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It happened when we least expected it. The literary Apocalypse. The end of all wor—
A couple of weeks ago, I invited Fatma Alici to play a little game of writing tag with me. I gave her some prompts and she picked the following: “After a thousand years of darkness, he will come.” From this prompt we both wrote a story. Mine is below, and Fatma’s can be found over on her site here. Please take a look, review if you like, and feel free to start… Read More
A World Full of Nothing My Granddad travelled a lot, when he was younger. He went to France several times, crossing the sea in a small boat when the water was least violent, and claimed he even made it as far as Italy before coming home and settling down with Grandma. Once, when I was just a few years old, I asked him what the rest of the world was like. He… Read More
The Iron Road When Mama died, Granddad decided to take me away from Edinburgh. He had a cousin in Carlisle, so we followed one of the Iron Roads for a hundred miles or more. Granddad said that in the times Before, the Iron Roads carried great vehicles upon them, and thousands of people rode to distant places in only an hour or two. After The Cataclysm, the vehicles were stripped down for… Read More
When I was eight, I found a beautiful flower peeping shyly out from a crack in the concrete. Granddad told me, that Great Grandpa told him, that before The Cataclysm, flowers used to grow everywhere. They grew tame in Gar-Dens and wild in great fields called Maid-O’s. They filled the world with a wonderful miasma of perfume, their hues and shades too many and varied to name. A blanket of colour upon a carpet of green,… Read More
Take Two Tag (or, The Urban Spaceman plays writing games with you) At the end of February, the Queen of Quotes, Jade M. Wong, and I had a play-date with our inner-fangirls, and the result was two Harry Potter one-shot fanfics based on the prompt of “Arthur Weasley at work” — one of three prompts I suggested, and the one Jade liked best. It was super fun. The goal was to see… Read More
Today is Thursday Friday, which means it’s surely time for another of Chuck Wendig’s attempts to break his web server by having his many loyal fans flood it with their responses to his challenges! The challenge for today is right up my wormhole. I’ve been experimenting more with shorter flash fiction in an attempt to curb my tendency to ramble (the result is a serial of short stories found here) and Chuck now… Read More
When I was young I found, buried beneath the last century’s ash and dust, a book about the end of the world. Written before the The Cataclysm, it told of how invaders came in gargantuan ships, raining down laser death upon wings of steel. There were dogfights in the sky, great heroics on the ground, and always the altruistic and fearless to lead the way. Humanity went out in a fierce blaze of… Read More
Great Grandpa used to tell me stories about the time right after The Cataclysm. He spoke of suffering and despair and death. Of bodies piled in the streets, rotting where they fell. The flies and rats and crows came in floods. Rivers blocked with bloated corpses. Groundwater tainted by seeping fluids. He told of the sickly sweet smell of decay. It flooded the nostrils and infected the mind with a fearful madness,… Read More
I try to imagine a world inhabited by seven billion people. I try to imagine what it would be like to see other human beings, every single day. I try to imagine how easy life would be if such things as supermarkets and shopping malls still existed; if hunger was not a constant companion. I try to imagine a world in which dogs are just pets, not ravenous beasts which feast in… Read More
Observations of The Urban Spaceman 
Things humans said