Author: terribleminds (page 216 of 465)

Quite recently, my four-year-old (the increasingly infamous “B-Dub”) has become enamored of the idea of stories — not just stories you watch or read at bedtime, but the kind of stories we speak aloud and… y’know, just make up. Pulling silly, weird, absurd, even scary things right out of the air — catching them like curious birds and then cupping your hands around them and pulling back one finger at a time to reveal the strange and squirming beast you have made captive.

He wants me to tell him stories, as kids often do of their parents, and because I am both a) interested in his creative development and b) a fundamentally lazy human being, I decided to instead include him in the storytelling act. I don’t just want him to sit passively as I tell him stories; I want him to co-create. I explain to him that it’s his dime and he might as well get the stories he wants — and so before I begin the (usually very short) story, I ask him who the story is about and what’s the situation. Like improv, except with a kooky preschooler who frequently likes to include “poop” and “toots” in the narrative arrangement. The most interesting thing, perhaps, is not just that he helps me tell the story — but if you keep leading him down the road with questions, eventually he ends up telling the story himself.

As such, we’ve developed a rotating cast of regular characters which he has named (and to some degree invested with personality): Detectives Baloney and Hair; their robotic dog, Hamslice; the protective and kind forest monster; Pinky the Bigfoot; another dog named Blue; an animated chair named, duh, Chair; Spot, the Ladybug (also occasionally called Dottie); Snowball, the animated snowball who has a propensity to kill zombies by shooting snowballs from its body; Leafy, a giant talking leaf; Daddy Long-Legs, a spider who everyone thought was a bad guy but is actually a good guy; and Steppy Stone, who is for some reason a stepping stone that talks? Just go with it.

Anyway — so, hey, it’s Father’s Day, right? (Happy Father’s Day to all of you DADs out there with your HOT DADBODS and your CHARCOAL GRILLS and your SKEET SHOOTING and your incompetent portrayal on American TV commercials!) My wife, my wonderful wife, my glorious wife, my amazing wife, went ahead and actually had B-Dub draw up all of his famous little characters and then she bound those drawings together with needle and thread which means holy shit my son wrote his first book.

No, it’s not going to land on any bestseller lists — but hey, neither have I. (Which reminds me hey ha ha ha preorder ZER0ES or I’ll scream.) But it’s amazing and creative and weird and frankly the kid will probably out-sell me in a hot New York minute. I actually don’t know what a hot New York minute is, but I’m guessing it smells like hot dog water and humid, aerosolized rat urine.

I mean, damn, check out the sheer rumpled ruination — the bedraggled world-weariness! — of Detective Hair, pictured above. I want that guy solving my murder, okay? I’m just saying.

You can check out the gallery of his drawings from the book.

And now, another round of:

Things B-Dub Has Said (No Context For You)

– “Sometimes it’s good to do things yourself. But it’s okay to ask for help, too.”

– (on creating a new “game”): “You smell R2D2. Then R2D2 hides. Then you have to smell where he’s hiding.”

– “I’m Blood Spider-Man. I shoot blood. And I drink blood, too. I mean, what else would I drink? Webs? Yuck that sounds awful.”

– “Nobody knows what Wonder Woman eats. Ultron gives you a rash. Iron Man heals it with his Boo-Boo Gun.”

– “I’LL make the cuckoo. YOU make the clock. Let’s go.”

– “I’LL CENSOR THE WEINER.”

– “I WILL BE A FROST GIANT AND I WILL PUNCH HOMES AND OFFICES.”

– “I AM MOPBOT 3000. I PEED MY PANTS. GOODNIGHT MOPPO BOTTO.”

– “Girls can play with trucks, too,” he said, irritated at a commercial for toy trucks aimed at boys.

– “That guy pooped out a monkey, and the monkey pooped out a snake.”

– “If I eat a ton of coconuts, I will become COCONUT MAN.”

– “You Should Give A Cat A Hot Dog And It Will Walk Behind You Forward Or Backward,” he said, deciding that this needs to be a children’s book he should either write or read.

– “Darth Vader is Han Solo’s father.”

– “Daddy? “Yes?” “Do Transformers poop?” #toughcosmicquestions

– “They have hard energon poops,” he said moments later, answering his own question.

