"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
First things first: The cards drawn for February, 2022 were a Three of Hearts, a Four of Diamonds and a Two of Clubs corresponding to a Fan Fiction, set in a Pizza Parlor including a Sack of Potatoes.
So, Participants have until sometime next Monday (February 14th, Valentine’s Day) to write a fan fiction set in a pizza parlor with a sack of potatoes, 1,000 words or less. Everybody’s welcome to play!
Actually, take your time, do it whenever you want and the length is no biggie. Because this challenge is for fun! No pressure! Link your story to this blog or e-mail it to me or link it to my Facebook (where I’m posting it) or my (as Mike Mayak) Twitter, where I’m also posting it.
Special thanks to Jeff Ricker, Cait Gordon and ‘Nathan Burgoine who started and maintained this challenge for the past few years!
Well, good luck and I’ll see you with the results in a week!
——-jeff, a.k.a. mike
Oh, Yeah: Here’s the chart where I list all the choices for the draws! I’m no good at doing graphs online!
I haven’t done as much writing as I should but I have kicked it up a notch on the reading in the last month. Yesterday, I bummed through a paperback edition of a 1962 Y. A. anthology “Teen-Age Outer Space Stories” (Lantern Press, edited by A. L. Furman.) I remember this type of anthology; several stories from Boy’s Life Magazine, several others, none by authors even I recognized. (Probably one of Heinlein’s Boys Life tales would have cost too much!)
Most of the stories haven’t aged as well as one would think, but there was one delight: “Flying Teacup.” I found nothing about the author, Fred Gohman and the Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists no more credits, other than several editions of “Outer Space Stories” (as it was renamed.) http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?34638
“Flying Teacup” is told in first-person by young Kenny who lives near a classic whacky inventor. Any more would spoil this charming, lighthearted story. Just one more bit of information; that particular outer space story takes place largely on Earth.
The story is worthy of being reprinted in a contemporary anthology of comic science fiction, and there have been plenty of those!
As for the rest of my reading, I read a few short stories in the Greenberg co-edited anthology tie-ins with the Superman, Batman and Dick Tracy movies of several decades ago. As well as part of C. W. Grafton’s novel “The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope,” several of the stories in “The Women of Weird Tales” (Valancourt Books) and some of an anthology of the late Mike Resnick’s collaborations with Lezili Robyn: “Soulmates.”
Every week we post six lines from a work of ours, a work-in-progress or published, or a recommendation of someone else’s work with at least one LGBT character. Posted at Rainbow Snippets here:https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974
I got a nice response a few weeks ago for snippets from one of my stories about closeted Gay teenage runaway Bryce Going, out on his own after his Mom bails on him around 1975. In this one; “The Milk Grotto” Bryce thinks the police may be after him so he’s hiding in the basement of a nearby abandoned football stadium. He finds the basement inhabited by some men who are not what they seem…
I felt my way carefully down the stairs and stayed still, listening for any sounds from upstairs. Instead, I heard a rustling in the room with me. I stayed in the middle of the stairway, unwilling to walk into a basement of scurrying rats.
“Company,” a voice said.
“Don’t turn the lights on yet,” said another.
I heard a scuttling on the stairs behind me and I groped for the lights.
Here’s another snippet:
When my eyes adjusted to the light I realized this wasn’t the huge stadium basement I’d imagined in the dark; just a medium-sized storeroom lit by a bare bulb. I took that in in an instant as my major concern was the three men I saw standing at the bottom of the stairs, all wearing gray sweatpants and sweatshirts.
“We saw you running from next door,” one of the men said.
Also, the first few stories about Bryce have titles taken from the Biblical story of The Flight Into Egypt, which was the title of the first story and is part of the title of a full-length Bryce Going story I’m working on.
“What? Are you crazy?” Burt said. “Your Mom and Dad are…”
“Sitting down in the beer garden,” Ross said. “In another minute, the Ferris wheel will turn enough that we’ll be hidden behind the building and nobody can see us.”
“But everybody can see…” Burt started to say.
“Not up this high if we don’t hang out the edge of the car.”
“But we’re…” Burt said.
“Do you love me?” Ross asked. His eyes were wide and his lower lip was shaking a little.
“Yeah, yeah I do.” Burt said. They’d never said that aloud before.
Ross’ Mom and Dad had driven the two teenagers over to the county fair. Neither of them had a car yet. Ross stretched his legs and Burt stared at his bluejeans-covered thigh.
The Ferris wheel creaked as it started moving again. For a moment they were at Twelve O’clock. Then One O’clock. Then it stopped at the Two O’clock position.
Ross glanced over at the building that filled their field of vision.
“Okay…now,” Ross said.
The two young men embraced and kissed. It wasn’t the first time but it was the closest they’d come to kissing in public. Certainly not in this little town at their rural high school.
