BOOK PROMO
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FROM FIONA GREY: Paladin’s Sword: Professor Porter Book 1 (Professor Porter Paranormals)
Dr. June Porter is headed for New Hampshire as a professor, brand-new PhD in hand. The last thing she wants in her new life is more magic, so of course that’s exactly what she finds. Magic, and a mysterious Irishman with emerald eyes. But there’s little time for dalliance when historical artifacts begin taking a life of their own and threaten the campus. Can June reclaim her magic, protect her students – and keep her job?
Dr. June Porter is headed for New Hampshire as a professor, brand-new PhD in hand. The last thing she wants in her new life is more magic, so of course that’s exactly what she finds. Magic, and a mysterious Irishman with emerald eyes. But there’s little time for dalliance when historical artifacts begin taking a life of their own and threaten the campus. Can June reclaim her magic, protect her students – and keep her job?
FROM MARY CATELLI: The Turtle in the Sea of Sand.
“The sea of sand touched many shores — the meanest beggar’s brat knew that — and many sands drifted up from them, but Persinette always maintained that black sand meant death, and mingled with red, a bloody death.”
Kyre still had to work for his living. Even it meant taking a job from a wizard. . . .
FROM H. PETIT: Eden Will Be Destroyed!: A Very Short Story That Explains A Whole Lot
The Bible tells us mankind originally lived in the Garden of Eden until the Serpent tempted Eve who led Adam astray and they were all cast out to suffer and toil in the dirt. But what if that version wasn’t strictly accurate? What if the true story was distorted through generations of oral history, then edited by dead white men employed by an imperialistic dictator with a history of failed relationships and an unhealthy fear of snakes? Wonder no longer. Herewith, the true story of the Fall of Mankind and the Loss of Eden. Well, sort of.
FROM PAM UPHOFF: Double Dragon
Lieutenant Scarlet Magana was trained as ship’s crew, but it’s a good thing she also had dirt-side scouting training . . .
A distant planet. A damaged hyperspace colony ship. Lieutenant Magana and the rest of the crew discover that not only are they not the first arrivals . . . they may well be the third.
And then there are the dragons . . . and a serial killer.
FROM J. L. CURTIS: April Fool
Sean ‘Mac’ McCampbell just wants to keep his head down, avoid the riots, and finish his Linguistics PhD before his GI Bill runs out. But when the professors are promoting insurrection and the cops won’t contain the violence, Mac finds trouble won’t leave the people and places he loves alone.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: Loud
According To Hoyt 
Sam MacPherson looked around the nearly empty room. “That’s odd,” he said to his partner, “there’s usually a pretty loud bunch here.”
A Loud Voice was heard screaming “I should have waited until the Promos to purchase April Fool” (so Sarah gets her cut)! 😉
Seriously, it’s a Good Read but for some reason I thought it was set in the 60’s-70’s but it’s a “current day” story.
McCracken sidled up to the bar and ordered a drink. As the bartender poured him a stiff one, he saw Bostich down at the end of the bar. To his utter shock, The many was doing the impossible. Bostich had reached into his shirt pocket, drawn out a cigarette, and lit it with a match!
“Hey!” McCracken shouted, “that isn’t allowed in here!”
“what’s that you say? I’m a little deef!”
“I SAID IT ISN’T ALLOWED!”
“What?”
“IT ISN’T ALLOWED!”
“no sonny it isn’t loud in here, in fact I’d say it’s quiet and peaceful.”
McCracken was exasperated beyond all comprehension. “Don’t you see the sign in here? It says no smoking is allowed!”
“It does? Well I never learned to read neither, So I can’t say to that exactly.”
Another guy lit his pipe saying “the picture on that sign only shows a cigarette not a pipe”. 😈
The sign was updated with a picture of a pipe. The next day, the guy calmly sat under the sign and lit his pipe, explaining to anyone who would listen about an artist named René Magritte and his important contributions to society.
This seems fitting to link to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
Yep. Debated putting the picture title in, but figured the joke would be better if you had to work it out for yourself. But for anyone who didn’t get it? Look at the painting called “The Treachery of Images” and think about the difference between the map and the territory, between the object and a picture of the object.
