alarawriting

[alarawriting]

we have more in common than we are different! I, too, like having no pressure on top of me, even though I'm a normal person! Humans are amazing.

i know all about allistic people. they really love loud sudden noises and bad textures

[alarawriting]

It's here!

My short story "Good Neighbors", which won the BSFS Amateur Writing Contest last year, is printed in the program book for Balticon 59.

[alarawriting]

Reblogged from my writing tumblr.

Good news, everyone!

I am told that I have been awarded first place in the Baltimore Science Fiction Society's Amateur Writing Contest.

The parameters of the contest were:

science fiction or fantasy short story, 5500 words or less, by

an adult resident of Maryland, who

does not qualify to be in SFWA. This qualification is basically "have you sold $1000 worth of fiction that is sf or fantasy, in your lifetime, and can you prove it?"

story must never have been published anywhere, including your blog or Patreon

The winners will be formally announced at Capclave 2024 in Rockville at the end of September, but they told me (and, I presume, the other winners) directly.

To be honest, I'm probably within striking distance of SFWA qualification now, if I can get my financial records going back as far as 1993 (spoiler: I almost certainly cannot), to prove what I've sold. "Civil Disobedience" actually got me royalties (that was my story in "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds", an anthology, not to be confused with the recent series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds), but I've still probably made at best $250 off it, since 1999, and I can get records back to 1999 if I work really hard at it, but it would be difficult. "Calley's Story" in "When Will You Rage?", a White Wolf anthology, also got me maybe $250 total, but that was 1993. So if I could prove it, earning this prize would mean I've totaled $750 or so lifetime sales, and I'd only need to sell a few stories more. (Most short stories do not pay you $250. I was lucky to sell to two mass market publishers producing anthologies.)

Since I almost certainly cannot prove it, I may or may not still qualify by the time the contest rolls around again. If you're an sf/fantasy writer, in MD, an adult, and haven't sold over $1K for your sf/fantasy work, maybe consider entering the contest next year.

My story is called "Good Neighbors", and when I'm allowed to publish it online, you'll see it's part of my Kai-Diwar universe, where the things that make humanity special are that we like kittycats and beer, because I got sick of "humanity has a quality of growth!" and bullshit like that. (I also folded my story "Crab People" into the same universe, so now it's, we like kittycats, beer, and eating crabs.)

[alarawriting]

Good news, everyone!

I am told that I have been awarded first place in the Baltimore Science Fiction Society's Amateur Writing Contest.

The parameters of the contest were:

science fiction or fantasy short story, 5500 words or less, by

an adult resident of Maryland, who

does not qualify to be in SFWA. This qualification is basically "have you sold $1000 worth of fiction that is sf or fantasy, in your lifetime, and can you prove it?"

story must never have been published anywhere, including your blog or Patreon

The winners will be formally announced at Capclave 2024 in Rockville at the end of September, but they told me (and, I presume, the other winners) directly.

To be honest, I'm probably within striking distance of SFWA qualification now, if I can get my financial records going back as far as 1993 (spoiler: I almost certainly cannot), to prove what I've sold. "Civil Disobedience" actually got me royalties (that was my story in "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds", an anthology, not to be confused with the recent series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds), but I've still probably made at best $250 off it, since 1999, and I can get records back to 1999 if I work really hard at it, but it would be difficult. "Calley's Story" in "When Will You Rage?", a White Wolf anthology, also got me maybe $250 total, but that was 1993. So if I could prove it, earning this prize would mean I've totaled $750 or so lifetime sales, and I'd only need to sell a few stories more. (Most short stories do not pay you $250. I was lucky to sell to two mass market publishers producing anthologies.)

Since I almost certainly cannot prove it, I may or may not still qualify by the time the contest rolls around again. If you're an sf/fantasy writer, in MD, an adult, and haven't sold over $1K for your sf/fantasy work, maybe consider entering the contest next year.

My story is called "Good Neighbors", and when I'm allowed to publish it online, you'll see it's part of my Kai-Diwar universe, where the things that make humanity special are that we like kittycats and beer, because I got sick of "humanity has a quality of growth!" and bullshit like that. (I also folded my story "Crab People" into the same universe, so now it's, we like kittycats, beer, and eating crabs.)

[alarawriting]

Just submitted to BSFS Amateur Short Story Contest, 20 minutes before the deadline closed. Wish me luck!

[alarawriting]

Fuuuck... accidentally posted to the wrong account against.

