Improving Skills & Exploring the Ice Cave—Swords ‘n’ Magic and Stuff (Ea...

-

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NEW RELEASE: AUTUMNAL THREAT

-
Image
An alien autumn. An unseen predator. Deadly burrowers and an oncoming winter. And bugs big enough to ride. Joaquin only wants to warn his daughter of a new danger. To keep her safe. To make her understand her mother isn’t coming back, while keeping her alive. But what if he’s wrong? What if Mariam really did survive? What if, when everything looks like it’s going wrong, it’s really going right? Autumnal Threat is Joaquin's story. It is a father's story...and the story of a husband who misses his wife, and wants to keep his daughter safe from a new threat on their frontier world. It's a story of hope, and not giving up, and of family, as well as an exploration of what an alien eco-system might look like. It was a lot of fun to write. You can find links to this newly released, stand-alone, science-fiction short story on this Books2Read page: https://books2read.com/u/mgyopK or read an earlier version in A Collection of Lost Ships and Colonies .  
Read more

Free Read: Forest Connections

-
Today, I managed to settle down and write a response to the latest flash fiction challenge on Chuck Wendig's Terribleminds blog - The Dead Body . There were only two rules: the word limit was 1,000, and the story had to open with a dead body. This is what came out: Forest Connections The body swayed in the trees rocked by storm winds and illuminated by lightning. It was naked, except for the green, leather gloves it wore on both hands—the hands from which it was suspended from the tree. It might have been an attractive body, if there hadn’t been a gaping wound where its stomach should be. Perhaps… but Garamond wasn’t looking at the body, didn’t notice the slender hips or sculpted chest, the beauty of fine-chiselled cheek bones or luxurious fall of hair. Garamond fought his breakfast back into place, swallowed bile, forced his focus to the other trees in the grove, the ground onto which he’d nearly stepped. If it hadn’t been for the crow flying out of the chest cavity...
Read more

Australian Spiders: A Large White Tail came to Visit

-
Image
This is a whitetail spider. If you look very closely, you can see a faint white marking near the end of her abdomen that gives it the name. The sun glare is from the bathroom, she later headed into. That, as well as the long, almost cylindrical body and distinctive layout of the head and legs is a giveaway. As you can see, they are climbing spiders.      They also have a nasty habit of dropping onto things that pass below them - and biting them. They are quite poisonous. This one measured around 2.5-3 cm (approximately an inch) long and about 0.5 cm (or around 1/4-1/5 of an inch) across, which makes it probably female, and most definitely the biggest of these spiders I've seen in an urban environment. I've used a door jamb here to give you an idea of the size. Not my best photo, but I hope it helps in understanding the size. I've seen one larger, but not much, and that one was in a still-establishing housing development, in a crease in a pai...
Read more