Tag Archive | 30days

I mentioned I wanted to do a Worldbuilding challenge based on the doodle challenge. inventrix made me a modified list.

Day 2 is Climate. The climate of the world around Aerax (that’s an island with a center pinacle on top of a long tree trunk, not the Space Needle) is temperate, wet, and windy, especially up on the islands. (There’s a cactus on the other side because the original challenge was “cactus”, and also because over on the far side of the mountains, the weather is much dryer.)

Aerax and the sky islands are the setting of my Patreon serial The Expectant Wood.

(Day 3 is Seasonal food/fruit)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1151304.html. You can comment here or there.

August (Worldbuilding) Challenge Day One: Measurements

Aug2

It went like this: SeaLemon has this August Doodle Challenge (Tumblr), and it looked interesting, but in that “neat-but-not-quite” sort of way.

I mentioned I wanted to do a Worldbuilding challenge based on the doodle challenge. inventrix offered to make me a modified list.

Day 1 is Measurements. This is a wearable measurement tool from Reiassan, showing several sizes of cord gauge (alphabetical from K to N), a small ruler measuring up to 3 Demai, or a Taiden, a “knot.” A taiden is 1/10 of a gorzhee, a “reach.”

(Day 2 is Climate)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1149890.html. You can comment here or there.

30 Days Second Semester: 30, Vas’ World, Coming Up

Sep14

For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “30) The story ends with ‘coming up’.”

This come directly after #1 in this series – “It’s going down.” (LJ Link). Vas’ World.

“Someone built it,” Suki assured him, not for the first time. “We might not have met builders yet, but elevators don’t grow organically.”

“I know. That’s my issue,” Vas finally admitted. “Look at the pulley. It’s nearly identical to ones we have back on Earth. The horses,” he lowered his voice, despite the fact that the damn things seemed telepathic, “are remarkably similar to horses on Earth. Even the walls we found are reminiscent of old New England cobblestone walls. It’s eerie.”

“Theory of common construction from common need?” Suki asked. She didn’t sound like she believed it, either. “Simple tools are simple tools on any planet. We found wrenches on Mondant Three.”

“Wrench-like tools,” Vas sighed, not certain why he was still bothering. “Not something you could have picked up from Sears.”

“You couldn’t pick that pulley up at Sears, either. Or the horse.”

“But do you really believe the parallel evolution bullshit some of the pseudo-scientists put forward?”

“In some cases it’s provable. The Antoni, for example…”

“Were cat-like, yes. Cat-like and with some behaviours that could be considered feline. But they were hexapodal.” He knew he sounded peevish. The elevator bugged him, more than even the horse-like creatures, and it seemed as if everyone was ignoring his concerns. “Not just scaled-up pastel horses.”

Suki peered over the edge, making Vas’s stomach lurch. “Mmm. You may have bigger things to complain about soon…” She trailed off. “For a certain definition of bigger.”

“What?”

“You’ll see. She’s coming up.”

The List:
1a) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
1b) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
2) write a scene that takes place in a train station.
3) the story must involve a goblet and a set of three [somethings]
4) prompt: one for the road
5) write a story using an imaginary color
6) write the pitch for a new Final Fantasy styled RPG (LJ Link)
7) prompt: frigid (LJ Link)
8) write a scene in the middle of a novel called “The Long, Dirty Afterwards” (LJ)
9) prompt: mourning dead gods (LJ)
10) write a story set in three different time periods. (LJ)
11) Write a movie trailer style trailer for a story, existing or not-yet-written. (LJ)
12) prompt: sweet iced tea (LJ)
13) re-write a story that everyone knows (LJ)
14) write a vanilla story dealing with kinky subject matter (LJ)
15) prompt: ascension (LJ)
16) write a scene that takes place at the end of a long road trip. (LJ)
17) write an uncomfortable story (LJ)
18) prompt: a step too far (LJ
19) write a story in which something goes BOOM. )LJ)
20) Write the end of the story ‘The Purple Bag. (LJ)
21) Roll a d20 twice. Combine the themes of the two previous stories for those numbers. (LJ)
22) Prompt: White Knight (LJ)
23) write a scene that takes place in a place that is war-torn (LJ)
24) prompt: founding fathers (LJ)
25) write a story set in a library LJ
26) Prompt: Elemental LJ
27) write a story using only one period. (LJ)
28) write a story set in a laundromat (LJ)
29)…Re-write that prompt as a Spaghetti Western or Melodrama (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/128492.html. You can comment here or there.

