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Part thirty-three of After the Storm is taking longer than I anticipated to finish up. It will be posted tomorrow. My apologies for the delay.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, Q&As, short stories,  and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

I know this post is longer than normal, but I couldn’t bear pushing anything to the end of the month. My readers need all of these excellent links this weekend!

Polly Answers Your Questions via Brucegerencser. Bruce finally convinced his wife, Polly, to answer some reader questions. I hope this will become a regular column on his blog. It’s so interesting to hear things from her point of view. A lot of marriages wouldn’t have survived all of the transitions these two have weathered.

Bubble on a Mud Puddle via JexShinigami. An imaginative short story that I can’t say anything else about without risking spoilers.

Do You Need to Eat That? I really dislike it when one person criticizes what someone else is (or isn’t) eating. This article provides a long list of ways to handle obnoxious behaviour like this without telling the reader that there’s only one right answer here. In the past I’ve ignored these comments, but I’m seriously thinking about switching up my responses in the near future.

Interview with Alara Branwen. Alara is the author of a series of short stories about romantic interludes between dinosaurs and prehistoric women. In this interview she describes how she stumbled upon this highly unusual niche and why she finds it so interesting. No, this isn’t satire or a trick of some sort. She honestly does write dinosaur romances. What I find really interesting is how comfortable Alara is with the  campy-ness of her stories. I can think of a lot of other creative folks whose work would be much better if they publicly acknowledged that sometimes they create stuff that’s kind of silly.

He Was Arrested 20 Times for This…but I Think It’s Totally Worth It! via KenKaminesky. I have no reason to believe in ghosts, but I’ve been intrigued by abandoned buildings for a long time. There’s something sad and slightly bittersweet about walking through or past a building that was once filled with people. It’s even worse with houses because I imagine all of the triumphs and tragedies of daily life brushing against those walls over the years. And now all they hear is silence.

She Deserved My Undeterred Love. One of the most powerful things I’ve read in 2013. Possibly NSFW.

From Pernicious Hope:

The work of psychotherapy is often to chase down Pernicious Hope in all its daemonic and slippery aspects. To capture it, examine it, to challenge and question its true mission, to find out which god this Hope actually obeys.

To exorcise it.

From Naked Joe:

One hundred years ago, Joe Knowles stripped down to his jockstrap, said goodbye to civilization, and marched off into the woods to prove his survival skills. He was the reality star of his day. For eight weeks, rapt readers followed his adventures in the Boston Post, for whom he was filing stories on birch bark. When he finally staggered out of the wild, looking like a holdover from the Stone Age, he returned home to a hero’s welcome. That’s when things got interesting.

Did you know that sugar was once used as a medicine? Sweet Tooth delves into the history and sociology of candy. With the holiday season quickly approaching most of us are going to be surrounded by sugar for the next six weeks or so.  As much fun as it is to eat it, I found even more pleasure in learning how generations past made, ate, and thought about sweets.

History isn’t only about war, religion, and disease. You can learn a lot about a culture based on their attitudes on mundane, everyday experiences like buying sugared medicine for sick loved one or picking out treats for your kids.

The only thing I didn’t like about this book was the author’s memories of the candy she ate as a child because it was a little repetitive. It would have been more interesting to hear stories from people who came from a wide range of ages and backgrounds. Some families have a constant supply of candy around, others never allow their children to eat it. And even what is considered good candy varies quite a bit based on the culture and class you grew up in.

What have you been reading?

If the embedded video in this post doesn’t show up, click here.

I actually use Apple products exclusively, but I still think this is humorous.

Picture by Jože Gorjup.

Just tuning in? Start here.

“Guarantee me at least another decade and I’ll go peacefully with you at the end of it.”

If Death still had the muscles necessary to cock his (non-existent) eyebrows Paige would have immediately known what he thought of this deal. He rubbed the nearly invisible line on his clavicle as she finished her argument. It had long since healed, but the thought of it snapping in two again aggravated nerves that really shouldn’t exist in a skeleton.

“I want to see the girl grow up. Once she no longer needs me you can have me.” Malachi had lost just as much as his sister had in their short lifetimes, but somehow the idea of Wilma growing up without any memories of her parents, grandmother, or great-grandmother seemed unfair. Paige wanted both of her descendants to remember where they came from, especially if they were going to grow up around a woman like Daphne.

“Fair enough. Do you want to pick the day, or should I?”

“Make it the first unbearably hot day of summer. No one expects the very old to survive that time of year anyway.”

“I will.”

“Would you like a cup of tea before you go?”

“Yes.”

Lemon whined as Paige began heating up the water and rummaging around in all but bare cupboards for clean cups and the last of the tea. The table smelled like sour milk, but he couldn’t see who or what the oldest member of the household was talking to. She patted his head as she poured out the tea and began an animated conversation with the empty chair on the other side of the table.

The children had been left more or less to their own devices while Daphne and her sons were gone. Paige fed them their daily meal, but other than that Wilma and Malachi slept when and where they pleased and wandered as far away from the house as their legs would carry them. Her hip was bothering her more than it had even a week or two earlier, and she had trouble keeping up with even the lightest chores.  Yet if she stopped to rest it was hard to do so without falling asleep or sinking so deeply into her thoughts that she lost track of what was happening around her.