The next day McCracken sidled up to the bar and ordered a drink. As the bartender poured him a stiff one, he saw Bostich down at the end of the bar. To his utter shock, The man was again about to violate all established norms of polite society: Bostich had reached into his shirt pocket and drew out a white cigarette! Without a word, McCracken picked up and empty beer glass and stormed down the bar. He was going to teach that undesirable a lesson he’d never forget. as he reached Bostich and drew back the stein to slam it down on the bastard’s head, smoke from the man wafted under his nostrils. Stunned, he stopped at once and gently laid his weapon on the bar.
“You’re smoking a joint! he cried.”
Bostich looked at him quizzically. “You that same man yelling about being loud last week?”
“I-uh, you go right ahead with your smoking sir! The Governor says smoking weed indoors is perfectly acceptable!”
Dang. I a hurry, made tyro error on consistency? Next day /= last week. sorry
Even after *Randolf’s Rustbucket* stopped thrusting, the torchship was filled with hisses, gurgles, and groans as joints expanded and contracted, pressures equalized, and heat sinks radiated waste heat.
“I did not expect this!” Herman Wong shouted.
“That’s right,” Captain Randolf shouted back. “Space may be silent, but spaceships are loud!”
The launch began in eerie silence. For a moment the rocket seemed suspended above the eye-hurting brightness of its own exhaust, and Tara wondered if something were going wrong. As the rocket began to rise from the launch pad, the thunderous roar began to arrive, overwhelming, making her whole chest vibrate.
All too soon it was over. Tara tried to follow the rocket up into the sky, long after it had gone too high for the sound to carry to the ground. Already her classmates and their chaperones were growing impatient, wanting to move on. To them the show was over, and they couldn’t understand why she would want to drag things out.
And that was just a SpaceX Starlink launch. What would it have been like to watch a Saturn V take off for the Moon? As Tara trudged back to the bus, dutifully staying with the rest of the group, she fought the longing for what might have been. A world that didn’t turn its back on the Moon, that didn’t retreat to Low Earth Orbit for four decades, so that her generation would be stuck catching up to what should’ve been.
The wind roared about them. In the woods, trees bent nearly parallel to the ground. Ava put her hand about her hair, but it still escaped, lashing at her arm.
Julian raised his hands and cast the spell.
The sound slackened, but it did not cease.
“Very good,” said Isabella.
The time gate announced itself to the early morning Mojave desert with a brief flash of light like a flashbulb going off followed by a few seconds of a loud, deep bass rumbling. The phenomena disturbed a snake, two lizards and a kangaroo rat all of whom quickly forgot about it and went back to their normal morning business.
I must admit I enjoy these vignettes, and often aim toward exactly fifty words. Having said that, can’t help but notice that a number of folks, in postings above and around this one, have noted the sign saying no smoking aloud
So I guess I’ll just have a quiet smoke.
First, GROAN! 😆
Second, I’m already having a quiet smoke. 😉
I guess for you, a NO SMOKING sign is equivalent to HOLD YOUR BREATH? 😛
Yep and when I can’t hold it any more Fire Comes Out. [Embarrassed Dragon Grin]
Oh, Adult Dragons Are To Breath Fire ONLY WHEN NECESSARY not by accident. Only baby Dragons can’t control their fire.
Long as it don’t come out the other end. *eg*
Nobody (not even dragons) want to be near what comes out of the “other end”. 😈
😀
That would be covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act. We don’t try to force people to curbside service.
There was a terrible, loud banging sound somewhere deep inside her body and Sam groaned. “Damage report!” he yelled, his eyes scanning the monitor screens as he tried to bring her body around.
Multiple minor shock faults, spiders are repairing them, the manifold system replied in his brain. Voids are at sixty percent power but still coherent. We have a loose power feed system to the starboard turbo-laser destructor, power levels are half for at least three minutes.
“Feed me targets, where the hell is that hostile,” Sam hissed, feeling his right shoulder and left leg pull as the control frame indicated where the minor faults were.
Target lost, engagement logs indicates a long distance salvo fire of steathed missiles using AG lift and thruster coils. Size of missiles suggests hostile Titan might have only one or two salvos, the manifold reported calmly.
