Back of the Envelope

The next story is Everythinig Happens on Halloween by Darleen. It is quite a story, frightening in a way few stories manage. The ending made me go back over it, trying to piece together the clues, to see if I understand what's really going on. It may keep me up tonight.

Meanwhile, I have to compliment the author on just how well-told her story was. A lot of what makes a story scary involves not plot, but how it's told. I especially enjoyed the drawn out descriptions at the end, partly since I've just finished a similar scene in the sequel to Fire.

The next story I'm highlighting from the Storyblogging Carnival (just a reminder, I'm not highlighting them all--mine definitely won't be included, for example) is Victims of Slavery vs. Lloyd's of London. It's less of a story than a fictional court decision. It's told well, however, and it's very funny. Be forewarned, though: you may consider it highly offensive if you consider restitution for descendents of slaves a good idea.

The third story in the Storyblogging Carnival is When the Mind Hears. It's a short cliffhanger, powerful as well as confusing. Are you sensing a pattern here? None of the writers seems to want to tell us what the heck is going on. Now, I guess I'm not one to speak, as I like to incorporate plenty of mystery into my stories that I don't clear up until about midway through, but it's annoying when other people do it. Anyway, hypocritical pet peeve aside, it's a nice story, and I'm wondering whether the doctors are trying to cure the girl's deafness (I think she's deaf), or something else.

The next story is by Sheya Joie, called The Child, One. I think the One means part one, since if you click next, you'll be taken to The Child, Two. Doc Rampage thinks it's allegory, but I don't think I agree. Then again, I've only read part one out of eight so far, since that's what was submitted to the Carnival. It looks interesting--a nameless, amnesiac child left somewhere unfamiliar with just a single item as a clue. I'll wait to see whether part two is submitted to the Carnival next week before going on.

This time, rather than writing one post to discuss all the stories I found interesting in the Storyblogging Carnival, I'll take them one at a time in their own posts. First up, the entries from Jeremiah Lewis of Fringe. There are four of them, each exactly fifty words long, not including the title. I'm not sure how, or if, they fit together, but each one is cool in its own right. The brevity makes them compelling and mysterious, with plenty of unanswered questions.

Arsenic
Garrot
High Wire Fate
Rebellion

Very much worth reading, and it won't even take very long.

Doc Rampage is now soliciting stories for the next Storyblogging Carnival. If you have a story you wish to submit, send Doc the following information at doc-at-docrampage.net (replace -at- with @):

Name of your blog
URL of your blog
Title of the story
URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
A word count
A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
A short blurb describing the story
(OPTIONAL) Author name or pseudonym

I look forward to seeing you at the carnival!

I finally got around to reading all the stories in the latest Storyblogging Carnival. Yes, it took me a while, but I have to wait until the weekend to read the stories even when I'm hosting (only in that case, it's the weekend before--I do read all the stories before the carnival goes up). All the stories except one, I should say. I had to skip Marty Dodge's "Why I do..." story, since it was in audio format, for technical reasons. Those being that I'm on a dial-up connection and the file is 10 megabytes. It's a neat idea, and I'm all for it, but in the future it might be necessary to reduce the size of the file. I think that can be done relatively easily, since voice-only MP3's can have relatively low sample rates and still sound okay. Just a suggestion. I'm sorry I missed it too, as it was part of the Sage of Wales series and I'd like to read more about it.

I especially liked this story by Sheya Joie Yonathi. I'll admit I don't fully understand what's going on in the story, but the character portraits it paints are beautiful.

I thought this story by Gunner Miller, and the blog of which it forms the first post, were very interesting. This is what I meant about fictional blogging. The grammar in this first story is a bit spotty, but it improves in the later posts.

Doc has an entry, of course, set in the Mexican-American war. Well, no, not that one, the one which hasn't happened yet. And, no, I don't really know why we'd want to go to war with Mexico. That's the fun stuff about speculative fiction--you speculate.

Update: Oops, I forgot to mention Robin Jones's story, "Holy Spirit Warehouse." I wasn't sure how I felt about it until the last section, where things really picked up. A bit of a wait for the pay-off, but worth it.