Edit: Oh crap, this is only about two-thirds of what I wrote! D’oh! And I’ve already discarded the email draft that I wrote it up in. *sighs*

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George is a young cat, probably under a year old, according to his lanky frame and too-large paws. His dusty, spiky fur and gaunt appearance speak of a stray’s life. He doesn’t have any scars yet, so either he hasn’t started pining for the ladies, or he escaped recently. His fur is a medium gray with ever so faint tiger-stripe tabby markings. His eyes are gray, matching his coat.

He walks with false confidence and bravado, seeming to be both timid and macho at the same time.

“Hello, George.”

George looks over his shoulder disdainfully, seemingly annoyed that he would have to pay attention to a human, much less talk to one.

“Soo…you’re a cat.”

Are we playing the obvious game, then? In that case, you’re a human.

“Right then, definitely a cat.”

George tries to pull off the long slow blink to show how tiresome this whole process obviously is to him, but ends up looking like he is falling asleep.

“And a young cat, at that.”

George stands up and his back arches slightly, with his legs going stiff. Do you have a problem with me being young? I can do everything that any of the other strays can do.

“‘What big teeth you have, grandma,’” I quoted as I looked at the rows of long nails sticking out of board that was clamped to a bench in the workshop.

Unfortunately, I saw neither the calculating look of the workshop’s owner nor the wolfish grin that spread across her face before she replaced it with a sickeningly sweet simper, and said, “What a delightful child!” while patting my cheek fondly.

I stiffened. I wanted to grab the woman’s hand and twist it in a lock, but my guardian placed her hand on my shoulder just then and leaned close to my ear as the woman wandered away, talking about her wares.

“You don’t know how close you are to the mark, child.”

I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks, but I knew better than to sass a guard of the yellow order.

“Look at how she walks, how she does her work.”

I grudgingly returned my attention to the owner of the shop, but soon I was fascinated. She walked with nearly regimented precision and when she swung the wool comb down, I could see how she had trained with weapons before, and how she considered the comb as just another weapon.

My eyes widened as they moved around the room, noting the many combs and hackles, made of steel spikes resting in wood, the spindles, poking up like sharpened stakes, even the brushes, with teeth stiffer than anything I would let near my head.

“She is a textile master. Her order is highly sought after for their skills. It should come as no wonder that for an apprentice to be sent out on their journey, that they must have the fighting skills to keep themselves safe.

“Besides, you didn’t think it would be easy to shear a wolf, did you?”

I tried to detect if my guardian was pulling my tail, but if she was, she kept her own counsel.

It was a small effort to not step back as the woman I now realized was a warrior walked back toward us, but it was still an effort I noted.

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Just over 350 words, but I’ll accept that for now. Still trying to not be sick. I’m hoping that things are looking up (and that I don’t cough myself out of sleep again tonight).

They aren’t really SF&F stories, but I figure that getting some writing in is what is most important right now.

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The crust was in the freezer, her stomach was full, and everything was lined up how it should be. Thoughts still flitted through her mind, though. The tickle in the back of her throat, the gazpacho that she hadn’t started, how long it would take to make the quiche filling. They were all things that had nothing to do with what she told herself that she wanted to do.

Why did writing provide such a challenge? It was a dream of hers. Something nearly pie-in-the-sky. If she started writing and she was bad at it, what would that mean? Would her life crumble?

She coughed angrily. As if her life would crumble just because she couldn’t write. How silly. She’s spent years studying to be a software engineer, and who cares that she was slated for testing rather than development? She made good money.

But, there in the back of her head, was the voice that kept saying that it wasn’t happy. That it wasn’t doing what it wanted to. It wasn’t making a difference, it wasn’t working hard enough, and that’s what it wanted to do. And then, another voice, saying that it was tired of keeping to someone else’s schedule, tired of worrying about when to go to work and when to take lunch and how long it should take.

That’s true, she thought. What was it that was said on the self-help teleconference earlier? If it doesn’t make you happy, why are you doing it?

Why was she doing it? Well, money, of course. She made more than enough to start paying back her debts. Not that she was making much headway yet. Was the work fun? Sometimes it was. When the anxiety over time didn’t step in, or the longing to be doing something else. She supposed that the fact was that it didn’t make her happy on a day-to-day basis.

So, what if she could make money by doing something else? Or what if she could look at what she was doing now in a way that made her happy?

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World Setting

What if curiosity didn’t kill the cat?

What would the cat become? A dragon. Dragons are cats that curiosity couldn’t kill.