– My wife: “It’s time to sit down now and read. Or we can just go to bed.” B-Dub: “Fine. I will sit here on this PILE OF NONSENSE.”

– Him: “Do you want a Cheezit?” Me: “Sure.” Him: “I’ll repulsor-blast one over to you!”

– “I built a laser gun. It shoots lasers, missiles, syrup, and bees. But not all at once.”

– As a morning greeting: “Looks like we’re all powered up with BEES!”

THE OUROBOROS BITES HIS OWN TAIL.

Ahem.

What I mean is, hey, once in a while someone emails me with an idea — “Hey, I think this would make a neat flash fiction challenge!” — and sometimes, that actually pans out. A lot of times, I fall asleep on my keyboard and accidentally delete your email. Sorry!

So, I thought, let’s streamline this process a little.

This week, your challenge is to come up with a flash fiction challenge.

Go to the comments.

Drop in a 100-word-or-less idea for a flash fiction challenge. If I like one and end up using it in the future, I’ll toss you some kind of prize — an e-book or e-book bundle or something. (And here’s where I am shameless and remind you that with coupon code ARTHARDERMF — which is to say, Art Harder, Motherfucker, not ARTHAR DERMF — you can get 25% off my gonzo writing e-book bundle, thus dropping the total cost for eight books down to $15. That coupon expires 6/23.)

(Oh, also — don’t forget the Awkward Author Photo contest runs till Tuesday.)

So, drop in your ideas — one per person, please, if you have it — into the comments below.

You’ve got one week: due by Friday, 6/26, noon EST.

(One more shameless plug: I’ll be at Seton Hill this Saturday, 6/27, in Western PA giving a big-ass writing talk if you care to hear me “Tell It Like It Is.”)

Nature has many assholes. I mean, not literally. (Though also: literally.)

Ticks are assholes. Those little bloodhungry, disease-curdled vampires. Mosquitos are assholes, too. Yellowjackets are super-assholes — total fuckfaces looking to fucking fuck up any picnic you have. Nature’s vast gaping assholery doesn’t stop with the insect world. It goes all the way up and down the spectrum — from the micro (crotch fungus) to the macro (hippos, no matter what Sandra Boynton would have you believe). In fact, one suspects that being an asshole is probably a biological imperative. Ducks are rapists. Chimpanzees form violent jungle gangs. Sloths are cute and all, but c’mon guys, get a job. Am I right? I’m right.

I’m sure if you watched a blue whale long enough he’d make a left turn without using his blinker and then loiter outside a 7-11, vaping while porpoises pass by and offer judgmental stares.

Bugs, cats, people: this planet is just crawling with assholes.

But I’d like to talk to you about one very special asshole.

My nemesis.

THE DEER FLY.

Look at him.

Just look at that little bastard. Sitting there like he doesn’t give a hot rat’s rectum.

The deer fly is from the family Tabanidae, which is Latin for: “Hateful Fuckery.”

The deer fly is of the genus Chrysops, which is Greek for: “Christ, Get This Thing Out Of My Ear.”

The world is home to an approximately infinite variety of deer flies, and I assume that each one of them are awful people. Just wretched. They are related to another asshole, the horsefly, who is basically the tank version of the deer fly. But horseflies are fat and dumb and slow. And the deer fly? The deer fly is fast.

Here’s what the deer fly does, and here is why I despise the deer fly with every ounce of gall I can muster inside my hate-fueled body: you’re just walking along, minding your own business. Whistling, chewing gum, checking your email, walking your dog, fidgeting casually with your genitals presuming nobody else is around. It’s summer. It’s warm. The birds are whoo-doo-doodlin’ along. A squirrel is nearby, panic-eating an acorn because squirrels are not capable of doing anything without a veneer of twitchy panic. In short? It’s a nice day.

But that’s about to get all shitted up.

Because somewhere nearby, hiding in the brush like some deviant who wants to show you his balls, is the deer fly. The deer fly senses motion. It senses the exhalation of carbon dioxide. It’s such a malodorous asshole it probably can sense the contentedness and well-being you presently feel. The deer fly launches from forth its hiding space and zeroes in on every part of your body you don’t want it to — your nose, your eyes, your earholes. It tries to get in those places and, when it fails, will just batter itself against you like some drunk bro-hole at a local dance club. It’s all just thap thap thap thwip thud thud flit flit and it’ll get in your hair and on the back of your neck and it’ll bean you in the dead center of your forehead.

