50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong
My friend and mentor, Warren Ellis, is an award-winning writer, and incredible human. I am grateful and incredibly lucky to have him in my life.
Warren’s been writing and sending out this newsletter called Orbital Operations for awhile, and the most recent one had two things in it that I loved so much, I asked for and was granted permission to share them here.
I had this epiphany at the beginning of September: This thing that I’m doing? This series of choices I make every day? It isn’t working. I don’t like the way I feel, I don’t like the way I look, I don’t like the things I’m doing. Things need to change.
So I took a long, hard, serious look at myself, and concluded that some things needed to change.
It’s been about six months since I decided to hit the reboot button on my life. I’ve checked in about once a month since then, to see how I’m doing, celebrate the victories, and identify where I can do better.
Let’s see how I’m doing.
Flash Fiction, that is, you filthy animals.
This is another one from my dumb Tumblr thing, based on another neat work of sci-fi art I reblogged.
Jace looked up from the scanner. “Two colonials, Hep! On the other side of the rock.”
“Perfect,” Hep said, almost to himself.
“Perfect?! How are we gonna handle two?!”
Hep took a short breath. The rookie was jumpy and a little panicky, but what rookie wasn’t? Flying through space is fun and all, right up until someone’s trying to blast you into it.
“Colonials are good, but they’re also cocky, Jace,” Hep said, powering up the Needle’s thrusters.
The scanner flipped from green to red and Jace instinctively interrupted him. “Two colonial Zona fighters now moving to intercept, sir.”
Hep continued. “One of them, alone, could be a problem, but a pair? These idiots will be so busy trying to impress each other, we’ll be able to fly circles around them.”
The scanner sounded and began to flash. “A third colonial Zona fighter has activated its ions and is now moving into attack formation Delta,” Jace said.
A moment of tense silence filled the Needle’s cockpit. “Hang on.” Hep pulled his controls toward him and the Needle arced sharply upward, spun 180 degrees, and flattened out again. Hep powered the ship’s thrusters to maximum, pushing both pirates heavily into their seats.
“What are you doing?”
“Two is a patrol group. We can handle two.” The Zonas came around the asteroid in a tight formation.
“Three is a combat defense squad. They only put a combat defense squad around this rock if there’s something more than metal in it.
“The good news is, we just found something very valuable.”
The Zonas opened fire.
“The bad news is, we may not get to tell anyone about it.”
I’m proud of these things, because I do them off the top of my head, taking the first bit of inspiration I find in the image, and writing without judgment. In this particular one, I decided to sort of flip it and make the pirates the two people in the foreground, who are probably not meant to be the bad guys in the image. Then, while I was writing it, I realized that I thought there were two ships that I called the colonials, but there were actually three. So I decided that our heroes had also made the same mistake, which is why they are fleeing from them
My talk to Miami University went very well, and there were way more adults (like, old people like me adults, not college-aged adults) than I expected. Turns out I was terrified for no good reason.
I recorded the entire thing, and once I have a chance to clean up and edit the audio, I’ll post it on Radio Free Burrito. Until then, here’s an excerpt from my prepared remarks.
(NB: I write these things to be spoken, to be performed. I don’t know if it translates perfectly to written text, because if I were writing this to be read, I would change a bunch of things.)
I’m in Ohio for 24ish hours, because I’m giving a talk at Miami University later today. I’ve given talks at conventions over the years, and some of them have even been successful. I’ve keynoted two PAXes performed at lots of w00tstocks, so speaking to large groups of people is nothing new for me … but this is the first time I’ve actually prepared a talk on a subject, and traveled across the country to give it to a bunch of college students.