#Fridayfictioneers: Compromise

On March 3, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories7 Comments

copyight-sean-fallon — PHOTO PROMPT © Sean Fallon

“Here you go.”

Holtzman groaned. “What the hell is that?”

“You said you needed a battery. This is what we have.”

This is the worst mad scientist lab of all time, Holtzman thought.

“You hired me to build a killbot. A four-story tall killbot. You were very specific about four stories. How do you expect me to power a four story killbot with AAA batteries?”

“I don’t know,” Gilbert sniffed. “You’re the scientist. You figure it out.”

Holtzman thought carefully for a few minutes.

“Fine. I can do three stories. But you’re going to have to find me a nine-volt.”

Word Count: 100

Friday Fictioneers is a weekly blog hop hosted by Rochelle. She posts a photo prompt then challenges readers to write a 100 word story inspired by the prompt. It’s a fun challenge. Give it a try! Check here for the info then write your story and post it, link up and enjoy the other stories!

#Weekendcoffeeshare: Anniversary Edition

On February 27, 2016February 27, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories7 Comments

newcoffee

If we were having coffee…

Shit, what are we doing having coffee? I’ve got packing to do!

This weekend (well, tonight, specifically) my lovely wife and I are celebrating our 8th year of marriage and our 2nd anniversary. (Think about what year and month it is.) We are generally homebodies and so we decided when we got married that, February already being crowded with other gifty holidays that we were ignoring, we were going to make our anniversary not a big thing other than every 4th year when the actual date of our marriage rolled around. So today we’re dropping the boy off to spend the night at his grandparents’ for the first time and heading off for an insanely expensive meal and a night at a casino.

I don’t gamble. This ought to be interesting. I have perused the menu of the place where we’re having dinner, as the meal is far more significant to me than the gambling, and have discovered that there is a $120 steak on the menu.

I may not be able to pass up the opportunity to pay a hundred and twenty dollars for a chunk of cow. And, conveniently, our tax refund showed up this morning.

But: point is, there’s a lot to be done before then, plus the actual driving, which isn’t obscenely far but the weather’s been crappy lately. So let’s slurp the coffee down; I gotta bounce. I’ll post a hotel room picture tonight, I promise.

#WeekendCoffeeShare: Annoying Toddler Edition

On February 20, 2016February 20, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories11 Comments

newcoffee

If we were having coffee, we’d be doing it in short-sleeved shirts. I don’t know if the sudden warming trend is a Midwestern phenomenon or if everybody’s seeing a spike in temperatures yesterday, but my yard was covered in a few inches of snow on Thursday and by the time my wife got home from work yesterday it was ALL gone and now the universe is made of mud. We literally went from 20s to 60s in a matter of a few days. And the zoo’s open today! It’s going to be insanely crowded, but we’re going anyway.

Also a fun feature of yesterday’s weather: insane winds. I spent all day working in the office and waiting for a tree to fall over, and the winds managed to rip a shingle off the roof, which I’m not completely sure how to fix. Plus I don’t know how much weight your average roof is okay to handle (the Googles will probably help with this) and so I don’t know if it’s a good idea for me to go up there myself to check it out. No trees down, though, at least not near me.

(Considers Googling “Am I too fat to go on the roof?”)

If we were having coffee, I might kvetch about parenting a bit. Tell the truth: how many of you have had the urge to bark the words “You’re four, what the fuck do you know?” at your kids at least once? Because I was just informed that blueberry juice exists by a very small person with the unshakeable confidence of a serial killer. And you know this how, person who can’t read? Don’t get me wrong: I like four way more than I liked three, two, one, or especially zero. But dammit boy I know better than you so shut the hell up.

(NOTE: I am reasonably sure all kids do this, and one way or another this is a turnabout-is-fair-play moment. One of my earliest memories is barking “It’s a sword holder!” at a friend of my mother’s who had just innocently tried to teach me the word scabbard. This is the shit I’m talking about. I’m sure all the parents have encountered it before.)

The plan for this week: back to Sunlight, which got put aside so that I could frantically blast through writing a Benevolence Archives story that grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let go, and make some damn headway for an anthology story that I committed to months ago and have made a shamefully low amount of progress on.

Also maybe get a job. That would be nice too.

How’re you?

