For Halloween, some of the staff and associates of Flash Fiction Online wrote six-word horror stories, Pico-Flash stories. It is not as difficult as it seems. After you've assigned a word to character development, setting, plot points, plot resolution and style, you have a word left over to enrich the story, perhaps to comment on the horror genre, or deepen the character, or set up a sequel. One should be careful not to bloat the story with the last word, though.

In the way of an introduction, here is a six-word story allegedly written by Ernest Hemingway (who is neither on staff nor an associate of FFO). Wikipedia referred to this as a vignette, rather than a flash fiction story. It is rich in implication to make up for its paucity of words:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Here are the Flash Fiction Online staff/associate-written six-word horror stories:

Oliver House

• Carved jack-o-lantern teeth are soft -- usually.
• Captured trickster, well-roasted, now a treat.
• Found: a fragment of flight 2245.

Oliver has published a six-word story in one of the Smith books and which was reprinted in Reader's Digest.


R.W. Ware

• Man walks into bar, says, 'Ow.'
• No rest stops for eighty miles.

Wade Rigney

• Tiny casket. Baby fangs. Feeding time.
• Incurable sadness. Blood-slicked bathroom tiles.
• You'll never beat me again, Daddy.
• Carribean seductress's embrace. No one returns.
• Gunfire. Sanguinary peace unites the fallen.
• Darkness. Moving Shadows. Flashing blade. Blood.

Deb Hoag

• Silken descent into lust and death.
• 
  

big teeth
small fist
no contest

Sue Freivald

• Executive horror: Made the late train...What meeting?

Anne Pinckard

• Uncostumed today, blending in at last.

Gary Cuba

• Teen squeals. Zombie's disappointed: No brains!
• Hanging thought: I didn't do it!
• One bullet left. My luck: misfire!
• Forgive, Dearest. This'll hurt me too.
• Unwise costume idea: Duct tape mummy.
• Timmy squirms; doctor extracts; Mommy's charged.
• Quicksand! Help! Don't stand there laughing!
• Cop question: Who's in the deepfreezer?

steffenwolf

• Clown well done. Who's laughing now?
• "New Moon's in theatres. Wanna go?"

WouldBe

• Beady eyes, fangs, the taxman cometh.
• Vampire in my bedroom. No protection.
• For sale: daughter, shorn and shoed.

IO9 has a brief overview of horror that tickles the funny bone, whatever the intent might have been. The article writer warns that the article wasn't intended as a comprehensive retrospective; rather, it addresses the categories: 1920s stage plays, comedy teams and camp of the 30s and 40s (Abbott and Costello, for example), 60s anarchy, self-aware campiness, Ghostbusters/Gremlins and more, Troma comedies of the 80s (Surf Nazis Must Die), werewolf/vampire humor, body horror/comedy, the rise of Sam Raimi, Christopher Moore, creature features, Buffy etc., Chucky/Leprechaun films, horror spoofs, and zombie romance/comedies.

IO9 posted some nice graphics with this short look at horror-comedy film history.

This story via SlashDot: you have to admire this guy. In Monrovia, Liberia, a place with poor access to news via the state-run media, a man uses a low-tech solution to broadcast news: a dry erase board. He watches the news and summarizes it on a publicly accessible "white board." He apparently has many appreciative readers of this analog blog. Here is the SlashDot article, which leads to one with a video.

From NASA's blog: NASA's Ares I-X test rocket lifted off at 11:30 a.m. EDT Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a two-minute powered flight. The flight test lasted about six minutes from its launch from the newly modified Launch Pad 39B until splashdown of the rocket's booster stage nearly 150 miles downrange.



Now, Flash Fiction Online readers and writers are naturally skeptical, especially after a reader's anonymous tip led to the moon landing controversy, which NASA had to defend. However, Yours Truly personally viewed the launch from about 30 miles south of the Cape. I can attest that the Ares I-X flight had substantial vertical and eastward vectors. As a Fair Witness, I can say it left from somewhere (Titusville, Florida area), but I cannot confirm that it arrived anywhere, as that leg of the flight was beyond unenhanced human vision from my viewing location.

However, I haven't taken our meds in a while and we are very, very confused. Ohh, shiny!

Whew! The doom prophets apparently misinterpreted the Mayan calendar, and the apocalypse has been rescheduled for 2020, according to a SlashDot article. That article describes the mistake briefly, but gives a link to a detailed Dutch article on the Mayan apocalypse, in NWT magazine, which is translated by Google. So even if you're not interested in the explanation, it is interesting to see the state of automatic language translation. The translated article is readable, but still a bit wonky.