And you think, okay, yeah, that’s annoying.

That sucks.

But it’s not that bad.

As they say on TV: But wait, there’s more.

The deer fly will not only harass you for a mile, but the deer fly also likes to bite. And again you think, well, lots of bugs like to bite. That seems to be a rather buggy thing to do, in fact. But take special note of the deer fly’s mouthparts: it is basically a pair of scissors. It’s a little knife and it goes snippy-snip across your skin (or even through your clothing) and boy howdy does that hurt like a motherfucker. Then it laps up your blood like a sloppy Labrador eating food someone spilled on the floor. And then it has the option to spread various diseases to you because of course it has diseases. Tularemia and anthrax and something called “hog cholera” which is about the worst sounding thing I’ve ever heard and I would’ve before now assumed it was some kind of sauce you’d find at a Guy Fieri restaurant. (“New Double-Bacon Monkey Wings With Chipotle Dingus-Crisps, Triple-Sextreme Castoreum Squeezin’s, And A Hot Slatherin’ Of Rib-Kickin’ Hog Cholera!”)

Deer flies are also territorial. So they hunt the same area every day.

They’re seasonal, to boot. For us here it starts around June, ends in July. Which is almost two months of me walking my dog or my taking a stroll with the family and being facially assaulted by one or several deer flies at any given time. I wonder what my neighbors must think of me — sometimes I suspect the true conspiratorial intent of the deer fly is to get me to look like a dum-dum in front of other people. As I walk, I’m frequently flailing my arms around like I’m in the throes of endless muscle spasms. Worse, I’m constantly smacking myself in the face, neck, and head as if for the purpose of clumsy, brutish flagellation. They must see me through their windows and think, That guy really doesn’t like himself. Then they lock their doors and hold their children and pets close in case the Strange Smacking Man would ever stray onto their yards or into their homes.

So, the question is, what can one do to thwart them?

Well, you can cover yourself with DEET, but they don’t seem to give an actual shit about it. I guess maybe if I sprayed it right in their eyes like it was pepper spray it might work, but otherwise? They keep on buzzing and biting. Probably be more effective to just cover myself in lighter fluid and fling a match against my chest. Sure, I could cover up — a hat helps, and if I really want to brine myself in my own fluids, I could wander outside in a pair of jeans, boots and a heavy Christmas sweater in the 90-degree summer heat, I guess? Your own personal sweat lodge!

Or, you can do this fucking thing.

See, deer flies are extra-attracted to THINGS THAT ARE BLUE for some indiscernible reason, and further are likely to fly closer to something that is higher than other things.

So, you create a deer fly trap by slathering SOMETHING BLUE in SOMETHING STICKY and then somehow affixing this thing to the top of your head because hey, congratulations, who doesn’t want to look like King Doodoo Dunceworthy of Dinkletown as you’re wandering around the neighborhood walking your dog or having a jog? Just wear this stylish sonofabitch:

LADIES.

Haute couture! You definitely won’t look like an escaped deviant with that thing rocking the top of your skull! You definitely won’t be added to a variety of neighborhood watch lists! It’s fine!

It seems then that the choice is to do nothing. Or, I suppose, I could kidnap a very tall friend and paint him blue and then duck down beside him as I take a run or whatever. Anybody willing to take that bullet for me? I’m only 5’8″, people. I pay well, which is to say, I do not pay actual money but I do have Cheezits and Tim-Tams I would be willing to share.

(Hell, it’s not even just on walks anymore. I literally killed one inside the writing shed this morning. In fact, killing a deer fly gives me a perhaps unreasonable amount of pleasure. Once in a while one will get trapped in my hair or beard and I’ll just batter the fuck out of my own body until it’s dead, and when I have its corpse, I pinch it tight and parade it around, showing it to all the other deer flies. “THIS IS WHAT YOU GET,” I bellow. “FUCK WITH THE BULL AND YOU GET THE–” And then usually another one bites me on the neck or something and I then have to run home like a whelped puppy with tail between legs and fly corpse pinched betwixt fingers.)

Won’t anybody help me defeat my dread nemesis? The winged villain that plagues my journeys?

