Category: writing

Today from the No Shit ToC, I bring you a favorite of one of my slush readers: Leaving Bordeaux by Lou J. Berger.

On its face, Leaving Bordeaux has a similar feel to The Pursuit of Happiness: gritty, military-ish scifi. This one’s just got some added time travel in it, and the aliens are both less and more disturbing, depending on how you think about it. It rolls along, with battles, man pain, people smoking in silence, just like you’d expect.

And then you get to one sentence that you could probably miss if you were reading too fast. When I hit it, I burst out laughing and literally shouted: “Lou, you son of a bitch!”

This is the problem with this story. I love it, but if I tell you any more detail about why I love it, that’ll ruin the fun. I may have already said too much. Lou did an incredible job putting this story together and building it in just the right way. He made it just as long as it needs to be to make the denouement work well. And beyond that, the concepts he’s come up with for this world are fun.

But the punchline. The goddamn punchline. Hats off to you Lou. You got me fair and square.

Want to see what I’m trying so hard not to spoil? Support the kickstarter, and you get the anthology for as little as $5!

Ready for your daily dose of awesomeness from the No Shit ToC? It’s the generally titled Really, I’m Like St. Francis That Way, What With Holding Bird­Like Creatures And All by Adrian Simmons.

Really, I’m Like St. Francis That Way… is the most traditional No Shit, There I Was story in the entire anthology. It’s about an innocent guy who’s just trying to do the right thing, saving an alien creature from certain death from certain death in a hostile environment. And like anyone just trying to do something right, it all goes wrong at every turn.

I really don’t want to spoil the amusing series of events that this story encompasses, but what did it for me is the last line, the most traditional thing about a No Shit story. All this crazy stuff happened, and that is the reason why something almost completely unrelated occurs. You can easily imagine listening to this entire story of compounding mistakes while drinking a beer and nodding sympathetically. Adrian nailed the format and involved cute, fuzzy, alien creatures.

I’m a sucker for cute, fuzzy, alien creatures.

Think that sounds fun? Kickstarter is right here, and you can get 23 more very different stories for as little as $5!

As of this moment, we have two weeks left on the Kickstarter, with 279 backers and $1,248 left to go. We’re chugging right along. Just keep spreading the word around about the awesomeness from the ToC, and let’s make this book happen.

Speaking of the ToC, today’s offering is The Former Minion’s Support Group by Alanna McFall. This is a story that posits a universe where campy comic book supervillains with puntastic (think: old school Adam West Batman-style) evil plans are real, and so are the poor schlubs they’ve often abducted and forced to help them with their dastardly plots: the minions.

What makes this story stand out is that within the fun concept and nominally light-hearted villainy, there’s a real question about what this would do to actual human beings who have to deal with being minions. How badly would it mess someone up to be under constant threat of death by their overlord while attempting to train mind-controlled sharks how to sing a chorus of madness?

And that’s where the support group comes in. Underneath a slightly ridiculous veneer, there’s a respectful examination of trauma and coping mechanisms and recovery that we found remarkable.

This and the other stories on the No Shit ToC can be yours if you support the Kickstarter. Go, go, go!

Everyone likes Satan and dinosaurs, right?

Today from the No Shit ToC, I bring to you: The Devil’s Apprentice by Premee Mohamed.

This is another of those stories that crawled into my brain and left me feeling incredibly fucked up. It refused to let me go, and I had to put it in the ToC because, as a caring person, I need to share that sensation.

The Devil’s Apprentice is about a young man who becomes the Devil’s apprentice because how the hell else are you going to get a job in the current economy? And The Omen-style, he gets a familiar. Only very unlike The Omen, he doesn’t get a rottweiler: he gets a brightly-colored, tiny, carnivorous dinosaur. A tiny, carnivorous dinosaur who would like to eat him. Because the Devil is a giant asshole.

Premee’s writing is left me feeling so disoriented as I read this story; the description of Hell as something banally horrifying and incredibly surreal. Nothing works quite the way you expect it to. Nothing looks quite the way it should. It’s incredibly desolate and empty and too full and almost claustrophobic at the same time. Nothing in this story went as I expected it to, and it left an impression on me that I could not shake for weeks.

