Category: writing

There’s a lot of fun to traditional ghost stories, the kind you could imagine telling around a campfire while someone is torturing a bag of marshmallows by running them through with pointy sticks. (Optional Colorado addition: passing around the local microbrew.) The next offering from the No Shit ToC puts me in mind of just that: Rudy’s Revenge by Anne M. Gibson.

The story expands on the origin of a haunted pinball machine, and involves a circus side show, the strong man, the witch doctor, and a total asshole of a clown. (Clowns automatically make everything creepier.) What I liked about the story was how atmospheric it is. There’s a solid sense of environment, of the characters, and with a real economy of words that honestly makes me jealous as a writer. You can practically smell the popcorn and cotton candy mixed in with a humid night at a fairground.

Even better, the pinball machine in question actually does exist. Well, as in that pinball machine design exists. I can’t really say one way or another if it’s actually haunted. The Williams Funhouse pinball machine is a real thing with a real animatronic talking face named Rudy, and he’s real creepy if you ask me. I found this cool video covering all the features and modes of the pinball machine.

Sound like spooky fun? (It is.) One more reason to support the No Shit kickstarter and get the anthology!

We’re back to the sillier and much more literal side of the No Sh!t Table of Contents: I’m Not Taking This Phantom Crap Anymore by David Jón Fuller. In this case, the problem is literally no shit–crap is mysteriously disappearing from the outhouses of a bunch of quaint little lakeside cabins. And it’s up to the intrepid Kristoff with his husband Dale in tow to solve the mystery before all of the missing crap mysteriously reappears at the worst possible moment and in the worst possible place. (As if there’s a good place for several tons of human feces to suddenly pop into existence.)

This story is fun, a sort of Nancy Drew and the Case of the Missing Crap if Nancy was actually a gay Canadian man who investigates otherworldly mysteries using psychic powers activated by knitting.

Yes, you did read that correctly. Kristoff’s appetite for yarn cannot be denied. His poor husband seems resigned to having his sweaters sacrificially unraveled now and then.

The otherworldly forces behind the crap wandering off are something I found personally amusing for a myriad of reasons, but I don’t want to give them away. You’ll just have to support the Kickstarter and read the story yourself. I finished this story hoping that there are more adventures of Kristoff (he does mention a werewolf problem, maybe David will tell us more about that some day, hint hint David) since he would make a wonderful hero to follow while curled up under a blanket, a mug of hot chocolate close to hand.

So what do you call it when aliens are trying to change Earth to be more hospitable to them? Certainly not terraforming.

Today’s offering from the table of contents of the No Shit, There I Was anthology is If You’re Hearing This, I’m Already Dead by Sunil Patel. This story stands out for a lot of reasons; first off, it’s a first person, stream of consciousness monolog, a step apart from even the couple of more traditional No Shit stories that made it into the anthology.

I love what Sunil did with this story, because it’s got many trappings that could be read as outwardly silly–the invading aliens are named Graxians, you can kill them with peppermint oil–and leaves no question how deadly serious the stakes and circumstances are for the story’s hero. There’s a driving sense of urgency through this story that never lessens. You’re on the edge of your seat the whole time, listening to Tamika trying to figure out what’s happening, what she’s going to do, what she even can do about the desperate situation on Earth. It’s not an easy thing, to maintain this level of tension in a story like this, when you’re basically having a character sit in one place and unfold the past for the reader, but Sunil does it perfectly. You never know what Tamika’s going to say next.

And Tamika herself is a wonderful character–a black girl who has brilliant wit, wisdom, and a razor-sharp mind on her side, but she’s also just one girl against an alien invasion. And her determination will leave you wanting to cheer and break your heart at the same time.

Shut up, I’m not tearing up, you’re tearing up.

If you support No Shit, There I Was on Kickstarter, you’ll get to meet Tamika, the bravest girl on Earth. She’s well worth knowing.

So in an anthology titled No Shit, There I was, there have got to be some classic “no shit” stories, right? At least you’d hope so–and don’t worry, you’re not hoping in vain! We’ve got a couple that are definitely tales of strange happenings that lead to an odd and hilarious conclusion.

The first of these is Lo, He Has Risen, by Linda Tyler. You start off right in the head of a woman of a certain age who’s attending a Church of England service, enjoying the “bells and smells” routine. Then the comforting cultural theater is interrupted by an apparition of her deceased neighbor, and thing gets a bit silly.

I loved this story because it’s so indefatigably British. You can just hear it from the first words of the narration, read it in the way all of the characters react and interact because of mischievous ghost.There’s just something to this nice lady looking around her church that you couldn’t imagine an American doing. There’s a sly, wry sort of humor about the goings on that can’t be denied.

The best part is the way the ghost that brings people together, which I am not going to spoil for you–you’ll just have to read it, but all of the slush jackalopes were just tickled. The story is absolutely charming, and for the price of two cups of tea at a local cafe, you can support the kickstarter and have a copy of the book for yourself!

Your space ship has crash landed on a strange moon with a corrosive atmosphere. You are alone. You can talk to yourself–but you don’t like yourself all that much at this point–or you can talk to the odd, alien animals that flit through the stinging air, which look like nothing so much as silver fish.