It was not surprising, then, that she didn’t hear Daphne walking into a house full of air that smelled like unwashed dishes, smoke, and old sweat long after Lemon had gone to investigate what the smallest humans were doing in the other rooms of the house. For once it was too rainy outside for them to explore.

A strange smell snagged Lemon’s attention. There was a creature standing outside in the courtyard he’d never seen before. Daphne grabbed him before he could greet his newest friend, but Lemon barked a celebratory hello anyway to make sure the creature took notice his presence.

“I thought we’d have to swim our way home,” Ephraim said with a wry grin as he shook the water out of his hair and onto everyone near him. Isaac grabbed the harness and lead the mule to their shed. It was really too small for such a large beast, but he wasn’t sure if it was safe to leave the animal out in the rain and cold all night. His brother followed him to help make room, and once the source of his newest reason for excitement was out of sight Lemon curled up near his favourite human’s feet.

“I have to see if I can make this work again,” Daphne said to no one in particular after she’d washed her hands. “Sometimes there are new messages.” Paige watched Daphne carefully as the younger woman took a tablet out of her knapsack and set it on the table. She frowned but said nothing. It was a good thing Death left just after the young folks arrived back home.  The light flickered a little more dimly as the strange contraption slowly turned on.

The only new message was from Tara. The epidemic had grown so serious that it was actually referenced in their local paper. A small article appeared on the fourth page warning citizens to wash their hands, avoid contact with the sick, and continue taking their vitamins. Once again Daphne stumbled over words that she’d never read before, but she wondered how terrible the situation really was in the capital if even the official spokespeople were beginning to acknowledge it.

“I saw one of those things once,” Paige said.

“What?”

“When I was a girl I saw a box that acted like that thing. It had words in it that would disappear if you shook it. My Ma thought it was evil, though, dug a very big hole, and buried it.” Daphne didn’t know how to react to this revelation. She knew Paige had lived a very long time, but she had heard very little about the older woman’s childhood.

“Who gave it to you? Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know,” Paige said. “Dad was a trader so he might have brought it back on one of his missions, but until things got really bad there were always a few families that had an odd item or two. Most of them didn’t light up, but they did do things that no one could explain or were made of materials I’ve never seen anywhere else.”

“What happened to them?”

“We got rid of them in The Purge.” A virulent disease had shaken the valley many years before, killing many times more people than had died this past summer. To stop the deaths the ombudsmen had burned, buried, or shipped out everything that was suspected of harbouring evil spirits. To even mention their names risked summoning them, and very few families were willing to hold onto trinkets that no longer held any real purpose.

Once again Daphne wished she had been born in Mingus instead of being awkwardly transplanted there as a child. There was still so much she didn’t know about her adopted community.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Confessions of a Funeral Director. Imagine pallbearers accidentally dropping a casket in the middle of an ice storm. What happens next is something you’ll have to read for yourself.

God and Death Play Cards While They Wait for an Old Man to Die. There’s more going on in this painting that meets the eye. Can you spot what’s really happening?

Two Different Ways to Be a Good Person. I don’t think life is quite this simple, but do see value in teasing out the difference between thinking you’re a good person and seeing yourself someone who occasionally/regularly/often does good things.

Buddha Spirit via WilSenior. This article is about the connection between therapy, Buddhist meditation, and awakening your compassion for yourself as well as other people. I have a very tough time getting my mind to shut down when I occasionally try to meditate, but maybe I should give it another shot.

One Man’s Epic Quest to Visit Every Former Slave Dwelling in the United States. Historical reenactments aren’t just for wars. I would have never guessed that some slave quarters are still standing, much less that at least some of them are structurally sound enough to sleep in for a night or two. This is the kind of history that piques my interest. It’s easy to reconstruct how extremely wealthy and powerful people lived, but I find it much more interesting to learn about the lives of individuals who lived and died without those privileges. I think you can tell far more about any society from how it treats it’s most vulnerable members than in how caters to the top 1%.

10 Things You Should Never Say to Yourself via DearAnnMarie. I tend to be a little suspicious of the self-help market in general, but this is wonderful advice.

From The Hand That Feeds You:

After working at the farmers’ market, I’ve come to love fresh local food—and hate the people who buy it.

Every Saturday before dawn, I traveled from deep within Brooklyn to the northern tip of Manhattan to welcome a truck fresh from the fertile Hudson Valley loaded with fist-sized beets, shaggy bunches of kale, quarts of yogurt, loaves of organic spelt breads, and almost all the staples of a pesticide-free fridge.

Last week my friend Heather recommended the author Connie Willis to me. The first book of hers I read is Fire Watch, a fantastic collection of scifi/fantasy short stories. Most of them are hard science fiction, a subgenre that I haven’t spent as much time reading as I have other types of speculative fiction.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who prefers character-driven plots. The scifi elements of this book are interesting, but the characters are what kept me reading. Each one is sketched out in such great detail that it felt as if they were moving through full-length stories instead of the much shorter works they actually occupied.

