Category Archives: Stories

Bait and Switch

Posted on by Henry

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned.  Back on August 26th I promised you that I’d have a short story posted by today.  As you can see, I don’t have that here for you, but perhaps you’ll forgive me: I did give you the second installment of my Choose-Your-Own-Adventure far sooner than I had thought would happen, and I have actually finished the short story I’d intended to post today.  I just haven’t edited it yet.  My guess is that you’ll see that up here on Wednesday, though it won’t have any of the section that I teased you with last time (that should end up in another short story, which will come out sooner rather than later).

Finally, in hopes of making reparations, I offer you the flash fiction piece that I wrote over the weekend for Alison McKenzie’s contest.  The rules were that the piece had to be between 100 and 750 words long, and had to use the phrase “When dawn broke, he knew it was all over.”

Have fun…

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Getting Motivated to Write

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

I live in Portland, and as such, everybody I know is a ‘writer’. I imagine it’s like being an ‘actor’ in Los Angeles; people use the word as a catch-all for their hopes and dreams. But wanting to write and doing it occasionally doesn’t make you a writer any more than playing pick-up basketball every once in awhile makes you a basketball player, or playing with Legos makes you an engineer. And so most ‘writers’ I know are actually baristas, with most ‘actors’ being waiters/waitresses.

As with most things, success is hard, and most success will be measured in degrees. So what is a writer? Well, I’d struggle to define ‘writer’. My first attempt would be:

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Rough Drafts and Epiphanies

Posted on by Henry

Maybe I should put a number on that title.  I expect I’ll be writing more posts like this in the course of writing this blog.  Much like Mattias’ post, this one is meant to keep you up to date.  First, some housekeeping notes: I’ve set up additional pages such that you can more easily find my creative content simply by mousing over the Our Fiction tab.  My choose-your-own-adventure is still hidden a little deeper in there, so you’ll have to click on the tab itself in order to find it (I should probably fix that too, just to make my other work more accessible, no?).

Also similar to Mattias’ note, I’ve got news on more adventures for Jerome!  My Jerome, not his.  I’m afraid there was some cross-pollination after Mattias briefly used the name “Jerome” for all of his RPG characters.  Now we’ve both got main characters named Jerome in our stories, which certainly doesn’t help you, our readers.  Just remember that my Jerome lives in a world of fantastical alternate history, while Mattias’ Jerome lives in a straight up fantasy world.

Anyway, the news is this: I expect that there will be another short story installment in the next two weeks.  I’ll post it when it’s mostly done, but let’s call it September 9th just to be sure.

Would you like to know more?

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Experiment

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

When it comes to my writing, I’m not so good at putting things out there. Why? Because I want it to be perfect. I’ll edit things forever and still not be satisfied, so when I do release something, it’s still in ‘rough draft’ phase because everything I’ve changed now needs editing. So I thought I’d try an experiment, and start releasing scenes without editing. This is the start of a short story series I’m writing in a steampunk/noir setting. It got written in about an hour, and basically wasn’t edited, so it’s rough around the edges, but I like the tone of it, I think. I hope you enjoy it! Also, enjoy a cameo character!

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Prologue + Chapter 1: Memories

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

Well, it’s not complete done yet, but I felt it better to post it than to tweak it forever; here is the first chapter of a slowly building novel! I really want to call this a first draft, and many changes may be made yet, as there is one character I want to rework (too tropey), two scene I want to re-conclude (awkward ending), and one scene I need to re-write (just all around too staccato and not flowing well enough). But overall, I hope it’s enjoyable :)

But with that glowing endorsement, here is Chapter 1 of Book 1 of The Steam Wars, “Memories” (and the Prologue as a bonus!)

I’ll be updating formatting over time, and will keep the final version of each chapter here, with the most recent update date at the top.

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Somebody Like Me

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

At the close of my previous post, the most consistent comment I got was ‘I had hoped for more of a story’, or ‘I wish you had gone more in depth into your experience’. And really, I hadn’t planned to. Why? Because stories about me are — I feel — inherently boring. I rarely do inner turmoil. I’m pretty focused, driven, and single-minded. There are a few things I do feel conflict about it, and until 2 or 3 years ago, I had thought race to be outside of that. So gather around, and I’ll tell you a story, the spiritual successor to my previous story,  or perhaps what it was meant to be. I had the words to say, but it wasn’t until I was given the right inspiration that I know how to say them. So while this is a story, it is also an homage, and the stylistic similarities are both intentional and the sincerest form of flattery.

