Category: writing

Just another random writing exercise. Doesn’t mean anything or go anywhere. Except a bar, at the end. Spoiler alert.

Warning: Contains the F-bomb. Sensitive readers should avert their eyes.

George peered to his left, around the corner, slowly, as if moving slowly would make his gigantic pressure suit helmet less visible. Dust spattered from left to right. Once, twice. In a vacuum, he could see the bullets, but their impact was silent. He retreated from the corner. They couldn’t hit him here, and they were unlikely to change position. But then, neither could he.

It wasn’t the first time he’d been shot at since he arrived in Luna City. Nobody liked a P.I. snooping into their business. It was, however, his first firefight outside the dome. Just getting winged could make for a very bad day.

Just then, his sandwich buzzed in his pocket. More jets of dust burst to his left. One. Two. Three. His sandwich buzzed again.

Continue reading “A lethal weapon”

Another writing exercise from a café from when I worked on the Victoria and the Secrets website. All characters and events are purely fictionalized. Caution: This post contains strong language.

The summer of ’61 was a long one for Victoria and the Secrets. That was the year that their tour bus — an old VW camper van — caught fire under suspicious circumstances while stopping for gas in San Antonio, Texas. In retrospect, the suspicious circumstances weren’t necessarily suspicious, but highly irregular. While Adrienne and Victoria were inside picking up snacks for the next leg of their trip, Patrick fueled the bus, and somehow completely failed to notice the sudden appearance of several emptied gas cans in the parking lot.

To be fair, gas cans at a gas station aren’t in themselves suspicious, so there was no actual reason why Patrick should have even batted an eye. A nose, though, he should have batted, if it can be said that anyone can bat anything other than an eye, a baseball, or a mobile. Unnoticed as he gripped the nozzle, fighting away the waves of fatigue that blurred his view of the spinning digits on the pump, was a rising smell of gasoline. A smell stronger than usual.

Continue reading “Victoria’s van”

Random writing from a café.

All of the wires were yellow. Yellow!

They said to cut the grey wire and definitely not the blue, yellow, or green wires, or there would be dire consequences. Dire, as in he’d be instantly vaporized kind of dire.

Ted leaned back against the cold, damp wall, feeling the confinement of the concrete access tube. His only source of light — a light-emitting tube — flickered its sickly yellow light for a heart-stopping moment. In its tired glow, all colours were yellow.

“Well, fuck,” Ted observed. He glanced at his wrist clock. The countdown showed 126 seconds. Time enough. He could wait. In the last seconds, a random guess and a cut wire would either end it or not. Eight wires. 12.5 percent chance of surviving to be a hero.

And an 87.5 percent chance of instantly turning himself and half the city into a ball of searing plasma.

Ted exhaled heavily, his pressure suit creaking around his ribs.

Continue reading “Yellow wires”

In honour of Penguin Awareness Day, which may or may not be an actual thing, I’ve decided to share my book “Raised by Penguins”. A friend calls it “a good toilet book,” by which I assume — and hope — she meant that it’s in brief entries that are just the right length for doing one’s business.

So here it is. Feel free to download it, share it, print it, then burn it in disgust. Raised by Penguins.

To save it for offline reading, right-click that link and choose Save Link As or whatever variant of that your browser offers.