They hadn’t started by embracing, but Burt moved his hand behind Ross’ back. Ross rested his hand on Burt’s leg. It felt like the stars, Sun and Moon were swirling around them.
Then the Earth moved.
The Ferris wheel started up again with a “clunk.” Burt and Ross sat back in the seat, sure they’d heard an electric pop when they pulled their lips apart. They grinned at each other.
The wheel turned and the two of them stepped off trying to look like two high school buddies looking for popcorn, girls and games while maybe talking about college.
“My Dad’ll kill me. I mean, really.” Burt said.
“Yeah, my folks too.” Ross said.
“I turn 18 next summer.” Ross said.
“I’m 18 in March,” Burt said.
“We get out of town as soon as we both can,” Ross said. “After we graduate.”
“Yeah.” Burt said.
They ran into one of Burt’s cousins who was at least in her 40s and would be in the area forever.
“You boys having a good time?” she asked.
They looked at each other and grinned.
“Yeah,” they said.
Next summer seemed so far away.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This story just popped into my head and went a little differently than I imagined. I thought I hadn’t put enough detail in it or that I should leave it at a cliffhanger. But I think it’s fine the way it is. And I borrowed the title from Ray Bradbury’s fine story “The Black Ferris.” ——–jeff February 1st, 2022
Every week we post six lines from a work of ours, a work-in-progress or published, or a recommendation of someone else’s work with at least one LGBT character. Posted at Rainbow Snippets here:https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974
I’ve been writing at least one story a week since mid 2016 and this is from the most recent. I had a full-length version of this plotted out a few years ago but it is too much like a recent episode of “Ghosts” so I did the shortened version here. Our narrator, Billy Gonzalez, has appeared in several of my stories and has a knack for stumbling across the supernatural. Here, he’s the designated driver for Marv, a ghost who died in 1949 and haunts the house Billy’s college buddy Jayce is renting. Jayce agrees to let Marv temporarily take over his body so he can go to a local bar.
Here’s the first snippet:
The waitress came over and took our order. Small pitcher of beer, glass of cola for me, order of chips and dip for both of us. Marv gave the waitress who took our order a backward glance like he hadn’t seen a woman in seventy years.
“I’ve seen girls,” he said pouring his beer, “but I haven’t had a body to feel like I’m seeing girls since 1949.” He raised his glass and I raised mine. He drained the glass in a couple of gulps and poured himself another.
Okay, here’s another snippet:
Jayce and I used to drink beer on weekends when he lived in the dorm. We even made out a couple of times, but we never talked about that and I always wondered whether he remembered.
Marv took the next couple of glasses pretty slow, just looking around the bar and gawking. He really hadn’t seen a big-screen TV in operation before and was impressed. Not so much by the music.
“Last time I went out with my buddies they were still playing a lot of Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby, I don’t go for a lot of this Rocking Around the Clock stuff,” he said.
I wasn’t out drinking with the ghost but I was the designated driver.
I’d been at a couple of parties at Jayce Mackey’s’s house. He’d started renting it my Junior year in college. One of those old bungalows between thirteenth street and the river. Little but cozy. And of course, it was haunted.
The ghost in question was Marvin, a twenty-something who looked pretty normal if you could see him. Sometimes things like that happened to me. I thought I should have gotten some cards printed out: “Billy Gonzalez: Weird Stuff a Specialty.” Jayce could see him too, probably because he was renting the house. Or maybe he’d hung out with me for too long.
Like I said. Weird stuff.
Marv was (or had been) a pretty nice guy. He said he’d been gunned down a couple of blocks away back in 1949 and had been buried in a construction site when they were adding the big sun porch onto the back of this house.
Jayce and I had both offered to dig Marvin’s remains up or call the police but Marv always said that it was too late for the police to do anything about it.
“The time to call the cops would have been before they pulled the guns on me,” he would joke.
Marv didn’t give a lot of details about the afterlife, mainly because he said he didn’t know many. All he knew was that he had to sort of “hang around the area for a while.” Largely he went unnoticed by anybody else. Sometimes he’d walk a few blocks away and wander through some of the shops and restaurants they’d built on the intersection. “When I got into town, that was all undeveloped land,” he said.
It was spring of that year when Marv suggested going out for a beer. Something he hadn’t done in a long time, and had never done in Kansas. But the suggestion went a lot further than that. Marv wouldn’t be able to have any beer unless he had me as his designated driver (he said he’d heard the term on television) and borrowed Jayse’s body for a few hours.
“That’s about all I can do,” Marv said.
There was something more than a little creepy about the idea, but it must have appealed to Jayce’s sense of adventure, so he agreed.
Jayce had Thursday off so I met them at the house Wednesday evening. Jayce was wearing his old college sweatshirt and jeans. Marv looked like he usually did; tousled reddish hair, white button-down shirt, black slacks and shoes and a suit jacket that had gone out of style when Eisenhower was alive.
