Blog

A New Story At Lightspeed: “The West Topeka Triangle”

My latest short story is live over on the Lightspeed Website today.  It’s a semi-autobiographical tale with a lot of painful childhood memories rolled up into a tale of the supernatural… or is it?

It’s something very different for me as a writer.  I’m very nervous about how it will be received.  Some of the early reviews haven’t been great, so I’ve lost some of the confidence I had in the story.  But it’s out there, and now each reader must judge it for themselves.  It’s no longer my story.  Now it belongs to everyone.

You can read the story here.

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New Fiction, Uncategorized

Futuristic Foods and Where to Find Them

I learned over the holiday weekend that my story “Taste the Singularity at the Food Truck Circus” made the Tangent Online recommended reading list.  It received two stars out of a possible three. My posting this news is not a tacit endorsement of Dave Truesdale or any of his behaviors.  Anyway, I’m proud of this story and its reception.  It came out during WorldCon in Kansas City and a lot of people mentioned enjoying it to me, which made me really happy.

Speaking of future food, io9 has an article today called “Eight Futuristic Foods You’ll Be Eating in 30 Years” which, see above, is a subject that holds considerable interest to me.  I think the list is kind of disappointing and arbitrary, but I do wish I had done more with bugs in my story.  I do there there’s interesting material there.   What about you?  Would you eat bugs or food made from processed bugs? I think this may be one case where the processed version is preferable to the natural form.

This next bit of news has absolutely nothing to do with food — I have a new story out today on Drabblecast called “Garen and the Hound.”  This story is another Garen the Undreaming story — the first appeared in last year’s Swords v. Cthulhu.  It’s a short short, an easy read or listen.  I’m hoping to write another, longer Garen story later this year.

Finally, a personal note from me to you.  I am glad that you survived 2016, and I wish you the best of luck in 2017.  I hope to have some interesting things for you to read in the coming days.  2017 is gonna be the year of the blog comeback. I’m calling it now.

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This is 39

Today is my 39th birthday. The past year, on a personal level, has been pretty good, ignoring the upcoming impacts on the personal that are happening at the national stage.

Clockpunk Studios is on track to do roughly the same amount of business it did the year before.  It sustains my small family, and pays a couple of regular subcontractors.  It helps fund the experiment in erotic publishing known as Congress Magazine.  I still love my work and I enjoy the challenges involved in running a small business.  I don’t want to go back to work for someone else’s company ever again. I hope in 2017, things continue to be profitable and sustaining.  I’m a little worried about the coming changes at the national stage (how’s that for a repeated euphemism), but optimistic I will find a way to survive.

On the writing front, I had three stories published, and I sold one that comes out in January.  I had aimed to sell three, and I guess there are a couple more weeks for that to happen, but I’m not super-hopeful of hitting my goal given that I only have two stories on submission right now.  This year marked a continued exploration into my personal history and writing stories that draw on my childhood.  These efforts have had mixed results, but I’m proud of the writing I did; I wrote quite a few stories in the first half of the year, and I even started a novel.  Then WorldCon happened and work got busy and I fell off the wagon.  I’m still tinkering, and still hoping to have a new Dungeonspace story done soon.  I don’t know what kind (or how much) of role writing will play in my life moving forward, but I know it will play some role.

Dadding remains the most satisfying aspect of my day-to-day life.  I’m frustrated with my progress as a parent, most of the time, much as I am with my progress of being a better writer or web designer. I desire to find more patience and calm in the face of toddler obstinacy especially. That said, the end product couldn’t be better; Matty is funny, lovable, smart, and all the other adjectives you don’t need to hear from an adoring father.  Each day, he finds a way to astonish and surprise me.  His growing mental faculties are fascinating to watch unfold.  I can’t wait to see what he becomes next.

My wife Sarah continues to be the best choice I’ve ever made.  She is the best person I know, and I love her more every day.  The things we make together will long outlast us.  I can’t wait to see what comes next.

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Parenting, Personal Life

Scourge of the Memebots

Peeqo is a personal desktop robotic assistant who expresses himself through GIFs. Think of him as the love child of Amazon Echo and a Disney character. He has a conversational UI, so he responds to voice commands but answers only through GIFs.

Peeqo – The GIF Bot

Lin’s neighborhood was infested with memebots, and he’d absolutely had enough of them.  For the first few days, they were a novelty; cute little soda-can sized bots with screens for faces, trundling about on bug-legs.  They expressed themselves in old-fashioned gifs and memes, much to the confusion of the retirees up the block, and their neural networks were sophisticated enough that they were able to carry on something like a conversation.  They wanted to interact more than anything else, and seemed to have fairly advanced language parsing capabilities, but they had no ability to respond with anything other than images on their screens — no speech at all.   Talking with them got old very quickly.