30 Days Second Semester: 29, Wild Horses, Cya/Boom/Addergoole post-apoc

Sep9

For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “29) (from Lilifluff) Randomly pick a number between 1 and 28 (Random.Org) . Re-write that prompt as a Spaghetti Western or Melodrama.”

I got 19, and am writing a continuation to #19, though it seems I can’t write either Spaghetti Western or Melodrama.

She rode into town like a whirlwind, a mad mink of a girl with fire in her eyes and capture on her mind. She had a tongue smooth as silk and her lies were like a lasso, ropin’ me in.

I shoulda seen her coming, I suppose, but what can a man do when she blinks at him like that with big doe eyes and whispers her magic sweet as honey? No spider ever wove a web so neatly as she did, there in that parking lot. And I, damn fool I am, walked right into it.

So there I was, sitting in her trap, in her car, staring at the cowgirl who’d done me in. Trussed up with her magic as surely as if she’d tied me to the back of her horse. And getting carried off, too, abducted. Damn. And here I’d thought I was done with Hell.

“It could be a lot worse,” she told me, cool as a cucumber. I found I had a voice again.

“It could?” Hell could always be hotter, I suppose. But she was a pretty hot shade of damnation already.

“I could be a sadistic predator who’d just gotten you in my clutches.”

“You’re not?” She sure as hell had me in her clutches, after all, and wasn’t doing anything not to gloat about it.

“I’m not sadistic, at least,” she admitted, smiling so sweetly at me. I wondered about diving out of the car. It couldn’t hurt that bad, could it? Going ninety miles an hour on paved roads – Ellehemaei could survive anything. I reached for the door handle, slow and subtle like. “And I’m not out to hurt you, which is more than I can say for the road.”

“People who kidnap you aren’t generally out to give you a nice night on the town.” The road did look awfully hard.

“One year.” Chill and calm, like she wasn’t asking me to walk on hot coals. “Be mine for one year.”

Boom. And that was the trap slamming shut.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/127331.html. You can comment here or there.

Fishing

Sep8

For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “28) write a story set in a laundromat “

From dailyprompt: “choose again”

Stranded World.

“Go Fish.” Summer sprawled across the laundry-room table, staring at the cards in her hand, watching Mellie and Bishop over the edges.

“Really? You don’t have a green nine?” Bishop took a card from the pool. “Are you charming your hand again, Sum?”

“You know I don’t do that.” When she was playing with them, at least. “Mel, do you have a blue seven?”

“I do.” Her lovely girlfriend passed over the seven of rain. “This deck makes this so much more fun… ooh, there goes the dryer.” She set down her hand carefully and bounced off the table.

Stalled on her, Bishop and Summer shared a moment of watching the way Mel’s body moved. Under cover of the slamming of doors, he murmured to her. “Sometimes I can’t figure you out.”

“What’s to figure?” she shrugged, trying to keep the little pit of panic down. Lines of conversation like that never ended well for her.

“There’s this,” he gestured at the deck, hand-drawn for her by her sister, “yet you say you don’t ‘do’ that sort of thing. There’s the charms you don’t ever admit to and yet never deny, and that necklace you won’t explain that goes on display when we’re visiting your family. There’s you, acting like you want to be your big sister and your big brother all at once, theatre-business dual major. And you could have had anyone, couldn’t you have?”

“What, voodoo someone into dating me?” She laughed, trying to make a joke of it. “No. Fishing in the wrong pool there, Bish.” Mostly.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/126621.html. You can comment here or there.

Against the Planners

Sep7

For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “27) write a story using only one period. Bonus: write the story using only one /ending punctuation at all.”