Have a thing I'm working on instead of a rant that belonged on my main blog, instead. ****

You are very confused about how you got here, and moreover, what here even is. The last thing you remember, you were cramming for your Organic Chemistry final, it was like 4 or 5 am – you were scared of looking at the clock too often, so you’d been avoiding it – and it was so hard to stay awake, despite the six espressos, three Jolt colas, five regular Cokes, three energy drinks, and caffeine pill you had taken, but you were trying to force yourself to read over the text and repeat to yourself everything it said. The exam was going to be at 8 am and you needed to do well. Your entire future depended on it. You remember having a massive headache and thinking you should go find some Advil, and then deciding against it because you couldn’t spare the time from studying.

Now you’re in a large… cavern? Throne room? Temple? The room’s enormous, with walls that look like white marble glittering with embedded crystal, and you are standing in front of a winged unicorn, a human-sized bunny rabbit who is standing on its haunches and has six – arms? Forelimbs? It looks kind of like what if Shiva was a fluffy grey bunny rabbit? – and a Chinese dragon. The Chinese dragon is small for a dragon, maybe 10 or 12 feet long but it’s coiled around itself, looped tightly enough that its head is about, maybe 8 feet high. The unicorn is the size of a racehorse. The three entities occupy a dais in the middle of the room, with some sort of flame-like background that is in rainbow colors, and oh shit, obviously you are dreaming. Fuck. You need to wake yourself up now.

“Leo Chen?” the unicorn asks. Her lips move, but not like a human saying the words “Leo Chen” would move. You can’t lip read but you know whatever it was her horse lips are saying, it’s not what you’re hearing. Like a bad dub. Shit. Too many Godzilla movies. Netflix dubs are a lot better than this.

“Look, this is great and all and I’m sure I would normally love this dream, but I’ve got to study for my orgo final that is happening something like three hours from now, so I think I need to wake up.”

You do not wake up. Normally when your dreams go lucid and you realize, oh right, Grandma’s actually dead, or Jesus I am about to get hit by a bus except this isn’t real and I’m dreaming, or whatever, you wake up. This is not always in your favor. The dream where Jeff Whittaker turned out to be gay and have a crush on you and the two of you were going to go on a date and then you remembered, wait, gay or not there is no way he’s gonna want to date me, and then you realized it was a dream, you tried very hard to not wake up, but it didn’t work. Realizing it’s a dream wakes you up. So why aren’t you waking up?

The Chinese dragon is laughing at you. Chortling. You didn’t think anyone ever really chortled, that was a word Lewis Carroll made up, but no, he’s chortling. “Oh, dear. Another one of the ‘it’s a dream’ ones.”

The bunny rabbit says, in a very butch lesbian voice, “Yeah, sorry, dude. It’s not a dream and you don’t have an orgo final anymore.”

“I do have an orgo final! In three hours! Or less, depending on how long I’ve been asleep!”

In a gentle, musical, feminine voice, the winged unicorn says, “I’m so sorry, Leo. You’re not asleep.”

“You’re dead,” the rabbit says.

The unicorn glares at the rabbit. “Petra, do you need to be so blunt about it?”

“Oh, you could have me tell him,” the Chinese dragon says. “You’re pushing up daisies! Not pining for the fjords! Kicked the bucket! You are an ex-human!”

“And you, Hundun, do not need to be cruel about it.” The unicorn looks right at you. For the first time you notice that she has predator eyes, facing you, not the side-eyes typical of a horse. Also, they are purple. This is plainly shit your brain got out of The Last Unicorn or maybe My Little Pony – in fact, with a winged white unicorn and a black and gold Chinese dragon, this is a lot like My Little Pony.

“No, I’m definitely dreaming,” you say confidently. “You look waaaay too much like characters from My Little Pony. Except the bunny, I don’t know where my brain got you.”

The Chinese dragon laughs again. He is not voice-acted by John de Lancie, but the general tone and pitch of his voice aren’t entirely dissimilar. “I knew it was going to bite us in the ass someday that we sent someone back.”

“Hush, Hundun. The young man is dealing with a lot right now.”

The rabbit says, “Look, I’m sorry. You’re dead and we brought you here because we need people like you.”

You roll your eyes. “Oh, Jesus, it’s an isekai. I’m the Chosen One? The Hero who’s destined to fight the Demon Lord or some shit like that? That’s not even vaguely believable. I’m an overweight biochem major shooting for medical school. I’ve never fought anything if you don’t count video games and frankly I don’t even like JRPGs where you swing a sword around and kill things. There is no way I would ever be some kind of special chosen one.”