Here's the teaser quote from the Dutch article as translated by Google:

In the 2012 film that will premiere this month, killed the cities and continents in droves, as the world decays. Yet just a pity that research has shown that the "end times" of December 21, 2012 probably more than two centuries two.

There is no word yet whether the movie distribution company for 2012 is going to recall all their prints of the film to correct the errors.

Our friends at SFRevu had taken a month off for their review of short fiction. I missed that Sam Tomaino had juxtaposed two reviews of FFO. Sorry! He has a review of the Aug. 2009 Flash Fiction Online and a review of the Sept. 2009 Flash Fiction Online .

Those Flash Fiction Online issues are found here: Aug. 2009 and Sept. 2009.

Sam has also other reviews of short fiction:

• Analog Science Fiction and Fact for December and November 2009
• Asimov's Science Fiction for October/November 2009
• Black Static Twelve for August/September 2009
• Jim Baen's Universe for August 2009
• Murky Depths #9 for 24 September 2009
• The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for October/November 2009

You'll also find book reviews of UK and US fiction at their SFRevu home page.

Yesterday we had a story about YA apocalyptic fiction. Today's post is about another sort of apocalypse, the day the Internet died. How would people react if the whole network of networks collapsed and couldn't be rebuilt for a lifetime? No doubt, many would feel a deep loss or disabling disorientation. Many avid readers and writers would feel like they couldn't function. Many personal relationships that existed only through Internet connections would collapse with the Internet, with the people involved having no way to find out who was behind that screen name or goofy email address.

Cracked.com asked for Photoshopped pictures that would illustrate how we would react if the Internet died. I found this by way of SlashDot.

According to a short Publishers Weekly article, publishers of young adult fiction are sick to death of vampires. What's next for the little darlings? Yes, Virginia, there is post-apocalyptic fiction for you, and, according to one author, you may then tie a chainsaw to the bumper of your car if you wish, sweetie. Whoo hoo!

This article, first appearing in PW's Children's Bookshelf blog, gives some brief thoughts from authors Michael Grant, Scott Westerfeld, Carrie Ryan, and James Dashner who had gathered with fans at a bookstore. One issue is the "parent problem," mainly, how to get rid of them in the stories. Says the article writer, Sara Antill, “the bleaker the vision, the better:”

In fact, that mantra is an integral part of Carrie Ryan’s writing process. “I go with the philosophy of ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ ” she said, “and then I write that.”

The article doesn't mention the present publishing frenzy related to the Mayan predications for the year 2012, but that likely is fueling this interest. Here is PW's article on YA post-apocalyptic fiction.

What about a novel featuring post-apocalyptic vampires...no...zombies? Never mind.

A baker's dozen of astronauts have penned....no, these guys and gals are the ultimate earlier adopters. (Refueling.)

A baker's dozen of astronauts have texted an endorsement of commercial participation in spaceflight. This statement was aimed directly at NASA. These astronauts feel that NASA's strength is in exploration. Now that near-space access is slightly less than rocket science, the astronauts feel that the commercial sector is more suited to making it commonplace.

The paper cited Sally Ride's statement as capturing their thoughts concisely:

"We would like to be able to get NASA out of the business of getting people to low Earth orbit."

The astronauts participating in the statement were: Buzz Aldrin, Ken Bowersox, Jake Garn, Robert Gibson, Hank Hartsfield, John Herrington, Byron Lichtenberg, John Lounge, Rick Searfoss, Norman Thagard, Kathryn Thornton, Jim Voss and Charles Walker.

Here is The Wall Street Journal's article on the astronaut's endorsement of commercial spaceflight.

Here is an amusing graphical representation of twist endings, plays in this case. Across the top of the graphic are various story ending types, such as deus ex machina, or story elements, such as a MacGuffin. Across the left side are various genres. The title is "Harvet Ismuth's 42 Essential 3rd Act Twists." This was produced by Internet cartoonist Dresden Codak, a pseudonym for Aaron Diaz (which could be confused with the Latin singer/actor of the same name). Codak also has a one off Caveman Science Fiction cartoon.

Bonus: rhetorical piece about the future of traditional book publishing, on the Galleycat blog of Media Bistro.

A software program used to detect plagiarism by students was refocused in an interesting way on literary research. The program was used to verify that Shakespeare plagiarized himself, so to speak, thereby attributing the play, Edward III, to Shakespeare. It also attributes a co-writer, Thomas Kyd. Here is a Yahoo! News story on the use of plagiarism software to attribute Edward III to Shakespeare.