Cats have such tales. Of great cats that had gone on to become great dragons. But it has been centuries since a cat has taken up the challenge.

Why? Is it because humans have become technologically advanced? Has that killed magic? Or did humans become too good at killing dragons? Or did the knowledge of how to become a dragon get lost? Or did cats lose the culture which insisted that it is possible? or the lore?

There are still dragons. Most of them have drawn back into the in-between, where cats can see them, but most humans cannot. Most of the dragons are not true dragons, however. They are more spirits of the elements. Cats lost quite a bit of lore during the plagues of Europe, when they were killed because people thought that they were the cause. Humans did become good at killing dragons, but, as said, dragons withdrew to hide. True dragons were far-between before humans started killing them, and now that cats have lost their lore of how to become dragons, they are even harder to find.

Cats have nine lives. They have to finish the dragon trials before they run out of lives in order to become a dragon.

Since this is also about lore that the cats have lost, do they have gods and goddesses that have been forgotten? If cats can see in-between, what other things reside there, besides dragons? Do those things hate technology? Do they love it? Does a cat have to live in the country to hear the old tales from spirits that are in-between? What would a city cat hear from a country stray that has made its way into the city?

I will be participating in the Clarion Write-a-Thon and I would like you to sponsor me, pass on the news about Clarion, and provide emotional support for me. Even if you can do one of those, it would help me and Clarion immensely.

The Clarion Writers’ Workshop is an intensive six-week summer program that focuses on the fundamentals of science fiction and fantasy writing, in particular, short stories. Instructors are professionals in the industry, and participants often go on to be published themselves.

The Write-a-Thon is an event much like a walk-a-thon. You sponsor participants and the participants set goals for themselves. However, instead of walking, the participants will be writing. The money will be going to support Clarion and future workshops.

Why I’m Doing It

I haven’t written in years, but I’ve been wanting to. The stories float in wayward breezes in my mind, but I never end up writing them down. I will be using this Write-a-Thon to start putting stories down and to also help me gain the will-power to keep going, even when I feel stuck.

I won’t guarantee that the writing will be any good at all. It will all be first-draft sort of things, and I am beyond rusty. I’m not even sure if the non-fiction writing skills that I learned during college even translate to sci-fi and fantasy, and it’s not like I have much experience beyond that.

However, I will try and I will post the results here. My goal is 500 words per day, between June 27th and August 7th. Six weeks of solid practice.

How You Can Help Me

Sponsor Me

You can go to my author’s page to sponsor me. You can pay one lump sum or you can come back week-to-week (or however often you want) to give incremental sums.

Feel free to also sponsor other authors!

Spread the Word

Retweet, repost, anything that will send the word out and get more people in the loop. I want to make sure that the Clarion workshop stays around at least until I can get good enough to go there myself. Which, you know, might be awhile yet.

Read My Stories

They’re probably going to be bad. The one that I’ve already posted is just a fragment and it feels so stiff. But it will mean a lot to me. What will mean even more is if you can comment with encouraging remarks or about bits that you like. Even “yay, you posted today!” will help me out.

Also, if you want to, you could make story suggestions. I often find it more easy to start with some parameters, rather than trying to carve a story out of infinity.

In Conclusion

So, please, either sponsor me, pass on the news about Clarion, or provide emotional support for me by reading and posting comments here. Or all three. I’m not picky.

Stories So Far

Aborted Attempt
Starting Again

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Day One

Writing prompt:
This story takes place IN MODERN TIMES
…in A BUBBLE
…found ON AN ANCIENT LAKEBED.
The story centers on A MADAME/PIMP
…who comes up against A PILOT.
At some point, someone discovers A CONSPIRACY.

Their people had survived by avoiding the warm bloods. In the early days, they had lived on the spires in the lake while watching the warm bloods kill and eat each other. As the lake receded, their people adapted, finding underground caverns where there was enough water to breathe, bathe, and raise their young. When the lake bed turned to sand and the sun beat down, the spires started to crumble, and while the elders hemmed and hawed over their future, the younger generation took control to stabilize their caverns and build their cities even deeper under the new desert.

Now, thousands of years later, the families of the Rainbow Caverns were facing a new threat from within their own number.

Fleck disturbed some fliers as he put his contraption down on the ledge. A contraption. That’s what his mother called it. He smoothed his hand across the taut, oiled leather and spines of the nearest wing. It was his ticket to freedom, not a contraption.

He adjusted the straps and attached his harness. All of the flaps were well-oiled and they moved freely as he pulled the wires. He had never been up this high before.

