Art of the Odd

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?”

Remember when I got waitlisted for Clarion?

No, no. I didn’t get in. (Actually, I didn’t apply.) However, I did sign up for the href="http://www.theclarionfoundation.org/writeathon/wrtn-home.htm">Clarion UCSD Write-a-Thon, which is a fundraiser for The Clarion Foundation.

Each of the writers participating (and I’m in excellent company) has set their own goals for the Write-a-Thon. I’m trying to write for at least an hour each day, and I’ve promised to donate $10 for each hour I miss. (Since I managed to convince myself that the Write-a-Thon started today, instead of yesterday, one of my cohorts has already been the recipient of a $10 donation.)

I’ll also be posting excerpts from each day’s work. Here’s today’s:

A week later, Daisy found herself staring at the business end of one of Leon’s more docile cows, with a galvanized pail in her hand. “This is one of the ones I was going to call Betty,” Leon said. “She’s the gentlest of the bunch.”

“You wanted to name more than one of them after your wife?”

“This is the second he tried to name after me,” Betty said from the doorway of the barn. “The first one was meaner than a snake. He slept on the couch for two weeks after that.” She smiled sweetly at her husband. “You come on up to the house when you’re done,” she said. “I’ve got a present for your little girl.”

I should start by saying that we do not live in a bad neighborhood. We do, however, live in a neighborhood where new, upscale stores (art galleries and high-end meeting spaces and day spas and shiny salons) do battle with older, grittier businesses (liquor stores and cheap Indian takeout and, well – sex shops).

So, once upon a time, there was a porn shop across the street, well-stocked with candy-colored marital aids and oversized video boxes bearing such titles as Forced to Lactate: Volume XVII. Later, the porn store branched out, adding a case full of smoking paraphernalia in glass and bronze, all of it to be used only for smoking tobacco, of course. One night, though, we heard a sound, and NovySan looked out and said, “Why are they pressure washing the porn store?” and the next day, it was gone, carried off in a mighty torrent of water.

A couple of doors down, though, sits a business built on water – The Roman Holiday. It has no windows, but it’s open 24 hours. Some of its clientele walk proudly through the front door, while others slink through the back, shoulders hunched and hoods pulled low over their blushing cheeks.

Whoever it was who walked past my house on his way back from the bathhouse yesterday was, I suspect, one of the former, unless he dropped this packet in his fumbling haste to get back in his car without being recognized.

To The Roman Holiday – kudos for encouraging safer sex, though I’m amused by your recent rebranding as a health club.

To Joe Lube – custom-printed condoms and lube? That’s seriously kind of cool.

And to the guy who dropped his lube – I better not find the matching condom out there. Especially if it’s been used.