Putting Dreams to Paper
Short, normally unconnected pieces of writing that function as my ‘write something every day!’ exercise.
“Hey, um, writer-monkey?” Cautiously the fictive stuck her head into the bedroom room where the Writer was typing away on her laptop, three dogs and a ghost cat striving to conquer every inch of uncontested bedspread territory. “Got a minute?”
(Ye Olde MuseFic follows, sussing out protagonist motivations — thus Spoilers Ahead!) Continue reading
The Writer was curled up on her couch with a cat, two dogs, and a laptop. Her yet-another-werewolf fictive was on the floor petting the third dog who was Being Awesome as only boy corgis can be.
“I can’t figure out why this story isn’t working.” The Writer sighed, glaring at the draft of The Wolves We Are, “I actually outlined the plot and everything.”
(Ye Olde MuseFic follows, sussing out antagonist motivations and plot holes– thus Spoilers Ahead!) Continue reading
An Ode to Spammers
I do not like you Spam-I-Am.
I hate your stupid daily spam.
I do not want your stupid posts!
I won’t approve them, no I won’t!
I will not let them linger on,
Watch me delete them– poof they’re gone! Continue reading
Technically werewolves aren’t immortal, we’re just very very hard to kill.
But the rest of the world doesn’t know that– to them we’re immortal, untouchable. The legends of the Baron and his children are real world nightmares that our neighbors live with every day. For once there really is a monster in the woods.
If they knew what we were they wouldn’t be trying to kill us. Continue reading
It’s the first time she’s ever been on a field trip to meet a god and Mary was still trying to work out if she even believed in the premise.
“Oh, hey, you’re early.” The god in question was in the middle of making bread, but paused to pass the task off to his assistant bakers as soon as the class walked in. “Don’t mind the mess.” He wiped his hands on an already flour-covered apron and happily shook everyone’s hand. “Can’t believe we’re on a new class already, eh Marji? Time flies when you’re having fun!”
“Says the immortal,” the teacher grinned and stepped back to let him take over. “Just try and remember were not actually here to talk about toast.” Continue reading
Most murders go unsolved. I know this one will too– not because I know any more than the cops, but because I’ve seen it happen before. We might get lucky, the killers might get careless, but I doubt it.
Killing werewolves isn’t something you get careless about.
If we were normal wolves, there’d be some local bickering and then a new alpha would step into Donny’s place. Wolves are pragmatic, monkeys less so, and there’s just too much monkey mixed in with our wolf.
So instead we get an outsider sent down by the state alpha. There’s layers and layers of bureaucracy that get involved when you start mucking about with the natural order of things.
Normally it would only be regional alpha who got involved, but no one wants us, so no one claims us and that’s not normally a problem. We’re the dump pack, full of loners and losers and harmless misfits; we’re everything that doesn’t work about urban werewolves and still we muddle through.
Only now we’re no one’s wolves and that’s finally caught the state’s attention. So they’re sending down an enforcer to keep us in line until things are sorted out.
I wonder if running away’s an option…
Normal people got to play Monday morning quarterback and gripe about 20/20 hindsight, they got to say things like ‘it was totally unexpected’ or ‘no one could have seen that coming,’ and worst of all, they got to stand in the cold early-morning rain, watching steam rise from the twisted metal and finding comfort in shared ignorance.
Cee, on the other hand, was just as cold and just as wet, but didn’t have the same luxury. She’d seen Dean’s death in all it’s minute variations, but the visions had come too late for her to do anything but direct the ambulance where to go. The future was malleable and fluid–she saw probabilities, not certainties, but they had always been enough before. Instead of visions that layered themselves one upon another another until a common future shown through, she found herself skipping from one possibility to another without any hint which way things would unwind.
This was the third murder she’d seen too late and she didn’t have to look to know it would be her last.
One morning Henry awoke to find a particularly odd message scrawled on his ceiling in lipstick.
“Dear Henry,” it began, “congratulations! You have found a way to travel between parallel universes… If you find a way to stop, please let the rest of us know.”
“Signed, the Henry who puts his keys in the right front pocket, the Henry who chose the red overcoat instead of the rust orange, and the Henry who did not marry Anne.”
“Oh.” Said the Henry who put his keys on the table by the door, had done with the nice gray cloak, and had also very definitely not married Anne.