Note that at the time of posting, the Wikipedia article on Edward III did not have a reference to this development. According to that article (and the Yahoo! article), this play was often attributed to Shakespeare. This free plagiarism tool, Pl@giarism, adds some weight to that attribution. The software is from Erasmas Universiteit Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.

In August, we announced the finalists of the WSFA Small Press Award. The WSFA (Washington Science Fiction Association) award is open to works of short speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc.) published by a short press in English.

Science Fiction Awards Watch has announced the WSFA Small Press Award winner for 2009:"The Absence of Stars: Part 1," by Greg Siewert, published in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show.

Yesterday, we spoke of the transition of a ten-sentence picture book to a ninety-minute movies, Where the Wild Things Are. (Maurice Sendak's long history in publishing and avid fan base might have a little bit to do with it.) Today, Publishers Weekly has an article about an iPhone app, a popular game called Soul Trapper, netting the game author a book trilogy deal. The article seems to suggest that what the publisher is getting is rights to use the world via third-party writers rather than stories from the game author.

Having watched Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, with a 9-year-old and a greater-than-35-year-old, I was curious what reviewers thought of it, but found something more interesting: Spike Jonze's and Maurice Sendak's thoughts on the Where the Wild Things Are project, thanks to Pitchfork.

The Sendak picture book is sparse in text. (The article linked above says it has ten lines.) The characters in the book have no individual personalities, while in the movie, several have a fairly complex personalities. It was fascinating seeing a three-minute read interpreted as a 90-minute animated moody art drama.

If you liked his trilogy of best-selling Frankenstein novels, you'll be happy to know that Publishers Weekly is reporting that Bantam has signed up Dean Koontz for three more Frankenstein novels.

Koontz's Frankenstein website doesn't have any new information, yet, but it probably will, in time.

Normally, the opening of submissions for a magazine is not unusual news. In the case of Realms of Fantasy it is due to their drama of the last year: closing of the magazine, rumors of the sale of the magazine, sale of and reopening of the magazine. And for the last seven months or so since resuming publication, they've been consuming the stories that they already had in the pipeline before they closed, which I'm sure the authors appreciated. So...good luck from FFO!

Thanks to SFscope for the lead to this article, which has a link to the assistant editor's blog article on RoL's reopening to submissions.

SFscope reports that Odyssey Writing Workshop, a respected classroom-based writing program, now has some online writing workshop offerings. Individual online courses are not equivalent to the residential courses, but may be useful to many speculative fiction writers. The class size is limited to 14 students. The next course is Showing versus Telling in Fantastic Fiction, beginning January 6, 2010 with applications accepted from October 10 to December 10, 2009.

This course will be taught by Jeanne Cavelos, an author and editor, and winner of the World Fantasy Award for launching the Abyss psychological horror imprint at Bantam Doubleday Dell. She is the director and primary instructor at Odyssey.

How many times have you cursed the web gods when your browser went astray after you mangled the web address/URL by omitting the two slashes (strokes) or using the accursed backslashes? How many times have you had to take a cough drop after telling someone a URL: "it's ach tee tee pee colon backslash backslash...no, freakin' Microsoft...that's forward slash forward slash gee oh oh gee ell ee dot cee oh em....What, you want me to repeat it? That's ach tee tee colon forward slash....forget it.

Modern browsers have helped by automatically inserting the slashes/strokes, but they still lower our "user experience."

One of the top web gods would like to apologize for the web URL slashes. The slashes/strokes weren't really needed. Sorry about that. (Give the guy a break. As the Australian IT article suggest, the guy invented the world wide web and deserves a Nobel Prize.)

It's good that he's a Brit. If he were an American, we'd be suffering from constant class action suit commercials on the television.

Technovelgy has an interesting site that chronicles invention in literature. The home page is in blog format, showing the latest inventions or innovations. They usually give an explanation of the technology and links or information about literary references to similar innovations. For example, the latest innovation (at the time of posting) is a concept for SkyTran, an overhead monorail-like transportation system in which the personal cars (pods) magnetically levitate for a smooth ride (or to use recent marketing blather, an improved customer experience). They give reference to bubble cars, from Larry Niven's 1976 novel A World Out of Time.

Technovelgy provides sorting of innovation by time, going back to weightlessness, described by Johannes Kepler and mentioned by an unknown author in 1634. They also sort by category, and of course have a search facility.

This seems like a handy research tool for SF and fantasy writers or readers who want to know how innovative an innovation really is.