Smart as they were at talking, they weren’t great at survival. Quite a few of the first wave were run over by selfiecars; their small stature and inability to make sounds meant they didn’t register well on the car sensors; their cheap, brittle 3D-printed plastics crumbled on impact, rarely leaving a dent.  By week two, they seemed to have upgraded their path-finding and threat evasion.   One morning over his coffee, Lin watched as a small herd of them scattered out of the way of a street cleaner.

By the third week, they got more aggressive about demanding interaction.  The damned things were just so needy, even if they were cute, and that was when Lin decided he’d had enough.  After the fourth “I CAN HAZ SHELTER?” cheesburger cat  and shin-nudge on his morning walk to the commuter rail, he was determined to put an end to them.  Nobody had any idea who was fabbing the things, so he couldn’t resolve the problem with diplomacy or threats of a good old-fashioned beatdown. He had a pretty good idea how to reduce their numbers with ecology.

He spent a few sleepless nights and a long weekend designing a terminator bot.  It took a few captured and dissected meme bots to figure out how to exploit their recognition software.  The terminator bots had only the barely resemblance to a person; they looked like upright- brooms with 3D-printed skulls fastened to the handles.  But the memebots recognized them as people and moved in to pester.   That’s when the terminator bot would deploy its harpoon, skewering its prey through the CPU.  Once it had strung a few of the memebots on a tether, it would move to the nearest recycling recepticle, unload, and go back to hunting.  His first few field tests managed to clear the street outside his apartment quite effectively, at least for a few days.

He ordered up a dozen of them from his building’s fabricator, charged them over night, and released them in the morning.  Merrily they rolled along in search of memebots to destroy.   Within a few days,  they were an endangered species.  Several neighbors thanked Lin with free coffee and baked goods.  Life was pretty awesome until the memebots neural networks adapted once more to the threat.

It seemed they’d figured out how to exploit a flaw in the terminator bot’s imaging software, and could effectively hypnotize his hunters by displaying peculiar test patterns.  Lin cursed himself for not taking the time to roll his own code on that aspect; he was sure that some hacker was helping the memebots, but who was impossible to figure out.  His street was littered with seized up terminators surrounded by memebots celebrating with synchronized GIFs of the Anchorman cast jumping into the air over and over again.

He spent a few days in a deep funk, but eventually, inspiration struck.  If the memebots could exploit software vulnerabilities, then he could too.  He went back to the memebots and examined their code carefully for something he could weaponize.  Another sleepless night, and he had a solution; all he had to do was test it.

Someone had let a memebot into the lobby of his apartment building, and it made a convenient target.  It  rushed up to him, excitedly flashing cartoon characters laughing and babbling.

“Shaka, when the walls fell,” he said, smiling.

The memebot displayed a dancing question mark.

He leaned in close and whispered: “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”

The memebot displayed a puzzled Nic Cage.

“Uzani, his army with fists open.”  The memebot began to wobble, and its screen flashed white.  Then, an animated explosion, finally, a sad face.  It strolled away and pointedly ignored him.

Word among the memebots got around a few days later.  The memebots must have decided Lin was nuts; they never bothered him again.

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Fiction

Cancer Baby

Infertile women have been offered new hope after scientists found that a common cancer drug triggers the development of new eggs, an outcome which was previously thought to be impossible.
“Infertility breakthrough as cancer drug sparks growth of new eggs in ‘astonishing’ discovery”, The Telegraph, December 6, 2016

Madison had a question that found its way to her in the quiet times, in those moments free of protective distraction. It rushed up from the depths to ensnare her in its tentacular problems: can you really be called a “miracle baby” when the cancer drug that gave you life didn’t save your mother?

When she was old enough to understand the story of how she came to be, she had wondered: was the cancer inside her too? She imagined that the drug worked by taking the cancer from her mother, balling it up, and making eggs from it. It did not cure the cancer, instead only forestalling it for a time. She came to think of herself not as a “miracle baby” as her father had called her, but instead, a “cancer baby.”

She imagined that she could feel the cancer at the very core of her, hibernating like some kind of terrible, cthonic bear. One day soon, it would awaken and ravage her as it had her mother. It was only a matter of time. How much, though? That passing time turned imaginative thoughts into pillars of core belief.

