Edward Ashton's Blog, page 9
February 2, 2017
Quick Sips - Flash Fiction Online January 2017
Nice review of “Vernal Fall” here. It’s always fun to see what someone else takes from your work.
February 1, 2017
hanginggardenstories:
A GUIDE FOR YOUNG LADIES ENTERING THE...
A GUIDE FOR YOUNG LADIES ENTERING THE SERVICE OF THE FAIRIES, by Rosamund Hodge
I.
This is the lie they will use to break you: no one else has ever loved this way before.
II.
Choose wisely which court you serve. Light or Dark, Summer or Winter, Seelie or Unseelie: they have many names, but the pith of the choice is this: a poisoned flower or a knife in the dark?
(The difference is less and more than you might think.)
Of course, this is only if you go to them for the granting of a wish: to save your father, sister, lover, dearest friend. If you go to get someone back from them, or—most foolish of all—because you fell in love with one of them, you will have no choice at all. You must go to the ones that chose you.
III.
Be kind to the creature that guards your door. Do not mock its broken, bleeding face.
It will never help you in return. But I assure you, someday you will be glad to know that you were kind to something once.
IV.
Do not be surprised how many other mortal girls are there within the halls. The world is full of wishing and of wanting, and the fairies love to play with human hearts.
You will meet all kinds: the terrified ones, who used all their courage just getting there. The hopeful ones, who think that love or cleverness is enough to get them home. The angry ones, who see only one way out. The cold ones, who are already half-fairy.
I would tell you, Do not try to make friends with any of them, but you will anyway.
V.
Sooner or later (if you serve well, if you do not open the forbidden door and let the monster eat you), they will tell you about the game.
Summer battles Winter, Light battles Dark. This is the law of the world. And on the chessboard of the fairies, White battles Black.
In the glory of this battle, the pieces that are brave and strong may win their heart’s desire.
VI.
You already have forgotten how the mortal sun felt upon your face. You already know the bargain that brought you here was a lie.
If you came to save your sick mother, you fear she is dead already. If you came to free your captive sister, your fear she will be sent to Hell for the next tithe. If you came for love of an elf-knight, you are broken with wanting him, and yet he does not seem to know you.
Say yes.
January 20, 2017
January 19, 2017
So my editor does not like the title of my new book. She feels that “Hannah, Altered”...
So my editor does not like the title of my new book. She feels that “Hannah, Altered” does not really convey the correct tone, and would like something more “Douglas Adams-esque.” I’m now leaning toward “So Long, and Thanks for all the Super-Herpes,” but I’m not 100% committed yet, so if anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears.
January 7, 2017
Observations on the Health Care Market, on the Eve of its Destruction
Observation one: health care is not a market.
This should be entirely obvious, but it seems to escape a surprising number of commentators: nobody actually shops around for cheaper health care. When you have a heart attack, you do not compare prices at a range of hospitals before getting into the ambulance.
Observation two: we are not the sort of people who allow the poor to die in the streets.
This observation is probably more aspiration, if I’m being completely honest.
Corollary to observations one and two: reducing health care costs can only be accomplished by improving the efficiency of delivery.
In other words, forcing poor people to get their care in emergency rooms, which are by far the least cost-efficient place to take care of almost any medical problem, is not a good strategy for reducing health care costs.
Corollary to the above corollary: taking insurance away from twenty-six million people will unquestionably drive overall health care expenditures up substantially.
Who will pay these extra costs? Well, here is a partial list of people and organizations who will not:
Insurance companies—they will raise premiums to match expenditures.
The people who are having their insurance taken away—as is often said, you can’t get blood from a stone.
The wealthy—they now have complete control over the federal government, and will undoubtedly defend their interests vigorously.
Who is not on this list? This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Observation three: if you believe that your exercise and vitamin regimen mean that you will never need medical care, you are an idiot.
Another point which seems very obvious, but apparently is not.
Observation four: if you believe that because you are young and healthy now, you will always be so, you are even more of an idiot than those addressed in Observation three.
