Last month, John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton announced a fan-fiction contest to benefit the Lupus Alliance of America.
There were only three criteria. One: Each entry should be between 400 and 2,000 words. Two: No slashfic. Well, no slashfic which might make it difficult for John and Wil to look at each other in the morning. Three: Each entry must make an attempt to explain this image:
I’ll let you look at that for a moment.
Earlier today, I reminded Twitter that they only had a few more hours to enter – and then, when John Scalzi posted that they had just hit 300 entries for the contest, I thought, “Oh, what the hell,” and started writing.
Today, then, you get three excerpts of works in progress – two from yesterday’s session (in which I worked on two different stories), and one from today’s (in which I wrote a short piece on the dangers of clown-wear and community craft fairs).
One:
“You come back tomorrow morning, then. We’ll make a dairy maid of you yet. Bring Summer, if you can.”
“I tried to this morning, but she wasn’t ready to get up so early.”
Betty laughed. “I’m never ready, but I just can’t sleep past sun up any more. Here, I have a little present for her.”
It was a fine gold chain, with an apple pendant dangling from it.
“I can’t take this,” Daisy said. “It must have cost a fortune.”
“No, no. You take it.” Betty dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s not real gold. Just don’t let her go swimming in it, or it might turn her neck green.”
Two:
“You’re bold,” the bard said. “I’ll give you that much. Do you know the old tales?”
“Oh, yes,” Mara said. “All the ones I’ve heard, anyway. And I make up my own.”
“Do you? That’s interesting,” the bard said, in a tone that suggested it wasn’t. “There’s very little call for new stories these days. People want their old favorites.”
I could make them listen to new stories, Mara thought, but she didn’t say it. Instead, she said, “I know 215 verses of the Ballad of the Rhymer, and the first three chapters of the Great Chronicle.”
“Only the first three?”
“That’s all I’ve ever heard,” she said. “I always had to go bed then.”
Three:
It started with the sweater.He found it at a craft fair – one of those neighborhood thingies where people sell tchotchkes off of folding tables and all the proceeds go to the church, or the community center or something. I begged him not to buy it. “It’s the worst sweater I’ve ever seen,” I told him. The old lady selling it glared six kinds of death at me. I wanted to glare back, but the sharpened steel knitting needles in her hands scared me. I lowered my voice.
“Just look at it,” I said.
“I am,” he said. “It’s awesome.”
“No, it isn’t awesome. It’s fucking creepy.”
“It is kinda creepy,” he admitted. “But it’s creepily awesome! Have you noticed the way its eyes follow you when you move?”