The weight of it informed all of her decisions in life. She never made plans more than a few weeks in advance; after all, the cancer would wake soon, so what was the point? She worked odd jobs, never very disappointed when the work dried up. After all, putting down roots and starting a career only made sense for those people whose lymphocytes weren’t ticking time bombs.

It made no sense to become romantically attached, and so she kept suitors at a distance, only allowing two or perhaps three dates before breaking it off. She carefully explained that she did not expect to live in this world for much longer, and she was sparing them grief. After all, she had grown up in the shadow of her father’s grief, had tasted it in every half-hearted meal, smelled it in the air every morning. She would not wish that kind of grief on anyone, and it was a simple thing to avoid creating it.

She learned to do the blood work herself with at-home testing kits. She tested herself every Sunday, as part of her morning coffee and web-surfing. It came to feel like paying a toll; each week, a prick of blood onto the sensor attached to her tablet was the fee to live another week. One day, her coin would be found counterfeit, she knew. Her only uncertainty was when.

“Remember in college, how I was always coming up with excuses to get an extension for my thesis?” Her friend Bethany once asked. “Your entire life is like that. Eventually, you’re going to need to stop asking for an extension and do the work of living.

“I just don’t see the point of starting work I’ll never finish,” Madison said.

“Nobody ever really finishes–but I’m not sure this metaphor can be stretched that far,” Bethany said, and dropped the subject. She’d tried for many years to shake Madison’s certainty, but it was a load-bearing belief in the structure of Madison.

Madison was forty-three when her test kit finally showed the positive result she had been expecting. When it did, she broke down in tears of relief. She thought: could you just imagine how horrible it would have been if she had spent all those years expecting the cancer, only to have it never awaken?

She verified the results with a doctor, who advised her on course of treatments. New drugs existed that her mother had never been able to take advantage of, the doctor explained. She would live comfortably for many years, after a painful and trying year of treatment.

Madison digested this news, asking numb, distracted questions about the specifics. In all her years of certainty that the cancer had been deferred to her somehow, she had never considered the possibility that it wouldn’t take her life as it had taken her mother’s. She went along with the treatments, unable to think of any other course of action. They were painful, and at times she considered giving up. Bethany and the doctor convinced her to continue, and she began to feel better in incremental steps.

At fourty-five, the tests showed that her cancer was gone, but that only confirmed what she had felt for months now. The hollow inside her, the den where the cancer had slept for so long, was vacant. The emptiness of it ached like the socket of where a rotted tooth had once been.

At fourty-six, tender, raw, and out of practice, she began to live with tentative, new purpose: to fill the hollow in her heart with new loves and friendships. Always, a little wistfully. She could never shake the feeling that when the cancer departed, she had lost the one last, delicate strand of connection to a mother she had never really known.

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Fiction

New Story: Hunting Trip

I wrote this story out of pain and horror at the Sandy Hook massacre.  It didn’t occur to me then we were on a path to make this story a reality, but now I’m not so sure.  No editor would publish it, understandably. It’s flawed, but it captures the terror I feel about our possible future if people like Bannon are allowed to rise to power.  Do not read this unless you’re  in a good mental space.  This is a horror story.  This story has all the trigger warnings.  ALL OF THEM.  I’m not kidding.  This is the darkest thing I’ve ever written.

 

Hunting Trip

by Jeremiah Tolbert

Dex clamored out of the pickup into the heat-seared air of the disembarkment point. He slung Jane over his shoulder and shuffled his feet in the sand, watching while Dad finished checking his work messages for the thousandth time. Jane vibrated with excitement.

“Calm down,” he whispered and laid his hand across her flank.  She stilled under his touch, and he wished he could calm himself so easily. He’d had two coffees on the drive, and he and Jane had talked the entire drive from the enclave. Dad must have been feeling guilty about their fight earlier; Dex hadn’t needed to argue to keep Jane in his lap for the ride.

The only time Dex saw his father lately was in the news, and when he’d finally come home from his latest trip, Dad had brought up the subject of Dex’s low grade in survival studies. No hello. He’d launched into the lecturing and belittling right away.

“It’s your fault anyway!” Dex had shouted back. “The other boys in my class have actually hunted. How am I going to learn if I don’t do it?  You may be an expert hunter, but are are like the worst dad ever.” (more…)

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Fiction

2016 Will not End When 2016 Ends

I fear that this year has been not an aberration but is a preview of things to come. This year has been characterized by rising xenophobia and anti-Islamic sentiments across the globe, catalyzed in large part by Syrian refugees.

