The summaries might talk about the story, they might talk about the kernel that initiated the story, they might talk about nothing even slightly relevant to the story.
I've got dates on some of the stories. I think the oldest one is circa 1991, "Bjorn" and the newest - well, it's not on the page yet because it's still in my head. Keep yer shirt on; I'll get it ported over eventually. Of course, I'd love any replies, commentary, critiques, and such.
In the late summer or fall of 995 AD, according to the Icelandic Eddas, an open longship under the command of Bjorn Herjolfssen, was blown off its intended course from Iceland to the Eastern Settlement of Greenland, and made landfall instead on a temperate, beautiful, large mass of land far to the west of Greenland, from which the sailors rowed their way back north and east to get to the far West coast of Greenland and thence to the court of Eric the Red. They were soundly laughed at for not having explored, not having even landed on this new land, and they gave no real reason for having come straight back without looking around. From details they gave, which were later checked by Eric's son Leif the Lucky during the ill-fated attempts to colonize this land of plenty, which they called Vineland, modern historians assume they made landfall on Newfoundland, but the question still remains: why didn't they explore?
When my grandfather was in his 92nd year, he realized (as he had not done earlier in his life) that he had loaded guns lying beneath the couches of his house. This wouldn't be a big issue other than that he had two grandchildren who were by then grown past the age of fiddling with guns (who apparently never looked under the sofa and thought, 'hey, let's play cowboys!') and one grandchild who was living at the house, inquisitive, and about 5 years old.
Grandfather decided this wasn't the best idea, so he sat down and proceeded to clean and unload his hunting rifles. While doing this, he picked one up rather carelessly, and echoing a story that we see regularly in newspapers, the gun (which had been lying, cocked and with a bullet chambered, for years and years) fired. The bullet bounced off a pail and slammed into the wall, punching a neat hole in the hindquarters of a horse in one of my grandfather's many many paintings. My grandmother, always a depressed sort, was in the bedroom, and recognized the sound as a bullet shot. She immediately came to the conclusion that my grandfather had finally shot himself (she was convinced that he would, despite him being far more happy than she ever has been) and ran out to find his body. Instead she found him sprawled on the floor, laughing hysterically and pointing at the painting, saying, "Look, Ethel, I shot a horse!"
This story is about a gun, a marriage, a child, and a man who never let his father go.
I read Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" and then Clifford Simak's "City" and found I had the phrase, "The cat peened" stuck in my head, so I wrote this. It's almost my favorite piece ever, incredibly vivid for me, and I adore it. I *know* it means something really deep, but I can't figure out WHAT it means. It might be science fiction, but mostly it's just very odd.
To Lift And To Taste ....... For Rachel, with Love
In a composition class, we were asked to write a story by a novel generation technique: we wrote on pieces of paper, five professions and five verbs, mixed them, and randomly drew slips. The idea was: your story had to have in the last sentence, one of those professions and one of the verbs. I got several interesting suggestions but I stuck with "janitor" and "prostitute" and "lift" and "taste." Well, "Prostitute" and "Taste" I could fit together all too easily, and I had this vision of a janitor who lifted trash cans all day long, so I used BOTH, in the story, "To Lift And To Taste." Later, after I read that more times than I could think about, I considered Rachel's side of the story a bit more, and rewrote the story as "For Rachel With Love." I like the pair because each is an interesting, complete story, but suddenly I realize that my stories illuminate a few threads of a much larger blanket of the stories that could be, and these two wrap around each other, touching but managing to involve many other ideas and happenings in these two peoples' lives. An awful lot of words focussed on the central question of Rachel's, "Why do people live lies?"
Some people bend before they break; others scratch the people they love.
Snow Crash.........Little People
In the year 2000, on the first day of Ramadan, someone - maybe an annoyed Jew, maybe a frustrated Sunni, maybe a crackpot - sneaked into Mecca and detonated a small atomic bomb near the Black Mosque, killing a hundred thousand people and igniting a gigantic war, the Armageddon Jihad, which resulted in the destruction of Israel, most of Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, much of North Africa, in a huge war. Afterwards, survivors of the holy war went back to their humdrum lives. In "Little People" a man falls into a village, during a bombing run, and sees what war is like, and in "Snow Crash," two people are stranded deep in Canada during a ferocious snow storm. "Snow Crash" was inspired by a scene from the movie, "Speed," which took my breath away. The two people are on the subway, the bad guy is dead, they're racing towards a brick wall, and he says something like Let's get out of here, and she mutely holds up her hands which are handcuffed to a rail on the subway car, unable to leave. He looks at her, looks out towards freedom, then walks over and sits down and puts his arms around her, waiting for the crash. They globbed a horrible ending onto the movie, and maybe it wasn't as romantic as all that in the original, but I LOVED the scene I have in my memory, so I rewrote it the way it should have been.
Two Hundred Words About A Horse.
Count them. I should include a picture: when I wrote this I had beautiful shoulder-length blond hair.
Dedicated to a beautiful Australian girl I knew during high school, named Roz. Someone famous once said that if the corpus of literature were erased from our memories, what we'd write first would be science fiction: warning stories about tomorrow and what we think we don't want to have happen.
A young boy watches the world change around him, with no ability to see the cause and effect that he KNOWS is there somewhere. One of my first attempts to write entirely from the view of a younger person. I was always fascinated by rodeo clowns, too.
Back in the old days, when it was still immoral to die of AIDS, I wrote a story about a gay guy and a questioning girl talking about death and God.
There are days when you make really dumb decisions, and there are days when they're made for you. What do you do when you're fed up with a relationship? What do you do when you're not SURE if you're fed up with the relationship? How do you end a story like this? Obviously, I don't know.
No, this has nothing to do with Ireland. It's a long story about a day when I drove to Denver and helped my grandmother fix her toilet.
An online acquaintence of mine killed himself and I wrote a few thoughts about it.
A really truly creepy story about the beginnings of a dominance/submission relationship. Or at least *I* think it's utterly creepy. Dunno WHERE in my head this one came from. But it goes a long ways towards showing why I don't like swimming in deep water. I started the story after reading an article in the New Yorker, about spitting, which started out by saying something like, "there is no more universal symbol of disdain than spitting on someone." I started thinking, 'gee, I've got friends who would probably get off on that.'
I took my friend Patience on a horrific bike ride, which followed the Leadville 100 bike race route and then the Leadville 100 foot race route, and I think she thought I was trying to kill her.
I read a book called Poodles In Hell and had a dream about Poodles in Heaven.
Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light" inspired a short story about different cultures and different technologies interacting. There might be some Mark Twain in here, too.
I read a book by Neil Gaiman and then got to thinking about EgyptAir Flight 990, which as you may or may not remember, plunged into the Atlantic for no obvious reason, and this is the story I came up with.
Just following Matthew Shepard's death at the hands of psychos in southern Wyoming, in 1999, I read Annie Proulx's book, "Close Range," which everyone should read, and wrote a little story about Wyoming and fairies (no, the other kind.) The scary thing is: the stories Derl tells, at the bit where he gets expansive, are both entirely true stories.
Winter ....... Cacophony.....Love Poems
Winter: about love and cold and control.
Cacophony: about a woman standing in a field, that I used to ride past on my way to school each morning.
Love Poems: "Roses Are Red" taken to its logical conclusion.