What have you been reading?

 – Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

From Richard Hammond’s Invisible Worlds via the BBC.

01010100 01111001 01110000 01100101 00100000 01111001 01100101 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100011 01100101 01100101 01100100 00101110 01000101 01110010 01110010 01101111 01110010 00101110 00100000 01010000 01110010 01100101 01110011 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101110 01111001 00100000 01100010 01110101 01110100 01110100 01101111 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110010 01100101 01110011 01110100 01100001 01110010 01110100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101110 01110100 01101001 01101110 01110101 01100101 00101110 00100000

The strange, flat, glowing rock filled with numbers. As Daphne adjusted her hold on it her left thumb accidentally pressed down on one of the smooth patches.

The surface brightened for a second before shutting off as quickly as it had turned on. In the eerie silence Daphne could hear something whirring inside of it for a few seconds before it, too, grew still.

She shook the rock to see if she could get it to light up again.

Nothing.

Daphne slumped her shoulders and was just about the deposit the stone into her knapsack when the whirring began again.

Slowly the light returned, and then a nonsensical message appeared on the flat side of the rock.

Tap any button to continue. 

She slapped the side of the stone. No response.

Holding it in her left hand, she poked the middle of it with her right index finger. Once again the screen filled with words moving so fast Daphne had no way of absorbing them all. When the display ended a row of two-dimensional boxes lined up on the bottom of the rock. They reminded her a little of the wooden blocks her sons played with as children.

Notes

Raw Data

Anomalies

Messages

She glanced up at dark clouds scratching the horizon and clicked on messages.

24 August

Tim,

I spoke to my CO. There’s no reason for the trackers to be malfunctioning. Are you sure you’re calibrating them properly before they’re inserted?

This study is a bust anyway. We’re no closer to catching the smugglers and R&D hasn’t been able to identify what makes the rednecks’ immune systems so much more resistant to this strain than we’re seeing in our population. My best guess is that their abysmal diets and total lack of medical care kills off anyone who doesn’t have an iron stomach. Survival of the fittest and all.

At the rate this is going I doubt you’ll still be there at Festivus. The governor isn’t going to keep spending money on a project that hasn’t lead to any breakthroughs.

Keep sending in your reports, though. Gotta cover your ass until the big guns officially decide this is a waste of time.

Tara

The group listened quietly as Daphne started reading the next message. She saw her sons trudging back up the riverbank, two animals in tow. For once Flapjack was walking quietly even with a rope tied around his neck.

25 August 

VICTORY IN MINGUS.

We just received word that our troops have subdued a small settlement called Mingus in the territory formerly known as Arizona. 

While the search continues for Dr. Spring and his associates we apprehended several individuals who lead us to his whereabouts. As soon as we’ve finished restoring order to this community we will be returning to the capital with the accused where they will receive a fair trial in exchange for the immunological data we need in order to finish the vaccine.

More information will be forthcoming as it becomes available. In the meantime your commanding officers will be issuing double rations and a half-day holidays. Please stay tuned to your teleprompters for the governor’s speech that will air at 17:00….

In the corner of her eye Daphne spotted a flash of light at the horizon.

“We won’t make it back to my place in time,” Mariposa said. “But we should get away from the water.” The lightning was erratic so far, but Daphne thought she could hear the faint rumble of thunder. If nothing else the storm would make the banks so muddy that climbing up them with two reluctant animals would be extremely difficult. They’d come back for the body later.

Daphne tucked the stone into her knapsack and walked to the top of the hill with her companions. As she began descending on the other side of it Ephraim noticed a small depression in the rock. It wasn’t quite large enough to shelter one person, but at least they could take turns avoiding some of the storm. He’d noticed his mother limping as they cautiously climbed over the steepest part of the hill and insisted that she take the first turn in the makeshift shelter.

“While we’re here you might as well keep reading,” Sean said. Daphne nodded in agreement, and once she found a place to sit she began combing through the rest of the messages. Official documents were unfailingly positive accounts of breakthroughs just around the corner, but casual messages told a different story. More than once she wished she had her dictionary with her. There were so many words Daphne had never heard of before. Wireless. Election. Plastic. Insurgent. Treason. Commercial.

Embryonic governments had formed and dissolved over and over again. For a time New Texas was so stable that its influence had occasionally reached Mingus before it, too, went silent after a few years of drought. As a young woman Daphne had heard rumours of a queen living in South California, but it had been many years since anyone had sent word or supplies from that kingdom.

A cold raindrop bounced off the end of her nose and onto the stone as she read.  She brushed it off with the cleanest fold in her tunic she could find and scrolled to the next page. A list of names and numbers caught her attention as she browsed.

Aberdeen, Mimi 3139 4002 6566 1091

Acero, Robert 1291 3026 9799 8564

Aden, Anna 9538 5028 3374 0123 DEACTIVATED.

Another word she’d never heard of before.

“Does anyone know what this means?” Daphne read the name aloud as the clouds squeezed out every last drop of moisture from their perch.

The next instalment of After the Storm will be published tomorrow. I apologize for the delay.