Category Archives: Stories

Short stories that I have written, mostly when I was about 11 years old. Since then I have only improved marginally.

Twitfic 2010 review

Written by . Posted on December 27, 2010. Filed under Bla, Stories. No comments.

During the past year I submitted a number of stories to twitter fiction magazine Thaumatrope. Twitfic is a strange little animal, trying to condense an idea down to <140 characters and still maintaining something of a narrative is an interesting exercise. Some stories will drop perfectly formed, others begin as sloppy brain farts and require several rewrites to be molded into halfway decent crap.

Unfortunately Thaumatrope doesn’t seem to have published anything anymore since September, so I’m going to back my stories up here in case the place disappears, and do a brief re-cap of what they were actually about, including my rejections and unpublished bits.

The first submission I made to Thaumatrope was a crippled post-singular computronium end-game scenario, it was published on Feb 3, 2010:

The influx of stray matter caused ripples of opinion to propagate throughout the deadlocked factions of the mind. No consensus was reached.

The second story I submitted was my first rejection. The editorial feedback was that they liked the concept & writing, but it wasn’t clear enough. A rewrite was requested, but I never submitted one. Instead the idea ended up filling a whole page of New Old Treachery.

Mothers found the glasses had a pacifying effect. 5 years later the exocog-native kids ran worlds, but never bothered to learn how to walk.

Next up was a story about the drag of interstellar travel with a shoddy healthcare plan, it was published May 2, 2010:

My transfer meatbag is slowly taking form. Government plans only provide a basic organic model, back to eating and shitting again I guess.

Then a good old fashioned family drama and alien invasion story, published May 31, 2010:

Do you even remember the culling? In just one day they devoured every vegetarian on the planet, so shut up and eat your goddamn tube steak.

My last submission was a time-travel suspense thriller. This time again a rewrite was requested, specifically for the ending to be put in clearer terms. I did resubmit, but a while later all publishing stopped and I never heard from Thaumatrope again. Here’s the rewrite:

Shit he’s dead, I need to buy some time. The ATM is a block away, if I empty out my account I can get back before the shooting starts…

So out of 5 stories submitted this year I had 3 published and 2 rejected with rewrite requests. Pretty good on average I guess? It’s a shame that Thaumatrope seems to have stopped publishing though, I’ve yet to find a ‘paying’ market that has the same pulpy feel and humor to it. Also they still owe me $3.60 haha.

I’m going to keep a lazy eye out for new markets to submit to if I come up with anything that feels worth it, but in the meantime I’ve started using Twitter properly anyway, so I might just ‘publish’ there (I’m @thesjef). Had Thaumatrope still been around, my next submission would have been a capitalist skin-suit horror remake of Hemingway’s classic:

For sale: baby, never worn. Shoes sold separately.

Redesign the World: Paperback

Written by . Posted on November 30, 2010. Filed under Stories. No comments.

‘Paperback’ was a runner-up for the AnyBook Award 2010 and was printed in the compilation ‘Redesign the World’, the first book manufactured by an Espresso Book Machine in Europe. It’s a 1000 word flash of a day in the life of some kid in the near future, dealing with the implications of micro-cults, the crazies at McDonalds, on demand printing and 21st century economics.

Download Paperback (.pdf 1000 words)

If you want you can go buy the book, but seeing as I won’t get paid anyhow I’m more inclined to encourage you to manufacture your own. The Espresso Book Machine that has been installed at the American Book Center in Amsterdam will allow you to do so from the low low price of just €12.50. For an extra 50 they’ll even throw in an ISBN and your book will immediately be available for sale to the world. It’s a publishing revolution, and we get to stand first row as another age old industry thrashes itself through rebirth. Fun!

You can have anything printed from the ABC/EBM database of over 1.5 million titles, the Google Books public domain titles, the Internet Archive Text Archives, and a number of other sources. By far more interesting of course is the opportunity for the creation of custom made works, advance copies of manuscripts for writers are an obvious use, but others might include custom made travel guides, cookbooks, instructables, research material, musical scores or a hard copy of all the long ass blog posts you’ve bookmarked but never gotten around to reading on screen. The best stuff will of course be things I haven’t considered yet at all, that’s what I’m looking forward to seeing mostly.

New Old Treachery

Written by . Posted on August 7, 2010. Filed under Cyberpunk @ P2PU, Stories. No comments.

This is the final assignment for ‘Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature’ at P2PU.org (yes, it’s late), writing a short work of fiction based on what we’ve, uh, learned. So here is the first story I’ve written in about 18 years, presented for your reading pleasure in what ‘The Complete Idiots Guide to Publishing Science Fiction’ tells me is the ancient traditional manuscript format.

“Somehow in between jerking off Bruce with one hand and using the other to piss all over this generation’s social network practices, economical and environmental crises, you managed to put Magritte in a crackpipe and smoke him. o_O”
- Benjamin Becker

Download New Old Treachery (.pdf, 2500 words.)

Comments are welcome, especially if you have any actual editorial experience your feedback would be wildly appreciated. Send me email. If you would like to swear at me for wasting your time that’s cool too, but do keep in mind that your submission will be subject to review. Only the very best insults will make it through, so please put some effort into it.

Thanks to Laurian for having run this course even though nobody actually adhered to the schedule in any way at all. I was entertained and informed, so the whole P2PU must be good for something. Now I’m going to have to go and find something else to rant about.