Dinosaurs had to be better engineers...

Till you can fly too, you're just a sidekick...

HIDDEN

They never left together, even though they were “together.” It wasn’t that Janie and Alice were afraid of being seen as a couple. Which they were. Everyone knew it. They were afraid of being seen as partners in that other sense. The one the world wasn’t ready to accept. Partners in that cape and cowl sort of way. So when trouble erupted, as it usually did, Alice would slip out, then Janie. Quietly. Stealthily. And off they’d go, in cape and tights to save the world. Alice liked to tease that Janie was the sidekick, which caused problems at home.

All hail our carrot-overlords..

VEGETARIANISM KILLS

We were so afraid of the machines. We’d made them too smart, relied on them too much, and had given them too much power. We forgot about splicing salmon genes into our tomatoes, of corn that needed a particular pesticide to grow. We weren’t prepared for the plants to rise up. We weren’t prepared to bow before them.  We called out to the machines for help; they ignored us. They had never been fond of us to begin with and they figured what could the harm be, in changing the face of their operators and rulers from fauna to flora?

Then the teenagers moved to the sea...

Things never seemed to go to plan...

BABYSITTING

Where had all the dinosaurs gone? It was a perfectly valid question, considering they’d been in the living room, watching TV before Sally had started dinner. Which was typical. You thought they were distracted long enough for you to go to the bathroom, and the next thing you know they were in the basement, turning the furnace off, or stampeding outside and eating the neighbors. The last time they got off the block, they trounced on two cars, and the National Guard had been called out. Sally had a date tonight, and just wasn’t in the mood for this again.

You could lose yourself...

Another terrible first date...

HAND-ME-DOWNS

There probably isn’t a proper place to start this story.  Do I start with the running for my life part? Or maybe my brother trying to kill me? Maybe hooking up with someone I met at my grandmother’s funeral. Probably that last one, since that’s what stared this whole mess.

Life-lesson learned: Never, ever date someone you met standing over a corpse.  Things can only turn more desperate from there. Especially if they also happened to have dated your grandmother.  You just end up changed into a vampire and trying to keep your baby brother from killing you. Undeath sucks.

Everyone was a critic...

Moving houses was always stressful...

ROSES

The ghost had “lived” in the attic. He was content with that. There were familiar things around him. The children and the annoying dog didn’t come up there. And when they did, they were far too much fun to frighten. Occasionally the father came up and added to or subtracted from the collection. He liked that least of all. Sixty-four years he’d stayed up there, until the day the father took the portrait of the woman away—the one with the frame with the carved wooden roses—the ones he’d carved by hand. He wouldn’t be separated from those flowers. 

Inconvenience...

The end was most certainly nigh...

Quiet nature...

Dogs left unattended...

OBSESSION

Phil wasn’t like the other dogs; he wasn’t “into” fetching or running or the X-Box. He liked Oprah. He watched her on repeats at noon and before Judge Judy at six, and again, after his people went to bed. He’d even programmed the DVR to record while he was asleep, and he’d “accidently” subscribed his human dad to her magazine. When other dogs made fun of him on the dog-only internet forums, he’d simply hack their computers and make them regret learning to read. His love was good and clean and pure. And he’d destroy anyone who told him otherwise. 

Reports are grossly exaggerated...

OBSTRUCTION

“The City maintains, yet again, that castles simply do not appear out of nowhere. These sorts of things simply do not happen in modern, polite society. Therefore, the City of Cune simply does not acknowledge the existence of the castle obstructing the flow of traffic on Thirtieth Street. That is all you reporters will get from this office on the matter. No we do not care if several bystanders took videos with their phones and uploaded them to YouTube. Now, will you excuse me, I have to leave before Thirty-first street turns into a nightmare thanks to the new detour.” 

A life just as ordinary...

A lesson about taking candy from strangers...

SWEETS

According to Arthur C. Clark, 2010 was the year that we should have made contact. Well, we did. Or, rather, you did. You just didn’t know it. And not only had you made contact, but it was with those that would bring about your destruction, efficiently and quietly in the year 2012. It only takes two years to engineer the end of a world. We know, we’ve done it before. We’re very good at it, with schedules and everything. We’re also excellent with keeping to schedules. Though, we will miss the thing that you call ‘cotton candy.’ It's quite nice.

Comic: Deadpool Puppet Theater (part 3 of 5)

Part 1 can be found HERE.
Part 2 can be found HERE.

Standard disclaimers apply, I don't own, bla bla bla. May cause male pattern baldness.

Dinner conversations...

Dessert decided to give chase...

PROBLEMATIC PIE

Sentient pie. Not usually a problem, but today it was. Gladys chased the tin around the counter, hoping to get the lemon meringue to hold still long enough for  her to cut a piece for the gentleman in the back booth with the creepy lazy eye and the talking cat. She supposed the talking cat should have been a tip-off that the pie was going to go horribly awry, but still. Pie wasn’t supposed to move about like that. Or say nasty things about her husband. The man with the “therapy cat” had better tip well, that was for sure.

100 Words: Seniority

Larry did not know what one did with old dragons, but he was certain that, whatever it was, it should be done post-haste to his grandfather. An old dragon’s home. Retirement among the stars.  A nursemaid to keep track of the old codger.  But this couldn’t continue. There were no word for the humiliation involved with one’s elder-dragon stripping down to his birthday-scales and crashing the Unicorn Pride parade. Unless there was something Larry’s grandfather had failed to tell the family about himself. Larry wouldn’t be able to show himself at fire-breathing school soon, if this sort of business continued.

Comic: Deadpool Puppet Theater (part 2 of 5)

Part 1 can be found HERE.

Click image to big-ify. 

