New Digs,

I am moving my blogging efforts, paltry as they have been, over to Wordpress. Here is the link to my new blog: http://davidalanjones.wordpress.com/


-- david j.

Where'd the previous flash story go? I had to take it down, because I have sent it to Flash Me magazine for consideration.

-- david j.

Following is my winning entry in the Aphelion Webzine flash fiction contest for December 2009.


Winter of My Disc Content



Samantha held a cup of cocoa under her nose and blew steam from its frothy surface. Despite the aroma, she found she had no real desire for the stuff. After two mugs the third was just a brace against the cold. It was either this or the bourbon, and she knew what lay at the end of that road.

Hoarfrost coated her apartment's one tiny window, nearly occluding its view of Sixth Avenue traffic as it muddled through the Village, churning last night's snow into gray-black muck.

Samantha ignored it. The cold outside was the last thing she wanted to think about. She wrapped a free hand about her middle, took a hot sip of chocolate, and turned to consider the cerebral-net system occupying an entire wall of her Spartan living room.

It was the only piece of furniture left in the place, save the secondhand couch balanced on one side by a cinderblock, and an air mattress. She had sold everything else.

At some level Samantha supposed she should be concerned about her preoccupation with the bral-net – she spent most of her free waking hours there – but really, what did that matter? She was three months a widow, and if this was her only way to see Upton, so be it.

"Power," she said. One blue, three-dimensional word appeared, floating and slowly rotating before her: Standby.

Then a feminine voice said, "Hello, Samantha."

"Hello, Rose."

"Shall I cast file Upton-three?"

Sam smiled, nodding.

"Please put down the hot chocolate," said the computer woman.

Samantha placed it on the floor near the couch.

"Casting," said Rose.

Summer light spilled from the apartment window, bringing with it June heat. Passersby on the street traipsed along in shorts and T-shirts.

Upton lay on the couch, pretending sleep, his lithe form stretching from one armrest to the other. No matter how many times Samantha played this disc, she always felt a little thrill of happiness pass through her middle when saw him there.

He peeked at her through one half-lidded eye, and a grin spread his lips.

"You're a horrible liar," said Sam. "That's why you can't act for beans."

He chuckled, opening his dark green eyes.

"Writers don't have to act, sweetness. We do it on the page."

"You should write bumper stickers."

He laughed again, the rolling sound making Sam's heart beat hard with longing and regret. She knelt beside him, running her fingers through his hair, and across his thick chest. At moments like this it was hard to disbelieve her eyes, her hands, her nose. With Rose's help, Sam had reconstructed her husband down to his scent, that slight alkaline aroma that reminded her of fresh spring air along mountain trails.

He was perfect.

"Affection in the afternoon?" he asked. "I feel like the benefactor of government largess."

A certain knowing smile played across her husband's lips, and Sam said, "If you make that large ass joke again I'm walking out."

He started to laugh, but she stopped him with a kiss, pressing hard against his warm, full lips. When she pulled away Upton had an entirely different look on his face.

"Do you love me?" she asked.

He gave her an indulgent smile, his eyelids drooping in that way they did when he was randy.

"You know I do."

She rested her head on his chest, hiding her face, and began to softly cry.
Upton's hand pressed into her hair and she felt him sit up.

"Babe, what's wrong?"

She couldn't tell him he wasn't real. She couldn't tell him he died and left her alone. Cerebral Upton believed in himself, in his make-believe world.

"I wish we had gotten pregnant," she said instead. "I wish we had shared that."

He was silent for a long moment, the sound of traffic filling the gap. Then Upton whispered, "It's not too late, Sam. You know I love kids. We don't make a lot of money, but hell, who does anymore?"

Samantha smiled. It was bitter, and wry, but somehow happy despite that. Upton would have said the same when he lived. He would have given her a baby anytime she wanted, but she had insisted on waiting until...what? More money? More stability? Since Upton passed she had less of both. Whatever she had been waiting for hadn't come.

