This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from Parrish Baker: Her shadow detached itself from her body and walked away.Here was an interesting idea -- and I immediately thought of the story of the fox spirit and the magic cat for an anthology open call later next year. But if it's going to be set in an alternate 1920's ( Read more... )

Recently I saw an online discussion of Clarke's famous dictum any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to the uninitiated, in which the argument against it rested upon a very specific definition of "magic" in the field of theology, which restricts the term to involve a pact with unclean spirits ( Read more... )

This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds Than Ends was from nother Mike: There were teeth in the clouds.An interesting prompt, and lots of ways to take it, but my first thought was dragons. In particular, Asian dragons, who are associated as much with water as air. Every cloud, every wisp of fog has its guardian dragon -- but why ( Read more... )

There's a new writing challenge over at Sarah Hoyt's blog. My effort is a bit of the Sparta Point saga -- although if the Sharp War Blues sequence doesn't have any scenes from Leonid Gruzinsky's POV, I honestly don't know where it would belong.

marycatelli has a new vignette challenge on her Dreamwidth account. My effort is another bit of "Breaking Strain," ( Read more... )

Last May I wrote a scene in which one of my characters described four basic types of fantasy: high fantasy (Tolkien and his imitators), heroic fantasy (sword and sorcery), whimsical fantasy (the Alice books, the Oz books, Peter Pan, etc), and dark fantasy (Lovecraft's Dreamlands and the like). At the time, it seemed like it pretty well covered all ( Read more... )

I've always had a certain interest in stage magic, whether it be sleight of hand, illusions of perspective, escape artistry, or any other creation of the impression of the impossible for the purpose of entertainment. If there was a Doug Henning special, I'd make sure to watch it if it at all fit into my schedule ( Read more... )

This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from Fiona Grey: “What land o’ Faerie have we here?”Maybe I would've handled it differently if I'd been writing more fantasy, but right now I'm pretty well emmeshed in the Grissom timeline. That meant having to do a little more thinking about it -- and then I remembered a ( Read more... )

This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends is from Becky Jones: I jumped up in surprise when the wind blew the elf down the chimney. Luckily I managed to grab him before he caught fire.This could be a Christmas short, but right now I really didn't want to start another story that I'd need to circle back to and finish later. So ( Read more... )

It's that time of the week again. The polls are open for voting on the Readers' Choice Award for this week's Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Writing Challenge. As usual, read all the stories and choose your favorite. While I would love to earn your vote, I want the voting to reflect actual reader tastes ( Read more... )

This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge from More Odds Than Ends came from nother Mike: Summoning a demon to wash the dishes was a mistake…Well, yeah, summoning a sworn enemy of the Almighty would definitely be a mistake -- but what if the demon wasn't one from the Abrahamic religious tradition? What if it were from the dharmic faiths, or from ( Read more... )