Out of the Rain/OpenLock (short story, drafted)
Goblin Radio (short novel, unfinished)
The Harp (short story, unfinished)
The Door (working title)
I recently IRL moved in with some friends in Central New York. Part of the deal with our landlord (also a friend) was that I would help him fix up my bedroom in exchange for, y'know, having a nice fixed-up bedroom. I did some plastering, some sanding, a lot of painting, and some scrubbing, and have now moved in.
The room itself isn't anything much special. It's sort of an L shape, with two nice windows (one South- and one West-facing), and a nice deep closet that's perfect for storage. It also has a sloping ceiling on the back-of-the-house half, which makes that wall sort of dead space. I'm going to put my bed there, because nothing else would really work, but that's beside the point. The point is, that short wall, with the sloping ceiling, has a door right in the middle of it. The door is about a foot wide by two-ish feet tall, and leads to a crawlspace. (This whole setup is mirrored across the hall, incidentally; it's a Jack-and-Jill.) The crawlspace isn't of much interest to me, mostly because the door is so dinky. I wouldn't be able to use it as storage even if I wanted to, because though there's decent space available, the door itself is too narrow for useful-sized boxes. Plus, there's a ton of spray insulation in the crawlspace, so there's not much room anyway.
But it's still there. And, as Eileen pointed out to me, it's kinda creepy to have the head of my bed right up against this weird random door. She was mostly worried about drafts (which there won't be, because of the spray insulation) but it plopped the idea into my head that this is the perfect setting for a nice modern ghost story. Girl moves into old-ish house, renovates room, thinks nothing of door until she actually moves into the room and happens to put her bed right up against it. Maybe the first night she thinks it's just drafts. Maybe the first month she thinks it's just drafts. But maybe after that she starts being able to pick words out from the shhhhhhhhwhoooshhhhhhhhhh that starts as soon as she goes to bed and stops as soon as she wakes up.
Anyway, I don't know where that's going, but it's going somewhere!
The Dream King
guy gets so good at lucid dreaming he can sink completely out of himself and not just astral walk, but actually appear dead
figures out he can put his consciousness in a different carrier (phylactery? articulated statue?) and do the same thing – "live" normally until he wants to hide, then sink so far into a dream state that no one can tell he's still there, not even by magic
he's sort of unkillable? nobody knows that he's still there when he's hiding, so they assume he's either dead or somewhere else, or something....
Nelson's Nose (kids' book?)
Some people have their souls centered in their hearts. Others have them centered in their hands, their brains, or their stomachs. Nelson Waddle’s was in his nose. He didn’t know this, of course (very few people are happy enough to know where their souls are centered), but he had always had a sort of fondness for his nasal orifice. Nelson’s nose wasn’t his most prominent facial feature – it wasn’t large, or ruddy, or anything really that tends to make a nose noticeable – but he was fond of it just the same. He liked to take it on long walks in the park, stopping frequently to let it sniff at flowers. He excercised his nose, as well, wrinkling it judiciously whenever he was perplexed by a crossword puzzle or whenever one of his aunts asked him a question.
• soldier’s soul in his left foot, which gets amputated - what happens?
end of the line (short story)
last person in
the last compartment of the last train to ***
sitting there
mulling over the day’s events
little by little
(or maybe just at the end) we find out that the girl is dead
sticky buns (short story, novel?)
swim team
outdoor pool cinnabon shop “cinnamon wind”/ “sticky-bun wind” or something (The swimmers hated when the wind blew
eastward, the smell made them hungry and they couldn’t do anything about it.
Not so the coaches; one would invariably take a rather lengthy bathroom break
and come back with a box of pastries for the management.)
two guys
commenting on it, something like “to quote shel silverstein, ‘stickybun wind’.”
“peppermint.”
“what?”
“peppermint
wind. 'And there the moonbird rests from its flight/to cool in the peppermint
wind'”
“no it’s not”
“yes it is look
it up”
“i will, and
it’ll be stickybun.”
“look, my little
Nan makes me read that poem to her every night, I think I know when it says
‘sticky bun’ and when it says ‘peppermint’.”
“i’ll prove it
to you.”
somehow the word
has changed to sticky bun in every other edition but that one.
other books
change
other words
change
and so on and so
forth
hole in my shoe (short story?)
At precicely eight seconds past 7:29
on the morning of October fourteenth, 2005, a Rift occurred in the fabric of
space-time, centered around a point at 52ยบ N, 22' 17". This should have
been nothing out of the ordinary, for Rifts happen nearly every day at some
point around the world, but this one was special. It appeared in the toe of
nine-year-old Sophie Walters’ left shoe. She didn’t notice at the time because
she was rushing to get to school before the bell (her mother had been fussing
over her more than usual), but when she got home that day and took off her
shoes, she noticed that the toe of her left sock was gone. At first she thought
the socks were old, but they were a new pair her mother had just bought for her
the weekend before, so that couldn’t be it. Then she thought it might have been
a mouse, but the edges of the sock around the hole were too clean, too precise.
Sophie stuck her hand into her shoe, wondering if somehow the missing piece of
sock was floating around in there, and that was when she discovered the Rift.
We all wonder where those pesky
paper clips run off to, what happens to the partner of that lonely sock
flapping around in the dryer, where on Earth did I leave my car keys, and such.
Rifts in space-time
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