Coming soon… Strange Adventures in a Deviant Universe – WPAD Science Fiction.
From the creative minds of the members of WPaD (Writers, Poets, and Deviants) comes
Strange Adventures From A Deviant Universe
With stories from Michale Haberfelner, Marla Todd, Lea Anne Cutler, Mandy White, Diana Garcia, James Cooley, David X. Hunter, Jason Kemp, Debra Lamb, Nocera, James Turley, Benedict, AND Skeet Beecham.
Cover by Jason Kemp
Coming soon. Stand by for lift off (and cats.)
Proof of Life on Mars!
Best Halloween story I’ve read this year!
The night air was thick and warm. Too warm for the last day of October. The moon wasn’t quite full, and the smoke from the mill gave it a spooky look. The kids were having fun though. First time they didn’t have to wear anything heavy under their costumes.
“Trick-or-treat,” Suzy said, before reaching the porch.
She had on the best one Paul had seen tonight. Her face was green, and she wore a pointed hat. Suzy was a miniature wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz. Even the broom matched
Suzy’s eyes glazed over as he put a chocolate bar in her plastic jack-o-lantern. A chill crawled up Paul’s back
Suzy nodded her head, and two short flying monkey’s appeared from behind her. Each had their own broom. One hit Paul over the head with the handle while the other poked him in the stomach. Nothing came out when…
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I’m reading The Trixie Affair – A Gluten-Free Mystery.
Just kidding that title has been popping into my head all morning.
November is a big month. Just yesterday it started to FINALLY cool off. Our first rain of the season will be later today or tomorrow. And believe me when I say RAIN is a big deal where I live (just out of the drought and in fear of fires near Sacramento, California.)
Vampires like cooler weather. Necks aren’t so hot and sweaty. Everything tastes better – even without Pumpkin Spice. But you CAN have pumpkin spiced blood if you want.
Mix together:
3 tablespoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
1 ½ teaspoons ground allspice
1 ½ teaspoons ground cloves.
Put a teaspoon in a cup of warmed blood and enjoy. I do realize that there is no pumpkin in there. You COULD put in…
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HA HA HA Happy Halloween
Trick or Treat
Little Paulie held his bag open and Mrs. Johnson dropped a handful of candy into it.
“There you go, Paulie. Tell your folks I said hello.” Mrs. Johnson smiled down at him, emitting warmth through her wrinkles and stained teeth.
“Thank you, Mrs. Johnson, I will.” Paulie returned her smile through his mask and turned to head down the sidewalk.
As the door behind him closed, he noticed an adult in a zombie costume coming towards him. Paulie paused in wonderment at how easily the man seemed to portray his chosen character.
“Nice costume, mister. You really got it down.”
You MUST take your Dragon to work this week!
As we lean into the last weekend of October, some of you who are familiar with MotD may be saying, “But wait. Did I miss Take-Your-Dragon-to-Work Day?”
No you didn’t! This year, tomorrow, October 27, is TYDtWD. So tonight, give your Dragon a good scrub, burnish her scales, and remind her of proper workplace etiquette, for tomorrow she will be walking the halls of education, commerce, politics, you name it. It’s time for Dragons to represent in the work-a-day world.
But more on that tomorrow.
Today is still about telling Dragon tales. Or, more specifically, talking Dragon books.
The time for gifting is fast approaching and so I offer a few Draco-centric suggestions for the Dragon lover on your Yule/Channukah/Kwanzaa/et al. lists, beginning for a not-so-humblebrag of my own. As the Dragons keep reminding me, being a WAFDE VIP does have its privileges, so here goes.
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You decide… Fun article with a bit of history and a bit of mystery!
“Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating” – Carl von Clausewitz
They missed a good marketing opportunity…
Uncertainty is unpopular. It’s why we invented cool stuff like probability and statistics. I mean, if you’re going to be an expert in something, it sucks when your predictions turn out wrong, and it’s nice to have sufficiently complex mathematical concepts to conclusively demonstrate that nobody’s perfect. Folks tend to stop donating to oracles that are consistently off target. The oracles probably don’t care as they are high as a kite, but even a prophet has to make a profit, be it fiduciary or celestial. When you are a noted intellectual giant in a field of inquiry, repeated failures to show your smarts tend to make all those college loans seem like a frivolous expense.
