Chalk on a blackboard

Bench

O

Meanwhile...

Logomania

Too late to dream of sleep

What happened when I started submitting stories to publications?

 I enjoyed writing stories here, they were freely available to anyone who cared to read them. I posted over 300 stories this way. Then I wrote something here I thought worthy of submission. Turns out it was. It was rejected because posting a story here counts as prior publication. Who'd 've thunk it.

I started a new site called 100 rejections to record my rejections from publishers. Not an original idea but it has been fun and the rejections have been getting encouraging. Why have I not updated that site?

The answer is summer happened. It was time to disperse so I could better coagulate in the Autumn.

Why do I intend to post here again? Because it seems true that in order to keep the flow of ideas coming, giving them away really does work.

While I will be submitting again (without the exuberence that I watched my youthful peers possess) I accept that to keep that tap running I have to leave the garden hose on as well.

80 The Battle for New York

The Battle for New York was a disaster, Walter Gromwell looked around at the 4 other men who'd made it out of  Staten Island with him and then he looked at what was left of their kit. Gromwell couldn't supress a groan as something inside his injured chest wobbled and pain shot electric sparks from his hips to his ribs. Gromwell had seen his General  brought down before his very eyes as if by magic. His head clipped from his body with less sound than the farmboy from Sussex had heard coming from a cat fart. He started to smile but the tightening of his chest made him stop mid-chuckle. The General had been on his horse, halfway through an order and then his head had exploded, Gromwell hadn't been thinking then, all he'd known had been flung out the window at that instant leaving only room for living through the next second and then the next, all the way to the present moment, the moment where he was right now, clutching his side and slowly freezing to death months later in this harsh New World January, despite the cold, despite the pain, it seemed less real than that summer day in July when they'd landed on Staten Island expecting little to no opposition from the traitor Washington's men.

Instead, something had taken his General's head off. No, it was  really more like it had exploded from the inside, as he'd first thought. General Sir William Howe had been a good General and Gromwell, like most of the General's men, had loved him, Gromwell had seen action with him in Austria and later in Canada and even the Caribbean. When Howe's head had just come off like that, the dirt, the grass, the creaking of the landing boats, the mad blue July sky, Gromwell was fairly sure that if he closed his eyes and took the time, he'd be able to count each leaf of each branch of each tree that had surrounded them when that mysterious force took the General's head.

It had only been the beginning of the nightmare, They'd landed with 25,000 soldiers but after the General's head got taken off, the senior officers had been next, hundreds at a time it seemed to Gromwell. Now it was January and the scattered panicked forces the General had led were wandering lost, hungry, diseased and dying in the snow all across New England.Hunted as well. Gromwell couldn't help grunting, could he call it New England anymore? These Americas would be his death and he knew it. Still, with the handful of men that had made it with him back to one of the remaining landing boats (some were strangely little more than splinters) he had gotten across to the mainland and managed to survive as long as January and as far as Jersey. They were heading North hoping to find the Continenal Army still in command up near Quebec whose streets, he could hardly believe he had walked once, with a full belly in clothes that did not stink.

He'd gone right past horror on the day of the landing at Staten Island and was only now beginning to come back round to it again from the other side and started properly thinking, what could have happened? They'd abandoned all their cannon where they had fallen. The precision, no, the decision of the strike against them was what had baffled and panicked the men, 25,000 soldiers only have about 300 senior officers and only one General. It hadn't been like an attack, it had been like a decapitation. Gromwell was just a regular infantryman, as were all who had escaped the carnage on Staten Island that day. In fact, he doubted any commissioned officer had lived out the hour, let alone the day. Gromwell couldn't put his certainty into words but either by Grace or Glory, he'd not just been lucky, he felt he'd been spared.

In the treeline, half a kilometer from Walter Gromwell's camp, a lance of figures lay motionless and observed the proceedings using starlight goggles.

                "Sergeant, they have muskets but have been using them only to hunt, avoiding built-up areas, their provisions must be depleted soon, they have continued on a northerly heading since we've been observing, recommend catch and release, these boys are done fighting, over."

                "One of them might be my granddad, right Private Tremayne? Have you identified them?"

                "Yes Sergeant. Historical profile reports their identities as Walter Gromwell, Jackson Struthers, Willard Jensen, Amos Philips, Gerard Buckley, visual confirmation, over"

                "Not much left of his regiment, okay, all names are green, except Walter Gromwell's, he didn't survive the war, over"

                "Yes Sergeant, over. " said Private Tremayne wondering about all those who were supposed to have survived but had got sniped all the way back in July. Some Brain had explained at the campaign briefing that big changes had smaller and more predictable consequences but little changes had huge unpredictable consequences. Something as well about big changes being on purpose shouldn't mean accidental changes being introduced willy-nilly. That was improvisation. He didn't understand the math but it appealled to his sense of neatness. He sighted in and took aim. Exhaled.

Gromwell huddled up in his blanket and tried to get some sleep, hoped things would look better t--

Coming soon: The battle for New York!

Thank you for voting! Check back on November 20 at the latest for my story!

76 The Battle for New York

Coming soon!

 Thanks to Anon for this story idea:

112,000 British troops
300 Special Forces
The historic battle for New York in 1776-77
Time Travel
7 Days

I won't promise the whole story but given the research conducted by Anon, including myself among the horde, I think the problem has been thought through enough to write on it.

Who wants to read this story?

Click Like or Dislike below to vote! Do you want to read such a story?

Voting ends October 1st!

78 Deep Space Blues

1.

There was no turning back. With plenty of time now to stare out of the small viewport in the common area into space, into nothing.  The viewport had been added after studies had shown that people fared better psychologically on long space missions when one was installed. For the same reason the cockpit had two seats even though there was ever only one pilot in there at a time. Having evidence of other human beings was as beneficial as being able to look outside, even if there was nothing out there and no one in the second seat.

Pilots would always smuggle scotch aboard even though it was against the rules. All pilots did this, even those who didn't drink, whether superstitious or otherwise, every pilot brought some good scotch and by and large, most of the bottle made the journey. That empty seat started getting called the "angel's seat" and the splash of scotch it received before departure was called the "angel's share" after the amount of scotch lost to the aging process.

Once in a long time, a pilot would come down to the common room and take a belt of scotch and stare.

There was another reason to keep scotch aboard.

2.

"How did you make it, when so many of the crew regularly go mad after coming out of their sim-fantasies?"

"I simply requested a real-time broadcast of the ship during stasis, most crew psychosis isn't permanent, you know."

Ignoring the question the interview continued."So while everyone else was living a shared hallucinatory fantasy, you were imagining yourself alone, here?"

"That's about it. On board the whole time, the simulation matched reality right down to the controls, it was an option, I chose it"

"Option?"

"The engineer assigned to my sim had time to spare, he suggested the sim controls be brought online"

"7 years, I understand the simulators were intended to solve the tedium of space travel."

"I understand some crew choose longer subjective times."

"One crew member lived a Buddhist monastery simulation for 700 years subjective, he had to get special approval for that."

"That would be Em."

"Em, yes, does he have a last name?"

"I thought that was his last name, I've shipped with him before, I don't even know why you're interviewing me, this is standard attrition. With rehabilitation, most of those space zombies will come to their senses."

3.

"You didn't hear? Dr. Fahr has succeeded in creating a stable gate to Earth, long hauling is history!"

"Just Earth? well, until there's a gate on every habitable planet in the universe I won't worry."