From dailyprompt: “not a cloud in sight” and “set events in motion.”

Planners ‘verse.

There was not a cloud in sight that Sunday, nothing looming on the horizon, nothing at all to suggest that the consortium that called itself the Planners had set events in motion that would change, not only the world, but the future of the universe (this may, of course, be a little bit exaggerated, but at the time of the upheaval, it certainly seemed as if everything in the universe was changing – history was changing, the way banking happened was changing, government was changing, the structure of power in the known world was changing – all in all, it was an unstable and unpleasant time of change, and it was all due to the Planners and their infernal, internal, inheritable planning); the future of society hung in the balance, swinging on one comma in the Planners’ ledger, because that is all that any of us were to those people, commas, balances on a spreadsheet, numbers of acceptable losses (look at the way they planned out for this apocalypse, after all: so much food set aside for each city, so much medicine, put aside, even admitting “we expect an attrition rate of ten to thirty percent,” as if admitting it bald-faced like that makes it better, somehow; it was clear from the very beginning that they intended to set themselves up as the sole power left on the planet, and that only setting aside so much food for the rest of the world was part of their plan – and it worked.

The List:
1a) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
1b) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
2) write a scene that takes place in a train station.
3) the story must involve a goblet and a set of three [somethings]
4) prompt: one for the road
5) write a story using an imaginary color
6) write the pitch for a new Final Fantasy styled RPG (LJ Link)
7) prompt: frigid (LJ Link)
8) write a scene in the middle of a novel called “The Long, Dirty Afterwards” (LJ)
9) prompt: mourning dead gods (LJ)
10) write a story set in three different time periods. (LJ)
11) Write a movie trailer style trailer for a story, existing or not-yet-written. (LJ )
12) prompt: sweet iced tea (LJ )
13) re-write a story that everyone knows (LJ )
14) write a vanilla story dealing with kinky subject matter (LJ )
1 5) prompt: ascension (LJ )
16) write a scene that takes place at the end of a long road trip. (LJ )
17) write an uncomfortable story (LJ )
18) prompt: a step too far (LJ
19) write a story in which something goes BOOM. )LJ )
20) Write the end of the story ‘The Purple Bag. (LJ )
21) Roll a d20 twice. Combine the themes of the two previous stories for those numbers. (LJ )
22) Prompt: White Knight (LJ )
23) write a scene that takes place in a place that is war-torn (LJ )
24) prompt: founding fathers (LJ )
25) write a story set in a library LJ
26) Prompt: Elemental LJ
27) write a story using only one period.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/126059.html. You can comment here or there.

30 Days Second Sem, Elemental Love

Sep5

For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “26) Prompt: Elemental .”

Started out Stranded world, ended up misc misc.

“You’re wild,” he murmured, his hand tracing the line of her hip and flank, the tattoos inked there, the flesh stretched over the bone. “Elemental. Untamed. Like a volcano, like a waterfall. Unrestrained, untamed.”

“I wasn’t that loud,” she chuckled, both embarrassed and amused by his effluvient praise.

“You know what I meant,” he protested, smiling as if she’d said something very clever.

“I do,” she admitted. Others had said similar things. Others had eventually said those things as complaints, instead of praise. Instead of saying those things, things that were relationship taboo, she said instead, “even the waterfall and the volcano bend to natural law, my love.”

“I’m not sure you do,” he admitted, a little bit of his nervousness showing through. “When you’re dancing, I’m never certain if gravity really applies to you, and when you really get going, I’m pretty sure you break a couple laws of thermodynamics.”

Dancing. She traced his ribs with her fingertip, wondering why it was dancing this time. “Gravity applies,” she assured him. She wasn’t going to lie, but that was different than telling him the whole truth. “And I bow to all of nature’s laws, my beautiful darling.”

“Just not to society’s.” Now, he sounded jealous. “Some day, I worry, someone will burn you at the stake for all of that, wildflower. The outcast can’t live.”

“But I do.” She pressed a kiss to his sternum, and hoped he’d forget. “I do.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/125694.html. You can comment here or there.