"You're right," she said, rubbing the tears away, giving herself back to the computerized dream – playing her part to perpetuate the fantasy.

"And there's no time like the present," said Upton, pulling her atop him. He sank one strong hand into her black hair and kissed her thoroughly.


# # #


Doctor Morris stepped into the tiny examination room, a file in his hand, a smile on his lips.

"Well, it's official," he said.

Samantha swallowed, her eyes wide, bulging even.

"You're joking."

Morris looked taken aback for a moment, as if he were instantly changing gears in his head. He knew Samantha as a newlywed – she had never bothered to tell her GP about Upton's death – and probably assumed his news was confirmation of a planned pregnancy. Now the look on his face said he might have just given a cheating bride some very bad news indeed.

"No joke," he said. "You're about two months along." He paused, watching her expression. "Is something wrong?"

"I haven't had sex in nearly six months. My husband died." Sam hated being so blunt, but it saved further explanation.

Morris thought she was lying; she saw it in his eyes.

Sam shook her head. It didn't matter. She was pregnant.


# # #


"That's wonderful, babe!" said Upton, swinging her in circle.

"It's nuts," said Sam. "You aren't real, Upton. You're a computer image in my brain."

Upton tilted his head. "It's all a story, Sam. And I'm a writer."

"The hell does that mean?"

When next he spoke, Upton's voice lifted, taking on a familiar, feminine tone. "It means, Samantha, that you get your wish."

The End

Plotting a novel; a real, honest, in my opinion professional novel is arduous work. I'm proud to say I've nearly completed story arcs for all the characters that matter, along with back stories for each. I'm about half done with the plot skeleton outline I'll use for the actual writing.

If all goes according to plan (that's the working title of this story--PLAN), I'll start the actual writing in Feb. I plan to hammer the thing out in a 2-3 months, write something else, and then return to Plan for rewrites. That puts the completed final draft some time in late summer.


-- david j.

I read an article last year by a woman who said her husband is bad with directions. He had traveled with a friend to a business meeting and upon returning they shared a rental car to get home from the airport which, unfortunately, was about four hours from their hometown. About halfway, they traded places, the friend too sleepy to drive anymore. The hapless husband took over and drove nearly two hours back towards the airport before the friend woke up and discovered the mistake.

That's I how I felt about the novel I'm writing. I think I was driving the wrong direction for maybe 30k words. This weekend I tore the outline apart and am going to relaunch, writing in a whole new direction. I think this time I'm headed home.

-- david j.

I broke one of my cardinal rules of writing, but I did it for a good cause. I put my novel down for two weeks in order to pen a middle reader novella for my son. The finished product seems strong to me, but authors can't always see the leaves for the branches when it comes to their own works. My wife and two good friends are reading the rough draft readers copy now. They'll let me know if it's a flop, especially the wife -- great editor that woman.

The break has given me some inspiration on my novel. While I don't plan to rip it apart, I'm going to readdress the outline with an eye towards bigger meanings and creating more fun for the reader. Maybe this way the time off from actually adding words to the thing won't leave it stale.


-- david j.

I have a story in the Aphelion monthly flash challenge for November. I can't say which one is mine, but feel free to vote for the most articulate, brilliant, well-written entry (that will be mine). ;-)

Here's the link: http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1598

Today's Word: Opinions

Opinions are NOT like assholes. Every asshole can be put to proper use.

Opinions are like brains. Everybody has one and they all think theirs is worth something.



-- david j.