Suddenly the past few weeks made much more sense…
He isn’t sure if this is an end or a beginning. There’s a silence to the whole event, as if the last moments of his life were destined to be played out in mime. He wants to tell them to talk, cry, laugh, something to fill in the static silence that roars in his ears. But they can’t hear him, or he can’t speak— he can’t tell if he ever stopped screaming.
It was never meant to last this long. Not the war, not the bond, not any of the bloody chaos his life has— had become. So it’s a relief, almost, to stumble to an end.
Only this isn’t death, not quite— he’ll be alive, only separated back into his component selves. And that’s a sort of death, although not in a way anyone who hasn’t been part of a bond can understand. To go from I to we… he closes his eyes, feeling a sluggish lag between the people he won’t be anymore.
With a final shiver, he falls apart.
[Zee has fun with controlled shifting...]
[An overview of the Werewolf Curse]
[What Mira was thinking when she set out to attract Zee's attention. Possibly repetitive from earlier posts, but I needed a place to start.]
The alarm went off and I batted at it with a paw for a moment before uncurling enough to shift back to something with thumbs. Unfortunately gaining thumbs lost me my nice toasty fur coat and as soon as the unholy siren had been quenched I shifted right back. Which left me half in and half out of the bed, tangled in the sheets, but warm.
Marion muttered something I couldn’t quite make out from her side of the room, but didn’t make a move to join me in the land of the living. With a long suffering sigh –wasted on my 9/10th asleep audience– I headed out the door for the morning patrol.
The campgrounds were still empty, we wouldn’t be getting any campers for at least another six weeks, but I still had a job to do.
Thankfully I’ve never minded the cold that much (complaining aside), but I was still happy to see winter finally creeping back up the mountain. The woods were just starting to green again and as I made my rounds every so often I’d find patches of snow still hidden in the shadows. The plants weren’t the only thing responding to the warming temperatures, the ground was littered with the smells of critters young and old as they emerged from their hibernation. Nothing worth stopping to snack on yet, but there was the promise of a nice rabbit or two later in the season.
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| These snippits are copyright Martha McMahon Bechtel and may not be reproduced or distributed without express permission. All rights reserved. |
[This totally doesn't count as starting my NaNo novel early... *shifty eyes*]
“You’re killing me off in the first chapter?” Daniel Jackson looked over the top of his glasses at the Writer with something considerably less than enthusiasm. “The first chapter?”
“Well, err, yes?” The Writer looked up from her keyboard as the fictive carefully put away the copy of ‘Saving the World: There and Back Again’ he’d been reading.
“Exactly why did this seem like a good idea?”
“Because I needed a Chosen One and, erm, you were handy?”
The fictive gave her one of his rather legendary ‘you can’t possible be as stupid as I think you are’ looks, which in all fairness was very nearly as good as the ones Rodney McKay gave out, but only nearly. “And I die.”
“Yup.”
“In the first chapter.”
“Almost the first paragraph even,” the Writer offered helpfully, “but I think I need a little time to set the scene before I kill you off.”
“And I come back to life again later I take it?”
“Err, no.” The Writer suddenly found her keyboard very interesting.
“What?”
“youstaydead.”
“I can still hear you.”
“whoops.”
There was a short pause while the Writer tried valiantly to think of ways to fend off a military grade archeologist and the archeologist tried to figure out a way to bribe his way out of what was apparently a very short cameo.
And then the timer rang.
The End.
Oddly it bothered her more that Kai had seen fit to provide her with a new wardrobe than it did that he’d swiped her cell phone and her keys. The later at least made sense, the former was just insulting. True, her jeans had been a bit worn around the edges and the sweatshirt had seen one too many art classes to really be called any specific color, but darnit, they were her clothes and she wanted them back.
In theory she should have been able to track them down, the house was large but it wasn’t that large. Even if she took it a room at a day she’d find them eventually. Only he’d put some sort of confusion magic on the hallways and she searched the same room three times before she realized what she was doing. It didn’t help that the decorating style for two-thirds of the mansion was ‘dust cloths and bubble wrap’. It looked like someone was in the process of moving in or out, and she hadn’t decided which way the enigmatic immortal was headed.
Well, at least not ‘out’ until the curse was lifted.
