Category: Miscellaneous Shorts

We go from the shortest story of the collection to the longest. Hopefully quality is inversely correlated. I know that if I tried to write a story in, like, seven pages, it wouldn’t go very well. I need space to develop ideas and let a slow burn get through the wick. Of course, this has led to my decision to just not release any stories under 25,000 words in length, and I usually aim for 50k-100k, because that’s the area where I’m at best, but hey, I had to write a lot of short stories that sprawled into 50k+ novellas before I figured that out, and I could see a timeline where I’d decided I really needed to commit to the short story thing and wound up writing some of those, and that they would be worse the shorter they were.

So that’s an entire paragraph of me procrastinating having to actually start reading, which is definitely not a good sign.

The aromas of rum and sweat wafted about him with blood and black powder just beneath the surface.

There it is, guys, that’s the smell of pirates, case closed. For serious, though, this is a pretty good opening line, especially in tandem with the title.

That balance was subject to change, of course, depending on the ever-changing winds and where they blew him.

But here it’s kind of belaboring the point.

Anyway, this story opens with a pirate leaving a tavern to find some noble girl walking around near the docks after nightfall, whereupon she is accosted by a gang of hoodlums. The pirate decides he would rather be the one raping her instead. This coming right on the heels of a story about the guy who can’t sleep which immediately disregarded its premise to instead be about some mediocre efforts at comforting an assault victim, this collection is coming across as having a very weird prefixation with sexual assault. Come to think of it, the last short story collection I read, from a completely unrelated group of authors with a completely unrelated topic, also had a weird prefixation with sexual assault. Is this just a hot-button issue that everyone wants to write about these days? Is it just a fundamentally compelling idea that people tend to land on when they don’t have any better ideas? It definitely doesn’t crop up in the best works nearly as often.

Continue reading “Leaves of the World Tree: The Smell of Pirates” →

While I’m waiting for Conan the Indomitable to arrive, let’s take a look at another of the short story collection in Leaves of the World Tree. This one starts off reasonably interesting:

3 is the loneliest number. At 12, the people with work the next day are done hanging and head home. At 1 the reckless are partying strong. At 2, you can still find someone to talk to. Friends exist at 2. If you aren’t still hanging out at 3, no one wants to start. It’s too close to 4. People need to sleep. But I guess I’m not exactly “people.”

And then immediately faceplants:

If there is no rest for the wicked, I guess you can call me Doctor Doom. I’m being facetious, of course. I have no castle in Latveria. No robot army at my command. No, I’m quite alone most of the time. Then again, you don’t really understand what “most of the time” means for me. Not yet. Perhaps I should explain.

This whole paragraph is basically white noise in which our narrator gives us a metaphor and then explains why the metaphor does not apply. But if you haven’t figured it out, our narrator is immune to sleep. This story is going to try and convince me that this is one of those blessings that is actually a curse, and the obvious way to do that would be to have the narrator in a constant state of lethargy. If you never really need to sleep but are constantly in that state where you’re too tired to really focus, that would be terrible. It’s kind of like never needing to eat but always being hungry. Sure, you save a lot on groceries, but it’s not really worth it, is it?

But no, the narrator never gets tired at all, and takes advantage of this to work out a lot:

For one, I’m ripped as fuck. You would be too if you were never tired, and had twice as much time as you do now.

“Twice as much.” People only sleep one third of the time, unless they’ve got some kind of disorder.

More importantly, the narrative is trying to convince me that the downside to not having to sleep is being lonely all the time. I guess maybe this guy is an extreme extrovert, but even so, there’s still like twenty hours of the day where someone’s awake, and that’s assuming this clearly modern story takes place sometime before the internet era, when you can get into chat rooms or (in the past 5-ish years) voice chat with anyone at any time.

Continue reading “Leaves of the World Tree: 3 AM” →

Leaves of the World Tree is a book gifted to me by its author in hopes of a review. That was, like, half a year ago, because this blog is not always the best at updating. But what I lack in alacrity, I make up for with implacable determination.

Olaff

Leaves of the World Tree is a short story collection, and if I recall the author’s pitch correctly, each story takes place in a different time period. Story the first is called “Olaff,” and takes place in a time before creativity had been invented.

Like many Olafs before him, he was named Olaff. It was not a bad name by any means. He shared his name with four others born that year, and he would share it with seven the year after. Olaf was then, as it had been before, and would be for generations to come, a common name.

This is the first half of our opening paragraph. These are the lines that have to sell an audience on the first page. Now, reading one page isn’t a huge imposition and it’s not that hard to convince your audience to do it, but even so, “our protagonist has a common name” isn’t a strong foot to be starting on. It is only half the opening paragraph, though. Here’s the rest:

It was as though his parents had expected him to be average. Growing up he never felt as though he were different from the other boys. He was not scrawny and smart, or muscular and dumb, nor better or worse at most things. He threw the axe at the tree and hit five times out of ten, and his spear landed smack in the middle of everyone else’s. It was only when they taught him how to write his name that he realized he was unique. His mother, being the literate one, had spelled his name with an extra “f.”

