New Story! “My Father’s Wounds,” at Beneath Ceaseless Skies

My latest story is live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies – have a sample of the opening, why don’tcha?

Father carries the knife, because I asked him to—but he keeps turning to look at me, earnestly, as if he hopes I’ll take it back.

 It’s hard to believe he knows I’ll stab him with that knife. Even harder to believe he’s eager for me to do it. But that’s my father; he thinks the world of his precious daughter. He’s thin yet unbowed in his ascetic gray Blacksmith robes as he leads me up through a cold forest to the Anvil.

It doesn’t matter whether my father will live once I stab him. That’s not the point. The point is all the questions that no one thinks to ask after we’ve healed their fathers, their soldiers, their daughters. Nobody questions our magic, except for us, the loyal priests and priestesses of Aelana.

We can’t stop asking. We can’t sleep for asking.

The origins of this story are either mildly embarrassing or total nerd cred, depending on how you look at it, since it stemmed from a question I had about D&D – how do those first-level priests learn how to Cure Light Wounds, anyway? Do they just stab each other and hope for the best? And I wrote a story that wound up answering questions not only about that question, but as to why a cleric who can cure wounds can’t mend a country.

I really like the ending on this one.  I hope you will too.

 

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

When The Robot Uprising Hits, I Know I’ll Be A Cult Figure

Ever wonder what my most popular piece of writing was?  Here it is.  It’s a short-short anecdote about how Gini and I thought the third episode of Sherlock was extremely slow-paced, until we realized that a background process was playing the video at about 75% speed.

Spambots fucking love this piece. I get three, four comments a day on it, mostly about prostitutes: “prostitutki moskva on layn.”  I clear them out overnight and come back to the applause of more spambots, happily commenting away.

I’ve considered locking this entry, but I’m actually curious to see how far it’ll go.  For the past three months, it’s like clockwork: I wake up, and the spambots have commented on my Sherlock post.  I’m not sure why they’ve settled on this piece, when there are so many others to choose from, but there you have it: spambots love Steven Moffat.

It’s good to know that the robots love me.  Maybe when the Singularity hits and the ad-bots rule us all, I can be their poet laureate.  Or a comedian.  Or whatever floats their boat about this entry, I don’t know.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.