Water fell from a hole in the sky – about nine thousand gallons an hour. The water was not particularly interesting. It was brackish, filled with common trace elements, and it smelled of sulfur. It posed no particular threat to the Earth.
What made this water interesting was that it poured from a black, two-dimensional circle six hundred feet in diameter about four thousand feet above the surface of the Atlantic Ocean seven miles off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
For three days the American military and scientific community had studied the phenomenon, sampling the salty rain and monitoring the hole by every conceivable means from merely eyeballing it to searching its depths with Doppler sonar. All agreed something, or, more rightly, many somethings, moved just behind the portal’s featureless black surface. And those somethings were, by human standards, huge.
Waves lapped against an orange and white Coast Guard cutter anchored below and just outside the portal’s fall zone. The boat had been retrofitted to handle several hundred pounds of radio transmission equipment and computers. Painted in blue letters on the ship’s stern was the name Contact.
“You ready for this?” asked Dr. Teller, the team’s resident chaos theorist and computational pattern analyst.
“Not gonna get readier,” quipped Dr. Alysan Mizen. Unlike Teller, she had no formal ties to NSA, CIA or any of the other three-letter govie agencies. Her game was communications theory, especially as it applied to hypothetical extraterrestrial civilizations. Funny how that had seemed laughable to most of her peers until about seventy hours ago. Now she was on the verge of directly contacting a non-human, sentient intelligence for the first time in homosapien history while all her friends who had gone into telecommunications to make the big bucks watched on Fox and CNN.
“Okay, this is it people. We’re blasting the first twenty prime numbers at three hundred gigs, ten watts, and twenty megs of bandwidth. If you’ve got a TV dinner you want warmed up, just plunk it on the dish,” said Alysan getting several smiles and even one real chuckle from the taciturn govies.
Her finger hovered over the target pad on her laptop as she started a countdown.
“Ten, nine, eight. . . “
A sleek, black cigarette boat raced across the water, ripping up the surf and churning a plume of white froth in its wake. Coast Guard ships plowed after it, sirens blazing, and men on microphones screamed hoarsely for it to cease its ingress towards Contact.
“Oh, shit,” said Dr. Teller.
Must be a religious freak or one of those weirdo sci-fi people, thought Alysan.
The cigarette boat flew towards the scientists at incredible speed, bouncing on the waves like a toy. Dr. Teller dived over the side and the other govies followed. Contact’s captain yelled for them to stop, but they were already in the water.
“I can’t start the engines with them right below us,” he cried at Alysan, as if she could pull the govies back on deck. For her part she ran for the bow, carrying the laptop with her.
The cigarette boat’s engines died suddenly and it turned at so sharp an angle Alysan thought it must surely roll, but somehow it remained upright coming to a near stop only feet from Contact. A canopy door popped upward on the black craft and a woman maladroitly tumbled out, flopping into the water with all the grace of a log.
She beat water, swimming hard as the Coast Guard ships tried to maneuver around her abandoned boat. Several uniformed men with rifles stood at the rails, but they seemed reluctant to fire in Contact’s direction. Thank God.
Alysan peered down at the woman, who was slowly approaching a sea ladder on Contact’s port side.
“Alysan!” the woman screamed as she struggled to grab a rung in the churning waters.
Alysan moved closer, her heart thundering at hearing her name. She placed the laptop on a secure stand and bent towards the mystery woman.
“Do not approach the suspect,” said an amplified voice from the nearest Guard cutter.
Alysan bent and gave the woman a hand onto deck.
When the woman cleared the rail, dripping and coughing, Alysan saw her own face, aged and worn and damaged. The older Alysan wore a dirty bandage around her head, covering her left eye. The bandage was caked with dried blood. Her left cheek bore an open gash that no longer bled, but looked hours fresh. Her brown hair was ratty and parts of it had been singed away. She wore a blue coverall splattered with what could only be more blood and whorls of some yellowish oily substance. Here and there her pasty white skin showed through holes in the fabric.
“You’re me,” said younger Alysan.
Older Alysan took her by the shoulders gripping hard.
“Don’t send that code,” she said in a cracked voice.
“Something goes wrong?”
“The Carcosai, they’re language is radio frequency. The first twenty primes are a threat – a grievous insult – a declaration of war. The moment you sent it the holes opened everywhere. The Carcosai – they are. . . tentacled, bulbous, many-eyed, the size of mountains. They were like titans, ripping down our cities, absorbing the brunt of our weapons like pin-pricks.”
“Stay where you are,” said the guardsman’s amplified voice as the cutter neared it’s engine idling.
“How did you get here?” asked young Alysan.
“No time!”
Old Alysan dashed to the laptop, typed furiously for several seconds and then smashed her hand down on the send pad.
In a matter of seconds a return message arrived, and then something huge, green, and sporting at least seven hundred tentacles eased slowly out of the hole overhead to float there dripping water into the sea.
“OH HELL!” said the Coast Guardsman who had never switched off his mic.
“What’d you send?”
“Six, six, six. The Carcosai holy greeting.”