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Now This Is A Story All About How…

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

I got to where I am right now
So I’d like to take a minute; just sit right there:
I’ll tell you how I got to the set of sociocultural beliefs I’m at right now and why I think it’s important (especially for gamers) to confront sexism/racism/homophobia within our community because minority groups are already not really taken seriously so all of their bad actions reflect on them whereas bad actions of ‘normal’ people just reflect on people which is why things like Steubenville don’t make the majority of our culture say ‘see, I knew football players were no good’ whereas things like this make people say ‘see, I knew gamers were no good’ when really both of them should lead us to the belief that we live in a self-propagating rape culture

…and I did this all after going to high school in a town called Bel-Air?

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Choose Your Own Adventure!

Posted on by Henry

Edit: Part 2a has been written, and can be found here.  Part 2b has been written as well, and can be found here.

I made this short choose-your-own-adventure story a while back, and only just realized that I could try to put it together in a functioning format on this site.  I haven’t managed to separate the sections as much as I’d like, so if you want the full experience try to avoid reading more than one segment at a time. The uppermost section is the one to keep your eyes on. Have fun!

#

You come to your senses after a long night of studying in the library and find yourself standing on a narrow dirt path running through the woods. You don’t know how you got here, and it doesn’t look like any place that you’ve ever been before. After wandering along for a brief while, you hear hoofbeats behind you. Do you:

a) Hide behind a nearby tree. Paranoia is the best survival trait after all.

b) Stand on the side of the road. Horses move quickly and you don’t want to be in their way.

c) Look for the horsey! You’ve loved horses for as long as you can remember, and you haven’t gotten to see any recently.

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Fleshing out the Details

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

So now that we have a setting, let’s add in some details! One thing that can derail a campaign most are details. Why? Well, because details are at once meaningful and arbitrary. That is, details have to be consistent with your universe, and they shouldn’t establish any themes which your  universe/story isn’t tackling, but they also aren’t always important. I once had to name a tavern at random. So I decided on a color and an animal/cooking object. After all, Black Bull, and the White Swan, or the Red Ladle, are all perfectly good tavern names. And this is how I ended up with the Red Bull Tavern, something Henry was so nice as to tease me about it here, and I’ll probably never hear the end of how I named the Mayor ‘Hamer’, which was intended to be pronounced “ha-Mare”, but ended up being called “Mayor ha-Mayor”. So it is important to make sure to make sure that your random details are unobstructive. But how do you craft important details that are meaningful?

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Azorius: A Teaser

Posted on by Mattias Lehman

This is the blurb/teaser to a universe I’ve been developing for use in a series of short stories (and soon to be an RPG):

Long ago, history tells of a great war between all the kingdoms, of magic that tore up the earth and sundered the sky, of demons and gods that walked the land, casting down hundreds where they glanced and calling down lightning from the heavens and fire from hell. These wars raged for decades, consuming all the races of the world. And when the dust parted and the blood cleared away, war was the least of anybody’s problems. The dead had risen. Few weapons could be used efficiently against the undead; mortal blows hardly even slowed them. In months, fully a third of the world’s cities were unlivable.

It was then that a major breakthrough was made: magic could damage, and destroy the undead. But while divine magic could repel the undead, arcane magic attracted them, worse, it could create them! Thus began the Great Purge. Any magic that wasn’t sanctioned by the church was hunted down, quickly and brutally.

Now, years later, the world is at an equilibrium. Maybe a quarter or a fifth of the cities and town from after the war survive, but they do survive. Each town is protected by a few priests; the larger the town, the more priests. And that protection remains under a few conditions: any magic users are turned over to the church, the church’s rituals are kept sacred, and the church can take anybody under the age of 18 into the clergy, at any time. If those rules are broken, the town risks losing its protection. And with these rules, rebuilding has begun, of cities and of roads. Of society.

But rumors linger, of rogue magic users who control hordes of undead, or of guilds of magic who seek to use the undead for their own nefarious research and goals, and worst, of corruption inside the church itself. But not all rumors are bad. Some tell of guilds of magic who seek to end the undead problem, of rogue magic-users who roam the countryside, seeking pockets of survivors or of magical artifacts that ward off the dead, and even of cities that escaped the devastation.

This is the realm of Azorius, and these are the tales of its people.