oasis of the virtual

virtual

to the oasis of the virtual

Welcome to the oasis of the virtual!

Brainery

Welcome to the oasis of the virtual!

stopped moving; from place to place

Since he left Rose he hasn’t stopped moving; from place to place

or monster

He felt their presence as absences in his life.

Soft meat gets eaten first,

Cano bit back a warning cry as he saw the skinny kid’s jabbed leg crumple under him. The robots converged on him as he fell, his rifle arm flung wide. One of the insect-like machines crawled up h

s torso, and jabbed him on both sides of his neck. The skinny kid’s shriek trailed away into a whimper and he fell limp. The other two robots worked their many legs to catch his body and soften his fall. ¶ 95 Leave a comment on paragraph 95 0 The three machines spun the boy’s thin, limp body as they printed a thin coating of transparent plastic from their undersides.

online

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Welcome to the oasis of the virtual!

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Welcome to the oasis of the virtual!

digital

Welcome to the oasis of the virtual!

to the oasis of the virtual!

the virtual!

Two: Continue to Enjoy the Work

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Step Two: Continue to Enjoy the Work

me tell you of their triumphs. Of the kingdoms they have saved. The loves they have created. The sacrifices they have made to create a better place- for all good stories need a villain, and those of us who embrace the path of the witch accept that the villain will be u

you are here to learn the secrets of witchcraft, the stories that no one tells. We all know of the wickedness and evilness of witches, of their ugly spirit and soul. How they curse those that cross them, and hex those that vex them. Turn men into frogs, princes to beasts and princesses into swans

¶ 128 Leave a comment on paragraph 128 0 Grace never speaks.

A monster is a monster is a monster. And my sister, my poor sister, just a pile of bones. I can hear the door open far away, in another lifetime, and a male voice, call out. “Katya?” echoes down the hall. I have to warn her, but I have no air, no voice. I reach a claw out to my Katie, my Katerina, my Katya, with hair as thin and reedy as straw, and so yellow it’s almost white; and brush a talon down her tear-streaked face, leaving a trail of blood. ¶ 218 Leave a comment on paragraph 218 2 I hope her tears make it burn.

Maybe say I dropped something between the boards?

Maybe say I dropped something between the boards?

Her eyes sparkled brightly, as though she wasn’t sure ravishing was such a bad idea.

Her eyes sparkled brightly, as though she wasn’t sure ravishing was such a bad idea.

Her eyes sparkled brightly, as though she wasn’t sure ravishing was such a bad idea.

Her bones felt so fragile under my big hands and I could feel her pulse fluttering like a dragonfly at my neck. I kissed her temple and she tasted of berries.

Her bones felt so fragile under my big hands and I could feel her pulse fluttering like a dragonfly at my neck.

She’d smile at me with her toothy grin, and I would forget how many months it had been since I last had fed.

and so girly

and so girly

You’re my best friend!

You’re my best friend!

heard

heard

In that moment, I knew I had her.

In that moment, I knew I had her.

¶ 40 Leave a comment on paragraph 40 3 “Ok, put your hand back here and hold these,” Thomas said, resetting Joshua to his earlier position. The feed jumped to a news cast discussing the results of the latest election two years in the future. “How is this possible? How far can we go…?” This would make them rich! All he had to do was find out what stocks to invest in, what teams to bet on, this was their ticket! He could leave his job, move the family to a proper house, in a proper neighborhood. This was his chance to change everything. He ran back to the closet and grabbed all the hangars, discarding coats all over the floor. Thomas hung them with the other and the feed jumped.

Come.” The fly tugged gently on one of Ruby’s ears, one of her legs in her tiny knapsack. “You don’t want to be here when they find them.” ¶ 70 Leave a comment on paragraph 70 2 Be what her tormenters had been—Ruby felt pity for them. ¶ 71 Leave a comment on paragraph 71 5 As she disappeared into the forest with the fly, and the night sky turned blood orange, the last thing she saw when she turned, was the look of terror in the elephant men’s eyes, when the first machete broke through the vines.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 2 As Balderson women, we were expected to provide the food for the auction. Grey-haired aunts scurried in and out of the kitchen carrying neon tupperware containers piled with family favourites: devilled eggs; nuts and bolts; casseroles of every variety. If you could open a can, you could bake a casserole, at least that was my family motto. My mother was the youngest Balderson, I carried my father’s last name so I was the youngest, and only, Crimshaw in the residence.

