dnschmidt
DNSchmidt.com
Science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories, and some jokes too.
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The Hardest Part of Writing
The hardest part of writing is expressing yourself through your characters while maintaining plausible deniability.
Oh, that? No, no, that's just some trauma I made up for John Protagonist. That never happened to me. I'm a normal amount of damaged... whatever that is.
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Don't Even Ask About Leap Year Day
"...And then," Dad said, "Laggard the Chrono Demon climbs up from hell to eat our beloved extra hour. But the valiant Clockwork Knight fends him off before he can finish his meal and eat all of time. But if Laggard ever wins, the clocks will slow to a stop, and we all all be frozen forever."
Billy frowned. "If you don't know how Daylight Savings Time works, just say so!"
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The Bunker
The brochure showed a couple standing in their bunker, a man in a suit and tie and a woman in a floral dress, heels, and a beehive. They were smiling despite whatever disaster had forced them to live in a steel box underground... (Short horror story.)
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The penguins have made me their king. We’re currently at war with the meerkats, but we have naval superiority.
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The Message
Amy called Captain Eric into her lab. “After many years of work and research, I’ve finally managed to translate the mysterious messages in alien crop cycles.”
His eyes widened. “That’s amazing! What do they say?”
"Congratulations, you have won a fifty zengblorg gift card. Visit Draconis IIV now to claim."
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Porter's Collection
You look lost. Oh, this must be so confusing, to suddenly find yourself here. Let me explain.
Some people collect books or stamps. Porter collects lonely people. He wears a long coat, as gray as a winter sky. He wanders the streets at night and finds folks walking all alone, and then his magic coat pulls them inside. You probably didn't notice him walking up next to you. He seems so ordinary, you see. But he's special. And now you're special, one of the special little people in his collection.
I met all my friends inside these woolen pockets. It's so nice to finally be included, isn't it?
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The Mirror
Captain Eric and Amy were in the starship's galley. "Oh," she said, "you've got something on your face."
He went over to a nearby mirror. "Welcome to ReflectCo!" it said. "Grab our app and watch a brief ad to start earning Shine Points! It's only fourteen points to see your reflection!"
He grumbled. "I hate the future."
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I'm never using Fiverr again for anything. Ever.
I posted a request for an ebook cover design with a list of about half a dozen elements I wanted. I specified absolutely no AI. I offered double the recommended fee, so the designer could purchase stock images.
I accepted an offer from a designer with great reviews. But then, the designer asked for an extension. And then another one. The project wasn't urgent, so I said yes to both. Finally, the designer responded to say she couldn't find any free stock images.
Um, how about you use some of that money I'm paying you to go get some professional images? I found great ones in about thirty seconds of searching.
She said, "Here's some AI generated stuff. How about these?"
No! That's the opposite of what we agreed on! I'd rather huff dog farts.
Fiverr did give me a refund after a couple of days, but that experience just shows how useless the site is. Every search for graphic design is full of AI generated garbage. There's no checkbox or filter to avoid AI. They don't care about customers who want real, human creators.
All I got for weeks of waiting for a lazy, lying designer was a refund and a 5% off code.
AI is black mold killing off everything good about the internet. It's infesting everything. Logitech is even putting ChatGPT in your mouse. Fucking hell.
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Saved By The Bell Never Explained Zack's Powers And It's Been Driving Me Crazy For Thirty Years
Saved by the Bell was a pretty weird show. Characters disappear without explanation, people nearly ruin their lives over caffeine, and of course there’s the issue of Zack’s supernatural abilities.
At some point on the show, Zack gains and then loses the ability to freeze time, and they never explain it.
“But actually," you say, "that was just so he could break the fourth wall and talk to the audience!”
No, you're wrong. You're so incredibly, stupidly wrong. He also used it to escape from fights with AC Slater! His "time outs" weren't just a gag or a convenient way to add narration. While time was frozen, Zack Morris was able to directly impact the other characters. In Season 3 Episode 18 - Video Yearbook, Zack is being held by Principal Belding in his office. He calls "time out" just as AC Slater is about to punch him. While time is frozen, he escapes Principal Balding's grasp, avoids the punch, and stops Kelly from kissing her boyfriend of the week.
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The time outs weren't a fantasy or a gag. Zack had real supernatural abilities. That's canon. Saved by the Bell gospel, baby.
But perhaps more importantly, Zack didn't have powers on the first season, when the show was known as Good Morning, Miss Bliss. And he didn't have powers on Saved By The Bell: The College Years. Zach canonically had powers only in high school, and they never explained where he got them or where they went.