“Unless the mother-fucker has someone to reload his fucking racks nearby! Launch drones on the impact bearing,” Sam half-yelled. “Half active, half passive, now!”
Drone launch denied. Possibility of revelation of status reaches unity, interlocks engaged, the manifold interrupted.
Sam held onto his temper, screaming at the fucking crazy machine that was going to get them all killed somehow wasn’t going to help any. “We got a hostile out there trying to kill us,” he replied calmly. “Do you have any suggestions?”
Working. the manifold replied, then there was a momentary silence. Hacking of local video and audio sources completed. Possible launcher located twenty degrees to port, four hundred meters away. On the screen, there was a set of images overlaid on a map of one of the boys from her school. Possible launcher source detected, real-time tracking engaged. Cannot engage at this time, possible launcher is in a location where status revelation reaches unity.
“Follow him,” Sam ordered. “Is our backpack intact?”
Backpack status confirmed intact, the manifold replied.
“Good,” and Sam moved to carefully open the backpack and pull the sweater over the damaged blouse and the healing injuries of her body. “I want somewhere we can engage him, and I need to know now.”
Confirmed, the manifold replied, and Sam made sure nobody could see her as she got up and there was no physical evidence of her injuries. There was still a slight stagger to her left leg, but nothing too obvious. Maneuvering required, must depart area before status revelation odds increase, the manifold noted as Sam settled backpack on her shoulders.
“Moving,” Sam said, and he started to move his control frame so that Kimberly would walk away from the attack.
The screams resounded, and the sound of people fleeing. The figure before them laughed and flames surged outward. Autumn resisted pulling closed to Ciara. They were safe here, until perhaps the thing that used to be Reynardette turned the full force on them.
Then she thought. “Ciara, purify that flame.”
The audiometer pegged hard, which was odd as it was dead quiet. Then Veronica looked up and saw her visitor. The meter wasn’t wrong. His shirt was as someone had viewed a Hawaiian pattern through an LSD trip, or would be if toned down a few levels. She donned sunglasses.
The silence greeted them as they descended, and Rosine tried to ignore it. The governor’s soldiers often brought quiet with them.
Still, a place so rowdy as the taproom of the Scarlet Sturgeon was unnerving in silence.
It was no help to descend farther and see the taproom still full.
Sailing through the Silent Deeps was a quiet little ship. A strange little thing it was, out where Hydrogen atoms went lonely for long enough that new stars were born, and died, before they found anyone to talk to.
If on some lonely core of a long dead star, deep within, was someone to look out at the little ship they might wonder. If, that is, they had some nifty good optics or gravimetric sensors. You can’t hide from gravity, and it’s damn hard to hide from light, too. Where did it come from? Obviously from somewhere outside, somewhere with stars and planets and all the bits and bobs that go with.
But, assuming your optic array was very, very good, you could look back, well, it didn’t really come from anywhere. One moment it wasn’t. Then it was. And off it went, hardly radiating even any heat! Remarkable, that. Everything that moved on its own radiated heat. It was practically a law.
And small. Not a planetlet, nor a rocky bit of proto- or post- planet debris, like an asteroid, no. Tiny. Shiny, if there’d been much of any light to see it by. There wasn’t, not really. The Silent Deeps was the unfashionable sort of place even starlight seemed to avoid.
The Hydrogen atoms got a few friends out of the bargain, at least. Lucky, that. Can’t sail without company, and wherever it came from, it brought the things that ships carry along with them. Even quiet little ships that don’t seem to leak even a Helium atom bring a few little friends along.
The ones that came after, oh, now those were large. And loud. If the hypothetical observer on the core of a dead star saw *them,* well. “There goes the neighborhood,” he might say. And then back up his array and go hide on the other side of the core, because some things, well… Some things it just doesn’t pay to know about.
Sailing through the Silent Deeps was a quiet little ship. A strange little thing it was, out where Hydrogen atoms went lonely for long enough that new stars were born, and died, before they found anyone to talk to.
If on some lonely core of a long dead star, deep within, was someone to look out at the little ship they might wonder. If, that is, they had some nifty good optics or gravimetric sensors. You can’t hide from gravity, and it’s damn hard to hide from light, too. Where did it come from? Obviously from somewhere outside, somewhere with stars and planets and all the bits and bobs that go with.