This would make you the protagonist of Sarah Tchernev’s story, Silver Fish, the next offering from the No Sh!t, There I Was anthology. Life’s not being kind to him. On the other hand, he’s richly earned this particular fate.

I like a good character study , where the plot is internally driven and the external more a reflection of the conflicts and changes happening within. This story stuck with me because it has that arc like Cast Away, where it’s a single person against a hostile environment, only in this case the greater enemy is the one within, guilt and regret and the realization of mistakes that cannot be undone.

But what pushed this story into the “I will have this!” folder was Sarah’s use of language. There’s a dreamlike quality to the distant moon she creates, the choking atmosphere and the waving plants, the alien fish swimming through the unbreathable air. It’s like watching a human flounder around in a fish tank without a diving suit and then slowly developing gills–or at least believing he has.

It’s belief that’s the most dangerous, after all.

From this strange moon in the back end of known space to Uranus, this anthology is going to take you some strange places, guaranteed. It just needs a little kickstart.

For today’s dip into the table of contents of this anthology (hey, we’re halfway to our goal! KEEP GOING!) I have for you Uranus Calling by Devyani Borade.

As you can imagine, with an opening line like No shit there I was, we got a number of submissions from writers who took it a bit literally. And I’m not going to lie, the best of those stories are represented in the anthology. I’M ONLY HUMAN, PEOPLE, WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME.

Devyani went a step beyond though, a free association from shit to farts to butts to the planet Uranus, and the results are hilarious. (In our heart of hearts lives a five year old child.) The gassy heroine of Uranus Calling, Tina, receives an urgent distress call from Uranus (no, really) and must produce a Clever Plan to save the planet from a terrible fate after flying there in her inflatable spaceship with her obnoxious cousin Tommy.

The absolute charm of this story goes far beyond giggling at some well-timed fart jokes. If you, like those of us on the anthology crew, grew up reading Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, there’s an immediate mental connection between Tina’s tale and the Adventures of Spaceman Spiff. Tina and Tommy’s trip out to Uranus has that same feeling of imaginative illogic that we found with Calvin, and you’re never quite sure if the adventure is real, or if any moment Tina’s mom is going to come out of the house and yell at the kids to come in and have dinner, and please stop farting on each other, it’s not funny.

(Mom’s wrong. It’s very funny.)

Uranus Calling pins the silly end of the tonal spectrum for the anthology. It’s all in good-natured fun. I’d say it was clean fun too, but you should probably wash your hands first.

And that’s how I ended up at the gambling table with a motley collection of aliens.

Wait, let me back up and tell you the whole story.

I knew Wren Wallis‘s The Storyteller’s Sleight was special from the first paragraph. This is not a story that tentatively dips its toes into the world or winks coyly at being space opera. You get thrown right into a colorful, rich universe full of myriad aliens and people and cultures without apology. You know you’ve only just scratched the surface as you follow the plots and tales of Esmat, the titular storyteller. There’s an incredible amount of world building depth visible in less than 5000 words.

(One thing I asked Wren right away is if there are more stories about Esmat, because I want to read more about her and the fascinating universe around her.)

And all that? Is the sumptuous backdrop for a heist that takes place during a game of chance, one that keeps you guessing about just what Esmat’s plan is until the end. I loved this story because it drew me in and kept me guessing–and I loved all of the players in it, sketched out with dialog and action. I have to give a shout out here to Captain Pham, the host of the game, who spends the entire story Done With Everything. (“The next person to ask me why anyone else at the shitting table got invited can show themself out the shitting airlock, right?”)

I’m a sucker for this kind of technicolor space opera, and for fun heist stories, and for clever storytellers. So no shit, there I was. And there you can be too, if you support the Kickstarter!

As promised yesterday, I asked the great god RNG to pick a story for me to tell you about today, and it has. That story is: The One About Jacob, by Tyler Hayes.

The One About Jacob is one of the few dark/horror stories that made it into the anthology–we didn’t get a whole lot of horror submissions, and that’s just fine, because I’m not that big of a reader of horror either. And it’s one of those stories that I didn’t read and immediately body slam onto the YES I WILL HAVE THIS list–because it did its work in a much subtler way. It crept up on me, day after day, and I found myself just thinking about the story, and the eerie nature of it, and the creepy final lines, until I finally had to beg: “Look, if I put you in the ToC, will you please stop whispering in my ear when I’m trying to make my morning tea?”

And Jacob smiled, that game, preternaturally likable smile of his, and said “Sure.” (He was lying.)

The One About Jacob is a story that’s about the power of stories people tell each other, both positive and negative. The way stories can bring the wounded together, and the way they can warp and twist and become something truly awful without anyone ever intending the end result. It’s also about the tenuous nature of free will, and how it’s a bad idea for anyone to have the power to change peoples’ minds in a permanent way, but an even worse idea when we’re talking pissed off, lonely, fucked up teenagers. Because this is what happens when people can literally create their own perfect friends, when perfection tends to hide something monstrous and ugly beneath.

It’s an excellent, creepy story, and it’s in No Shit, There I Was. Reason number 1 of 24 to support the Kickstarter so you can read it!