PLAIDDER’S ORIGINAL
FICTION
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or otherwise without my express permission. Please respect my rights to this
material, for if you do not, then I, my attorney, and my small but fierce corps
of readers will be forced to get medieval on your ass.
SHORT FICTION
Speculative Fiction
Four short stories written during the first
eight years of the twenty-first century and set in worlds which seem like ours...but are somehow not
quite right.
Straight Stories
Four stories started before I started writing
fantasy (and before I figured out that I was not in fact straight).
It
doesn't surprise me any more to meet fringe people on trains. I'm not talking about
lunatics; I meet those on the streets. But the fringe people, the ones who hang
on at the outer edges of sanity near the borders that we like to keep a
distance from, seem to like to take trains.
Standing on the asphalt
in her narrow heels she listed the mistakes she had made, from the sheer black
stockings through which her pale knees showed to the sharp, cropped haircut to
the lipstick that had been selected with indoor light in mind and the bright
yellow tailored jacket that must be shining in the sun like the lacquered back
of a beetle. It was the wrong look. The city's look.
The artist, of course,
saw in the small still figure that blotted the very corner of his vision field
the creative spark, a spark that perhaps was being fed into flame by these
daily visits to the site. In his overactive dreams, he had already seen the boy
become himself, leading another group of artisans into a stranger's field to
try and nail down a dream with pine planks and mirrors.
.
In the Disney version, they let the grasshopper in. They put a
blanket around his shoulders and give him some hot cocoa. It's been a while;
the part about the hot cocoa may not be true. But the grasshopper is toasting
his Jiminy Cricket spats in front of the ants' fire at the end of the short, that much is certain. With a tear of gratitude
standing at half-mast in his preternaturally huge Disney eyeball.
LONGER FICTION
The last mystery, the
question left after all the reporters had gone home, was why the dolphin chose
Rockproof Cove in the first place. Dolphins were common enough off that part of
the
VERY
LONG FICTION
An
original fantasy series set in a created universe. It includes five novels and
several short stories and has a small but loyal online following.
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