It saddens me that this one even bears mention.
Observation five: The United States is the only developed nation on the planet that seems not to understand the points listed above.
The implications of this point are also, depressingly, left as an exercise for the reader.
Almost exactly a year ago, a friend lost her daughter. The girl was a basketball player, and last...
Almost exactly a year ago, a friend lost her daughter. The girl was a basketball player, and last night her high school team dedicated their game to her memory. The score of the game at halftime was 32-11. Her jersey number in college was 32. Her jersey number in high school was 11. At times like this, I am forced to consider the possibility that my thinking on these matters may have been in error.
January 1, 2017
Vernal Fall by Edward Ashton - Literary Fiction - Flash Fiction Online
Got a new piece up this morning at Flash Fiction Online. Give it a peek if you have a chance. It’s a real morning pick-me-up.
December 23, 2016
Her: Turn it up, Dad. I love this song.Me: “The Queen and the Soldier”? That’s dinosaur music,...
Her: Turn it up, Dad. I love this song.
Me: “The Queen and the Soldier”? That’s dinosaur music, isn’t it?
Her: Yeah, but… for some reason, this song just makes me feel… happy… or maybe safe? I don’t know. Weird, right?
Me: Yeah, weird.
Unsaid: When she was a baby, she had terrible nightmares. Two or three times a night sometimes, she’d wake screaming. I’d run up the stairs, pick her up, walk the dark house with her… and sing her that song.
I don’t tell her why I’m tearing up, and she doesn’t ask. We ride the rest of the way home in silence.
December 18, 2016
December 1, 2016
An Excerpt from Mickey 7
The last time anything native seriously opposed one of our landfalls was nearly two hundred years ago, and maybe fifty lights spinward from here. The beach-head Command there must have given the place a name, but these days the planet is called Roanoke. Roanoke is not what you’d call an ideal habitat. Its star is a red dwarf, and the planet itself is a tidally-locked rock with almost no axial tilt, very little water, and a thirty-one day orbital period. It’s got a hot pole on one side, where the ambient temperature rarely drops below 80C, a cold pole on the other side where it snows CO2, and a habitable strip of perpetual twilight circumscribing the planet in-between that’s maybe a thousand kilometers wide. Roanoke is an old world. Speculation is that it’s harbored life for maybe seven billion years. And all that time, everything that’s evolved there has been fighting for a toehold in that dry, wind-scoured, thousand-kilometer strip.
Apparently, bringing a few million liters of liquid water to a place like that is like bringing a giant sack of scrip to a shanty-town, because the colony wasn’t a week past landfall before things started coming after them. There were tiny little biting things that came on the wind, burrowed into any exposed skin, and brought itching rashes, then pus-filled blisters, then sepsis, then death. There were things like sand-burrowing starfish with armor-piercing fangs. They injected a necrotizing venom that killed in minutes. There were insectile things half the size of a man that shot jets of concentrated sulphuric acid from glands in their heads. Half the creatures on the planet seemed purpose-built to defeat the colony’s defenses, and though it seems obvious to us now what was going on, they never did figure it out.
Almost from day one, Command at Roanoke couldn’t keep their people alive outside the main dome for more than an hour. They lost them in ones and twos, week after week, until finally they had to start making extra copies of their Expendable just to keep their berths filled. They eventually did button the place up and try to hunker down and do some research into what was happening to them. By that time, though, something was reproducing inside the dome. Command tried a half-dozen sterilization protocols, but whatever it was, it kept coming back. By the end, the entire colony was made up of copies. The central processor kept cranking them out until it ran out of amino acids.
One of the last of the Expendables to die got at least a glimmer of the truth, just before the end. Bio had released a phage tuned to take out one of the microorganisms that was tearing them up. A resistant strain showed up six hours later. The last words in his personal log, dictated as his innards were liquefying and pouring out every orifice, were these: I am not paranoid. Someone here really is out to get me.
