This bit came out of a very thin two-line joke (“what would sprint review look like in hell?” “I meant to torture 40 souls this sprint but I only did 35”). I managed to stretch it out to 800 words. Go me!
fiction
I write fiction really slowly, and when I get deep into technical writing I tend not to write much fiction at all (my mind only seems to work on one track at a time: technical or creative. Not both at the same time). So this page gets very infrequently updated, alas.
Bas Floyd 166ae0
I seem to be fixated on stories with a heavy geek bent to them, which makes them nich-y and unpublishable. This one is similar to the earlier Exit Strategy, although I got somewhat more carried away imitating Lovecraft with this one.
The Deadline
This is another computer-geeky story, with a supernatural bent. I wrote most of this story in 1999 at the height of the dotcom era. I didn’t finish it because I was having trouble with the middle. I uncovered it again this year and realized that despite being kind of dated, it wasn’t that bad. In finishing the story I brought it somewhat up to date, although it still feels very 1999.
Transmission
I wrote this after spending time with my cell phone carrier’s tech support when my phone was behaving strangely. They told me to reboot my phone. Given that I work in high tech this should not have surprised me but the notion of rebooting the phone seemed kind of funny. I put this story away after Strange Horizons said that funny futuristic tech support stories are way too much of a cliche and they never want to see any more. But then I dug it out again recently and thought well, it isn’t that bad. So my cliche is your gain.
Amanita
I’ve been feeling like returning to my roots recently and writing horror-ish stuff, but now in a much more subtle way. This won’t take you more than 30 seconds to read.
Rain
Been taking a lot of fiction workshops recently. This was an exercise from one of those. Yes, I write a lot about driving.
Rush Hour
I used to get incredibly amped up on espresso, go out driving, listen to really loud fast angry music, and then come home and write this. Its sort of an angry violent science fiction alt-future cyberpunk thingie. It is very raw, and it ends badly, but who knows, maybe there’s something here to like if you like this sort of thing. Warning: lots of very bad language in this.
Flame
A short short. Wrote this in 5 minutes. Sometimes things just work.
The All-Nighter
#2 in the Silicon Valley social commentary series (see the next story for #1). Less technical. More pointed.
Exit Strategy
A technical tale of bad behavior in Silicon Valley. From reader comments this appears to be so far the best thing I’ve written.
Roadkill
Dark highways and the strange things you find on them. Gory.
The Tattoo
OK, so I read too much Lovecraft as a teenager. One of my “gothic nightclub” stories. Very gory.
Night Blindness
Another violent gothic nightclub story. Drugs. Violence. Bad language.
Julian & Me
A fragment from a short story I never finished. It appeared on the back of a T-shirt for the Usenet newsgroup alt.gothic. I once actually thought of an ending for this story, so maybe I’ll finish it someday. No violence, just kind of spooky.