Apparently the society Olaff is from is one with a perfectly centered bell curve of throwing axe proficiency. So at least we’re setting our story firmly in some kind of viking-ish era. That’s not nothing. Here’s the rest of the first page:

Not every day was spent sprinting into battle. Like most of his days, he spent one in particular rowing. He sat on a long bench in the center of a large group of benches that were nearly identical and only distinguishable by their varying degrees of mold. As could be expected, if anything at all could be expected of such a regular person, he sat in the middle. Smack in the middle of everyone else, on his bench, between Vjolf and Bjorvak.

This story has spent a lot of time letting us know how boring and unexceptional the protagonist and his life is, and if I hadn’t gotten a review copy of the book, I would be strongly considering not reading any further. Lucky for our author, I did get a review copy of the book, so we’re gonna see if this story is boring all the way through or just a slow burn. Well, not really lucky for our author. He sent it to me, so it wasn’t really luck so much as a direct and predictable result of actions he took.

Continue reading “Leaves of the World Tree: Olaff” →

I think the entire Humble Bundle I just got might just be short story anthologies, which is certainly fine by me for purposes of blog fodder. Today’s story comes from the Final Frontier, which is a collection of stories that would be Star Trek episodes if Smart Publishing had the Star Trek IP.

Not that all stories necessarily follow the Star Trek format of being a ship exploring on behalf of some more-or-less utopian space communists. The first story opens with this line, for example:

You keep a low profile when you’re in oxygen debt. Too much walking about just exacerbates the situation anyway.

This is definitely a planet that the Enterprise would visit somewhere outside of Federation space. The whole theme of the first few pages is that space is super inhospitable, which has the obvious-in-hindsight consequence that being poor really sucks in space. Whereas on Earth, limited access to water is almost always a clear sign of corporate abuse and limited access to air is unthinkable, in space, that stuff has to be imported, which means someone is shipping it out here, and that guy needs a paycheck. This is the kind of place where you’d like to have some government intervention so that everyone gets to breathe courtesy of taxpayer dollars, but absent that, your debt grows with literally every breath you take.

Our protagonist is “Alex” and the story is written first person, so I have no idea whether they’re male or female. The setup is that Alex is running up a big air debt, and the harbormaster of the station they stay on is having difficulty justifying letting Alex continue to run up that debt. The alternative is usually to go into hibernation and only be thawed out for guaranteed work until they’d built up enough spare funds to buy their contract back. It’s left unclear what the effects of long-term hibernation would be. Do you still age? Can you go crazy from it? Either way, Alex isn’t looking forward to it. The harbormaster does have an alternative, though.

Continue reading “The Final Frontier: A Jar of Goodwill” →

Blood Sisters is an anthology of vampire stories written by women, and it’s worth noting that they consider “written by women” to be a cover-worthy selling point. I’m always skeptical of anthologies that advertise themselves with “written by [demographic],” because even if you are trying to give more writing opportunities to [demographic], you have presumably selected authors who are actually good at their job and who can be advertised on their own strength. I got this one as part of a Humble Bundle and I’m gonna dive into it here principally because it’s a short story anthology so I can pick one, write a blog post about it, and then move on to another book if I feel like it.

Something about the first story in the book, A Princess of Spain, was so immediately boring to me that I decided to skip to the second story in the anthology, Shipwrecks Above. I’d tell you why, but I have no idea. For all I know it’s a perfectly good story, but that first paragraph somehow just repelled my eyes beyond what would be reasonable for text to accomplish.

Shipwrecks Above, though, opens with this:

This one, she rides the tides. She has been hardly more than a shade drifting between undulating stalks of kelp, and she has worn flickering diadems of jellyfish, anemones, and brittle stars. The mackerel and tautog swap their careless yarns of her.

Fish are spreading rumors about some drowned undead? I have no idea what this has to do with vampires, but I’m down to find out.

A few paragraphs into the backstory of this drowned woman, we set the tone for the story:

Her father and lover, her self-appointed Lord in all matters of this world and in any to come hereafter, ferried her high into the Carpathian wilderness, up to some crumbling ancestral fortress, its towers and curtain walls falling steadily into decrepitude. It was no less a wreck than the whalers and doggers, the schooners and trawlers, she has since sung to their graves on jagged reefs of stone and coral. And it was there, in the rat-haunted corridors of István’s moldering castle, that she did refuse this dæmonic paramour. All his titles, battlefield conquests, and wealth were proved unequal to the will of a frightened girl. When he had raped her and beaten her, he had her bound and, for a while, cast into a deep pit where she believed that the Archangel Michael, bringer of merciful Death, might find her and bear her away from this perdition unto the gilded clouds of Heaven.

What buy-in the opening paragraph managed is rapidly wilting. The only thing the story particularly has to say about incestuous rape and torture so far is that it sucks, so we certainly appear to be in full edgelord mode here, something that I’d suspected might happen in a vampire anthology. This is the kind of story where a story about human evil is confused for a story contrived to be maximally evil.

Continue reading “Blood Sisters: Shipwrecks Above” →