I looked for a book about a kitten who would come running “hurry, scurry, worry” that I remembered from my childhood for yeeeeeears before a kind commenter on Twitter, responding to a post from seven months ago, helped me find it. ❤️
I’m so happy to be able to read this book again!!!
When the 15-year-old was little, we entertained them sometimes by giving them imaginary ponies. We’d describe a pony, and their imagination is so strong, it was like a real gift.
Lately, I’ve been rewarding them for doing difficult schoolwork with ponies drawn by Midjourney…
Originally published in Daily Science Fiction, January 2018
Sloanee opened her eyes and felt her heart racing. What was she doing? Lying down? She was on the lam. She should be running or hiding. Nowhere was safe from the royal guards pursuing her. Queen Doripauli and her army of photosynthetic tumbleweed-like aliens would stop at nothing to catch and punish the amphibioid who had betrayed them.
Originally published in Daily Science Fiction, March 2020
A spaceship crashed down at the end of my street this morning. Its inertial dampeners and camouflage shield must still be in working order, because it looked like nothing more than a parabola of blue light followed by a puffy white clump of cumulonimbus cloud streaking down from the sky. After the crash, the puffy cloud dissipated with the morning fog, leaving behind a boxy, non-descript, ranch-style house, painted a bland shade of tan. The paint is even peeling. Sure, the lot at the end of the street had been an empty field all winter long, but somehow people have a way of forgetting that. Continue reading “Home Remodeling”
Originally published in The Voice of Dog, August 2021
“Here, let me carry those,” Lt. Vonn woofed to the team of scientists packing a crate with electronic devices that looked like funny mechanical spiders, sprouting metal legs in every direction.
The scientists — an orange tabby cat wearing techno-focal goggles, an arctic fox android, and a very striking brown cat with leopard spots — finished arranging the last few mechanical spiders, closed the top over them, and stepped back from the heavy crate gratefully. Lt. Vonn stood a head and shoulders taller than all three of them — even the spotted cat, who was unusually tall for a cat. Continue reading “Crystal Fusion”
Originally published in Tri-Galactic Trek, November 2021
A cat with ghost-white fur walked into the lumo-bay, the sleeves of his Tri-Galactic Navy uniform pushed up above his elbows and a bucket of electronic tools hanging from one paw.
The blue grid lines of the lumo-projectors usually sketched out regular, hexagonal patterns on the dark lumo-bay walls when it was not in operation. Right now, they looked more like drunk squiggles. Continue reading “Ensign Mewly”
A tiny metal object jumped through Lea’s open window, drawing her attention away from the Animorphs book she’d been reading. She put down the borrowed e-reader from her mom on the bed and went over to investigate.
Lea hadn’t seen the object very well — it had been moving too fast. Just a blur really. But it had reflected the sunlight, shining like a quarter thrown into a fountain, outshining all the pennies around it. So, she wondered if it might be valuable. Continue reading “Flerble Gerbil was a Hologram”
Out of curiosity, I made an account with a text generating AI program, and I’ve been wrestling with it to see if it’s useful or fun…
So far, it’s at least as hard as normal writing, possibly harder.
I wanted to start off with a project I’m invested in enough to bother with… but not so much that I’ll mind outside interference.
Then I remembered I had a first sentence stored away for a furry re-imaging of The Matrix and figured writing about AI with an AI could be fun… Continue reading “Experimenting with AI Writing”
Originally published in Daily Science Fiction, October 2018
Lee-a-lei and her clone-daughter Am-lei perched in the Crossroads Station recreational airlock with their long spindly legs folded. The two lepidopterans exchanged a glance with glittering, multi-faceted eyes. Lee-a-lei was nervous and kept flapping her mechanical wings, but her daughter looked excited.
Am-lei didn’t have wings. She’d followed the traditions of their homeworld and had her yellow-blue-and-purple wings cut off after she metamorphosed. So, she wore a simple zero-gee jetpack like a human or one of the canine Heffens would. The jetpack strapped around her thorax, firmly secured. Lee-a-lei had checked her daughter’s straps several times. Continue reading “Jetpack and Cyborg Wings”