From the days (or more accurately hours) before Zee inherited the werewolf curse:
They ran through the city, the foreigner half-carrying, half-dragging Zee beside him. The crowds parted just enough to let them by, but didn’t seem to take much notice of the flight. In this section of the city contests between the residents and guards were common enough that few locals bothered to take sides. Once a street vendor grabbed for Zee’s shirt, but the fabric was so worn it simply tore. For once he was thankful for his mother’s miserly ways.
They paused only when the man had determined they were far enough ahead, ducking into a alleyway and then in through an unbarred door. Zee sagged against the wall, trying to catch his breath as the man slipped the heavy wooden beam across the door, then motioned for him to move farther into the darkened house. Any sounds of pursuit were masked by the heavy foot traffic, they’d only know they’d been found when the guards started battering the door.
| These snippits are copyright Martha McMahon Bechtel and may not be reproduced or distributed without express permission. All rights reserved. |
This is a rough of something, I think… *pokes story*
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“They found her in a room tied to a chair watching this whole bank of tvs; sports channels, pay per view matches, everything and anything you can bet on.” The officer shook his head as he led them through the hallways. “She had a stack of paper on this desk in front of her and there was this godawful tape repeating ‘Who will win?’ over and over… damned creepiest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“And they seriously thought she could tell them?” The detective was two seconds from turning around, going back to the real work waiting for him.
“Didn’t think,” the cop finally stopped by one of the doors, “knew.”
~*~*~*~*~
Continue reading
There is sound and there is noise and this hovers at the brink, their voices still a distinct thunder, not yet the overwhelming flood of full migration. By midmorning she’ll need her headset, earplugs, earmuffs, and other layered defenses against her prey, but for now she can just watch them pass unprotected.
There are few worlds that allow the luxury of size, most life is more akin to mice than elephants, but on the world they haven’t gotten around to naming, life started with elephant and worked up.
Only the outliers of the herd are up and moving with the sun, the core is still asleep, blanketing the grasslands in a patchwork of black and tan hide. It still takes her a bit each time she sees them to wrap her mind around the fact that the herd literally goes on to the horizon. They’ll strip the ground bare by the time the last of them passes, but less than a day after that everything is green again. No ecosystem should be able to support such overabundance, even temporarily, and the cycle of feast and famine seems too delicately balanced for her comfort. But this is Big World and they’ve just started digging into all it’s quirks and biological oddities.
The mud is deep this time of year, cold from the ice melt and thick as paste it tugs us back at every footstep. The king had wanted a omen, and apparently for once the mountain was happy to provide.
Whatever cheer the party had started with was long gone by the time they reached the sun rest. Only the king’s driving desire to see his questions answered by something more than mere mortals keep them climbing. Not that they hadn’t briefly debated the merits of letting him climb his own damn mountains without them, but the honor guard was the honor guard, little things like mud and weather weren’t supposed to slow them down.
There was the traditional petition of the mountain, followed by the traditional offering, followed by the traditional long ass wait as forces beyond their ken pondered the question. Or were just lazy. Right now the soggy, cold, and thoroughly bored honor guard was betting on lazy. It wasn’t completely unexpected for the mountain to take days deciding on a response, so they had already begun setting up camp at the base of the monument when the king came barreling down from the sun rest.
Apparently the mountain wasn’t too keen on the idea of railroad tunnels.
I hate stories with a twist. I especially hate stories where you can see the twist coming three words in, and this looked like it was going to be one of those stories.
“But he’s cute!” Sandy was right, the puppy was cute, but normal dogs don’t have magical auras that spark and fizzle in chaotic rainbows. I flattened my ears and rowled my opinion of of the demonic fluffball.
“Words!” She chided.
“I think this is a very bad idea.” I glared at the puppy who looked up at me with misplaced adoration. “There’s something wrong with it.”
“Wrong how?” To her credit, she did ratchet up her shields, if only a smidgen. Thankfully the pup seemed oblivious to the changes.
“It tastes of young magic,” the wild unpredictable sort that had popped up since the war. “I don’t think we found it.”
“You think it found us.” Sandy was the youngest of the company, both in terms of years in service and years alive, but she learned significantly faster than most of the older recruits. Still, she hadn’t actually put the puppy down yet. “So,” there was a pause, “so if it found us doesn’t that mean if I put it down it will just find us again?”
I hate these sorts of stories.
“Life is pain!”
