This is linked on his guest post but it needs additional emphasis! After years of my pestering him about it, Bill O’Neil has FUCKING FINALLY gotten around to setting up a dedicated story blog. Bill/William/whoever was making me want to shred everything I ever wrote and set it on fire in a toilet while he was still in high school, so I’m (mostly) glad to finally be able to slot him into Google Reader. If you don’t do the same then you’ll just have to accept that you and I have different tastes!
Category: William O’Neil
Three things make a roundup
- Holly presents Towards a Critical Framework for High School Musical, which comes perilously close to accomplishing the formidable task of making HSM interesting to me. (As the author notes in the comments, though, it may already be too late.)
- Leonard is creating an free, online-only speculative fiction anthology called Thoughtcrime Experiments and he’s paying big bucks for stories! I can’t submit because I’m a first-degree acquaintance, but other people can, cough ahem guys.
- Oh, right, and MY SISTER’S GETTING MARRIED
Ersatz blogrolling
The main side effect of the Penny Arcade bump for Ommatidia has been a notification avalanche–via email or Technorati–of other people who have started (or were already doing) tiny story blogs in a similar vein. I think this is awesome, but honestly I lose track of which site is which, and even I can only read so much blink fiction in a day.
So here’s an offer: if you’re doing tiny stories on some sort of schedule, email me with a link and a little summary and I’ll add you to the directory page I’m putting together now. I am not promising to subscribe to all of them, for the aforementioned reasons, but I will go through once a month to check them all, maybe make a recommendation, and clean out the dead ones. (If you have emailed me about your story blog, and it’s still going, and you want it to be on the list, I would appreciate it if you’d email me again.)
Besides the obvious, I’ll start it off with just such a recommendation: The Two Minutes Project, comprising Two Minutes Less a Third and Chasing Concordia. Very short stories and very short songs! Read The Eternal Question if you need convincing, which you shouldn’t, dammit you have got to start TRUSTING me someday.
William, co-king of the Anacrusis mashup, made a Dinosaur Comic out of Odysseus:
Story Fight!
Miranda sits at the table and turns the ring over and over. “You should have called me,” she says.
“Of course I called you.” He blinks and frowns. “I called you until your mailbox filled up. I called out the window and I called 911. I called, I–I called you names–“
“Please don’t take that tone,” she says.
“Why not?” he asks coldly. “It’s not as if I can make you upset.”
But Miranda loves him, loves him like chocolate and heat and really good pop songs. She can’t speak. She slaps the table and all the windows blow out.
And it’s a bit of an in-joke, but William’s allegory for my occasional struggles with syndication is unfairly rich.
Story fight!
Last week, William challenged me over the Miranda story; took a while to figure this out, but I got it. Your serve, sir.
They don’t even check whether you’ve got an emergency shunt or cutout: either you do or you’re here because you don’t. Took Miranda months to find them. They don’t exactly advertise.
It smells like smoke and nerves. “Ready,” says the tech, then kicks the starter and scrambles back to his place in the circle. Miranda’s already got a sweaty hand in each of hers. The multiplier cycles up, rattling, as the tech leans forward for a bite of chocolate.
Overload. Miranda gasps in joy, in pain, in joy, in /
/ the bathroom, at home, Zeke shakily cuts her ring off his finger.