My theory? Saved By The Bell was created by Sam Bobrick, who also wrote for Bewitched. I believe Zack Morris was also a witch. This explains not only his time freezing abilities, but the fact that he clearly manipulated the minds of his "friends" into maintaining their friendship with him for years, despite the fact that he was objectively a horrible person.
Was he perhaps the half-witch grandson of Samantha Stephens? Did his mix of human and witch DNA give him relatively weak powers that activated during puberty and faded over time?
The world may never know.
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Munchshrooms
Captain Eric and Amy were in the woods on Doru IIV. Something crunched through the dead leaves on the forest floor.
Amy watched a cluster of three-stalked mushrooms crawl towards them, fangs bared. "Predatory mushrooms!" she gasped. "What a discovery! We should capture some and research them. I could write a paper, submit it to academic journals..."
"You know what goes great with scientific research?" Eric said. "Garlic butter."
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Time Jump
Captain Eric grabbed Tooki's arm. "You're a Taldarian. I need you to manipulate time."
"It's dangerous," Tooki insisted. "We could end up lost in the time stream."
"This is an emergency!"
Tooki sighed. "Fine, a five minute jump should get us past the commercials..."
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Bored At The End Of The World
“There’s food in here,” Elsie called. “And another vidiot, but just a skeleton. No smell this time.” The other scavengers followed her into the dusty, dilapidated apartment.
The vidiot’s remains were on the couch, still wearing his neon pink VR sim goggles.
Like billions of others, he had grown bored with real life and starved to death in a fantasy world. Humanity had survived wars and diseases, only to be devastated by the exhausting monotony of a world where robots and AI did everything for them. After the drama and excitement had faded away, the world ended with a yawn.
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Need a little adventure in your life?
“The only thing that makes space junk salvagers different than space pirates is our code of ethics. Well, that, and the lack of parrots.”
A salvage crew goes after a ship lost in the Screaming Void, the most dangerous place in space. They battle alien gangsters, the galactic government, and their own minds.
Great for fans of Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, and fun science fiction adventure.
Available at http://screamingvoid.net.
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Why You Should Build Me My Own Museum
If you think about it, all the arguments in favor of government funding for sports stadiums would also apply to your city building a museum dedicated to me, an unknown science fiction author who isn't even from there.
Just check out these benefits!
Job creation - It would need a curator, tour guides, ticket takers, and one of those hippie sign spinny guys.
Tax revenue - The government could put up parking meters, and I'd give them a cut of the merch sales. The gift shop would have me-themed t-shirts, me-themed bobble heads, and me-themed refrigerator magnets, and a coloring book where kids can draw in that weird mole my doctor keeps worrying about.
Boosting the local economy - Tourists would come from miles around to visit the town who gave some random guy his own museum. While they were here, they could spend money at the me-themed movie theater, the me-themed arcade, the me-themed laser eye surgery place, and The Food Flinger, the only restaurant where you can load your leftovers into a trebuchet and launch them into the ionosphere.
Decreased crime rate - The museum would have spooky monsters painted on it to scare the criminals away.
Civic pride - Who wouldn't be proud to live in my neighborhood? I must be a great guy. After all, they built a museum about me.
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Heterological Words
I’ve always been annoyed by certain counterintuitive words, words that demonstrate the opposite of their meaning. Words should be easy to grasp once you learn their definition, but some words seem to want to confuse you. The word “hyphenated” has no hyphen. The word “long” is shorter than “short.” The word “backwards” isn’t spelled in reverse. How irritating!
Words like these that do not accurately describe themselves are called heterological...
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Writers, Don't Preach
When you're writing a piece of fiction about a theme or event related to your personal beliefs, it's important to not get preachy. Unless you happen to be the ghost of John Bunyan, that's not why people picked up your book. Fiction readers want to be entertained and emotionally moved. It can be very tempting to be argumentative with your readers and try to convert them to your viewpoint, but that will turn people off very quickly. If you want to talk about a worldview, it's important to show it rather than let your story turn into a lecture.
Rather than having a character say, for example, "we should open the borders to immigration for the following reasons", show us an immigrant family and the struggles they deal with because of closed borders. Whatever your worldview is, demonstrate it with the plot or hide it in metaphor.
In addition to not turning off your readers, showing your worldview this way is actually more impactful. If your character outright says "open borders are good", your readers could mentally argue with them and come up with reasons why they disagree. But people are less argumentative with stories.
We all have mental walls made up of personal beliefs and prejudices. But stories have a way of sneaking in past our mental defenses. You can hide anything in a story, and if the story is entertaining and emotionally compelling, people largely accept it.
So remember, make literature, not lectures.
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Shrimps is bugs
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