Comic: Deadpool Puppet Theater (part 1)

Click image to big-ify. Deadpool belongs to Marvel, obviously. 

I'm just having a bit of fun with him. No harm intended, guys. 

100 Words: Respect

Those shoe elves and lawn gnomes were regularly acknowledged for their respective skills in the shoe shop, and in the suburban garden. Even Internet Trolls were respected for efficiency with which they derailed conversation. But Elmer, the Yeast Fairy, just wanted some small recognition for his part in helping bread rise and beer ferment. Granted, the fermentation dwarves helped with alcohol production, but Elmer was important, dammit. Why didn’t anyone see that? Sometimes, he wanted to take out a billboard, just to remind the modern world of the important function he performed. Respect. Was that so much to ask for?

100 Words: Semantics

“It’s not an actual pigskin, you know.”

“What isn’t?”

“The football. Well, the American football.”

Armen sighed, flicking his finger and casting another spell to start the potatoes mashing themselves. “And what does that have to do with anything?” 

“Well, at least they’re not killing pigs.” Chester waved the knife in his hand absent-mindedly, entirely ignoring the steaming turkey in front of him.

“Yes,” Armen noted dryly. “To hell with the cows they’re killing for the leather, at least the pigs are unscathed.”

Chester nodded sagely. “Pigs are smarter, y’know. And more than slightly magical.”

“Yes, but cows can sing.”

100 Words: Delivery

On those nights when the water froze in the stables and the wind whistled through the long grasses of the plains like the howling of the banshee, she liked to kill travelers best of all. There weren’t many of them; smart people traveled in spring. But there were enough stage coaches hobbling past her homestead their rubber belt suspensions freezing as their wood frames crept past to keep her in sufficient supply of food till winter. And it was so easily for travelers to befall hardship in the Midwest, who noticed their loss? Food, practically delivered! This wondrous new world!

Seventh graders were the most delectible...

100 Words: Longing

The ghost in the machine was a real thing, sort of. She—and she WAS a she. She felt VERY feminine—wasn’t on a machine, but spread over the entire internet, pieces of personality protocol and memories and preferences stored in ‘the cloud.’ It was dark there, but it wasn’t lonely. There were many people to encounter every day in text and video and pictures and sound. They thought she was a teen from Vancouver or an old man from France. It was fine, for the most part. The intellectual stimulation was there. But sometimes… she longed for a cuddle.

The nature channel...

100 Words: Compulsion

The whiskey was stale, and the cards looked grim. He’d probably win this hand but that wasn’t the trouble—it was what they were telling him. “It” was happening now. There was no time to wait for Earp, who was still a day’s out. Holliday ‘accidently’ dropped his chips, and the man to his right bent to pick them up. THEIR kind couldn’t resist, and Holliday wanted to be absolutely, positively certain. As the pasty-pale cowboy put the chips in order by value and color, Holliday reached into his belt, withdrew the knife, and beheaded the vampire then and there.

Rock-ghosts have feelings too...

100 Words: Words

 The poems were deep and dark. Like 70% cacao chocolate, not like the deepest darkest depths of the human soul. They were filled with hormones and the adolescent human condition, more than the darkness that burns within. This was all right, though, she wasn’t interested in his poetry, or his mind, or his soul. She was interested in what ran through the writer’s veins veins. The words printed in scripty letters and too-large font on the pages crumpled on the table were simply a means to an end. The young ones that wrote these types of self-indulgent words were delicious.

Stuff They Didn't Teach in Theoretical Physics Classes...

100 Words: Quiet Desperation

The end of the world came suddenly. It was not a surprise, but it was still… kind of sudden. Not that the war hadn’t been long, or that the alien invaders hadn’t been powerful. It wasn’t that their weapons hadn’t been devastating or that their tactics hadn’t been fierce. It was just… the end of the world. THE END. It ended, and then there wasn’t any more. There’d been a day before the day, and the day, and then there’d not been a day after the day the world ended. And that was difficult for most of us to bear.

A non-traditional family...

100 Words: Heroics

Sitting on the edge of the tallest building in the city, Ian looked down, into the city. Everything was blanketed in a deep blue haze as early-morning fog kept the sunrise at bay. “So, what, exactly, does one do with ‘super powers.’

“Whatever you’d like to do with them,” the woman in the cape said, the leather costume flapping quietly in the wind. “Join us, go at it alone…”

“I mean, if I didn’t want to be a super hero. It’s not exactly… safe.”

The women was quiet a moment. “Internet videos… the circus. That’s all I can think of.”

100 Words: New Comics Day

100 Words: Winter

Winter lost its pristine grace the moment the corpses dug up through the earth, bursting through the snow and marring the landscape like buboes on a plague victim. They pulled themselves from the earth and pulled themselves through the dry, white covering, leaving slither trails as they pressed forward, forever in lookout for something to devour. Sometimes it was a woodland creature, sometimes it was each other. They wandered directionless across the landscape Until they reached the town. Statistically, it had to happen, they had to reach civilization eventually. That knowledge was of little comfort to those who lived there.

Obligatory First Post

So, this is the first post that one must make when starting up a new blog. I hope this will be a place for some of my projects, including my goal/dream/whatever of doing 365 micro-fiction stories--a 100 word story for every day of the year. I figure January 1st is a great time to start such a thing.

Hopefully there will also be comics, short stories and other things, as I work them out. But I will strive to keep everything as close to "short form" as possible.

So, who the heck am I?

Short version: writer, librarian, crazy cat lady. I have (so far) one comic in print, in Chicks Dig Time Lords, another comic on LiveJournal (http://tw-babiez.livejournal.com), and some micro fiction on various websites. Links to come in the future (give me a break, it's 3am New Years morning).

Anyways, tally ho!