“You’re right,” the rabbit says. “You’re not actually special.”

“At all,” the Chinese dragon says. “You are, in many ways, miserably average. I mean, I’ll give you this, you’re smart and hardworking. Well, at least the hard working part, given that you just gave yourself an aneurysm studying for an exam. I can’t help but think that if you were smart you could have avoided that.”

You’d had a terrible headache.

No. Bullshit. You’re not dead, this is an anxiety dream because of the headache making you feel like you were going to have a stroke. That’s a figure of speech. Guys your age do not actually have strokes, not even if they’ve been up for 32 hours writing papers and studying for exams and have been mainlining caffeine and energy drinks the entire time. The one dose of Adderall you were able to get from your roommate’s friend would have worn off a long time ago, that was more than 12 hours ago.

“Lemme guess,” you say. “You’re the Power of Kindness” – you point at the unicorn – “you’re the Power of Honesty—” the rabbit—“and you’re the Power of Being An Asshole.”

All three of them start laughing hysterically at this.

“He has you figured, Hundun,” the rabbit says.

“Oh, absolutely! And Eufy, all ‘pwetty pwease people don’t be mean to each over…’”

“It is true you’re fairly blunt, Petra,” the unicorn says, chuckling. “As for Hundun… we need to work together so let’s not go there.”

“It’s more like Order, Chaos and Harmony,” Petra, which is apparently the rabbit’s name, says.

“Called it. This is some kind of weird MLP fanfic my brain is making up,” you say.

“Or Change and Transformation, Stability, and the necessary balance between them that allows life to exist,” the unicorn says. “Or Rebellion, Doing What You’re Told, and Working Things Out. Conflict, Top-Down Unity via Enforcement, and Collaboration. Fire, earth and water.”

“So where’s air?” you ask skeptically.

Hundun the Chinese dragon sighs dramatically. “STEM students. Have you never heard of an analogy?”

“The Trains Run On Time, The Trains May Be Somewhat Delayed Because There Are a Lot of Trains, and When the Fuck Is This Train Showing Up?” Petra says.

“And you’re not making any of this up,” Hundun says, “because, trust me, you’re not that imaginative.”

[alarawriting]

#weird take: if pedophiles were humanely reformed so as NOT TO DO THAT ANYMORE instead of destroyed utterly#it would probably be easier to get POWERFUL AND WELL LIKED CHILD PREDATORS to stop doing that#if your only options are 'deny that the guy is a pedophile because he's a good dude who#doesn't deserve being skinned alive'#or 'skin everyone's favorite pastor alive because yeah he definitely did touch those kids'#you're going to have to contend with people protecting their friends and relatives and colleagues in every single fuckin trial#if there was an actual functional rehab we could shove these guys through#MORE GUYS WOULD BE SHOVED THROUGH EVEN BY FRIENDS AND FAMILY#and less kids would be harmed#please note: in the last ten years of hysterical online pedophile witchhunts#i have not seen one child predator be discovered or put through any kind of criminal justice system#ive seen an awful lot of queer artists get the skinned alive treatment tho

Roach's tags are right on the mark.

There is a reason we don't have the death penalty for child molesters (who are not the same thing as pedophiles; pedophilia is a mental illness. Not all pedophiles molest children and not all child molesters are pedophiles; some just want to rape someone, and children are available and easier to control than adults.)

The reason is that, if Daddy who buys you ice cream and takes you to the amusement park and is super nice to you when he's not raping you will die if you tell anyone what he did to you, you will not tell anyone what he did to you.

Child molesters groom their victims. That means that many, many victims love the person who molests them. If child molesting held the death penalty, those victims might never be willing to come forward.

It would certainly be better to humanely treat them in a way that makes them non-offending in the future than it would be to kill them. And I, a person who is not entirely against incarceration if the criminal in question has too high a risk of recidivism, would be in favor of incarcerating them if they cannot be prevented from offending in the future. But killing them would do enormous damage to the children they harmed. Can you imagine how it would feel to know that someone you loved, someone who hurt you but you loved them nonetheless, died because you told the truth about the harm they did you? Can you imagine the psychological trauma? Honestly, some kids might get more fucked up from that than from the molestation.