#Fridayfictioneers: Going Native

On February 19, 2016March 3, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories2 Comments

She pointed. “That’s how long you’ve got. Make it worth it.”

“It wasn’t my fault–”

She cut him off. “Bzzt. Try another one.”

“It wasn’t me!”

“Fifteen seconds.”

“I was captured by aliens and replaced by a Gerotrossian replicant who managed to ruin my life in the 24 hours he had between insertion and his PseudoSkin simulant dissolving and needing to return to the mothership. I’m actually a space cop from Betelgeuse 19.”

An eyebrow lifted.

“You have my attention. That was at least entertaining. One more minute.”

Galactic Sergeant Olin Cardswallock rubbed his forehead. Sometimes undercover on-planet work wasn’t worth it.

Word Count: 100

#WeekendCoffeeShare: VD edition

On February 14, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories3 Comments

Let’s be honest: if we were having coffee, we would absolutely be talking about politics in one way or another, but I’m not super interested right now at 10:00 in the AM on a Sunday in talking about politics. I’ve entered the Two Weeks of No Romance period of the year, guys; my wife’s birthday was yesterday, today is Valentine’s day, and this being Leap Year we actually get an anniversary on Feb. 29th this year. We’ve been married 8 years, but this is our 2nd anniversary.

What do we do to celebrate these august (heh) events? Well, nothing, really. My wife and I both agreed that Fat Tony’s death was the best birthday present the universe could possibly have arranged for her, we’re dropping the boy off with his grandparents and going to see Deadpool today, and as for our anniversary … hell, we’ll come up with something. What did I get her? Nothing. We aren’t gift people. (For the record, she didn’t get me anything for my last birthday either, and we didn’t exchange gifts at Christmas.) What will we be getting each other for our anniversary? Chances are nothing, although we’ll certainly go somewhere and do something fun together.

Valentine’s Day? Bah. Neither of us care.

I married correctly, is what I’m saying here.

This was an odd week. I got nothing done on either of the two fiction projects I’m working on during the week, a combination of exhaustion, depression, and what was probably a very mild flu completely taking me off my game from Monday through Thursday. I had my son at home with me all day on Friday and somehow between Friday and yesterday managed to get something like four thousand words done on the new Benevolence Archives novella I’m working on. Sunlight is still a little stalled, but I ought to be able to get back to that this week and I still have high hopes (ha!) of being able to get it done before C2E2.

Note that at one point I wanted it available at C2E2. So that tells you how good I am at keeping on schedule for novel projects, if you weren’t already aware of it. For what it’s worth I love the hell out of the BA story that’s responsible for my recent distraction.

The Walking Dead is back tonight, and I have the boy again tomorrow (he gets a four-day Winter Break weekend) and so somehow I have to manage to avoid spoilers for 24 hours. This will be harder than usual, I think. I’m glad the show’s back, although I think The Expanse may have supplanted it as my current favorite TV show.

(Are you watching The Expanse, fellow coffee-drinker? Or, rather, did you, since the first season’s over? I strongly suggest that you get on that right now.)

So, yeah. That’s where I’m at. How’re you?

#WeekendCoffeeShare: White People edition

On February 7, 2016February 7, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories4 Comments

coffee2

If we were having coffee, I’d brag for a bit about my insane performance at trivia night last night. I am smart and know a lot of stuff, but success at a trivia competition tends to be at least partially a function of the luck of the draw, because the categories are so critical to how you do. I’ve only done these three times, but the previous two I wasn’t terribly useful because the categories were all in my bad spots. This trivia night? Ten categories, four of which were “David Bowie,” “Star Wars,” “Movie Quotes,” and “The 1990s.”

I kicked every bit of the ass, is what I’m saying. We were tied for first place, only missing one question out of the first 70, until the “Super Bowl” round happened, and our one sports guy had virtually no backup. Then there was the “Indiana History” round, where we missed a couple of questions we shouldn’t have because of team miscommunication, and we ended up in 4th place out of about 50 teams. So, still, not bad, but we literally missed seven of our eight questions in two rounds.

Also badass: the tiebreaker is predicting how many points your team will get right. I campaigned hard for 92 at the beginning and lost. Our final score? 92.