END

Today’s Word: Anomie (A recycle from 2003)



The mid twenty-first century saw an anomie of the middle class as conservatism and moral integrity weakened like pillars under the crushing arms of a long-haired Samson. Three generations -- these later deemed by scholars as the weakest links in the human evolutionary chain to date -- caused the downfall of western culture through a slow erosion of respect for law, moral fiber, and empathy for the human condition. Generations X,Y, and Alpha tore our country apart with murder, fornication, and lasciviousness.

That is why, during the latter half of the century, DOCTRINE was created. We are a global organization, with government oversight committees on every ruling body in the world. Our infrastructure of neural-path GOALMASTER™ supervision nodes now spans the breadth of humanity, unobtrusively preventing immoral behavior the world over. Because of DOCTRINE, global GDP has skyrocketed by nearly three hundred percent compared to market averages just fifty years ago. Crime is at lower levels than the 1950's, even in the former United States of America.

Now that you have reached the legal age of twelve, you have been fitted with your first set of neural-path GOALMASTER™ supervision nodes. From this point on, you will enjoy a whole new world of information access, as well as global GPS positioning twenty-four hours a day. You will even be able to ask for directions or answers to taxing moral dilemmas. A DOCTRINE agent is always just a PHONE THOUGHT™ away.


-- david j.

I am writing a novel called Plan. Who knows what I'll call it in a few months, but for now it is called Plan same as its parent novella. I had already begun writing it two days ago when my wife suggested a new character. Her suggestion was spot on and I knew right away she (the new character) was spot on for the job. Of course, I had already written a scene that would involve this new character and thus spent my time tonight rewriting that scene to include her. Despite the extra work, it was well worth the effort.


-- david j.

Today's Word: Eat

I think I'll eat me some Rice Krispies. I love them things.


-- david j.

Today’s Word: Profundity


Jerry would be an iconoclast. He would delve into the human psyche, plumb the heart’s inner recesses, drive a miner’s wedge between the known of human experience and the yet-to-be-discovered. No mere banalities would serve as killing blade in his hunt for literary perfection. Profundity would be the order of the day. Every Day!

Jerry grinned as these words appeared on the screen before him having lately rolled off his fingertips.

The phone rang.

“Yeah,” he said in a distracted tone.

“Jerry, it’s Caleb, remember me? Your agent, Caleb? You were to have that new romance done last week, man. Where is it?”

Jerry glanced at the corkboard attached to his desk’s flimsy door – the one festooned with bills not a few baring the ominous label: PAST DUE.

He sighed.

“I’ll have it done in three days, Cal. Three days.”

Maybe profundity could wait a little longer.


-- david j.

The Wheel

By

David Alan Jones


I am braced by the sound of the wheel turning, its jangle hammering on the soft, early autumn air. With my hands pressed hard into the pockets of my plaid coat, I watch the wheel, spinning in the harsh glare of upright floodlights. It is a monster, filled with monsters, and so it makes a monstrous sound.

Sometime in late summer, no one bothered to mark the date, the fair rolled into town. Center of the freak show stage, the exotic dancers' tent (shaped like a huge, red turban), and the hall of a thousand screams, a group of well-tanned and dirty laborers constructed a massive wheel. It was silver; thick aluminum, about the width of my arm, and the perfect length to accommodate a fifty gallon drum -- the kind you see bums using to contain campfires in the city.