Now, if Socrates said nothing else, we’d probably still know…
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A moving post to share – we all know someone in a situation who need help, needs to escape, needs to know they count and are of value, and loved unconditionally.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. If you or someone you know are being abused please know there is help available to you. There are ways for you to be safely moved from thishostile environment. I witnessed this success first hand while workingas a volunteer in a shelter for abused women and children. I saw women and children who had been afraid and hopeless in the past be helped through their nightmare to go on and build successful lives. The link below is a place to start. If this is happening to you please reach out.
This will be the 5th year for rememberingthe abused by bringing attention to the never-ending problem of domestic violence via “Shelter Girl” a short poem I wrote in 2013.
~
The day she came
to the shelter
She was a sight
for sore eyes.
Children in tow
a half-packed bag,
Evidence of…
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Dear Diary,
I do not understand these large vegetables called pumpkins.
~ Vlad
Dear Diary,
Tonight I went out for a bite to eat. It was night. Late night. I had gone to the usual night spots and had, what do people call it these days, oh yes, I had a snack or two. Small bites. Wanting more, and wanting something good I went to a tavern owned by a woman called Cassie.
I walked her home, nearly crazy with her warmth and the sweet smell of her blood. The night was cool with the change of the seasons. It was the autumn solstice. I was hungry.
Once inside of her house she grabbed my shirt and kissed me. I shared her embrace, hardly able to contain myself. Then she smiled and said she had to go to the bathroom. I waited, and decided to remove my shirt thus showing…
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Halloween Fun
Picture courtesy of: http://preventioncdnndg.org/eco-quartier/eco-tips-for-halloween/
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It is a great pleasure for me to announce the
3rd Halloween-Poem Contest
on ‘Writer’s Treasure Chest’.
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Every author and poet are invited to participate and deliver a “Halloween-Poem” to my email address: aurorajean.alexander@aol.com, together with their picture.
There are a few rules to follow:
Every poem that meets the rules and is delivered within the deadline will be published here on “Writer’s Treasure Chest” together with the provided picture.
End of this month I will introduce this years jury members to you. I am very proud that these authors agreed to be part of…
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I always look forward to these posts.
Quote about John Gardner: “The late John Gardner once said that there are only two plots in all of literature. You go on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Since women, for many years, were denied the journey, they were left with only one plot in their lives — to await the stranger. Indeed, there is essentially no picaresque tradition among women novelists. While the latter part of the twentieth century has seen a change of tendency, women’s literature from Austen to Woolf is by and large a literature about waiting, usually for love.” ― Mary Morris, The Illustrated Virago Book of Women Travellers
***
“All order, I’ve come to understand, is theoretical, unreal — a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world — two snake pits.” ― John Gardner, Grendel
“Stars, spattered out through lifeless night from…
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I’m a Vampire who enjoys stories getting Vampires right.
“Preacher” is one of them. If you’re not familiar with this AMC show — spoiler! — Cassidy’s a Vampire but not the main character. While we’re shown he’s capable of blood-raging violence, most of the time he just wants to be left alone with his substance abuse. He’s a predator who avoids killing because of both the complications it brings — bodies don’t hide themselves — as a well as personal code of who deserves his wrath.
Every Vampire I’ve met has their own variation of this unwritten code with no two alike. None are more complicated than that of a sire and their progeny, and in the case of Cassidy — another surprise spoiler! — turning his actual son, Denis. Cassidy is over a century old, so it isn’t clear if he fathered Denis before being turned, only that he…
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A little bit of Friday Science Fiction Fun…
Sure we all volunteered with a capitol V but we didn’t know we’d be stuck a billion miles from home with a bunch of assholes.
Our plan was to stop at Planet 2387 before we made communication with our target planet. 2387 is an uninhabited wasteland. There might have been the rudiments of life there at one time but that ship had come and gone.
So we land at what was left of the Emile Hanson Memorial Outpost, otherwise known as Hanson’s Hole. I looked up Hanson’s name before we left home. He’d been the captain of the third Mars mission. You know, the one whose head exploded when he ran into a couple of guys from Europa, but that was a long time ago. That was almost three hundred years ago, long before I was born.
On the wall of the main building of…
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The solar eclipse is on Monday, August 21. I’ll be on a beach in Oregon watching it. At the same time it will be my daughter’s first day of college in California. She’ll see it then race off to her first class. It is a busy time in my world, and it will be even busier when I return.
It will be a full moon on Monday too, which always makes me think of Werewolves. For some reason the following story of my past also reminds me of other things going on in the world right now. Odd how the mind and memories work that way.
Right after I’d graduated from college (the first time) from one of the rare Universities (now a well respected and famous school) that accepted women I took a trip across country on a train to meet my brother Val. He’d gone to New York…
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West Coast Review 