To use a rare Biblical parody, it feels like the developed world is saying loudly “there is no room in the inn” and slamming doors.  Simultaneously,  we are ignoring a growing global climate crisis that will lead to a hundred times the refugees we are seeing from Syria. Resources will be stretched far more thin by this, and I believe it’s unavoidable – the time to act was 20 years ago.

Recently in a story, I imagined this trend of climate refugees to be met with relative compassion and little disagreement, but I am afraid that 2016 has taught me that was overly optimistic. When people are afraid, they cling even harder to what they have, it seems. They demand an exile of the Others.  Climate refugees won’t be met with friendliness.  Communities will not open themselves willingly to those who flee coastal flooding.   They will close ranks and refuse them…that is what it seems to me now.

2016 has been a lesson for me in what’s most likely to come. I don’t want to witness it. But I know I will, and worse yet, so will my son.

Prove me wrong, world. Show that we can overcome differences and take care of one another. Show me that 2016 is a blip, a bump.

Show me. I’m waiting.

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Uncategorized

“The Cavern of the Screaming Eye” live on Lightspeed Magazine Today

My latest story, the first of the Dungeonspace sequence, is live today over at Lightspeed Magazine.  Give it a read or a listen, would you, and let me know what you think?

“Is that the collapsible, carbon fiber ten-foot pole from TrunchCo—” I slammed my locker door and spun the combo lock, but it was too late; the fanboy already seen my gear. I didn’t know what his interest was, but I didn’t want to encourage him. I said nothing.

He continued: “I’ve got the one from a couple of years ago that folds up. It sucks. I wish I had the new one.”

I stared at him over the rims of my glasses in my best glare. He didn’t flinch.

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Luke Cage Made Me Uncomfortable And That Taught Me Something About Systemic Racism in Media

Netflix’s latest Marvel series, Luke Cage, left me feeling somewhat uneasy in the first episodes. I wasn’t really sure why. I’d enjoyed all of the Netflix/Marvel series to degrees, but none of them had left me feeling quite so discomforted in the early part of the story. It was somewhere in perhaps the second or third episode when I finally began to put my finger on what was making me feel so strange watching the show. That led to even greater discomfort.

Why was I having trouble? I didn’t always get the cultural references being made. Some of the slang was unfamiliar as well, and I couldn’t identify with a lot of the life experiences of the characters. And then that last matter: there were very few white people on the show. Almost none in those early episodes. That couldn’t actually matter, could it?

My first reaction with myself was to get defensive. Why should that bother me? I’m not a complete stranger to that experience. I lived in Kenya for half a year in college, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to be the only white person around in my travel there. There were times when it was fine, and times when it was uncomfortable, but this felt different. I aim to not be or act consciously racist, although I know I struggle with innate bias like many do.  And so on the thoughts went.  Basically, the boiled down to “I’m a good person, I’m not racist, the problem isn’t with me, it must be with the show.”  Yawn.

If I stopped at that level of introspection, I wouldn’t be writing this post. Thankfully, my thinking went a little bit deeper. As I explored the feeling, it suddenly struck me: oh. Wait a second. What if this is what people of color feel when they watch 90% of American televsion, rarely ever seeing themselves represented, and when they do, it’s a stereotype, a caricature of a real person? Oh my God, it must be something like this. It must be like this with nearly every single show, movie, book. Day in, day out. This is what it feels like to not see yourself represented in the media.

Holy shit. 

I was supportive of the cause of more diversity and representation in our entertainment, but I didn’t understand it very well until now. I hadn’t walked a few episodes in the shoes of a person of color, so to speak. I hesitate to even make that analogy, because my short, weekend experience can’t begin to compare to a lifetime of that. I gained a little perspective, that’s all. But it helps me understand and empathize better, to connect with the words I’ve been hearing and reading for so long, but never fully understanding.

My discomfort passed quickly. I found I enjoyed the show even more for the fact that I was witnessing many things and viewpoints new to me. Ultimately, I think the character of Luke Cage is my favorite of the Netflix heroes. More than any of the others, he personifies an ideal, a struggle. To be good and do good for others. Honestly… he makes Daredevil look like a self-obsessed jerk.

All that said – nothing else I could say about the show really matters in light of that little glimpse I received, I think. You could very easily say that this isn’t a show for me. And you’re probably right that in some sense that this show was made perhaps to let people of color feel like  get to feel with nearly every damn show on the television. My experience is secondary to the primary experience. But I thought it worth mentioning. And I hope more white geeks like myself have a similar experience. It was eye-opening for me. And I really want to read about how the show made people of color feel. I can’t wait to listen to their thoughts and experiences with the show, so I can understand all of this even better.