¶ 90 Leave a comment on paragraph 90 0 “No. No, no, no.” I whispered it slowly, trying to convince myself otherwise—I couldn’t afford diamonds. Almost against my will, I took the earring from Suzy and brought it to my mouth. I used my teeth to pull the tiny prongs off the jewel, one by one, and I wrapped my tongue around the diamond, slipped it from its gold holder. It bounced around my teeth and I liked the way it felt, so I undulated my tongue over and over to keep the motion going. The little stone came to rest in the back left corner of my mouth, and I slowly clenched my teeth together on it. The gentle pressure in my molars thrilled me. I held it for a few more seconds and swallowed it whole.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 3 In the woods, I found a great house, bigger than the one with the party, which had been a cramped apartment, a garret compared to this. I could just see the spire of some central tower teetering among the tips of the tallest trees from afar. I couldn’t see much more than that, though, because of the gigantic hedge surrounding it. I walked around the hedge for most of the day until I finally came to a wrought iron gate, allowing my first glimpse into the property. Topiary beasts, glistening green, gazed in glorious self-satisfaction across the manicured lawn. The house itself – just shy of a castle, really – cast a long shadow toward the east. It was built of stone blocks as big as cauldrons, rough hewn, and forty windows, all curtained and black, stared as somberly as sentinels across the circular driveway toward me. Before all of this, however, quite close to me, stood an old woman, old but tall and proud, in a sweeping green dress, white hair groomed like a rose.

one H and 2 O’s

Not by name, of course, she wouldn’t have known my name.

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 6 A flame appeared to dance in her palm. Calling the Light was a basic spell, but anything more complicated was going to require her name. As a spell weaver, a creator, her secret name was woven into every spell. It was the name her mother had given her; it was the key that unlocked her natural-born power. And the demon had cast some sort of memory spell on her, so she couldn’t remember it anymore.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 She stepped over piles of refuse, clothing, rotting food. Her foot slid on something and she stopped, lifted up some rags. The vidscreen was still too new to be trash. Must have belonged to some stupid kid who wanted the latest model. She took out a driver from her backpack and tapped the device until it came on, connecting to a network. The headlines loaded and she read, “Rebels Accused of Breaching Ceasefire.” What else was new, she thought, as if nobody’d noticed the upgraded checkpoints. Just getting down from her squat on the hill onto the gondola downtown was an ordeal, with cops checking IDs at the turnstiles and again when disembarking.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 1 There were bright cloaked figures, there were animals beside them, and all stood statue-still with their faces upturned to him, expressionless, around a blue-orange pool that pulsed and whirled clouds of prismatic vapor. These floated up from the pool and their cloying tendrils embraced him, permeating his skin and holding him with a translucent intelligence that felt inevitable. One fecund instant had elapsed and Gashann was in a tide of cellular memory. Walls evaporated in a shimmering wash and he felt an enormous time-stream fatten his cells. It was a breathless state but he could not feel any need to breathe. He had become a single mote of perception, unbounded with any presence of sense-time-body.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 3 Few are born with a immunity to the poison. Fewer still have a strong enough resistance to handle the distillation process. Her family had called it a gift, a chance for them to change their fortunes and escape the dreary village they called home. At ten she was taken to study under the kingdom’s herbalists and scientists; learning the skill of poison-making from her tutors. At the end of her first year of study she had written to her family and said that she had found religion in the methods. The measuring, pouring and watching of the potions had seemed almost worshipful to her; an act played out for the gods.

Blur by Jonathan ¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Jeff had started to blur. Natalie noticed it first. They were kissing; she started to pull at his shirt. He raised his arms so she could slide it up and off, could expose his stomach to her gentle biting. Once he was bare-chested, Natalie started to rub her eyes. She blinked, squinted, rubbed them again. ¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 “What?” said Jeff. ¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 “Nothing, I guess.” ¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 But it happened the next time they undressed, and the next. Every time Jeff disrobed, Natalie narrowed her eyes and blinked a lot. The fourth time, he stopped her. “What is it? Why do you keep doing that?” ¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 “I…you’re blurry.”

With the burden of bodies came a desire to move on our own, to not be subject to the wind’s tossing. In my millings around the flatlands of the basin, I’d stopped looking down at the ridgy sand. Though the wind still danced along the surface, rearranging the grooves grain by grain, it became after a time a weak imitation of the storms of our origin. So I began to look up and around for solace. Nothing urgent – we did not feel things urgently at the time. Under the golden sky and before the wetness to come, there was nothing to know of want. I came to consort with other sandmen: we were still slightly deceptive and inchoate creatures, tight assemblages of the same stuff we walked on. I’ve spoken much of seeing, but there wasn’t the evaluative element to it, and now that we’d begun to live with ourselves, we became what I now know to be curious, I suppose. There was no death or reproduction to concern ourselves with, but in addition to sight, we had now to reckon with touch and sound, and naturally, being with other sandmen was one way to facilitate this reckoning.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 And there I go, speaking for everyone again. It’s easy to do; nothing like being forged from a primordial whirlwind to make you cockeyed about perspective

But instead of seeing the backs of their throats, he only saw the ends of the universe.