Other than that, I refer you to this post from 2014, because the experience was basically identical, right down to hearing someone call for Ray Lee Ray and looking around and having the incredibly rare and insanely problematic thought my god I’m the only black person in the room float through my head.

I am not a black person, obviously, and I should never be thinking such things. However, I suspect that were things like Trivia Night graded on a curve, I would be Yaphet Kotto. Because holy shit are these things white.

The cheesecake went over quite well, by the way.

Speaking of sports: I understand that the Super Bowl is today, and it’s entirely possible that if we were having coffee that subject might come up. I did not watch the Super Bowl last year, and as a result I missed seeing Missy Elliott live. This year, Beyoncé is performing, and the rumor is she’ll be performing the single she dropped yesterday. I will not be repeating that mistake. Let’s take a moment:

(Will that work? I dunno. It doesn’t appear to be available for embedding on YouTube.)

(Holy shit! It looks like it worked!)

At any rate, prior to going to the trivia night I’d been listening to and watching that over and over again, and if there’s any chance that that song is getting performed live at the Super Bowl I’m ferdamnsure gonna be watching.

The fact that I’d been watching that over and over again– and, more importantly, watching the reaction to it on Twitter– might also have had something to do with the cultural whiplash upon arriving at the Snow Folk Palace later that evening, by the way.

So, yeah. Are you having people over for the sportsenation? Tell me what you’re cooking.

#Fridayfictioneers: Move to the country! It’ll be great!

On February 4, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories11 Comments

“Well, there’s your problem.” The old man spat, then crossed himself. “Faerie road, out there in the marshes. Pointed to your house.”

I blinked. Twice. “What?”

“Aye. Brings the old ones out, it will. The sounds, the bangs, the cracks, the bugs. None of it the house. Their doing. All of it.”

He leaned toward me. “I know one who could fix it. But not a carpenter. An exterminator.”

Okay. “What’s his name?”

“Don’t worry about that, now,” he said. “Just … well, sometimes they’re angry when their roads are broken. Consider moving. Might be easier.”

Suddenly I really missed Chicago.

Word Count: 100

#WeekendCoffeeShare: Vidya Gaemz edition

On January 31, 2016January 31, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Stories7 Comments

coffee2

If we were having coffee, I’d be grateful: it would mean I was sitting down and out of the house and talking to an adult who is not my wife. I love my wife dearly, don’t get me wrong, but this “unemployed/full time author” thing means I speak to no adults other than her on a typical day, and I miss contact with grown-ups. Hell, I’m even starting to miss contact with kids, as the only one of those I ever see is my own son.

Yes, fine, I admit it, I’m starting to miss certain aspects of teaching, and all aspects of having a job.

You know what else I miss? Video games. I’m hoping you’re a gamer, because I kind of want to talk about them. When winter break rolled around and I stopped having uninterrupted blocks of time during the day because the boy was around, I stopped playing Fallout 4, and I haven’t been back to it since. I have three or four games on my iPad that get a lot of attention, but I just don’t seem to be able to carve out time for console gaming any longer (winter break has been over for nearly a month, remember) and when I do whatever I’m playing inevitably pisses me off somehow.

An example: I just heard from someone on Twitter that she bought The Witcher 3, a game I’d previously decided not to bother with, and she had to download twenty gigabytes of patches and updates before actually getting to play:

@nfinitefreetime Went to bed, woke up, went to the store and it was still updating.

— Carolyn Velociraptor (@Arumi_kai) January 31, 2016

Which … holy crap, I’d never even fucking play the thing. That would literally make me so angry that I’d abandon the very idea of playing the fucking game. (Think I’m kidding? I’ve done it before.) I cannot properly express how much I hate what has happened with this generation of consoles. I mean, that’s, what, eight hours of downloads, and who the hell knows what kind of shit your cable company pulls afterwards if you’re with the wrong people. Bah.

For someone who spends ridiculous amounts of time sitting in front of his computer, you’d think computer gaming would be a viable use of my time. Also no, despite being able to name several games off the top of my head that I’d like to be playing or that I actually have on my computer and have never actually opened. Why? I dunno. I just don’t. And I miss it, but despite having loads of free time and the means to be doing whatever I want, I’m not doing anything about it.

So I’m hoping you do, and we can talk about the games you’re playing, so that I can live vicariously through you.

The end.