The fair never began. Oh, there was an opening night, but no one rode the carousel, or the bumper cars, or even the flax sack slide which had always been so popular with the children. Everyone was drawn to the wheel; young, old, and hammered. The mayor was there with his wife and kids. Satchel Browne from the firehouse stood nearby. Several boys from the coal mine slouched in a black-stained gaggle near the floodlights.

A geek appeared at the great wheel's base. I say appeared, because he was not and then he was; a lank, thin man in a top hat and tails, his long white hair heavy on his spare shoulders.

"A goodly crowd we have tonight," he said, without benefit of megaphone or loudspeaker. But we all heard him. "My name is Marcus Paid, and this is the wheel of Equipoise."

"How's it work?" asked the Mayor.

Paid smiled – his teeth were crooked, yellow things – and said, "Step close Mr. Mayor, and let me show you."

"Have we met?" said the fat man.

Marcus Paid ignored him.

Two young men, both clad in overalls and nothing else, rolled a fifty gallon drum into the light. It was military green and looked heavy.

"The lid, if you would be so kind, Enos," said Paid.

Enos, the larger of the two men, prised the lid off with a crowbar. Every eye in town was on that drum.
"The wheel isn't a taker, it's a giver," said Paid, addressing the crowd, his eyes like two black spheres in his head.

He lifted a dress out of the drum, and I heard several women near me suck in their breaths. It looked to be silk, or perhaps moleskin, in the gathering darkness. It was purple and gold, its sleeves pricked with pearls, and its long skirts adorned with pleats.

"It was a favored thing, this dress," said Paid, showing those hideous teeth once more. "But the woman who owned this pretty ornament was a sad creature indeed. She had no want for material things, but her heart was empty as a well gone dry. Much like many of you."

Paid's last words hung on the air -- or perhaps on our ears -- creeping round our collective thoughts. And the longer he was silent, the more I knew he was right.

"This dress was her pride. It was the mark of her station -- her place above the masses. While she dined in solemn luxury, her neighbors starved. The day she gave this dress to the wheel, was the day she found true happiness. Now she is light. Now she is the same."

"Sir, I'll have you know we don't allow scams in our town. You may take us for rubes, but we have the might of law on our side," said the Mayor, trying to bluster over Paid's incontrovertible words.

"Give me your ring, Mayor. Put it in the drum. If you don't feel immediately lightened of your high station; if you don't realize in that very instant that we are all the same, then I'll return the ring to you. I'm promising you communion with your fellow man. Or do you think yourself so great compared to the common folk that you won't share in their plight?"

I wasn't sure what "plight" Paid meant, but I felt it all the same. The Mayor was being a stuffed pants bill grubber.

The crowd started to murmur, and the Mayor looked nervous.

"Alright," he said, pulling a thick gold ring off his thick short finger. We all knew that it was an academy ring, but I can't remember which academy. No one does, not even the mayor.

He dropped the ring in the drum and the young men sealed it up with the dress under the watchful eyes of Marcus Paid.

When they hoisted the drum onto the wheel I could hear other things, some metal, some paper, rattling inside. Even then I didn't wonder what those things were. It didn't matter.

With braided horse rope they secured the drum to the inside of the wheel's arching form. When it was done, Marcus Paid pulled a lever on the wheel's base, and the behemoth began to spin.

It was a slow thing, moving the little drum the way an elephant might move a tick on its sagging belly. We watched as the drum rolled up one side, across the upper curve (so like a slate sky), down the other side, and then back near to our humble place on the earth.

When the drum was even again, when it lay with its bottom facing our Mayor, Paid touched his arm and said, "Do you want the ring back, Morty?"

"No, sir," said the Mayor, his voice not so much sound as air seeping from his guts. He whispered something, but none of us could hear.

Paid leaned close, then turned, smiling at the crowd. "He wants to go home and get his bowling ball for the wheel."

We cheered. Our mayor had conquered his vice. It wasn't something anyone said; nothing we discussed later that night over coffee and cake. It just was.