That night the girl sleeps, and her dream is The Tale of the Stone Flower. She is the orphan boy Danila, and the dream does not feel like a dream. ¶ 120 Leave a comment on paragraph 120 0 The boy lies in the grass, speaking to the sky and sometimes becoming part of the wind that seems to blow through his entire being. Camilla feels not unlike her waking self. ¶ 121 Leave a comment on paragraph 121 1 The grandmother is there. She tells of the Stone Flower hidden in the mountains. ¶ 122 Leave a comment on paragraph 122 0 It is a deep sleep, and the dream moves quickly. ¶ 123 Leave a comment on paragraph 123 0 Danila searches the hills for the stone with living beauty. Knowing the longing in his heart, the Mistress of Copper Mountain appears. ¶ 124 Leave a comment on paragraph 124 0 “I will show the Stone Flower to you,” she says, “though you may forever regret it. You will never return to the life you know.” ¶ 125 Leave a comment on paragraph 125 1 And there in her garden, the boy sees his heart’s desire and kneels before the Stone Flower to touch

Still no sign of her elderly friend.

he should just grab the books and get out of town for the last time and finally do something with her life. She wasn’t getting anywhere reading under a blanket with a light spell while her parents came home at all hours from their adventuring. And the people they had over! Smashing beers together and getting food all of the floor, snoring all over the living room, dragging monster heads home with them, and then dropping all their gear into Marisa’s arms on her way to work in the morning. And something, somewhere deep in her veins in the places where her professors couldn’t look, she had magic waiting. Meaningful magic. She knew it. And she had the books to teach herself, now. But this wasn’t the right place and she was never going to make it here. Never. Especially if she got caugh

This might well have been annoying to a lesser machine, but Librarians had been designed without emotions which might interfere with their job.

People speculated endlessly about her. Was she one of the Hedren heiresses having a laugh? A former investigator of animal abuse, or some kind of colonists’ rights advocate? She claimed millions of supporters. But investigators had never been able to connect her with any other known criminal element or activist group.

As she entered the room, Leah looked up sleepily from her La-Z-Boy, offering a feeble wave. ¶ 206 Leave a comment on paragraph 206 0 “I’m so glad to see you!” said Jazmin, but Leah showed no recognition in her eyes. She fell back to sleep. Jazmin stared out the window, as if her gaze could transport her back to Brant with his croissants. ¶ 207 Leave a comment on paragraph 207 0 “Was it worth it?” taunted Rensa, the house quaking with her laughter. Outside, the hailstorm raged on

azmin drifted in and out of sleep until 2 PM, fighting the light that spilled in through the curtains, knowing this would be her last day with Brant. When at last she awoke, he insisted on making her croissants and coffee. When he left for the store, she walked to the brick house with the gate. On the keypad next to the gate, she dialed in the code “147,” and the gate opened.

Time was a tadpole, wriggling through the waters of a polluted pond

He was the most perfect looking man she had ever seen, sculpted from the sound of wind chimes and the smell of freshly baked bread.

Renza

Then, as if in response, the moon’s beaming smile landed upon a canoe resting under a tree

looking hollow and cavernous like whale skeletons

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 The hill in the road arched like a humpback whale,

so the closet smelled like steeped winter.

I bring monsters with me when I break into your home and you had just begun to believe that monsters would never come.

I am powerless here and if you turn some beam on me you will find me thin and weak and cowering in your corner. I am a beaten child cramming myself into further, smaller spaces and you are my father with a belt and its buckle. I love you. You feed me. I know that you can’t love me because I am your worst mistake. You brought me into this world and now I steal your food, your privacy, your lovers. I am the demon in your home drawing the heat to myself, a vacuum, nothing remains of your youth; I have it. Sleep, sleep, I beg you.

The sink is nail-polish-yellow, and everything swoops, the faucet like a stork’s neck, the pink towels on their holders, arcing outward.

Was that a bear thing?

Too many thoughts for another’s story; must needs paint then.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 You want a physicist to speak at your funeral.

Welcome to the oasis of the virtual!

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 The Brainery Workshop will be working exclusively with online peer review, complete with digital marginalia functionality.

online

Using my background in new media scholarship, I have been able to bring digital scholarly tools to our speculative fiction writing workshop. Submissions will be made into private posts (that will not be officially published online–so this will not effect future publishing opportunities). Readers will then have the power to highlight and comment paragraph-by-paragraph or line-by-line in the margins of a text.

¶ 34 Leave a comment on paragraph 34 0 “What a silly question,”

artists

A fourth a loaf of bread,

Reverb made my eyelid twitch.

made

They were leg shaped. But I could see into them. He had explained that these being a prototype they wanted to be able to see into their circuits and pumps and gears without having to take me apart, so instead of silver like the terminator or gold like c3po I got clear polymer skin.