Fleck stepped off the edge, scared for one moment that he wouldn’t, or that this step into his future would be his last, but as the wind rushed around him smoothly, he thought of how wrong he was.

—

Water was worried about her son. As the elder of the Painted Flower, she couldn’t afford his antics to become public knowledge. The ladies would never respect her if they knew of his radical leanings.

Imagine my surprise when I Googled “marled” and the first few links were all about the soil mixture called marl! I finally found the definition at the bottom of this page.

Amusingly enough, if you Google “marled”, all the images that come up are actually for marled yarn.

For those of you who don’t want to follow links, a marled yarn is a yarn where the individual plies are different colors and/or fiber content, creating textural interest in the final yarn. This is different than a heathered yarn, where different colors of fiber are blended together before being spun.

Now, the source of this project came from the fact that I have small amounts of different fibers, but usually not enough to make large projects. I had four ounces here, eight ounces there, and often in similar colors, but I didn’t want to just make everything striped just because I didn’t have enough to make a sweater or a large shawl.

So, I picked a project, the Danish Tie-Shawl (Ravelry link) from the Spring 2008 issue of Spin-Off. Then I picked the fibers out of my stash.

I had a batch of Calico Dream from Fae Ridge Farm, which is a wonderful mix of fine and long wools and mohair in several purples, a touch of pink, and several greys. Using that as a base, I further searched my stash for purples that would go with the variegated Calico Dream, and I found a dusky grey-purple from Enchanted Knoll, which is the Storms colorway, and a Targhee-Rambouillet roving in a full-on purple from Katrina’s Wool World. Finally, I wanted something that would be soft, puffy, and would tone down the overwhelmingly purpleness of the other colors I was using. For that, I used a milk-chocolate brown Romeldale lamb’s fleece and carded it up into rolags.

As you can see in this picture, I have Calico Dream on the left, the brown Romeldale in the middle, and Storms on the right, in the middle of plying.

The result, as you can see here, is a gorgeous marled yarn with a subtle striping.

I’ve since finished this yarn, and a second batch that used the purple Targhee-Rambouillet as the third ply. They both turned out to be about a heavy-worsted to aran weight, and are next-to-skin soft, in my opinion. In my next spinning/knitting post, I’ll show you the progress that I’ve been making with the Danish Tie-Shawl and both of the finished yarns (if I haven’t used them all up by then).

Thing 1:

Here’s what I want:

My Thing. (If you’re reading Fluent Self, this makes more sense.)

Hello, my Thing. I know you’re out there. I know you want to meet me as much as I want to meet you. I know you’re creative, and you just might be a bit OCD-ish, but that just means that we’re meant to be. I can’t tell if you’re writing or programming or game designing, or anything else in the world, but I know I want to find you.

Ways this could work:

You could just show up in a blinding flash of realization.

You could sneak up on me when I’m doing something related to you and I could recognize you.

You could sidle up to me when I’m doing something else and I could find you.

My commitment:

I want to find you, but I’m scared of you. I’m afraid that if I find you, I’ll be stuck with you and I’ll feel stuck, which isn’t what I want at all. So I commit to meeting with my fear and talking to it and see if I can get the stuck out. After that, I hope I can commit to doing my Thing and not being scared (at least, not all the time).

Thing 2:

Here’s what I want:

A job. I would like one that allows me to pay off $1,000 a month on personal debt, keeps me busy and happy, but not too busy, interests me, and ideally, has to do with my Thing, or leads me to find my Thing.

I would also like to not have to interview for the job, since interviews hardly tell any of my prospective employers anything good about me (I don’t interview well; I get too nervous). I’m alright with making a personal connection and finding out about the job in a casual way, and my employer or manager getting to know me in a similar way.

Ways this could work:

I could find the perfect job on the online job boards, and apply.

A network contact could find it and remember me.

It could fall in my lap in some other way that isn’t occurring to me right now.

My commitment:

I will work and learn quickly. I be so awesome that I’ll remind you, my job, of the Manchurian Candidate and how everyone only had good things to say about Raymond Shaw (without the brainwashing, promise). I will be happy to have you, especially if you don’t drown me in minutia like being at my desk at 8:30 am, sharp, and corporate rules. The more I impress and help my managers and teammates, the more I’ll be committed to doing my best.

Well, there they are.

Hopefully this will make things clearer for me, and maybe the search for these things will become easier. And maybe, just maybe, someone will read this and be able to help me out with one or both of my personal ads.

It is made to go along with the Noro Striped Scarf.

So I present to you: Noro Ribbed Hat

It’s my first pattern and I’ve just uploaded it to Ravelry. I hope people like it!