GO EAST, YOUNG MAN, GO EAST*

In EVERYDAY WEIRDNESS, a neat little flash-fiction website that throws you a new fictional curve ball every day of the year. I've noticed a lot of Absurdism, Horror and convoluted SF, all very fun to read just to see what nugget of back-handed wisdom that day has coughed out at you. These are good people, and this was a good idea.

The days have been flying by. I barely remembered it was the 27th of August when "Go East" came out. There have been a whirlwind of incredible things and incredible projects going through here. Many wolves to feed when some of those projects start becoming paying ones, starting with the biggest wolf that has been sitting on my chest for ten years. (Hell hath no fury nor Dante such sweet revenge as, 'Here's your check. You ruined my life. Now fuck off.')

But even that wolf was never that big. It all depends which one you feed. I learned how to feed the white one a long time ago, so the Churchillian-black one now looks kind of like the scavenging mutt it always was.

I can't talk about the big projects here yet, just a few more weeks. But I can say that Crooked Man 5 is half-done as a first draft, about four years ahead of schedule. On June 17th, I walked away from a wreck that should have ended my life. No power on Earth can keep The Rest Of This from happening. The Green Man has touched me this summer, and everything is coming up the same color. Now for Harvest Time, very soon...

"The Weapons Shop" in 'Featured Stories', SpecFicWorld.com

http://specficworld.com/fiction/DVSHORT.aspx?Id=41

In my own reading, Spider Robinson was the first SF writer to point out the particle-beam weapons system that Nikola Tesla tried to sell to both FDR and British Prime Minister Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. One huge Spider fan I know is CBS radio's own Big Jim.

Jim advanced the idea you are about to see. I find it truly horrifying in a way... but in a way, I kind of wish it would happen.

I wrote a lot of cynical things during the Bush Administration. I was sure it was Game Over. Game On passes strange, many times, but the winds have begun to blow hard out here. Hopefully, I too can get a job picking up the downed branches from the storm of the previous regime. Or at least mucking biofuel someplace.

In any case, "The Weapons Shop" was inspired by a great painting by Kenn Brown (http://www.mondolithicstudios.com .) Kenn told me he titled the painting, in turn, from A.E. van Vogt's SF chestnut 'The Weapons Shops of Ishtar."

Completely off-topic, but I finally get to nod three hands away at that old Dutch master, whose story "The Enchanted Village" was the best damn piece of SF I was ever exposed to in elementary school, period, with the exception of "Night of the Cooters"...

Anyway, enjoy. More on the way. ---ed/