Depending on your point of view, you may find this quite interesting (gosh, I get to read a bunch of good screenplays for free. Whoo hoo!) or depressing (I have to compete with how many screenplays for my Dark and Stormy Zombie Prom Night script?). IO9 had this short post on how to read the top 250 unproduced Hollywood screenplays for free.

Here is a brief synopsis of the screenplays from a 2008 post in the SlashFilm blog about scripts under consideration, referred to as the black list, which has an earlier perspective. You'll notice that a few of them were or are in the theater this year. I don't know if this list exactly matches the list of readable screenplays below, but there should be a large overlap.

Here is a collection of PDF files of the 2008 screenplays.

PhotoSketch is a web application for converting a crude doodle or stickman drawing into a photo-realistic image. You sketch the crude drawubg with a simple drawing program, adding descriptive labels to each object. PhotoSketch then searches for appropriate photographs containing one of the objects, and in PhotoShop-like fashion, blends the found photos together to match the sketch.

I hesitated to run this story since it had such heavy coverage on the big tech blogs, like Gizmodo, that the PhotoSketch site is presently unreachable. Maybe that situation will clear up in a few days. In the meantime, here is the Gizmodo Photosketch article with a short video and a gallery that illustrates the program, which was created by some Chinese university students.

Just noticed this on Amazon.com: Almost 22,000 words, 76 pages, by the wonderfully helpful Noah Lukeman: How to Write a Great Query Letter.

Of course, if you're a writer who you doesn't know who Noah Lukeman is, check out The First Five Pages. It's totally worth it, right up there with Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print by Rennie Brown and Dave King, which I consider indispensible.

If you're not sure that it's totally worth it, you can get a forty-nine-cent flavor of Lukeman's style with A Dash Of Style: Paragraph and Section Breaks.

Here is a summary of the speculative fiction movies scheduled for release in October through November, 2009. This is a partial compilation from this Wikipedia list of all movie releases for 2009. That article has links to summaries of each movie.

Oct. 2

• The Invention of Lying, Alt reality/comedy
• Zombieland, Horror/comedy
• Toy Story 3-D and Toy Story 2 3-D Double Feature (re-release in 3D), Fantasy/comedy, Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar

Oct. 16

• Where the Wild Things Are, Fantasy/Animation (based on Maurice Sendak book) Warner Bros.

Oct. 23

• Astro Boy, SF/Fantasy/Animation Summit Entertainment
• Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, Fantasy/Adventure, Universal
• Saw VI, horror, Lionsgate

Nov. 6

• The Box, Horror, Warner Bros
• A Christmas Carol, Fantasy, Walt Disney Pictures
• The Fourth Kind, documentary(alleged alien abduction)/Fantasy(you decide), Universal

Nov. 13

• 2012, Disaster, Columbia

Nov. 20

• New Moon (aka Twilight 2), Fantasy, Summit Entertainment
• Planet 51, SF/Comedy/Animation, TriStar Pictures

Nov. 25

• Fantastic Mr. Fox, Fantasy/Animated (from Roald Dahl's book), 20th Century Fox
• The Princess and the Frog, Fantasy/Animated, Walt Disney Pictures

Dec. 18

• Avatar, SF, 20th Century Fox Dir

Dec. 25

• Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, Fantasy live-action/CGI, 20th Century
• Sherlock Holmes, Mystery, Warner Bros.
• The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Fantasy, Sony Pictures Classics

Rusty over at Best Science Fiction Stories has previously reviewed several of our stories: "Just Before Recess" by James Van Pelt, from March 2008, and "The Dyslexicon" by Carl Frederick, from our April 2008 issue. (Links on the stories are to the reviews, links on the months are to our issues.)

Recently he started a fun set of collections: "Bizarrely Connected Stories". He put "Just Before Recess" into "Five Science Fiction Stories About Kids With Powerful Objects.

Here are the other collections:

• Six Science Fiction Stories Containing Altered Human Bodies


• Seven Science Fiction Stories About Powerful Children


• Five Science Fiction Stories Set On The Ocean


• Six Science Fiction Stories That Include Difficult Alien Languages


• Four Great Science Fiction Stories That Contain Long Walks

I think I must have been sleeping recently when he posted Fallen Planets and Classical Interruptions, which included links to "Billions of Stars" and "Gustav's Mars". Sorry, Rusty! And thanks!

Bloggist Capt. Xerox at IROSF has a short article about the continued interest in Philip K. Dick's writings. Philip K. Dick had SF cult status even after his death in 1982. IROSF's article includes a link to a posthumous interview with the author, published at Media Post. It is based on a surgery job on a 1978 essay by Dick, re-written as an interview. Here are two snippets from the short "interview":

The two basic topics which fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?"