This story is strange and red with blood, not quite the opposite of yesterday’s story, but on another axis entirely. I can’t wait to share this one with you, so you should support the Kickstarter and make that happen! We’re in the home stretch, just $1300 left!

Sorry, I couldn’t fit the full title of the next No Shit story in the title field. That’s because the full deal is: How I Became Coruscating Queen of All the Realms, Pierced the Obsidian Night, Destroyed a Legendary Sword, and Saved My Heart’s True Love. 

When this story, by Matt Dovey and Stewart C. Baker, landed in the No Shit slush pile, it caused quite a stir, from the title alone. The jackalopes circled it warily, poking at it with their flint-tipped spears and squeaking amongst themselves. Could a story possibly live up to a title like that? Should it? We were all a little afraid to look at it, lest the illusion be shattered and our lives plunged into despair.

Then I got a message from one of the readers: you have to read this, it REALLY lives up to the title. I opened the file. Read the first line.

No shit, there I was, knee-deep in necromantic weasels in the lair of the mad wizard-king, when Korgar and Elutriel both decided it was time to win my affections once and for all.

I said to myself, “Okay, there is no fucking way they are going to stick the landing after a first line like that.”

Matt and Stewart stuck the landing.

There are so many reasons I love this story, which is like a D&D adventure gone horribly, wonderfully, hilariously wrong in a world that is utterly ridiculous and pretends it doesn’t notice how ridiculous it is whilst simultaneously winking at the reader. I’m still not over the legendary sword of the title, which is named “Hrrnngnngrrrndr, the Sword of a Hundred Thousand Agonies.” This story is non-stop, wall-to-wall gems like that.

I don’t know what kind of aberrant brain chemistry the writers might have been experiencing when they came up with all of this, but I devoutly pray that it happens again, and soon, because I need more incredibly fun, smart stories like this one in my life.

You want to read this story, so you should definitely support the kickstarter.

Welcome to a very special I got up at 0515 in the morning for a flight that has now been delayed until 0945 edition of my No Shit ToC blogging! My apologies in advance to both reader and the writer whose story I’m about to talk about, because I’m not sure how coherent I actually am right now.

Today’s story is The Pursuit of Happiness by William RD Wood. I mentioned before that we tended to classify our slush pile on scales between two stories. The Pursuit of Happiness has the (dubious?) honor of fighting to pin the “bleak” side of the tonal scale. (There’s another story it traded off with, which I’ll talk about on another day, and I’m still not sure which of them wins. Depends on what sort of existential despair I’m feeling at the time.)

The Pursuit of Happiness is a gritty, (quasi)military SF-with-more-than-a-dash-of-horror story that involves an alien invasion and a small squad of mercenaries just trying to get the hell out of Dodge. Spoiler, humanity isn’t exactly acing this encounter. But what made it stand out to me the most are the characters that William builds in the pages. I loved the dialog, the banter, the interactions, because it said so much about each of them and rendered lengthier exposition unnecessary. It’s a fun read with a deliberate pace. If there’s a military SF equivalent to hardboiled, William nails it.

And the aliens? Incredibly creepy.

And–well, if you want to know more, you’ll just have to support the Kickstarter and read the story. I’ve got a plane to board now. Hopefully. Wish me luck.

The No Shit ToC keeps on rolling, rolling, today with a really cool short story by Frances Rowat: Thou Unnecessary Letter.

There are several writers who got a little creative with the required opening line for the anthology, but Frances took it and ran off on the orthogonal. When I started reading the story, I had to wrench my brain around and turn my head sideways to understand what was happening. And then I got it, and it was like a dawning light.

The way one of the slush jackalopes described Thou Unnecessary Letter is: “Magical alphabet noir.” That’s about the most accurate way I could think to describe it, myself. It’s a story that you imagine in black and white as you read, in which everyone is smoking (even if they’re not) and unironically wearing classic hats.

I’m at a loss to describe more about this story because I love it, and so much of that love comes from discovering how Frances played with the idea, with the opening line, and telling you more about it would just ruin the delight of unfolding all the complexity that she somehow managed to hide in 2000 words. Every time I read it over, I find something new that makes me say think oh.