“So,” I said standing there awkwardly in the living room. “We ready to do this?”
Jayce took a deep breath and breathed it out.
“Yeah.” Jayce said.
“Give me a moment,” Marv said. He stood there and shut his eyes, maybe gathering strength, reminding me for a moment of a stage mystic I’d seen. Then he walked over to Jayce, walked into Jayce, who shuddered and blinked a couple of times.
Jayce (or he looked like Jayce) looked up at me and grinned. “Yeah, this feels good.”
“How long are you staying in there?” I asked.
“I can manage it for about four hours, Billy.” Jayce/Marv said.
Okay,” I said heading out to the car. “Hey, is Jayce still in there? And what do you call you?”
“He’s kind of asleep. And just call me Marv,” Marv said out of Jayce’s mouth. He stood on the porch for a minute and then fumbled in Jayce’s pockets pulling out the house key. He grinned and locked the door.
Quentin’s Bar and Grill was a local place with good food and beer. When we walked in the sun had set and the music was loud and so was the big screen in one corner. We sat down in a booth and Marv pulled out his, I mean Jayce’s wallet.
“This round is on Jason,” Marv said.
The waitress came over and took our order. Small pitcher of beer, glass of cola for me, order of chips and dip for both of us. Marv gave the waitress who took our order a backward glance like he hadn’t seen a woman in seventy years.
“I’ve seen girls,” he said pouring his beer, “but I haven’t had a body to feel like I’m seeing girls since 1949. Cheers.” He raised his glass and I raised mine. He drained the glass in a couple of gulps and poured himself another.
“Hey, take it easy,’ I said.
“I really haven’t done this in a long time,” Marv said. “I’ll be okay.”
Jayce and I used to drink beer on weekends when he lived in the dorm. We even made out a couple of times, but we never talked about that and I always wondered whether he remembered.
Marv took the next couple of glasses pretty slow, just looking around the bar and gawking. He really hadn’t seen a big-screen TV in operation before and was impressed. Not so much by the music.
“Last time I went out with my buddies they were still playing a lot of Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby,” he said. “I don’t go for a lot of this Rocking Around the Clock stuff.”
Whatever was playing was more heavy metal grunge than anything else.
We were going to be here a while. When the waitress passed by I ordered a chicken quesadilla with lots of guacamole.
Marv kept drinking and talking, telling me about the women he dated and the gangsters he’d worked for and the gangsters who shot him up. I ate my quesadilla and checked out some of the guys in the bar which was fairly busy for a Wednesday night.
Within an hour and a half Marv was plastered. I figured I would be able to walk him out to the car. Then he mumbled something about needing to go to the men’s room and having not peed since 1949. Then he tried to stand up, slipped back in his seat and then Marv, the ghostly Marv in his 1940s outfit stepped out of Jayce who was still sitting there.
“Aw, man!” Marv said, standing by the booth shaking his head. Nobody seemed to notice him. Some guy heading for the pool table walked right through him.
Jayce sat there looking bewildered. Then his eyes bulged, his cheeks puffed and he bent over and unloaded whatever he’d eaten onto the floor.
Swell.
I apologized to the owner, luckily I’d been in there a few times before and knew everybody. Besides I was the designated driver. I left the waitress a big tip and helped Jayce out to the back seat of my car. We drove back to his house with Jayce groaning in the backseat and a totally sober Marv singing old songs my grandparents knew.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I plotted out a longer version of this several years ago. It bears too much of a resemblance to an episode of the new series “Ghosts.” So, I’m offering the short version here!
Every week we post six lines from a work of ours, a work-in-progress or published, or a recommendation of someone else’s work with at least one LGBT character. Posted at Rainbow Snippets here:https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974
This is from an unintended series that started from a picture prompt on Friday Flash Fics Facebook page. I worked in a mall food court about xxx years ago and set this story in a magical version of that.
In these snippets; Skid and T’amec are platonic friends working at the Food Garden Court when their boss has them try to get rid of a nest of Fae…I called this one “There Are Faeries At The Bottom of My Garden.” (I over-use song titles as titles, I know!)
Here’s snippet one:
“Uh, I think the fae did something to me,” T’amec said. “I can only do things when you tell me to, like grabbing the nest and helping you take it out or following you to the office.”
Skid stared, yeah, he did tend to tell people what to do.
“Let’s test this.” Skid cleared his throat; “do a handstand, now.”
T’amec quickly jumped to the ground and stood on his hands, something Skid hadn’t known he could do, holding the position for a moment, shaking and sweating.
Here’s snippet two:
Luckily, there was an Augury shop in the adjoining ShopCourt. The Assistant Prophet called one of the Sorcerers from their stockroom, a young kid with a scruffy goatee and the name of some instrumental group on his tunic. After an hour of analysis and scanning, the Sorcerer announced that T’amec must have had an encounter with some fae.