Kith and Kin

Sep2

For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “25) write a story set in a library.”

Stranded World (LJ), Autumn

The weather was brutal, and the festival had been more-or-less cancelled. Autumn had still shown up, still set up her booth, but once she lost two pieces to the wind-blown rain, she gave up and closed up shop. Nobody was coming out in this weather, anyway.

There wasn’t much in the small town to do – a café, three churches, and a Chinese-take-out-place – so she headed for the library, ducking in just as the rain began coming down in buckets. She stood dripping in the lobby for a moment, not wanting to endampen the books.

“Oh, you poor dear!” A woman in her middle-second-century or so that had to be the librarian bustled out with a towel, wrapping it around Autumn’s shoulders. “Are you here with the festival? That poor, silly farce of a festival?” She moved her free hand surreptitiously in a pattern that, to a layperson, would probably just look like nervous hand-fluttering.

Autumn could see the strands she was pulling, though, warming the air around them, pulling the water out of it, as she patted the towel. “The festival, yes,” she nodded, wondering why it had been a poor, silly farce. “And I have kin in the area, I’ve heard.”

That gained her a sharp look, and then, moving the towel away, a very sharp look at the inkings along her collarbones. “I see,” she murmured, much of the fluttery-old-lady gone. “Yes, I imagine you do. Come in, dear, and have some tea, and I’ll show you our Archives.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/124512.html. You can comment here or there.

The Real Power

Sep1

For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “24) prompt: founding fathers”

Planners ‘Verse, the beginning of the story.

October 1873
“It’s uncanny, Charlie, how you managed to pull everything out before the crash.” Ward Hudson sipped the Estes’ 30-year scotch and didn’t both to hide his frustrated envy.

“And damn kind of you to help us out,” Vince Howe added.

“Think nothing of it.” The thing was, with Charlie Estes, he probably meant it. “You two are savvy businessmen, I know you’ll be back on your feet in no time. Besides, I couldn’t leave your wives and children out in the cold, now could I? Especially not my sister.”

“Of course not,” Ward swigged more scotch.

In the drawing room, Charlie’s wife sat with her sister-in-law and best friend, sipping sherry and discussing the state of the world.

“You seem like you’re prepared for the Flood,” Jannie Howe commented, “and yet you were barely touched by the Panic.”

“Well, that’s the goal, isn’t it? Ward would have been fine if he’d listened to Ida, wouldn’t he have?”

“If he listened to anyone at all,” the frustrated woman agreed. “We would have been fine anyway, Jannie, but he was in such a panic… as if eating from our stores for a month would have killed him!”

Diana tch’d sympathetically. “And think of all the people who don’t have anything. There were riots downtown, did you know that?”

“I can’t blame them! Everything is falling apart.” Ida shook her head. “There ought to be someone to hold it all together.”

“Yes.” Diana looked towards the smoking room thoughtfully. “There ought to be.”

The Panic of 1873

The List:
1a) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
1b) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
2) write a scene that takes place in a train station.
3) the story must involve a goblet and a set of three [somethings]
4) prompt: one for the road
5) write a story using an imaginary color
6) write the pitch for a new Final Fantasy styled RPG (LJ Link)
7) prompt: frigid (LJ Link)
8) write a scene in the middle of a novel called “The Long, Dirty Afterwards” (LJ)
9) prompt: mourning dead gods (LJ)
10) write a story set in three different time periods. (LJ)
11) Write a movie trailer style trailer for a story, existing or not-yet-written. (LJ )
12) prompt: sweet iced tea (LJ )
13) re-write a story that everyone knows (LJ )
14) write a vanilla story dealing with kinky subject matter (LJ )
1 5) prompt: ascension (LJ )
16) write a scene that takes place at the end of a long road trip. (LJ )
17) write an uncomfortable story (LJ )
18) prompt: a step too far (LJ
19) write a story in which something goes BOOM. )LJ )
20) Write the end of the story ‘The Purple Bag. (LJ )
21) Roll a d20 twice. Combine the themes of the two previous stories for those numbers. (LJ )
22) Prompt: White Knight (LJ )
23) write a scene that takes place in a place that is war-torn (LJ )
24) prompt: founding fathers

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/123996.html. You can comment here or there.

