"Why do you challenge me on those three little words?" I spit and say.

I knew from that first day when we lay in the bails and you punctured
my soul.

"What fool wouldn't be able to tell when they'd found the needle in
the hay?"

But now you prick against my conscience because I know I am only six
degrees of separation from another true love...












...and someone who will cut my head off.

Posted by beth

Do I celebrate my failures? Wrap a silk ribbon around my heavy heart
and present it for demons to feast? Should I allow broken certainty
to overboil, to circulate salty liquid through arteries and out
retinas? Do I sit and brood in a puddle of sulky residue? Should I
celebrate my failures or allow success to set them free?

Life is a timeline without a pause. You can't stop at nowhere, you are
always somewhere, you may not know where.

True failure is often misdiagnosed, a misplaced coordinate; not a
symptom of exertion or the will power to succeed. Failure resides in
the cracks and shadows, in waning confidence and wavering assertions.
There are no straight lines to success, no simple routes or maps. No
shadows without some light seeping through.

Peer over, under and around. Appreciate the journey - the scenery. Be
experience rich.

When demons cross my path, I control the thoroughfare. Do I forge
forward through the Carrion of thwarted ambitions or take a new
direction? It's my choice, my destination, my journey, an evolving
point towards my own tailored satisfaction.

Just carry on.

Posted by beth

It's not a good time to sell a new title to a publisher. The economy's bad, many have cut back already, everyone's scared and everyone says they're not taking on new titles.

I went to the LBF to sell some of my own work, books by friends and Microhappy. The only success I had was with Microhappy. Two different places have expressed interest and will get back to me.

So it's probably a good time to tell you what I pitched. From that you'll know what we need from you to make it work.

Microhappy is a series of short pieces with accompanying images by the same person. Started here, about a third of it will have already been published on this site. The rest will be original work by the same writer-photographers. The sample book (ultimately to be one of 52; one for each week of the year) was chosen from a design perspective only.

If either of these publishers come through someone in the team will approach you as authors, ask the normal questions (do you want your work published for a percentage of any profits, will you guarantee it's your work etc). Then comes the fun stuff because we'll need much more material than we have and a lot of it needs to have not been published before.

Watch this space
:)


(all design by Sprocket, the stories and shots are yours, this was a sample and will be reviewed if and when we get a formal contract)

Posted by Dhamaka

I'm all for genetic engineering. I LOVE the 150-watt firefly. For instance.

I like my new leather wings, even though they'll never be able to do more than let me glide down a flight of stairs. And they make me sit funny on the bus. They're no more stupid than a tattoo or wearing spike heels for twelve hours. They help keep me warm, they keep the rain off, and they get me laid.

But that was the thing I never expected from genetic engineering. Life is PRETTY. Life is SEXY. Life makes WARMTH and LIGHT, and there was never enough of that.

Life used to be red in tooth and claw. Sometimes it still is. But life is also BEAUTIFUL. It was all the encouragement we needed to clean up the environment a little.

Now all it takes for me to have a decent porch light is a tiny sliver of apple smeared above my doorframe.

Life is beautiful.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

It's a molten ball of nickel-iron -- the poison that kills fusion-powered nightlights -- coughed into the vastness and adopted by a mother half her age, a bright mother who has yet to catch the killer hemochromatosis. Silica rock and carbonates on top of that, oceans of saline plasma, then a couple feet of microbial processed carbonates, sulfoxides, and nitrates whipped into a meringue and crusted with a light frosting of asphalt, concrete, and a confection of threadsteel and glass.

On top of that, in the atmospheric interface of soil and space, coterminous with sixty miles of damp air and the first twenty or so thousand miles of space, is the realm of a lighter foam of ephemerality -- flitting taxis, rented hotdogs and sugar-crusted nuts, rented and flitting illusions of wealth, still dense enough (so far) to have not been boiled into space, or maybe trapped by a transient and perverse inversion layer, wrapped in lacework Kennelly-Heaviside foil and thrown back into the cooling coals for an ultra-slow slow roasting.

The flavors are so delicate and fleeting -- a layer of melt-on-the-tongue rice paper, pork-flavored candyfloss, sweetened smoke silked with capsicum and cinnamon and chocolate aromatics and topped with electrified air and magnetized vacuum -- capable of being vanished with a sneeze or slapped away forever with the wind of a careless backhand.

We all scuffle for a sniff as if, as if. As if we ourselves weren't particles in the aroma, waiting to be slapped away in a whiff of diesel fumes, dollars, and sausage-inna-bun with mustard. Where is the shadow of the hand?

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

Richard didn't know he was dead, but he continued on his journey because he
couldn't stop himself. It wasn't a bus or a malignancy, bereavement or
bodkin that finished him, tant pis. It was to feed and make waste; to rise
again from recumbency; to take succour from adversity and umbrage at
atrocity; to love, without liberty, to mourn liberty, lorn of love; to bear
witness to the light and the dark in turn returning; to be suffered to suck
at the teat of his gaoler and to husband his ruination unto settlement of
debts owing to womb or ghost. It was the obligation to subsist that killed
Richard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvqDrvXDADI

Posted by Riddler

"Wtfs wrong with your kettle?"

"It doesn't work."

"I know. I've been staring at it for 15 minutes."

Posted by jc1000000

The old gods walk the earth all the time. We've learned to ignore them.

Here's one. Anubis. Out-of-work psychopomp, hanging around on street corners, too proud to beg. Larger than life. If he were our size, we'd bump into him and freak out. As it is, we walk between his legs, unheeding.

Collapsible scales in the back pocket. Somewhere on his dignified person, a feather. Sometimes he'll find a stone or half a brick that looks enough like a discarded heart and put it in a pan of the scales. Into the other pan goes the feather. When the stone demonstrates as heavier, he chucks it down a storm drain and moves on.

He pokes his pointy nose into alleys, ears twitching, looking for the newly dead from drink or exposure or quotidian violence. He cocks his head at each confused ba, curious to see if they know the rites. When they mill about, flitting in flocks like startled pigeons, he strides off to the next alley, neither satisfied nor disappointed.

One day he'll find the ossified heart of a saint, lighter than a feather, and toss it into the sky, where it will remain until claimed.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri