Chime-centric prequel

Summoned, posted to Zorgon’s castle yestereve.

Looks good. Ancient stonework—cool—damp—busy dungeon. Pretty sure I’ve seen Nargul, Zorgon’s toady, before. The rest of the lads seem a decent lot—average burliness, medium ugly, all fun-loving.


Stood around the dungeon swilling beer and exchanging coarse jokes while the new prisoners were brought in. Promising first day.

Maybe she was shy. She obviously wasn't shy online; she was vivacious and flirty and fun, but Bailey had learned from her other interviews that someone's online life wasn't always reflected in how they were in the flesh-and-blood world. Maybe she didn't think she was pretty enough.

or
How Reality Television Did Away With Campaign Ads

In the not-so-distant future of Virginia, the Personhood Act has outlawed abortion and chemical birth control. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, though.

When one lives in a gloomy castle atop a hill that is prone to thunderstorms, visitors rarely stop by for tea and cakes. In point of fact, Victor had not received a single guest in the six years since he inherited Duskspark Castle.

When she came to the palace, the king had a wife. It's important to remember that. That when she came to the palace, the king was already wed.

“Well, Antonius,” the magistrate said, “you are without question a licentious and disreputable young man. You have disgraced a noble patrician name and sullied your character in the lowest of pursuits, and we have received testimony that you are not only a drunkard and a gambler—but an outright murderer as well.”

Princess Regina must marry a prince - and soon - or she will lose her inheritance. But with true princes hard to come by, she might just have to invent one.

Really, if it hadn't been for the damn baby, Gong Ji would've gotten away with it.

Jai had thought this job was a good idea for a number of reasons, but watching Flaren's face as they waited to meet with Canon Hain, she was no longer so sure. Flaren was grimly trying to contain any emotion, but his desperation was leaking out of him like he was a sieve.

A sequel to Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid", in which is illustrated the danger of offending the sea.

Here. Listen.

I’ll tell you a story.

Listen.

Once upon a time there was a girl. She was probably about twelve or thirteen, but that was an age when children were older than their years and expected to do real work and help with the harvest, so perhaps she was only nine or ten.

http://ursulav.livejournal.com/1464434.html (part 2)

The townhouse of Richard Lowell was not one known to respectable members of Society.... Thus, when word went out that Lowell had died, and moreover had died without a will, an unprecedented opportunity arose to investigate the matter -- through suitable intermediaries, of course. The public auction was set for May the fourteenth, and many a wealthy man instructed his gentleman-factor to attend, there to observe, and perhaps to purchase any oddities which might appeal.

As far as Mike had been able to gather - the details were highly classified - VRP, the Vampiric Reversion Procedure, had been attempted a few dozens times and could be considered successful maybe a handful of them. Most of the failures amounted to botched science, but among the remaining were a fair amount of test subjects who ran to the nearest nest and turned themselves straight back. Vampires were pretty self-selecting and the prospect mostly attracted sadists or lunatics. After five or so of those they started screening candidates a little more carefully.

Velma "Velveteen" Martinez was one of the young heroes "adopted" by The Super Patriots, Inc. Sweet, smart, and totally marketable, with a power that lent itself well to the kiddie market, she seemed destined to be one of the company's most enduring properties...right up until the day she walked out on the hero world, choosing to return to a civilian life. The reasons are still coming out. More importantly, the Marketing Department is still trying to get her back.

Colin Byrne is a con man, an artist, an unlicensed private detective, and an occasional consultant for the police. He's also an ex-felon, an initiate into the unspoken, unseen magic that only prisoners know: how to disappear, how to tell fortunes and steal souls. Now the man who put him in prison, NYPD detective Joseph Wright, wants him to return to Railburg State Correctional Facility to help investigate a case.

I was angry when we had that fight, too. Our last fight, though I didn't know that at the time. What did you expect me to say? You come in late and you're bloody and filthy, and you tell me some story about "the fey," and "faeries." About the fey and our family and a war. You said, "I have to go, Mom. The Unseelie Court has taken the Southern Provinces, and only our family's bloodline can save the High Ones." It makes no sense. Those are things out of stories, out of books. I just want to know, Amanda—in what universe did you think I would not ask you what drugs you were on?

Magra rounded a corner in the servants’ corridors and came upon a body, one of the servant girls
stretched out upon the stone. A man, one of the knights of the castle, knelt beside her. He smoothed
the girl’s dress and folded her still hands across her abdomen. Then he looked up at Magra with eyes
that pretended at humanity.

The angel showed up sometime during the rotation from night to day shift.

It is hard to tell what dissatisfied Ivan so. Perhaps it was just that anything stolen from Kaschei is cursed, in defeat or not, but Ivan's princess did not captivate him, and his kingdom did not interest him, and in the end he let a cousin take it all, and in the midst of things he slipped out one of the doors and lost himself in the woods.

Sex scandals, embezzlement, internet gossip, clandestine love affairs, and one misplaced cake -- it's all in a day's work, in the charitable sector.

A Warden's feist is made to fit them perfectly. It's just that this isn't the one he made.

Beneath a drape of crimson crushed velvet, Miyabi grinned. She folded the fabric back and peeked out from under it. "Is it me?" she asked. Nobody answered. She looked up and down the aisle. "Hoshiko?"

A nearby pile of yellow tulle giggled, "I can't tell. Maybe?"

It is a little known fact that every solar system contains Mars. Not Mars itself, of course. But certain suns seem to possess what we might call a habit of Martianness: In every inhabited system so far identified, there is a red planet, usually near enough to the most populous world if not as closely adjacent as our own twinkling scarlet beacon, with proximate lengths of day and night. Even more curious, these planets are without fail named for war-divinities.

Sometimes, being attacked by fell beasts actually improves a date.

