I’m performing Escape Pod #363, “Flowing Shapes” by Rajan Khanna. The story contains sexual situations and may be offensive to some readers, but it’s a pretty good story, so… y’know… just deal with it.
Escape Pod is running a flash fiction contest. The entry period has ended, and we’ve moved onto voting. I have two stories in the running, out of the 92 total entries. The contest is completely anonymized – you won’t know who wrote the stories you’re voting on until they either win or lose.
Here’s how to read and vote:
The stories are 750 words or less apiece, so it shouldn’t take you long to read them.
A hint: my stories are both between 740 and 750 words. If you’ve read my other works, you should be able to figure out from the writing style which ones they are. They may or may not be posted already.
Anyway, I encourage you to read the stories and vote on them – even if you don’t vote for me.
Enjoy.
I also think this book suffers in some ways from being the series’s Empire Strikes Back. Geist was more a stand-alone novel, and Spectyr set up what’s going on in Wrayth. But Wrayth is clearly a ramp-up to the showdown with the true Big Bad (who, by the way, I was most emphatically not expecting when s/he was revealed), and once I realized that, I think in some ways it negatively impacted my enjoyment of the story.
[It] struck me as meditation on hope amid hopelessness. Great vocals by cast.
My narration of When Caverns Yawned by Captain S.P. Meek is now up at Protecting Project Pulp.
I don’t really like the voice choice I made for Dr. Bird, but I’d already committed to it by the time I realized he had some looooong monologues.
Play Dead is the story of the survivors of a zombie apocalypse in Miami, Florida. A short film made on-location, it follows this unlikely group of survivors as they escape the zombies, band together, and seek out a place where they can ride out the chaos until it ends.
Oh, yeah, and these survivors? They’re all dogs.
I found Booth to be strangely compelling. I didn’t know how much I would like it when I first started watching, but it caught me right from the start. Though the writing is deliberately obfuscatory at first — sometimes annoyingly so — it distills down to the reality of the situation pretty quickly, and by the end of the second episode you’re not quite sure just how much power The Man really has… and just how much of the truth he’s telling his clients. All you know is that Xander Berkeley, for all his scruffy, everyman look, has one hell of a disturbing smile.
I do think that Ink and stories like it — such as the film A Day Without A Mexican — do need to be told. Without getting political, I feel confident in saying that the US is getting more and more pendulum-like in its application of policy. We go too far in one direction, then swing even farther in the other, and so on — pretty much the reverse of what those swinging ball desk tchotchkes do — and there’s no end in sight. Ink is a pretty good look at what will happen if we go too far in one direction, and what makes it disturbing is how many people could read it and think “hey, these are all good ideas, let’s enact them now!”
Roseman looks at some current trends to explore love, sex and relationships in the near future, through the eyes of a young man who regrets his decision not to renew his relationship contract with his partner after eight years and one child.
Roseman’s first story in Asimovs (‘Bring on the Rain’) was an action-packed drama, and he attempts a much more difficult story here, in looking at relationships and getting into the mind of the protagonist, and it just feels a little less subtle than it needs to be.
Mark Watson at Best SF said the above about “Greener” and “Bring on the Rain”.
I agree that “Greener” was a more difficult story in some ways, although I actually have more difficulty with action sequences, as I worry about them going by too quickly. I just wrote a Boss Fight in my novel and I found myself having to pad it out a little to reach 2000 words in the chapter.
My story “Belief”, which first appeared in Fusion Fragment, has been republished in the latest Dunesteef, Episode 132. It’s in audio form, so grab a pair of headphones and tune in.
Episode 132: Belief
Josh Roseman: Writer, Voice Guy, Dad, Human 