But, assuming your optic array was very, very good, you could look back, well, it didn’t really come from anywhere. One moment it wasn’t. Then it was. And off it went, hardly radiating even any heat! Remarkable, that. Everything that moved on its own radiated heat. It was practically a law.
And small. Not a planetlet, nor a rocky bit of proto- or post- planet debris, like an asteroid, no. Tiny. Shiny, if there’d been much of any light to see it by. There wasn’t, not really. The Silent Deeps was the unfashionable sort of place even starlight seemed to avoid.
The Hydrogen atoms got a few friends out of the bargain, at least. Lucky, that. Can’t sail without company, and wherever it came from, it brought the things that ships carry along with them. Even quiet little ships that don’t seem to leak even a Helium atom bring along a few little friends.
The ones that came after, oh, now those were large. And loud. If the hypothetical observer on the core of a dead star saw *them,* well. “There goes the neighborhood,” he might say. And then back up his array and go hide on the other side of the core, because some things, well… Some things it just doesn’t pay to know about.
Testing. WP seems to be eating comments again. Testing…
I swear I didn’t change anything. I wasn’t even at the computer most of the day.
Not just you. I’ve had problems with other sites eating comments lately. WPDE. Worked through the reader function, but on the actual site nothing showed up, not just here, but on others too.
I had WP eat a comment a few days ago. Didn’t help that it was a post on operational-security. Hmm. It had one(!) link in it, and didn’t even hit moderation. (I was able to get an obsfuscated version of the link out. Not ruling out automated censorship at WP. The link lead to someone who TPTB don’t much like.)
Sailing through the Silent Deeps was a quiet little ship. A strange little thing it was, out where Hydrogen atoms went lonely for long enough that new stars were born, and died, before they found anyone to talk to.
If on some lonely core of a long dead star, deep within, was someone to look out at the little ship they might wonder. If, that is, they had some nifty good optics or gravimetric sensors. You can’t hide from gravity, and it’s damn hard to hide from light, too. Where did it come from? Obviously from somewhere outside, somewhere with stars and planets and all the bits and bobs that go with.
But, assuming your optic array was very, very good, you could look back, well, it didn’t really come from anywhere. One moment it wasn’t. Then it was. And off it went, hardly radiating even any heat! Remarkable, that. Everything that moved radiated heat. It was practically a law.
And small. Not a planetlet, nor a rocky bit of proto- or post- planet debris, like an asteroid, no. Tiny. Shiny, if there’d been much of any light to see it by. There wasn’t, not really. The Silent Deeps was the place even starlight seemed to avoid.
The Hydrogen atoms got a few friends out of the bargain, at least. Lucky, that. Can’t sail without company, and wherever it came from, it brought the things that ships carry along with them. Even quiet little ships that don’t seem to leak even a Helium atom bring friends.
The ones that came after, oh, now those were large. And loud. If the hypoethetical observer on the core of a dead star saw *them,* well. “There goes the neighborhood,” he might say. And then back up his array and go hide on the other side of the core, because some things, well… Some things it just doesn’t pay to know about.
Daria groaned and put her head in her hands. It was her first hangover and it was everything she could have imagined. “Please, God, who thought that dog’s claws on the floor could be so LOUD?”
Photons are *particles*. I’ve *heard* them. No, it was NOT fun.
The night before? Well now…
“So, your cousin nabbed a big buck for Christmas dinner. Where’s the lucky hunter?”
“In the den, with a file of naughty pictures open on his laptop for the others to see. His dad was supposed to have first crack at the haul, but the old man complained the group was too loud, and he would wait in the dining room until time to eat.”
“What’s he doing in there?”
“As best I can see, he is just walking around the table casting covetous glances at all the good china.”
“That’s sad. Encroaching dementia can be hard on a family.”
********
100 words.
Thanks for the boost!
Sirens wailed. Air horns blared as emergency vehicles tried to penetrate the line of screaming black-clad ‘protesters’ barring their way. Before those, another wave of shouting Molotov Cocktail-wielding ‘demonstators’ advanced on the cordon of authorties.
“Riots sure are loud, Captain.”
“You aint heard nothing yet. Lock and loud, uh, load!”