This is a story I’m actively jealous I didn’t write. (And I don’t think I could have.)

So if you want to know what I’m babbling about, you’re just going to have to support the Kickstarter and make sure all your friends do too, so you can read it.

Look at us, we passed 250 supporters! WOOOOOO!!!! 65% of the way toward our funding goal, and I’m not even halfway done telling you how awesome all of these stories are.

Today’s tale from the ToC is Incursion by RK Duncan, lovely Lovecraftian offering that stuck with those of us at No Shit Central. We all loved this story and refused to let it go.

We got a lot of stories in the No Shit Slushpile that followed the format of a person recounting past events to a listener, following the required line of course. The inherent weakness of stories like that is when it comes to maintaining the stakes, the tension. For example, you know the narrator didn’t get killed by the scary thing they faced, because they’re telling you the story.

Well, Robin put a twist on the format and then knocked it out of the park. The guy with the no shit story is the witness to an otherworldly incursion being interviewed after the fact, and it grips your attention. What happened? How does it work in with what else is going on? What does the interviewer want? The tension remains because the point of the story isn’t even necessarily what happened, but where it’s all going to lead.

I was personally a sucker for the atmosphere of the story, as a dedicated player of Arkham Horror. It has that same sort of feeling, rendered in prose, where it’s a mystery to be solved, a creepy adventure, and you already know that victory is not going to be without its very high price.

Support the Kickstarter, and have your Elder Sign handy.

Ever wonder how much of a pain in the ass it would be, to be the daughter of a goddess? One of many, many daughters of a goddess? This next story, The Goddess Whole by Heather Morris, has an answer for you.

There’s a lot that I love in this story. It’s got a compelling fantasy setting, one that feels very complete despite its short length. You can just feel how much there is under the surface, little details coming out and enriching the world without distracting from the narrative. And it starts out like a more traditional no shit, there I was story that starts the plot off, with our hero Caer listening in and jumpstarting her investigation into strange, godly goings-on from there.

I also like it because it’s a fantasy story that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Caer is exceptionally down-to-earth as a character, and being the walking, talking agent of the Goddess isn’t a trip in the park for her. There’s a certain dark humor to her situation and how she deals with it that really tripped off my amusement. When you’re one among many chosen ones and have to deal with the divine on a daily basis–a divine entity that is distracted, inattentive, and never gives you a good reason for what She wants–it must get wearing after a while. There’s also a real gritty earthiness to all of the characters that makes them very real and their situations, no matter how otherworldly in origin, very immediate.

It’s a fun story with an ending that makes me want to fistbump Caer. I think you’ll like it too, so you should support the Kickstarter and make sure you get a copy of the anthology!

Today’s treat from the No Shit Table of Contents is James Beamon‘s Episodes From the Abner-Mortimer Karmic War.

This story, y’all. This story. If Uranus Calling is the silliest story in the anthology, Episodes ties for the funniest. If you watched my video on the kickstarter, I mentioned we have some stories that are laugh out loud funny, and this is one of them. To be technical, this story made me laugh so loudly that it scared my cats and incapacitated me for several minutes.

Episodes From the Abner-Mortimer Karmic War is about two guys–Abner and Mortimer, as you might have guessed from the title–who really, really hate each other. With the seething, fiery passion of a thousand suns. And then some. And they are locked in an endless cycle of murder and revenge that neither of them are all that inclined to stop.

Now, murder and revenge might not sound that hilarious at first blush, but what makes this story is the karmic bit of it. Every time one of them dies, via revenge killing or natural causes, he is reborn… but not necessarily as a human. And it doesn’t matter what body he’s in: at some point he wakes up to the fact that his nemesis is somewhere in the world, and goes looking for him. Which ends up pitting man against snail, say, or seal against man. And the cycle repeats.

I’m not doing it justice. Because there is no way to accurately describe how hilarious James makes this concept without just transcribing the story for you. Instead, you should support the Kickstarter so you can read it for yourself. Just make sure you’re in an appropriate setting for loud guffaws, and not in the library, the quiet coach, or a church. I don’t want to be responsible for even the tiniest smudge on your karma, or any future encounters with vengeful snails.