In the future, I hope we get a lot more shows like Luke Cage. I hope they make me uncomfortable in exactly the same way. I eagerly look forward to watching them. As for my own writing, I know that I will take the lesson seriously. It’s going to change the way I think about some things. How exactly remains to be seen, but I am determined not to squander the perspective I gained.

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Stepping on Acorns

I go on a lot of walks. It’s the only form of exercise that doesn’t leave me feeling like death, which probably means it is barely exercise at all, and my expanding waistline supports this notion.  I suppose it would expand a lot more quickly without the walks, so they do serve a purpose.   I walk, I listen to podcasts, I think.  And at a certain time of year, I step on acorns.

This is absolutely not a metaphor for any other hobby or professional pursuit.  I really do this.

You might be asking, why would I want to step on acorns?  The right acorn, stepped on in the right way, is practically an orgasmic experience of textured vibration and sound.  The perfect acorn crunch is like the best bubble wrap pop times one hundred.  Really, why does anybody do anything?  It’s pleasurable, and there’s satisfaction in a stepping done well.

I’ve collected below a few tips and tricks to the practice that I think would be beneficial to the beginner.

First, you have to go on walks in places where there are acorns.  A treadmill is no good.   Indoor tracks or malls, no good.  You miss 100% of the acorns you don’t see.   Find the acorns, and walk.   A nice neighborhood full of mature trees like the one I live in is a good option.  If you live in a place without trees, such as the desert, I’m afraid this activity might not be for you.  There’s almost certainly some other kind of local analogue you can take up.  Let me know what you find.

Next, you have to keep your eyes open and scan the ground ahead.  You have to know where the acorn trees generally are, and generally the season of the year in which acorns litter the pavement.  You can walk randomly, sometimes accidentally stepping on acorns, but for the best results, step with purpose.  Over time, you’ll find that you’ll develop a sense for acorns as you walk and it won’t take so much effort.

The actual stepping can have a variety of outcomes:

Sometimes, you miss the acorn entirely.  There’s not much sense in altering the rhythm of your steps to get that acorn that’s fallen out of your path.  Sometimes, the acorn falls on the grass, and you can’t crush an acorn into the soil.   Sometimes, you step for the acorn, misjudge the distance, and you come down hard on empty air.  Them’s the breaks, no pun intended.  You have to let go of the acorns you miss.  There will always be more acorns.

Sometimes, you step down on an acorn and it’s all rotted out, mushy, and it makes no satisfying crunch. It just kind of… deflates.  It’s a disappointing when a step goes awry in this way, but it’s basically out of your hands.  The acorn went bad through no fault of your own.  You came to it too late, alas.

Sometimes, you step down on an acorn and it doesn’t crunch at all. It’s a hardy sort, and mostly just hurts your foot, even through the soles of your footwear.  That acorn wasn’t ready yet.  Hit it up on your next walk.  Some acorns, you can’t crack for days.  You might come to enjoy the challenge.  You might just kick the acorn into the storm drain out of frustration.  Who knows, maybe that acorn was destined to be a tree, and there was nothing you could do to stop that.  Wish it luck and move on.

The worst feeling is when you step on an acorn and you realize it wasn’t an acorn at all– it was a snail.  Acorn crushing is harmless; each tree drops thousands of them, and most people don’t want a forest in their front lawns.  When you step on a snail, you get the same satisfying crunch, but it comes at a terrible cost of guilt and grief, not to mention an agonizing and instant death for the snail.  Sometimes, this happens because you’re not paying enough attention.  Sometimes, you step on a snail accidentally, because of poor lighting or bad eyesight.  I don’t have any really good advice to avoid this, except to try not walk where you have seen snails in the past.  Best to avoid those regions entirely and apologize sincerely to the snails.  You can’t take back the pain you’ve caused, but you can try not to do it again.

When your steps are just right, when the acorn’s fallen in the right patch of concrete, and when you walk with purpose, setting your sights on the right nut–you get the perfect crunch.  It happens maybe one out of every ten, twenty acorns.  The sound, the feeling of it under your foot, it’ll be a mix a pleasure and the satisfaction of a job done entirely right. Nothing beats that, and you can do it a dozen times a day.

To recap: stepping on acorns successfully requires a mixture of planning, intent, practice, and luck.  But I know that if you dedicate yourself to the process like I have, you too will be doing it at a professional level in no time at all.

This is definitely about a real thing.  But it might also be a metaphor about other things.

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