¶ 132 Leave a comment on paragraph 132 0 I looked down and the bed wasn’t flat, there were shapes under the sheet, not leg shaped but not-not leg shaped

I screamed.

He wore a suit, off the rack not tailored

forhead

Fuck I can’t afford the hospital, I thought.

On the way out I saw Trace and Jan in the back row looking sober and with it, holding hands and leaning into each other like teenagers.

That’s how it was by then, no one blinked an eye, there was nothing even to blink at really.

they stayed true to stereo-type, old washed-out hippies

RV’s

Do they do that, put dead people in ambulances?

like arthritic spider

She had that sunk look, the one bodies get when the spirit scaffolding isn’t there holding everything up anymore

life

feet

figety

Sacrifices were now the stuff of legend at the village and had been for 20 years.

cuum packed in workout get ups

her

They’ve been classified as appliances.

warmth of humanity or the frigidity of automations.

“You are old enough to drink, right?”

I saw the time you took that photo of Trevor with all the hearts drawn around the frame with you to bed and rubbed it underneath your panties

¶ 90 Leave a comment on paragraph 90 0 Clara fixed her eyes on the sliver of moonlight flickering in the window. She remembered fishing with her father for starfish late one night. The moonlight spread out over the water and the whole ocean looked like a giant saucer full of milk ready to be lapped up. As her father dipped the net down into the water over and over, jellyfish would unspool their tentacles in clouds of green and purple. She worried that they were getting tangled in the net, but her father reassured her that the jellyfish were smart enough to know better, that they’d coexisted side-by-side with nets for years. Far below the jellyfish, where the sea congealed into a murky thickness, she saw a pair of red eyes glimmering. Beneath the eyes was a body, flat like a stingray, but much wider, so wide she couldn’t see either edge of the body.

Jolly Rancher blue liquid

The walls heaved like a fish’s gills

¶ 53 Leave a comment on paragraph 53 0 Sass could remember back when that was a thing, not so long ago, before the civic groups found much more pressing uses for their dollars. Back before the Defederation.

Plus, the thing had a steering wheel. Old school.

books

“274 miles charged, Dave.”

An extra passenger would mean an extra fee, and that was money she didn’t have. She doesn’t know how the kid could even afford it; his parents must be loaded.

Wrapped in her clean underwear

meting

mall bubbles showed the places where fish had surfaced to pick off fallen bits of flesh.

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Ella found Nathan’s body in the morning, beneath the shade of a cypress tree. From a distance he looked in the midst of a peaceful sleep, hands folded in his lap, head resting against rough bark. Gnarled roots shaped a throne around him, cushioned with thick Spanish moss.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Story here.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Story here.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 By centralizing the peer review experience with The Portal, it is my goal to make the task of reading and commenting on submissions an interactive and engaging experience, with a graceful learning curve. Furthermore, I hope to foster accountability amongst the workshop participants for thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback; I believe that an aesthetically pleasing GUI (graphic user interface) and intuitive digital tools can be a motivating force, where as the constant email shuffle of documents or DropBox and Track Changes can be tiresome and mundane.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 By centralizing the peer review experience with The Portal, it is my goal to make the task of reading and commenting on submissions an interactive and engaging experience, with a graceful learning curve. Furthermore, I hope to foster accountability amongst the workshop participants for thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback; I believe that an aesthetically pleasing GUI (graphic user interface) and intuitive digital tools can be a motivating force, where as the constant email shuffle of documents or DropBox and Track Changes can be tiresome and mundane.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 By centralizing the peer review experience with The Portal, it is my goal to make the task of reading and commenting on submissions an interactive and engaging experience, with a graceful learning curve. Furthermore, I hope to foster accountability amongst the workshop participants for thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback; I believe that an aesthetically pleasing GUI (graphic user interface) and intuitive digital tools can be a motivating force, where as the constant email shuffle of documents or DropBox and Track Changes can be tiresome and mundane.

“[G]ives readers the power to annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation.”

If you like writing in the margins or highlighting important sentences in printed documents, then The Portal will give you the digital equivalent that experience.

If you like writing in the margins or highlighting important sentences in printed documents, then The Portal will give you the digital equivalent that experience.

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 Welcome to the oasis of the virtual!

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Using my background in new media scholarship, I have been able to bring digital scholarly tools to our speculative fiction writing workshop.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Using my background in new media scholarship, I have been able to bring digital scholarly tools to our speculative fiction writing workshop.

Readers will then have the power to highlight and comment paragraph-by-paragraph or line-by-line in the margins of a text

Readers will then have the power to highlight and comment paragraph-by-paragraph or line-by-line in the margins of a text

Lorem ipsum.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum.