffee on my head and eggs in a place that sent me shrieking to the emergency room.

I am starting to wonder if things might not be going well between us.

“You wonder why I am a climate change denier? You poor fool: I deny nothing. I merely wish to see the climate destroyed. October 15th, 1982. My heart was broken and the sky refused to rain despite how I felt. I decided then that the whole world would suffer with weather that shattered as easily as the human heart.”

I gave you a secret without wanting anything in turn.

Knowing it would torment you more than anything else I could do.

They said the robots would take over the world, but the robots were built to be reliant on the old technologies. Within five years their armies were out of oil, gasoline, vital minerals and metals that would have kept them fighting. We welcomed our robot overlords for freeing us from those shackles, and the information age was replaced finally by the solar age.

“Write,” the muse demanded, hurling ideas, plots, stories.

“I need to apply for jobs. I need work. I need work,” the writer replied.

“…. do you want me to leave you?”

“No. But I can’t write if I have no place to live. I would tell the stories only in my head, shared with no one.”

“… I will improve your resume,” the muse declared.

“But you must help us! You defeated the Rockhearth Dragon, walked through the Six Sundered Castles! You -.”

“I have a good publicity team, yes. I pay a dozen bards to sing songs about me.”

“But you were the hero of Bythok Bay!”

“Only in songs, child. Only in songs.” And she smiled, who some called the Untempered Queen. “What you do becomes far less important than what people think you can do. If you play your cards right.”

“But people are dying!”

“I am sorry. But that is what people do, even more than cry out for heroes.”

I told you I could save you, but I meant only from myself.

“Hah! If you were psychic, you’d have known I was going to spill my drink on you!”

“That isn’t the sort of thing I predict.” And the psychic smiled, and told me the day that I would die, and their smile never wavered at all.

I lost the key, but it turned out you were never a door at all.

“Look, Charlie. Charles. When you married me, you had to understand that marriage was a triple-A game, full-price point and the honeymoon as a loot box? Our whole engagement was a beta test.”
“You prepared for this.”

“You bet your ass I did. The EULA between us was never talked about, love. Having kids is, at the least, a season pass on top of everything else. And don’t even get me started on the microtransactions involved later on.”

April 2017

Once upon a time there was a monster who tried to be kind, until they realized they weren’t the real monster at all.

Every window wishes it were a door, and there is no door that does not desire to be only a wall rather than a wound in the sameness of a barrier. Everything we build contains portions of our failings: how else could it have beauty?

There are rules that govern the world, but to understand them means you know they do not rule over you at all.

When the boss said he liked to micromanage, no one realized he meant it literally. Not until the critique of their blood samples landed in their inboxes.

“Being a hero is always easy. You see danger, you run toward it. It takes a lot more to prevent the danger in the first place.”

If you hold a door open long enough, at what point is it no longer a door?

Nothing is true. Nothing is permitted. Those who believe otherwise have swallowed the lies that run the world.

"I have never met a fish that did not wish to be a bird, and that is the nature of the world."

Have you fed your Google today?

He snorts. “Near as I can tell, the point of your religion is that if everyone goes well, your god did it. And if things go wrong, it’s never the fault of your god. Must be a nice gig if you can get it.”

The prince realized that the asphalt jungle was more dangerous that he had believed when he returned from one quest to find someone has stolen the horn of his unicorn.

It would be interesting to call a company and get their recorded message that someone will be with you, but it does NOT claim they are getting an unusually high volume of calls.