Leaving Town

Aug31

For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “23) write a scene that takes place in a place that is war-torn”
From dailyprompt: “highway” and “that awkward moment when…”

Set in Faerie Apocalypse. You can find Nila also in Hey you Kids get off my lawn!

*~*

The city lay in ruins. Nila didn’t know when, if ever, Michael was coming home. Power had gone out a week ago, and the looters had come through the neighborhood like locusts. She’d held them off when she could, hid with the children when she knew she couldn’t, but it was time to leave.

She settled Susan in her Kevlar sling and from there into her car seat, and made sure Allan’s backpack was balanced and light enough, taking the far heavier pack for herself. She checked all of her weapons and both of Allan’s, stared for a while at the note to Michael, and led her children out of their home.

The highways were buckled and bent, twisted like a ribbon in ways that would be unbelievable, if you didn’t know that god-monsters walked the earth now. Nila took the back roads near there, keeping an eye on the gas gauge. If she’d planned this right – yes. The car ran out of gas just as they reached the edge of the worst devastation, past the mobs and the crazy people, past the banks of less fuel-efficient cars and the toll-takers.

She settled Susan on her back and held Allan’s hand with her left, and sited a path south. South, she’d heard, the devastation was less complete. South, the winter would be warmer and more survivable.

She focused on the path in front of her, on her children, and tried to ignore the ruins around them that had been home.

They had been walking now for three days. They had to take it slow; Allan was sturdy for his age, but he still tired easily, and Nila couldn’t carry him, not and Susan, too. The kids were taking it like champs, but she could tell, as the sun began to inch downwards, that it was time to stop.

She was focused on the children, ignoring her training in a way that would have horrified her former Mentor, ignoring the surroundings, when they rounded a bend in the long country road and found it blocked.

There was a long awkward moment when she stared at the man-creature and he stared back at them. “Creature” because he was clearly not entirely human, “man,” because the part of him that was looked like a boy in his mid-twenties. “Awkward…” because the thing was clearly trying to decide if they were a threat. Them, a twenty-two year old girl and her two young children. She took a long look over him, cataloguing his injuries, noting that he wasn’t Masking the things that marked him as inhuman – or perhaps no longer had the energy to?

His doglike ears canted in her direction, and she dropped her own Mask, letting him see the flower-like patterns that swirled across her skin, and the blue “petals” of her ears. “We just want to pass,” she told him carefully.

He stepped out of the way awkwardly. “I won’t stop you.” From the way he was swaying, he couldn’t if he wanted to.

Nila sighed, and set her pack down. “Swear you mean me and mine no harm.”

The List:
1a) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
1b) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
2) write a scene that takes place in a train station.
3) the story must involve a goblet and a set of three [somethings]
4) prompt: one for the road
5) write a story using an imaginary color
6) write the pitch for a new Final Fantasy styled RPG (LJ Link)
7) prompt: frigid (LJ Link)
8) write a scene in the middle of a novel called “The Long, Dirty Afterwards” (LJ)
9) prompt: mourning dead gods (LJ)
10) write a story set in three different time periods. (LJ)
11) Write a movie trailer style trailer for a story, existing or not-yet-written. (LJ )
12) prompt: sweet iced tea (LJ )
13) re-write a story that everyone knows (LJ )
14) write a vanilla story dealing with kinky subject matter (LJ )
1 5) prompt: ascension (LJ )
16) write a scene that takes place at the end of a long road trip. (LJ )
17) write an uncomfortable story (LJ )
18) prompt: a step too far (LJ
19) write a story in which something goes BOOM. )LJ )
20) Write the end of the story ‘The Purple Bag. (LJ )
21) Roll a d20 twice. Combine the themes of the two previous stories for those numbers. (LJ )
22) Prompt: White Knight (LJ )
23) write a scene that takes place in a place that is war-torn

Alder's Grove Fiction

The Worlds of Lyn Thorne-Alder