December (1994.12) "Okay," December said. "Now, let's say that you woke up tomorrow and found that a bunch of aliens had taken over the planet. And the aliens announce that they're here to suck all the resources out of the planet and kill half the people and enslave the rest. But then they offer you a deal. They say that if you let them cut you apart and study you then they'll leave everyone alone and fly away. And they do it in the most painful way possible, they have some kind of technology that lets them cut you up without killing you so you feel every single piece being sliced off, feel every nerve of your body scream as the cold steel bites into your flesh and—" "December!" Mom said. December looked over at Mom. "Sorry." A Christmas story narrated by Ready, Okay!'s own September Young. I generally find writing to be an immensely painstaking process, but this one came to me full-blown and I got the whole thing down in two sittings.

A Winner is You (begun 1995.06; completed 2002.08) "December" took two days to write; this one, about December's sister, took a bit over seven years. I started it in '95, got halfway into it, found that it wasn't going where I wanted it to, and shelved it. But it always kind of bugged me that I'd never finished it, so the better part of a decade later, I dusted it off and wrote the ending (and rewrote most of what was already there). It's kind of a capstone for the Ready, Okay! universe, so if you haven't read the book this might be one to skip.

It's Okay to Eat Fish (1995.02) "So what do you do? Drink their blood? Suck it out with your fangs? Or do you just sort of drain their life energy and leave them as desiccated husks?" He tells her. She can't believe her ears. Meet Karol Carpathescu. He doesn't drink blood or sleep in a coffin or turn into a bat, but he is a vampire — of sorts. And while he'd planned on steering well clear of the backwoods redneck helltown of Glasgow, Washington, he is about to make a detour. Part of the Angels and Other Monsters suite I wrote between college and grad school.

Sweetness and Light (1994.10) "There's been kind of a mix-up," Sister Marjorie admitted. "Brother Ephraim took off to kill the two of you before we could tell him that the order wasn't real. So Brother Orson, who's an elder, sent me to protect you. I've had the same training Brother Ephraim has and I know what he's going to try to do." "Big deal," Decker said. "He could break you over his knee if he wanted to." Maybe," Marjorie said. "But we have two advantages. First, we have God on our side." Great," he said. "And second," she said, "Brother Ephraim is really stupid." In 1993 I was pretty aggressively recruited into a cult — this girl in a few of my classes started flirting with me quite heavily over the course of a few weeks, and then she started suggesting that I come visit her ashram and meet with her guru, and then she started insisting, and then I started getting angry messages on my answering machine when I didn't show... anyway, that experience no doubt was one of the seeds of this segment of Angels and Other Monsters.

Warrior Needs Food, Badly (1994.03) "Hey, isn't that a house?" Eric asked. He pointed off to the southwest. On the horizon was a silhouette of something that looked very much like a cottage. "Maybe they can put us up for the night." "All right, we're stoked," Mike said. "Or are we? This is some sort of fantasy dimension — what are the villagers like?" Eric scratched his head. "Well, villagers are usually distrustful of strangers at first," he said. "But if we can convince them that our intentions are good we should be okay." "I hardly think we should be worrying about their disposition," Jamie said. "How do we know they're even human? All we've seen are grass and trees, no animals or anything. And even if they are human, who's to say they're going to speak English?" "No problem," Mike said. "Yo hablo muy español." I wrote this for a class I was taking on highbrow fantasy lit. It is not, however, highbrow fantasy lit itself — it's pretty close to slapstick. If you're looking for depth of characterization, you might want to skip this one. (If you're looking for depth of dust, however, you've come to the right place. This would be the oldest thing on the site if not for the Barney article down below.)

Dark Marrissa (1996.10) "Patterson tells me the tower will go online tomorrow morning," Marrissa said. "Aren't you excited? I'm excited. After all, it's not every day a girl becomes omnipotent." Jay didn't say anything. She sighed. "It's almost anti-climactic, don't you think?" she said. "Here I thought I was going to have to spend the next twenty years of my life conquering the universe and now it turns out that all I have to do is start up the tower tomorrow and I'll have the universe in my back pocket." Marrissa checked her watch. "Well, time's a-wasting!" This is a story set in the Ratliffverse, and as such demands the reader do a bit of background reading — at the very least, you should read the MSTing of "A Royal Wedding" (#8 on that page, last I checked). This was a fairly weird project — it's set in someone else's universe, populated with someone else's characters, swipes left and right from other stories, and was written at about fifteen times the speed I usually write. But it's one of the things I was known for in my pre-IF days, so for the sake of completism, here it is. (I had Dark Marrissa #2 plotted out in my head at one point, but these days its chances of getting written look more than a little slim.) hide ▲