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

Spectrum's purpose is "to promote the fantastic arts and provide an annal showcase for contemporary artists." According to Locus, the 2009 Grand Master Award (link may change) goes to Richard Corben. He is best known for the comic book, book cover and animation art.

SlashDot.org is a geeky blog with moderated submissions by a core team. Anyone can submit an article for consideration by the core team or comment on other posts. If you comment anonymously, your name will be "Anonymous Coward." The blog is eclectic, but open source (especially Linux & BSD) software, space science, game platforms and SF movies and television rule.

Also ruling are the love-to-hate topics, such as Microsoft and patents, especially software patents. Mention a game and you'll get a couple hundred comments. Say something nice about Microsoft or Bill Gates and you'll get 500 comments.

In the past (and perhaps still), if your web site was mentioned on SlashDot (/.), you'd be "slashdotted," meaning you're puny web server would be overwhelmed by visitors from SlashDot. That was a Good Thing, to most. Yeah, you were shut down with interest, but in the long haul, you'd have some new visitors if you had something to offer.

Today, someone posted a question about the content of a high school science fiction/fantasy course. At the time of this post, there were about 850 comments. Here is the link to SlashDot's high school SF/F course contents.

There are two anniversaries this month: the fiftieth anniversary of Twilight Zone and the fortieth anniversary of Monty Python. They're both speculative fiction, right? TZ obviously is. MP has angry Frenchmen catapulting cows over a castle wall at Englishmen. That's speculative, right? Here's a silly tourist tossing a cow from Duone Castle on Monty Python Day.

TZ, the American classic TV show, has been in first-run or reruns nearly continuously for fifty years. It is the inventor of many a trope that annoys fiction editors these days, but inspires new writers and amuses others. See the Jar of Tang writing trope at the SFWA.org's Turkey City Lexicon article, and check the "surprise or twist ending" section in Strange Horizon's excellent Stories We've Seen Too Often article.

Monty Python is a generic term for a the British too-funny television series and movies. They are an excellent distraction from writing or reading. Oh, you're from Mars and never heard of it? Here's the Dead Parrot Sketch. The text is good, but you must see/hear John Cleese and Michael Palin performing the sketch.

The Herschel Space Observatory is still in its performance validation test phase. The ESO has released some "sneak preview" pictures of the Milky Way. The images are composites of five different infrared frequencies, which were then color-coded to give new insight into the structure of the galaxy. Here are the early Herschel Space Observatory images.

The Ig Nobel Prize for 2009 winners have been announced. The Public Health Prize winner was the inventor of a brassier that can be converted--in an emergency more dangerous than not wearing a bra--into two gas masks.

But my favorite is the Physics Prize for determining why pregnant women don't tip over. A close second is the Literature Prize to the Irish police service, for issuing tickets to the greatest traffic offender in Ireland, Prawo Jazdy; the Irish police are a little red-faced because that means Driving License in Polish.

The Peace Prize was just stupid: research to determine if conking someone over the head with a filled bottle of beer was a more dangerous than an empty bottle. (I claim the Philosophy Prize for considering whether a half-empty or half-full bottle is more dangerous.)

See Ig Nobel Prizes for 2009 for more prizes, and the names and nationality of the winners.

Fantasy Magazine now has a short window open for Halloween-themed flash fiction stories that are inspired by a graphic, such as a drawing or photograph that is available for publication. The graphic does not have to be the author's own work; it can come from archives of public domain images, for example. The submission window opened Oct. 1 and will remain open through Oct. 16.

Here are the details of Fantasy Magazine's 2009 Halloween Flash Fiction and Graphic Contest.

By way of SlashDot.org: Serge Brunier traveled to photographically friendly locations in the northern and southern hemispheres and took 1200 visible-light images of the sky. He and Frédéric Tapissier created a zoomable tapestry of these images. This was associated with the International Year of Astronomy and the European Southern Observatory. Here is the amazing zoomable image of Earth's sky.

A click on the back to menu link there will lead you to other fine Serge Brunier photographic projects.

Here is some astounding science news that may rock the way naive science fiction writers approach quantum mechanics in their mundane SF stories. The Onion has reported how NFL physicists proved that quantum mechanics affects (American) football:

Citing the extremely low level of entropy present before a normal set of football downs, scientists from the NFL's quantum mechanics and cosmology laboratories spoke Monday of a theoretical proto-down before the first. "Ultimately, we believe there are an infinite number of proto-downs played before the first visible snap,...."

Here is the rest of The Onion's quantum mechanical football story.