And so the town lined up. Paid had no end of fifty gallon drums, and the wheel seemed like a voracious beast ready to eat up our pride like maggots on infection.

That night I was number thirty in line. I put my lucky quarter and a twenty dollar bill of no significance into an off-white drum. I've never had much to speak of, but money has always been my vice.

Days and weeks have come and gone. The fair is still in town, though it was scheduled to move out just two weeks after it arrived. Everyday we gather at the wheel, watching it turn afternoon into night into morning. It's finally filling up, as our good townsfolk empty out their prideful lives into the wheel's ready circle.

Yesterday the Ingles put their daughter, Maryanne, into a yellow drum. She was sleeping.

A beautiful girl, that Maryanne; her parents' greatest pride. I remember my own mother commenting once how she wished she'd had a little girl so pretty, with long golden hair, dimples, and striking blue eyes. Maryanne cried for quite a few hours, but she's stopped now. I guess those drums are airtight.




END

Today's Word: Suffer

I was thinking. . .

It's sad when you grow so old that people no longer laugh when you trip and fall. Better to suffer embarrassment than pity.


-- david j.

Today's Word: Speak

You don’t teach a dog to speak and then ask it if it still wants to eat cats. Of course it still wants to eat cats, only now it can have them delivered off the internet.


-- david j.

Today's Word: Square

My first idea would not fit into 1k words. I went back to square one and found a little tale up in the right hand corner, right there in a tiny crack -- I had never taken such a hard look at square one; its surface is uneven and rough and pitted.


-- david j.

Today's Word: Witty

Witty people don't have to cuss. If you aren't so witty. . . to hell with it.


-- david j.

Today's Word: Simulation

"So you see, we're not really on earth, though I don't doubt there once was an earth -- probably long since destroyed by its own sun," said George Trenlor, president of the Lucas Falls chapter of the Society for and Enlightened People (SEP).

"We're really in a big computer simulator," said Kaleb, a news reporter for the Lucas Fall Observer.

"That's right," said George with a genuine smile. I might have a convert here, he thought.

"Isn't that just like that Matrix movie?" asked Kaleb.

"Well, yes, but Dr. Provelmein, the founder of our society, put forth this idea back in 1949. So you see, we knew about the Truth long before some Hollywood-types stole it."

"Right," said Kaleb, making a note. "And your society claims we invented the computers running this massive simulation ourselves."

"Not us, our ancient ancestors. Humans once had incredible technology. We once harnessed the power of stars and traveled this entire galaxy. But our people saw that we were essentially a blight on the universe -- we polluted everything, everywhere. They were so disheartened, they decided to build a simulation that would care for us and give us the semblance of a new start while also protecting the environment from our harmful influence."

"Uh-huh. And you also claim that most associations here don't matter?"

"They don't matter. Our children are not real; they're just computer programs built to simulate humans. We --"

"Wait, wait," said Kaleb, holding up a hand. "You're saying my kids aren't real because some computer randomly generated them"

"Not randomly. They are made to look and act much like real children created from your own genes might."

"How long has this been going on?"

"Twenty million years."

Kaleb stared for a moment. "Twenty million?"

"Yes."

"Then are you a computer program?"

George looked perplexed.

"Of course not."

"Then how could you be one of the original real people? Human's don't live twenty million years."

"I --" George swallowed. "I. . . never --"

"Only the first generation would have been real people, right? After that we would all be fake."

"Twenty-five years," said George in a choked whisper.

"Excuse me?"
"I believed in this crap for twenty-five years and I never questioned it. I lost my wife, my girls. Oh, God, the kids -- my girls -- I thought they didn't matter. I thought they were just programs. I treated them that way."

Kaleb was scribbling frantically in his little notebook. After a moment he looked up into a face as broken as any he had ever seen in his twenty-four years.

"Sorry."



-- david j.

Today's Word: Burn


The stomach burns only what the brain earns.


-- david j.