***
After a few months of saving up my editing paychecks, I was finally able to buy myself a new iPad. It arrived last week, and I've spent several days happily playing, enjoying the brighter colors on the new screen, making Siri perform random tasks for me that would probably be easier to do myself, and poking through my old files and stuff as I reorganize.
I loaded up Pages (which is, at $10, the most expensive app I own, but worth every penny when the writing bug strikes) and as the iPad started uploading all the files to the cloud, it began shuffling their display order. Which brought to my attention some files I had completely forgotten about -- stories begun and then set aside or even abandoned.
For instance...
"Next Thursday Night" -- This is a project I keep meaning to go back to. It's about a pair of guys who have a sort of friends with benefits deal going, except they're not even really friends... until one of them is severely hurt in a homophobic hate crime, and they discover that maybe there's a little more than they'd thought about their arrangement of convenience. I put this on hold because I wanted to do some research on injuries and pain medications, but I never got around to it.
Mark woke, blearily. He was lying on a cot in a tiny space, made even smaller by the presence of the cop sitting next to him. The cop was indisputably hot, but as soon as Mark noticed that, his attention was immediately drawn to the burning pain in his groin. Mark had a sudden, vivid memory of a steel-toed boot arcing toward his privates; his balls tried to tighten and draw up, but they were already so swollen and bruised that the protective twitch served only to make Mark whimper with additional pain.
The sound drew the cop's attention. "Woke up, did you?"
"Between Cycles" -- a sort of cyberpunk story about characters from wildly different times and places meeting in a virtual reality.
Joel opened his eyes to dull nothingness, as if he stood in a void of unreflective grey, the world around him leached to the color of unprinted newspaper. Even the ground under his feet, if you could call it ground when there was nothing there. Had he taken some drug? He couldn't remember.
He couldn't remember much of anything, in fact. Just a few lines of poetry. And Terry. Of course he remembered Terry. But nothing else.
His heart began to race, but then suddenly the nothing around him hiccuped, and lurched, and Joel was standing in what looked like the countryside. Emerald grass swayed gently under a bright sun, mountains sulked on the horizon, and the sudden babble of a nearby brook served to underscore how silent it had been before. Far out, Joel thought. He still couldn't remember anything, but now that the world was back, he wasn't so worried.
An untitled piece about a woman who is mugged and the man who comes to her rescue, that at its core is about challenging stereotypes.
It was a white man who stole Mary Ellen's purse, completely counter to Grandma Owen's dire predictions. Not even a disheveled, homeless man or a gangbanging teenager, either, but a tall, handsome man in his thirties, wearing a button-down shirt and khakis, the sort of man Mary Ellen's mother was always nagging at her to date. She'd smiled at him as he passed her, and had even begun to wonder if she could contrive to stop him and talk to him, when suddenly he snatched her purse from her side and took off at a run.
Another untitled piece that's pretty thinly-veiled fanfic (and desperately, pathetically MarySue), but which actually has a nifty opening about time travel that should really be peeled out and used in a real, publishable story.
Another week or two later, we got some more ancient animals, and then some more, and by that time the language barrier was finally crossed, and what the future scientist told us was that the future end of the door had basically snapped backward like a rubber band, and was now closing in on its resting state of just leading to, you know, the now.
It wasn't long before our first human came through, some sort of aborigine. We'd been ready for him, sort of, but he wasn't ready for us. His brain snapped and he went crazy, and then later they reported that he was in custody and under sedation, but then his immune system collapsed under the weight of all our weird future germs and he died of pneumonia. It was sad, and after that, they tightened up security a lot more and were way more careful with the poor, unwitting time travelers who came through the rift.
"Taming the Dragon" -- My first attempt at writing BDSM, and it's all wrong, but I actually rather like the story itself. Maybe one of these days, I'll be able to recover the good parts.
"Good," Zhan said. "And how will you report the incident to Lord Pan?"
Wen Fai looked directly at Zhan. It was so quick that if Zhan had not been watching for it, he would have missed it, but it was enough to confirm his suspicions. "This one would not think to trouble the lord with such triviality, master."
"No? Not Lord Pan, then. But someone. It's why you're here."
"This one is here to serve you, master."
"Perhaps," Zhan allowed. "But your chief mission is to spy on me for the White Dragon."
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