This is a snippet about that Apple Rumluck, the heir to Ivy House and the northern third of the valley of Elsewhere proper.

---------------------------------------------
Apple & Blue
---------------------------------------------

I first met Apple Rumluck when she was three years old. She was the second cousin of my second cousin, Daphne Rumluck, and the two girls refused to be separated. Therefore, when Daphne's family came to visit my grandparents and the rest of the Turnagains, Apple tagged along. And for some reason I've never been able to fathom, she decided that I was fascinating and needed to be followed all day long.

The Dreamlands are, simultaneously, both the easiest of the otherworlds to get into and one of the hardest.

I knelt before the King and asked, “What is your pleasure, my liege?”

Smiling, he gestured for me to rise. “In a forest there is a palace, and in the palace there is a labyrinth, and in the center of the labyrinth there lurks a creature. I order you to kill the monster and lay down its head and heart before the throne.”

dragon drabbles

Adventures of Cath Traethlin, thief extraordinaire.

It's not like the Carverquest books had the sanest fandom to begin with. You had your wanks, your sockpuppets, your cosplayers who got at one anothers' throats over who looked more like Dux Carver. Man, there was some hardcore porn in the fandom, all the wank over the underage kiddies having sex, who will think of the children? You had feuds, you do get your standard fandom feud. Seriously, the Harry Potter fandom looked at us and thought, Jesus, at least I'm not a Carverquest fan.

... Still, it never feels quite safe to be alone in your mind in hyperspace, and that's because it isn't. It was a real relief to feel his weight in the back of my brain, and to hear his voice like the whisper of a guillotine in my head: Human female.

A Japanese businessman stumbles into another dimension and meets an Assyrian warrior. Adventure and romance ensue. Nice worldbuilding, interesting non-cliche characterization, and lots of culture clash.

Spots began as a way to keep my mind active while at the gym, a thought exercise initially presented as a series of themed vignettes. It didn't stay that way long, though. It only took a month for a story to start coalescing out of these disconnected episodes. These days, at 160+ pages and 70+ episodes and counting, Spots has graduated to a full-fledged military SF novel, complete with outline and planned plot arcs and ending.

Subject: Candle Cove local kid’s show?

By Divine providence, we captured the mermaid with neither loss of life nor injury to any seaman, nor any harm done to the specimen. So easily we might have passed her by without even noticing her; but the sharp young eyes of Small Jack espied her as she lay all in sleep at the surface of the sea.

Miss Tansybaum did not have a freakshow (at least not in the conventional sense, although the less charitable would argue that the entire operation qualified.) Instead she had Sister Rosemary's Curious Convent.

Original slashy high-fantasy tentaclefic epic threesome...just for starters. *hearts*

The angel of the LORD cometh upon you in the shower at the worst possible moment: one hand placed upon thy right buttock and the other bearing soap, radio blaring, humming a heathen song of sin.

Lady Araminta was seen off from the docks at Chenstowe-on-Sea with great ceremony if not much affection by her assembled family. She departed in the company of not one but two maids, a hired eunuch swordsman, and an experienced professional chaperone with the Eye of Horus branded upon her forehead, to keep watch at night while the other two were closed.

Sad to say these precautions were not entirely unnecessary. Lady Araminta—the possessor of several other, more notable names besides, here omitted for discretion—had been caught twice trying to climb out her window, and once in her father's library, reading a spellbook. On this last occasion she had fortunately been discovered by the butler, a reliable servant of fifteen years, so the matter was hushed up; but it had decided her fate.

Summary: Beauty and the Beast with a twist (and a wriggle)

The complete book free online

twisted fantasy AU of the Little House on the Prairie books

Crouching on the rocky flat above the streambed, Ilias studied the sandy gravel below for tracks. "I wish this idiot would just give up so we could kill him and go home," he said in irritation.

The storyteller said: He was a sorrowful prince, young Livna'lams, seven years old and full of sorrow.

Rolling Stone sends a reporter to interview a B-list supervillain.

It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in Alabama--Bill Driscoll and myself-when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, 'during a moment of temporary mental apparition'; but we didn't find that out till later.

This Passover vampire story is the only vampire story I've ever written. :-)

A brilliant young FBI agent. An unpredictable international art thief. What happens next is quite possibly not what you'd expect.

Two guys on an LDS mission come out of the closet and put their houses in order. About as blasphemous (to Mormons) as it gets, so leave your religious piety at the door, or move along.

The problem with crying in the woods, by the side of a white road that leads somewhere terrible, is that the reason for crying isn’t mostly inside your head. You have a perfectly legitimate and pressing reason for crying, and it will still be there in five minutes, except that your throat will be raw and your eyes will itch, and you will still be stuck in the woods halfway to somewhere terrible.

Will never imagined what could happen when he side-kicked a Creep like Cole

The Angel was only a temple myth to scare wild younglings, or so Ratty believed.

Not every naked encounter ends up the same way.
(PG-13)

When confronted by a rampaging comic genius, what's a studio publicity fella to do?

...The descriptions of sexual activity cannot, of course, be considered authentic, but must be understood as metaphorical, or perhaps a miscreant scribe's later addition to the text.

Whenever possible, I have attempted to verify Eland’s writings against other sources, but our information about the clockwork labyrinth, the “gear world” Eland the Younger describes, is so fragmentary that Eland’s writings must often stand on their own. Additionally, past librarians have often jumbled these sources together with Eland’s own work, so that one may occasionally find fragments from other writings related to the subject, or inclusions from other volumes of Terra Absurdium, or in one case, for no reason that I can determine, three volumes of the formerly lost work "Ganesh's Guide To Tchang Cooking," rendering the process even more frustrating.

The golem girl sat in the corner of a ruined basement.