Prevent them from hurting anyone else in the future. But "I feel like they should all be killed" is wrong on so many levels, and the level that's probably most important to the people saying "kill the pedophiles" is that doing so would hurt the people you are trying to protect from harm.

Too real, I see this all the time. Joking about how certain people in prison should be taken care of or molested. Two wrongs doesn’t make a right

[alarawriting]

I Suddenly Found Myself In Class With Amnesia, but I'm the Teacher?!

Experimenting with trying to write in "light novel" style despite being an American who writes in English.

****

I couldn’t tell you what the last thing I remembered was, because I couldn’t tell what order any of them had happened in. Was the last thing I remembered sitting in the back of the English classroom, gossiping with Suzy and Chantel, quietly enough that our half-deaf and eighty percent dead old English teacher couldn’t hear us? What about that moment in science lab where I had a beaker and I was pouring liquid into a retort and then there was a bright light and a boom? Or could the last thing I remembered be the moment where I was crossing the street in front of the high school, and I had my head turned because I was talking to my friend Rob?

I’m a big fan of portal fantasy. English, American, Japanese, it’s all great. Someone walks through a closet and finds themselves in another world. Or they get hit by a car and they wake up in a strange place full of magic. Or they die and get reincarnated as a cute little baby. Usually in a strange place full of magic. Most of these stories involve strange places full of magic.

That might have been fun, if that had been what happened. But no. I suddenly found myself standing in front of a room full of high school students that were filing in the door and finding seats.

Was I giving a presentation? I looked around, but there was no teacher. And then I looked down at how I was dressed – a plain blue blouse with a little pleating, and a very pleated, dark blue skirt, with sensible flats like my mom might wear, and pantyhose, like I would ever wear pantyhose. And then I looked up again, at the students, who were looking at me, and I realized that while they were mostly wearing T-shirts and jeans, the colors and styles were all wrong. Lots of neon stripes, and strategic cuts, and all the sneakers were either black with fluorescent stripes of some kind, or bright colors. And several of the boys were wearing pink. And none of the hairstyles looked like anything me or my friends would be caught dead in.

I reached behind my head and found that my hair was in a bun. In the last things I could remember, my hair was in a pixie cut. Pixie cuts cannot be made into buns. Somehow time had passed that I couldn’t remember. A lot of time.

My hands looked normal. No rings. But my fingernails weren’t chewed. There wasn’t any nail polish on them, but they were neat and clean and didn’t look like fingernails I might have.

The students weren’t looking at me the way students look at other students who are up at the board to do a presentation; they were looking at me sullenly, or expectantly.

I realized then to my horror that I was the teacher here.

If I was the teacher, I absolutely could not have a panic attack, even though I felt like I was about to. I also couldn’t suddenly run off to the bathroom – in all my years of school I have never seen a teacher do that at the start of a class. Teachers always present themselves as perfectly in control, without basic human needs, or else the class senses weakness and eats them alive.

This was exactly the kind of situation you might think to yourself, I’m having a bad dream. But my feet hurt. The shoes were annoying me. I have never noticed how my shoes feel, in a dream. And I was wearing an underwire bra, which was digging into my skin under my breasts. This was not a dream; I don’t dream up those kinds of details.

So. Somehow I was the teacher. I had no idea what I was teaching. I had never wanted to be a teacher – I’d planned to be a marine biologist. A quick eyeball around the class didn’t give me any hints; it was a very, very generic classroom. I did have a whiteboard with markers instead of a chalkboard, and the students didn’t have notebooks in front of them; most of them had something that looked like a laptop monitor, except smaller and without a keyboard, like a really big cell phone. A few had pens, except they were probably styluses for writing on the laptop monitor things, somehow, because without paper I couldn’t imagine how they could use those as pens.

No one was taking out a textbook, either. Seriously, how was I supposed to even guess what I was supposed to teach?

I could run off, I thought. This wasn’t actually my real life. I wasn’t a teacher. I was a high school student. This had to be some kind of Freaky Friday craziness where I’d swapped places with a teacher, somehow.

But… that was a ridiculous idea. Whereas the idea that somehow, something had happened to my brain and I’d suddenly lost years of memory and started thinking I was still a high school student when in fact I was a grown adult teacher… was possible. Implausible, and I didn’t like the idea at all, but it was more likely to be true. And if it was true, that meant this was my real life. This was my real job. And I’d be fired if I admitted I’d suddenly had some kind of brain damage that wiped out my memories of however many years it had been since I was a high school student. Somehow I had to fake my way through this, at least long enough to figure out what was going on.

