Paula’s Comments (group member since Oct 28, 2015)

Paula’s comments from the Science Fiction Microstory Contest group.

Oh Marianne--yes, my condolences too.

Quick shout-out to Karl and to Richard for each getting into some of the terrors of our times. Very fine. I have to say everyone's work so far this month is way up there--genuinely well written and either very moving or damn terrifying.

What J.J. said. The bar is way, way raised. Must have been an inspired move.

Scrolled on the green silk leaves
Copyright © 2015 by Paula Friedman

It had been there on Sarie’s Layout when she first woke up—well, the first time she remembered waking up. Reading already, she must’ve been four or so. But right there it had been, under the translucent polkadot curtains of her window, penned on the “Someday” segment of the big 25-Year Itinerary Layout that Mom and Dad had made her, but, unlike the others—First Baby Doll, Horseback Rides, Go to College, Meet Your Guy—it had a big green question mark and a green silk flower beside its spidery words, scribbled scroll-like on the long silk leaves, “Jamie-Sue, do not forget me! Mama”

Unlike the other segments, it had stayed, year after year of her growing, in-between the College Delights and the gold Award items on the fading Layout—always there, always greeting her with the dawn.

“Am I ’dopted, Mom?” she’d asked, at some point; she must have been six. She had pulled on her Mars-Chill hood cord, head perked to one side, and smiled the “cute” smile neither Dad and Mom could resist.

“'dopted’? No, you’re not adopted, Sweetie!” Mom had crooned and hugged her, and turned her own cute-smile to Dad, “What charming thoughts our child dreams up!”

Dad had put down his holo-news and not replied. After awhile, “I wonder,” he’d said, and gone to the Layout and run one finger over the green silk flower. ““How big our universe,” he said. “Never on all the settled worlds has anyone seen a flower like this.” But Mom had looked through the sand-port toward the crater edge and, saying something Sarie couldn’t hear—except it sounded like “not tell her?”—he’d gone back to his holo-news, settling in his soft thick chair. Mom had stared at him, then started sobbing. So Sarie never asked again.

She was a good scholar. She won the Alpha Centauri System Navigant (f) ribbon and, with her scholarship money, shipped off to Earth for studies. There, she met a boy she really liked, except it worried her when Conrad said things, usually while they were in the thick of it, like “But I knew you, back in our second formats, Millie—I mean, um, Sarie. Don’t you remember that night on Station 6 when we—?”

“C’mon,” she laughed, but sometimes the timing really . . . well, sucked.

She wondered, though, especially after Conrad called her a “forgetful bitch—and don’t forget, this time. You were then, too.” Something was wrong, and Mom and Dad were old, and Dad not always how he should be anymore, so she couldn’t just ask.

But then, in a Monday faculty lecture series, “State of Evolving-Minds Research,” after an initial discourse on “Forgetting Our ‘First’s,” by noted Oort Cloud and biophysics expert Mandy Minhor, Sarie decided to follow Minhor’s course on how brain scan evolution had allowed “dead pre-animatives’” to be stored for up to (so far) thirteen decades, even “reconstituted” (“You’d say ‘reinserted,” Professor Minhor had smiled), into the “soft, flexing minds of babes, a wee part and parcel of a whole new persona, or self.”)

“Well, not exactly,” Professor Ken Keenan of Earth Ambule, sharing the platform that night, had whispered into the mic, even as Conrad mouthed in Sarie’s ear, “Ah! A baby, she means,” nuzzling Sarie’s neck.

*
“Mom,” Sarie would say. Holding the old silk flower carefully, she would barely peek through the loosely curtained doorway, not wishing to disturb her mom in the darkened room. “Mom, I . . .” But no, how could she ask? “Mom, I was born before, right? I was—am--someone else, and my mental construct, my template, got re-installed from some other mama’s baby’s mind, right? Maybe into your baby’s? Replaced it ‘cause the first mind had a problem, right?”

And she’d say, “Mom, Dad, that note came from my . . . my pre-me’s mind’s first mother, yes? Mom?”

She wouldn’t, though. They were old. Yes, there had been pre-me’s made into templates. Their moms must have missed them terribly. Those had been long ago when flowers grew green. Or somewhere else. Not here, not now. People lived; people died. People had their memories and some had others’ memories. Or others’ children, others’ parents. Mom, Sarie thought, and Mama, be glad, and, holding the green silk flower, she let the curtain fall.

Heather, if people want to go with 750 words as the limit, why insist on 1000? Frankly, most places until the past couple years considered anything under 2000 words a "short-short story" or even "flash fiction"; why not suggest a 2000 words limit? The same "freedom" and "welcoming" arguments can go for that. Or for 200 words (another oft-found flash fiction limit), ftm.
And each limit provides a very different sort of writing experience--why not try the 750 words for awhile and see how that goes? At least we know that we may have TIME to write our entries and read all the entries, at that length, even those of us swamped with work. I hope this answer is direct enough. As for the general issue of welcoming experimental sf, literary sf, complexly written sf, etc.--I agree with you; some here do, some don't.

We are getting more and more people in this group. If even half the people add more and more words to their word counts, some people's stories--and likely they'll be the longer ones--just won't get read by all the participants. Think about it.
And does anyone really want reading his/her story to seem to others like homework? The longer stories will if they eat up all of people's time.
Also, at least half the stories we do here could use some editing and rephrasing to cut their word count, just as much or more than they could use extra words. "Less is more" can go too far, but there's a reason the phrase is used often about people's fiction.

Not only did GR fix my problem with the old and new e-addresses, but the fellow who did it wrote a charming and sensible post re what he'd found and how he'd fixed it. So this place may be cool.

Breathe, Corey, breathe. Else, what happens by the time of novel 5?