Trick or Treat Reveals - My Stories
Trick or Treat authors are revealed! Sort of. The anonymizing glitch struck again. To manually reveal your stories, remove them from the collection (just delete trickortreat2018 from "collections") and post. Then edit the collection back in and repost. They should appear with your name on them.
Here are the stories I wrote.
Kilo India Tango Tango Echo November, for Yhlee. Original Work. For the inspired character prompt "Grizzled Soldier Who Keeps Adopting Abandoned Kittens." I added an alien invasion and a propaganda campaign centered around the ubiquity of towns named Springfield. Given my fondness for cats and Marines, the authorship of this story was apparently less than mysterious to several sharp readers.
Several real cats have cameos in this story. Snoozer, the black kitten with huge yellow eyes, is my Erin Burr as a kitten. She still likes to sleep in my lap. Remington, the leaping, shoulder-sitting gray tabby, is my Alex Hamilton.
Bat Thing was a neighborhood cat from when I was a kid, named by myself. I still don't know what kind of cat he was. He looked very much like a Ukrainian Levkoy, with huge ears and that strange face. He was covered with an extremely short plush of velvety black fur, more like suede than anything else, which frequently provoked debates over whether or not he was technically hairless. He had very long flaps of skin between his front and back legs, and could jump very far and very high. When he did, he spread out the flaps and seemed to glide like a flying squirrel. Since he really did look like a cross between a bat and a cat I named him Bat Thing. To this day I don't know exactly what he was. He was a stray kitten in a middle-of-nowhere Indian town. No one had ever seen anything like him. Everyone theorized that the mama cat had booted him out for being weird. I said he must have been a spontaneous mutation similar to that which produced other weird-looking cats, but in my heart of hearts, I still think he was the escaped product of genetic experimentation to create a cat-bat hybrid. Na na na na na na na na BAT THING!
Eilonwy Wanderer, for Scioscribe. Title says it all. She had prompted this last Yuletide as well, and I regretted not having a chance to write it then, so I was very pleased to see the same prompt pop up again. The jobs she tries out were intended to save me from having to do too much research, as I know a bit about both, but I ended up having to anyway as I still had to look up what they would have been like in medieval Wales. Thanks to Cyphomandra for answering questions like, "When did doctors figure out what nerves do?"
Men Sell Not Such In Any Town, for Selden. "The Goblin Market" - Christina Rossetti. Warning: contains incestuous longing, though no actual incest. It's a space opera AU with lots of alien fruit descriptions, and a nod to Ursula K. Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace."
I also wrote four stories for Stephen King books.
Twelve More Months In Tarker's Mills, for Escretoireazul. Cycle of the Werewolf - Stephen King. That obscure novella has a werewolf vignette for each month of the year adding up to a complete story; I wrote a sequel with a drabble for each month adding up to a complete story.
Lost Girls, also for Escritoireazul. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - Stephen King. My recipient's enthusiasm for werewolves, which I share, inspired me to write two stories for them. This one combines two different prompts they had for this canon, which were werewolves and "weird west." Thanks to Scioscribe for helping me come up with an actual plot.
A Spread of Cards, for Skazka. The Dark Tower - Stephen King. The man in black never tires of fucking with Roland. This was a response to their prompt, "The palaver at the end of The Gunslinger, once more with banging. I had a lot of fun coming up with Tarot cards. Thanks for Scioscribe for suggesting some of them.
A Yellow Sky, for PositivelyVexed. The Long Walk - Stephen King. A fix-it for the world's least fixable canon. The book is so relentlessly, inexorably grim and tragic, I really enjoyed giving the characters some hope, comfort, and a chance to get off their feet.
Crossposted to https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2226656.html. Comment here or there.
Here are the stories I wrote.
Kilo India Tango Tango Echo November, for Yhlee. Original Work. For the inspired character prompt "Grizzled Soldier Who Keeps Adopting Abandoned Kittens." I added an alien invasion and a propaganda campaign centered around the ubiquity of towns named Springfield. Given my fondness for cats and Marines, the authorship of this story was apparently less than mysterious to several sharp readers.
Several real cats have cameos in this story. Snoozer, the black kitten with huge yellow eyes, is my Erin Burr as a kitten. She still likes to sleep in my lap. Remington, the leaping, shoulder-sitting gray tabby, is my Alex Hamilton.
Bat Thing was a neighborhood cat from when I was a kid, named by myself. I still don't know what kind of cat he was. He looked very much like a Ukrainian Levkoy, with huge ears and that strange face. He was covered with an extremely short plush of velvety black fur, more like suede than anything else, which frequently provoked debates over whether or not he was technically hairless. He had very long flaps of skin between his front and back legs, and could jump very far and very high. When he did, he spread out the flaps and seemed to glide like a flying squirrel. Since he really did look like a cross between a bat and a cat I named him Bat Thing. To this day I don't know exactly what he was. He was a stray kitten in a middle-of-nowhere Indian town. No one had ever seen anything like him. Everyone theorized that the mama cat had booted him out for being weird. I said he must have been a spontaneous mutation similar to that which produced other weird-looking cats, but in my heart of hearts, I still think he was the escaped product of genetic experimentation to create a cat-bat hybrid. Na na na na na na na na BAT THING!
Eilonwy Wanderer, for Scioscribe. Title says it all. She had prompted this last Yuletide as well, and I regretted not having a chance to write it then, so I was very pleased to see the same prompt pop up again. The jobs she tries out were intended to save me from having to do too much research, as I know a bit about both, but I ended up having to anyway as I still had to look up what they would have been like in medieval Wales. Thanks to Cyphomandra for answering questions like, "When did doctors figure out what nerves do?"
Men Sell Not Such In Any Town, for Selden. "The Goblin Market" - Christina Rossetti. Warning: contains incestuous longing, though no actual incest. It's a space opera AU with lots of alien fruit descriptions, and a nod to Ursula K. Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace."
I also wrote four stories for Stephen King books.
Twelve More Months In Tarker's Mills, for Escretoireazul. Cycle of the Werewolf - Stephen King. That obscure novella has a werewolf vignette for each month of the year adding up to a complete story; I wrote a sequel with a drabble for each month adding up to a complete story.
Lost Girls, also for Escritoireazul. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - Stephen King. My recipient's enthusiasm for werewolves, which I share, inspired me to write two stories for them. This one combines two different prompts they had for this canon, which were werewolves and "weird west." Thanks to Scioscribe for helping me come up with an actual plot.
A Spread of Cards, for Skazka. The Dark Tower - Stephen King. The man in black never tires of fucking with Roland. This was a response to their prompt, "The palaver at the end of The Gunslinger, once more with banging. I had a lot of fun coming up with Tarot cards. Thanks for Scioscribe for suggesting some of them.
A Yellow Sky, for PositivelyVexed. The Long Walk - Stephen King. A fix-it for the world's least fixable canon. The book is so relentlessly, inexorably grim and tragic, I really enjoyed giving the characters some hope, comfort, and a chance to get off their feet.
Crossposted to https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2226656.html. Comment here or there.