“Good morning to you to.” Yoni rolled her eyes as Wilson died dramatically in the corner, apparently succumbing to the mind numbing horror of facing another day in the simulators. It would have been slightly more impressive if he wasn’t wearing what she could only assume was his best attempt at a red shirt costume from Star Trek. The clothing production capacities on the alien ship were impressive, but still required detailed descriptions for manufacture. This had left them with only basic clothing options, although those were rapidly expanding as the designers on board released new lines.
The rest of her team weren’t any more thrilled at the prospect of yet another day spent in virtual training, but at least they tended away from dramatics. Keller was decked out in his traditional ‘annoyance’ colors of line green and hot pink, while Anderson had opted for the more traditional pajama pants and bathrobe of indifference. Yoni was the only one who had bothered to wear anything vaguely mission appropriate, and she had only gone as far as jeans and a t-shirt.
Of course it didn’t matter what they wore, since the simulators would deck them out in the appropriate gear, but the remnants of Earth took a perverse joy in bucking the system as much as possible. Or they were just lazy, colorblind, and teenagers… Yoni wasn’t quite sure which.
“If you stop to think about it, we’re never going to get this done.”
Lorcan gave Neda a measured look, “And that’s a bad thing?” But he kept coiling the rope, counting out the knots in his head. “There might be another way.”
“We don’t have time,” Neda had gotten to fifty before him and was already lashing the rope to her pack. “If Bethany and the others think of something, they’ll take care of it. But for now,” she tugged on the straps to test the hold, “we’re the only chance they have of escaping the stormfront.”
“But we’ll be dead.”
Neda stopped, turning to give him her full attention. Lorcan didn’t look up from his counting, but he tensed in anticipation of the blow, eyes carefully averted. He hadn’t meant to say it, but the closer they got to the eye of the storm the looser his hold became.
There was a long silence and Lorcan cursed his lack of control. Neda wasn’t as bad as her father or her father’s father, but the Vocina temper bred true; thirty generations of dilution had done little to calm that fury. When she finally spoke, he braced himself against the expected pain.
“I rescind your oath.” Formal words, spoken in a language he’s assumed long dead, and he stumbled backwards in shock, feeling the collar crack. “I unbind your service.” The magic rose around them, cutting storm winds into a whirling vortex. “I release you, do as you will.”
And with that, six hundred years of servitude ended.
So here’s a thought, although a slightly overdone one: if vampires existed and everyone knew about them, what then? Assuming of course that these are vampires willing to ‘live in harmony’ and not the ones made from crazy-cake recipes.
1. People would put ‘vamp’ or ‘do not vamp’ in their living wills.
1a. Or medical bracelets.
1aa. Or tattoos. Continue reading
“So I’m some sort of mystical savior meant to prevent the world from certain doom.”
“Yes.”
“And I can’t tell my husband.”
“Right.”
“Because you’ll have to kill him.”
“Pretty much.”
“And you think I won’t stop you.”
“Well no, I think you’ll try–”
“Right.”
“–I just don’t think you’ll succeed. After all, there are hundreds of us and one of you.”
“I’ll kill all of you if you touch him–”
“But you’ll still save the world.”
“What?”
“Even if you kill all of us, because we’ve killed him, when the time comes you’ll still save the world.”
“No I won’t.”
“Really? You’d kill billions of innocent people because we did something we told you we would do?”
“You can’t kill my husband!”
“I’m hoping we don’t have to.”
“Well what if I tell everyone? You can’t kill everyone.”
“What?”
“If I go on TV, on the news and I tell everyone about this whole dammed mess–”
“Then saving the world stops being an option.”
“Why?”
“Look, let’s start with this. You agree not to tell anyone anything until we have a chance to explain it to you first. This is not a simple five minute explanation; we’re talking twenty hours of lectures, five hours of labs–”
“Labs?”
“Well I don’t expect you to believe it without proof.”
“Good point.”
“So do we have a deal?”
“Considering my apparent options are death, more death, or the end of the world: Yes.”
“It is possible to turn down a job, you know.” Angie leaned back in the chair, trying to stretch the kinks out of her lower back. “It’s not like we’re broke, exactly.”
“You just think it’s boring.” Valum banked the ship to the right and the ancient hydraulics complained in whistling grunts as the slings shifted under two tons of alien pilot.
