From the following list, please select any short story titles which you think should progress to the final round

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LETTING EACH TOMORROW SLAP US IN THE FACE
2 (7.4%)
THE JANE AUSTIN DEATH MATCH
2 (7.4%)
LITTLE PITCHERS, BIG EARS, AND GOOD NOSES
3 (11.1%)
LUBARBRI
1 (3.7%)
MIAMI SNOW
1 (3.7%)
THE MISADVENTURES OF ABIGAIL ADDY
1 (3.7%)
THE NECROMOUSER
8 (29.6%)
ON ARID SEAS
3 (11.1%)
ONE IS ONE
2 (7.4%)
THE PROPHET OF SEVENTH AVENUE
4 (14.8%)

Voting in Heats 1 through 8 will close on Sunday, June 3rd 2012 at 6:00pm (US/Eastern). Heat nine will take place soon after.

Good luck to all who take part! Vene, vidi, puddli!

My Uncle Tommy’s blood didn’t clot very well, a disease known as hemophilia, so blood pooled up in his joints.  It ate away his cartilage.  Near the end of his life, when he moved his elbow, you could hear the bones rubbing against each other whisper-thin, like two dry crackers ground together.

So he walked slow.

So I walked slow.

To this day, Gini tells me I amble glacially – because I’m used to quietly keeping Tommy’s pace, not wanting to upset him.  Oh, I could have jogged on ahead; not that Tommy would have been devastated, as I was basically his son and he would have forgiven me the world.

But he had enough reminders that he was broken and frail.  He didn’t need another one from me.  So I crept at his pace, which only got slower as the years went by, and we passed the time as two humans.

This is what you do when you have a friend who’s disabled.

Let’s be blatantly honest and say that having disabled friends is often an inconvenience verging on annoyance.  They can’t get up stairs.  They cancel at the last minute because of unpredictable sicknesses.  There’s more planning to be find the right restaurant because of their diet.

If you think it’s an inconvenience to you, imagine how it feels to them.

Every day, the world wakes up and punches your pals in the fucking face, telling them “Hey, you know all those things you want to do?  You can’t.”

You can choose to be one of those blows.  Or you can be understanding and loving and help them to live a better life.

It’s that fucking simple.

They live in a smaller world because of something they don’t have control over.  I think a good friend will take that into account, and tread that fine line between “Yes, it’s an inconvenience and you may not always be able to come along” with a lot of love and understanding and bold attempts to make room for your friend because yes, they have a condition and it deserves to be accommodated whenever possible.

Because when you are that sick, you notice the way people cancel plans with you.  The way they quietly stop inviting you to parties.  The way you don’t defend them when other, healthier people, complain that they shouldn’t have to deal with your issues.

They’re sick, not stupid, and they feel their excision from your life as keenly as a cut.  One more cut in a life filled with them.

I’m not saying I was saccharine-sweet to Tommy.  I acknowledged the difficulty of his disabledness from time to time, because we were loving humans and that means being honest.  But I never made a big deal about the way we had to get to concerts half an hour early so he could get to his seat, or how we had to stay an hour late because the crowds might bump him too hard.

Instead, I used that extra time to talk to him, companionably walking at his cane-pace, as friends.  He must have noticed that his hyperactive teenaged nephew was walking slow.

But for a time, he had the ability to live his life as though nothing was wrong with him. And that was the greatest gift I could give him.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

. . . that I married this woman.

Easily the smartest decision I ever made in my life.

Happy anniversary, my love.

Managed a meager thousand words on the rewrite of “Just a Game” last week—fighting through a fair amount of inertia—but even that little bit felt pretty good.  It’s always that way when I return to writing after a break.

Of course, getting back in harness means I once again have to wrestle with the whole “making it not suck” thing, which, you know, ain’t easy.

Yeah, it’s always something.

Anyway, it occurs to me that even though I’m classifying this as a rewrite, almost all of it is new material.  So I suppose I can fire up Magic Meter again:

And what the hell, here’s a snippet:

Lucas dug the trowel into the south end zone.

He had to push hard; the ground wasn’t frozen yet, but it was close.  He leaned on the trowel, working it in slowly, trying not to be too destructive of the painted grass, lest a groundskeeper notice the damage and get curious.  He needed only a small, surgical hole for this; no need for hackwork.

Besides, it felt worse than mere vandalism.  It felt sacrilegious, as if he were profaning holy ground.  Which, in a sense, he was.  This place, this stadium, was a temple erected by and glorifying powerhouse college football.  The mighty Stampede—a stalwart and storied program, long on tradition, always a player on the national scene, the pride of Illinois.  Eighty thousand congregants worshiped here on autumn Saturdays, Lucas not the least among them.  His father had instilled that much in him, if nothing else.

Not that he thought this would actually work, of course.  A man who had dedicated his life to the cause of science, Lucas Frazier didn’t believe in curses.  He was doing this strictly for his father—even though his father would be none the wiser whether he did it or not.  No, he had made a promise, and he would keep it, however ridiculous it might be.

Besides, it couldn’t hurt.

No updates for Write Club.

Back to making it not suck.