“We know that,” Skid said. “But what can you do about it?”
“Not a lot,” the Sorcerer said, “this sort of binding is pretty unbreakable and it can’t be changed, but you and the bindee can.”
Okay, one more snippet:
“Use the opposite of sunlight,” the Sorcerer said. “And make a profession of fealty, under the moonlight.”
“What, get married?”
“It would probably be enough if you just kissed,” said the Sorcerer.
“Him?” T’amec asked. “I mean, he’s kind of cute but I’m not ready to settle down.”
Author’s Note: The prompt pic this week showed a Buddhist Monk rapt in study. I translated this to a different setting as I hadn’t visited my World of Three Moons in a while.
Iatros Ti-abb rubbed his eyes. He had been staring at the scroll for hours. He looked up. The candles had been lit, Iatros had not noticed the young servitus enter with the fire sphere.
He shook his head. Gods who speak only to slaves, gods who speak to kings, gods who devour their worshipers as sacrifices, gods who express displeasure at offers of such sacrifice. And nothing in the scroll of the gods who answer those who seek.
The Vengeful one, the Watchful Ones, the Knower of Many Worlds. There were scrolls covering all these and more. Iatros was just a few steps away from tossing the scroll he was reading into the corner. Nothing that could help him.
He glanced directly upward. The zenith of the dome had the carving of the three Moons ascendant. One of the thick glass panels to the side would let them get hit by real moons light every now and then.
“Names of the Moons,” Iatros whispered silently looking upward. “I seek. That is all; I seek.”
He closed his eyes and looked down. He hadn’t expected a response.
But there was one.
There was an echoing, booming in his ears.
After another moment he stood up, dropping the scroll.
One of the young servitus’ ran up to Iatros.
“Seeker of Wisdom, what is the matter?”
Iatros smiled and stared upward.
“Nothing is the matter,” he said. “For the first time in millennia, everything is right.”
Iatros looked around, seeing everything as if it was new.
“You may tell them,” Iatros said, “that the Enlightened One is here.”
Ron Goulart. Comic book historian, expert on pulp fiction and a master of blending humor with science fiction, fantasy, horror and mystery, has died just after his 89th birthday.
I never met Ron Goulart, never communicated with him on line but I heard him nonetheless. Sometime in the 1970s I read one of his histories of comic books. Then in the late 1980s I started reading genre short stories, and encountered a library book “The Best Horror Stories From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.” In it was Ron Goulart’s story “Glory.” I’d read funny vampire stories before. And I’d read stories that meshed vampires and Hollywood. But never one that blended them all into a screwball brew. In the decade or so when I read all the genre anthologies he became one of the influences on my writing.
Only Goulart would have written “Please Stand By,” about a man cursed with turning into an elephant on national holidays.
The wink at Hollywood was practically a Goulart trademark. From his mystery novels with detective Groucho Marx, his mystery series about Hix, set during Hollywood’s Golden Age (Hix is after enough money to get married with!) Los Angeles was also a setting (and frequent target) of his stories.
He also blended fantasy, science-fiction and mystery and was nominated for the Edgar Award in 1971 for his science-fiction novel “After Things Fell Apart.”
Ron Goulart may be almost as well known for his opening lines in his stories and novels. He had worked in advertising and learned about grabbing the reader’s attention early on.
“Twenty-six million people saw them die, and that’s not counting reruns.”
“On the eleventh take, something made the assistant director float up in front of the camera.”
“I was hardly there when the electric dishwasher grabbed me.”
This is one from what has become my favorite series to write, about a kid who calls himself “Bryce Going.” When Bryce’s Mom bails out on him (his Dad is out of the picture) Bryce hits the road. He may be big for his age (about sixteen) but the mid-1970s are no time to be even a closeted Gay teenager in a boy’s home. So, he lies about his name and age and has a few paid-under-the-table jobs and a lot of very strange encounters. This one when he’s washing dishes in a back kitchen and living in a storeroom upstairs where Bryce has taken notice of the muscles of the cook Aegir, whose arms are decorated with tattoos with images of the sea.
It was one afternoon after the lunch rush that I was washing pots and pans in the big metal sink when I heard Aegir singing a sea chanty. As I kept on washing the pans the water started to slosh around by itself, reminding me of the sea. Aegir’s song kept rising and falling and suddenly I felt the floor move up and down as if we were on a ship. And now the wind was rising and I could smell the salt air. I looked out the window; the back room was tilting like a ship at sea; the view from the window kept rising and falling. I quickly ducked out the back door and staggered over to lean against the dumpster; there was no wind, no sea-smell, no rising and falling.
I probably talk too much about some of these, but I see the subconscious influence of Manly Wade Wellman, a writer I hugely admire and highly recommend.
authorjeffbaker 