“Because it is boring.” Angie leaned back far enough to brush his fluke with her fingertips. “People-cargo at least can hold a conversation, cargo-cargo is just more useless junk.”
“Junk that the consortium is willing to pay us handsomely to move from point A to point B.” Valum slipped the the ship into her berth with an unnecessary flourish that earned him a admonishing chirp from the docking computer. “Which we can use to upgrade the old mare, and maybe we’ll attract something other than the budget fares, eh?”
“I suppose.” Angie popped her chair upright and unclipped her suit from the control board. “You going for a swim?”
“I think I might.”
He sung something just at the edge of her hearing and the gravity slowly faded away, leaving him free to work loose of the pilots harness. She helped, where she could, although none of the controls were made for human hands. When he was free she triggered the pilots window and Valum swam out into space with a careful flip of his tail.
“Write when you get work!” She called after him, which earned her rude bubble of noise that the translator frantically bleeped over. Ah well, at least the space station should have someone interesting to talk to. In theory. With a sigh she twisted around to launch herself at the entrance to the docks. At least this time they wouldn’t run into Michael…
“I hate mornings.”
“No you hate having to get out of bed when it’s cold.” Kevin pointed out, “You had no problems getting up ungodly early when we were living in the islands.” He handed her a bowl of oatmeal as she glared at him.
“That wasn’t getting up early, that was getting up late.” Trish poked the oatmeal with a spoon, then sighed and started eating. “I hate mush too.”
“It’s nutritious mush, and when did I start being your mother?”
“When she turned off my alarm clock.” Bethany gave her daughter a less than amused look as she exited her own sleeping compartment. The planets low-g made moving inside the ship into a complex dance of vectors.
“You needed your rest!”
“What I needed was eight hours sleep. I got twelve.” Bethany took the offered bowl of oatmeal with a nod of thanks and slid into the dining nook with a practiced twist. “So how much did this cost us?”
“Lady Deep is a leviathan, not a whale.” Kevin pointed out, “She’s not going to leave just because we’re running a bit late.”
“I just wish she’d migrate already,” Trish tossed the now empty oatmeal bowl into the galley sink. “I miss the tropics!”
“I’m sure she’ll take that under advisement.” Bethany’s fingers danced over the touchscreen, skimming through reports send from Earth. “Now suit up, we’ve got a long day ahead.”
“You don’t find magic in an IHOP.” Wendy pointed a pancake laden fork at James with an annoyance just short of anger. “This isn’t some fairy tale adventure where second sight gives you an instant ability to find the mystic in the mundane.”
“So I’m just supposed to ignore the dragon that’s stealing sausage links?”
Wendy blinked, “What?”
“There’s a dragon right–” James leaned a bit to the left and then nodded at the table three booths behind Wendy, “–there and it’s stealing that guy’s breakfast.”
Wendy twisted in her seat, saw the chipmunk-sized dragon munching happily on Jimmy Dean sausages and sighed.
“So I’m not crazy,” James settled back into his seat, “good to know.”
“The point is still valid.” Wendy was glaring at the dragon who had frozen as soon as it had realized it was seen, sausage link still mid-chew. “You don’t see things like this in IHOP.”
The dragon grinned sheepishly, then bolted for the door, wings flapping valiantly as it tried to carry away its prize.
“Right.” But James counted his sausage twice, just to make sure.
“This isn’t a win-lose situation,” he adjusted the focus on the binoculars, “it’s more of a lose-lose.”
“Well then it’s win-win for the other guys.” She carefully unpacked the sniper rifle from its case. “Which is sad considering they don’t even know they’re playing.”
“Feel free to call them.” David scanned the parking lot, “I’m sure they’d love to know just how suicidal you’ve decided to be.”
“We’ve got a thirty-seven percent chance, that’s not suicidal, it’s just—”
“Stupid?”
“—Stubborn.” Amy finished putting together the last pieces of the rifle and turned to carefully unwrapping the unusual ammunition.
“Remind me never to ask what you consider stupid.” David’s breathing quieted and she could tell from the sudden stillness that he’d found their target. “Last chance to change your mind.”
“No man of woman born.” She slid the round home and took up position on the ledge beside David. “Lay on Macduff.”
“Second level, section C, tan Honda, wait for my signal.” He resettled himself, focus never leaving the target. “And less Shakespeare, more Die Hard.”
“Yippee-ki-yay Macduff?”
