The Dream

I dream f00dave calls me from work to tell me I'm late. "Oh no," I say. "Oh no oh no oh no." I throw on my clothes, run out the door, and catch the bus to work. Only after I've been working for one hour and twenty minutes do I realize it's my day off. Unsure of protocol, I go up to the main desk to ask. No one is there, so I must telephone a help line. I call, explain my situation, and the woman on the other line puts me on hold. While I'm awaiting her return, a man picks up the line and begins propositioning me in an obscene fashion. I hang up on him, and decide to claim my hours, but add a note explaining what had happened.

Then I decide to return home. f00 is leaving, too. He has a small white car. I get in the passenger side and he begins driving home. We're alongside a large river, and he turns up a side road. The road is covered with ice and snow. A large van is obstructing our way, but the road has no shoulder, so we must creep by the van very carefully. Every now and then, slim cows dart in front of us, and we must beep them out of the way. After driving for quite some time, we realize the road is a cul de sac, but there's no way to turn around. "Oh no," I say. "Oh no oh no oh no oh no." But off to the side, I can see a beach which leads all the way back to the main road.

By this point, our car has transmogrified into a barebacked white pony. Since I'm the better rider, I take the front, while f00 sits behind gripping around my waist. We start down the steep hill to the beach, the pony staggers, and f00, who is wearing slippery grey sweat pants, begins to lose his grip. He slides forward. I grab onto the pony harder with my legs, but slide up over the pommel. This surprises me, since our mount has no saddle. And the pommel is made of a chunk of wood. I bump over the top of it but retain my perch. f00, however, falls off and lands on his back in black mud. "Oh no oh no oh no," I laugh. "You are NOT riding in front, now." And then I wake up.

Link Dump

Yes, it's time for another.

Atlantic Nights by Travis Tea: "Several months ago, in response to a claim by a certain publisher that writers working in the SF/F genre believe it "does not require believable storylines" or "does not need believable every-day characters," genre writer James D. Macdonald [sff.net] got approximately 40 mostly science fiction and fantasy writers to cobble together an intentionally horrendous monstrosity of a novel (read it here as an FTP download in RTF [sff.net] and PDF [critique.org] format) and then submit it, in order to display the less than discriminating tastes of that same certain publisher in regard to the kind of work they accept for publication."

"Earlier last week, the sting has been revealed, the publisher fell for it (retracting the acceptance as soon as news spread, of course)..."

"Here's a bit of an excerpt from my chapter:"

"Actually, I think I am ready to order now," said Isadore, firmly ignoring it all, flipping back his red forelocks out of his face and beyond the back to where the bulk of the abundant and suggestive ponytail rested against his wide strongly utterly virile back -- a back that could do the beast with two backs so well, when one of the two backs came into question and under scrutiny (but the other back of course depended on the woman writhing with him, under him and on top of him ah, the beasts they would make!).

( And now for something completely different. )