The bell had rung a minute ago. The students were, mostly, pretty quiet, looking at me expectantly. I’m sure my lack of responsiveness was starting to seem weird.

I had to do something quick.

“We’re going to do something different today, students,” I said, wondering, as I said it, if I or the person whose life I’d stolen said things like “students” to address the class. “Let’s pretend I have total amnesia. I walked into this classroom, and wow! I don’t know my name and I’ve never been here before. Write me a short essay, in your own words, about what we’ve been learning for the past couple of weeks. Fill me in! Pretend I don’t know anything!”

[alarawriting]

Got all my bad guys and their powers all lined up for the giant climactic battle in Cold Light. Now all I have to do is match characters to opponents and choreograph this huge fight scene, including picking out who dies. I'll only write a small part of it because this is first person Meg POV, so we only get to see the parts that impact her, but I need to know all of it.

[alarawriting]

Pretty good

Did not achieve either my regular monthly goals or my quasi-Nano goals for this month, but I put down over 37,000 words on Cold Light, and finished chapters 9-11.

My original plan had been for 12 chapters, but chapter 11 had been intended to include both preparations for the climactic battle, and then the battle itself. That isn't working for me, so I split them. Now it will be 13 chapters, and I have only 2 left.

One of which is the climactic battle... *sigh* I hate writing fight scenes, and this one is gonna have so many moving pieces. I have to come up with an obscene number of superpowered characters, and choreograph all of them against all the superpowered people on my protagonist's side, and then only write the small fraction of that fight that the protagonist would be aware of because the book is in 1st person.

But I'm so close to done with this bullshit, y'all!

[alarawriting]

On the second draft, I have got to find a short word to convey "power mitochondria", because I have repeated that phrase to a ludicrous degree in this story.

[alarawriting]

Cold Light is coming along

Just finished chapter 9.

For reference, I expect 12 chapters. It took me, literally, 16 years to finish chapters 1-8. I started chapter 9 on Sept. 1. It is slightly longer than the expected outlined length.

[alarawriting]

This is hilarious.

[alarawriting]

And now, more news about 52 Project

Sometime next year, probably February or March, I am going to be releasing the 52 Project as self published ebook short story collections. Probably on Kindle. Yes, Amazon is evil, but they have the largest ebook market going.

You may ask yourself, why on Earth would anyone pay for an ebook where all the stories are online already?

I am so glad you asked! There are a number of stories I intended to put in the 52 Project that I never managed to get finished in time. There are also a number of stories in the 52 Project that -- I'm gonna be as objective as I can here -- kinda suck. So there will be between 2 and 3 original stories per collection. Gonna be releasing one every three months, is the plan, for a total of four books of 13 stories (except there might be two jokers, so maybe two of them are 14 stories.)

Now you may ask yourself, but can Alara actually finish these extra stories in time?

Well, one of them's done! And one of them is just maybe two or three scenes away from done, and I know what those scenes are. Most of these extra stories are partially written. So I think my odds of getting this done is pretty fair, given that I have close to six months before I intend to release the first one, and I only need to get, like, between 8 and 10 stories done within a year and three months, or so. And only 2 or 3 in the next six months.

I will probably be posting the new stories on my Patreon for patrons only because I am very impatient and not willing to wait for February or March before there are eyeballs on these stories.

[alarawriting]

Patreon is live again

I mean, it's not like I ever took it offline, but I'm actually posting content. I've put up three "backstages" for 52 Project stories, created collections for 52 Project and its backstages, and I've been adding the 52 Project stories to it for completeness and something to advertise to non-patrons, since they're not patron locked.

I need to completely revise my reward tiers. Turns out I am shit at writing on commission. Two people are still waiting for me to finish their commissions, five years later! (No, I haven't forgotten either of you.)

The Patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/alarajrogers , and I also have a ko-fi:

I am planning to put up a story that I have finished, but is intended for professional publication and is therefore not going to be available online outside of Patreon, in a couple of days.

[alarawriting]

Words words words

6,390 words into Cold Light Chp. 9 in three days!

I'm doing a pseudo-Nano here to try to get the thing finished; write like I'm trying to hit 50,000 in the month. I don't actually know if there's that much left in the book.

[alarawriting]

The project is finished and all hyperlinks are live! Gonna see if I can pin this post or something.

52 Project Master List

Probably I should have done this when I started.

Below the cut for list.

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