This bug that is good for nothing?

This extra-special asshole troll of the natural world?

*slaps at head*

*punches self in mouth*

*cries*

SEND HELP OR NAPALM

Hey, kids — I’m extending the REVENGE OF THE AWKWARD AUTHOR PHOTO contest (in which you can win your own death inside a the fifth Miriam Black book) by one week (6/23). I’ve been out of commission for the last almost-week, and haven’t really promo’ed this much. So, giving it one more week for folks to jump in. Put your own spin on an awkward, cliched, silly, weird, or otherwise uncomfortable Author Photo. And then win stuff! Click the link above for tasty deets.

Let’s see, what else?

– The Decatur Book Fest author list is up, and I’m officially on it — alongside authors like Delilah S. Dawson, Richard Kadrey, Daniel Jose Older, and Libba Bray. Also means I’ll be at DragonCon, bee-tee-dubs. Which is a con for dragons, isn’t it? MY BREATH WEAPON IS BEES.

– The first two Heartland books are on sale digitally in the lead-up to the third book. You can buy both Under the Empyrean Sky and Blightborn for $1.99. You can pre-order The Harvest, too, if you’re feeling sassy. The Harvest concludes the trilogy, for those folks not interested in buying a series until it’s all tied-up-tight. Also: for those wondering how I’ll do with Star Wars: Aftermath, well, I think these books are the closest analog presently on shelves.

– Speaking of The Harvest — hey, look, a Goodreads giveaway!

– I have other news I can’t share, so just assume that it’s cool.

– Cover images for THE SHIELD #3! Go see!

– Last thing last — I’m putting my Gonzo E-Book Writing Bundle on sale. It’s eight total e-books on writing, including my newest, 30 Days In The Word Mines. Normally, $20 — but with coupon code ARTHARDERMF, you can drop that price by 25% to $15. Link to the bundle here, if you wanna check it out. Please to enjoy.

*opens DVR*

*casually surfs to GAME OF THRONES*

*selects ‘cancel series’*

*shudders with a sigh of relief*

I’m sorry, Game of Thrones, but I gotta go.

I know, I know. This is an obvious, almost obligatory post after one of the soul-wrecking finales of your show — the post-episode karate-kicking-over-your-television-while-weeping-uncontrollably demonstration. I’m the cartoon office dude flinging his office papers in the air while being all like FUCK THIS SHIT. I’m like that cat who is so done he won’t stop pawing shit off the table. And of course the expectation is, eventually the trauma will recede out to sea and next year I’ll once again tune in like a junkie to see what wacky shenanigans Tyrion is up to.

I’ve been there before, certainly. Where I was thisclose to being done with you, GoT.

And then I come crawling back. Every year.

But not this time, I’m afraid.

(I know, some of you are breathing your own sighs of relief: OH THANK A HOT SACK OF MOIST FUCKERY HE’S DONE WITH THIS SHOW NOW HE CAN COMPLAIN ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE FOR A WHILE. I hear you. I’m sorry for duct-taping you to a chair and yelling all my complaints at you. I learned it by watching you, Ramsay Snowbolton!)

It’s not you, Game of Thrones.

It’s me.

I just spent all weekend in a hospital — my mother took ill and so we buckled her into the Healthcare Express and took her on a ride through the inefficacy and poor communication of the hospital system, and while there you witness even at a distance human suffering with the volume turned way up. Next door was a man who coughed so hard and so loud and so wetly you’d think he was hacking up four soggy cats. Another woman had chronic diverticulitis — a manageable disease, but one that earned her a stay in the hospital for a week with no food. In the ER was a young girl (presumably on drugs) freaking the unholy fuck out — weeping and struggling and fighting — just to see her mother. People in hospitals aren’t there because they’re healthy or happy or just having a laugh. It’s pain all the way down.

And I need to watch some television shows that aren’t all about that. (Or, when they are about pain, they deal with that pain honestly and earnestly and not only as spectacle. The Leftovers is dreary as fuck but it looks long into the eyes of that suffering to try to understand it and to help you understand it, too.)

Like I said: it’s me, not you.

I watched last night with none of the shock I was supposed to feel at the series of deaths that it presented to us, and I felt only general queasiness and fatigue. I felt like I was making a face the whole time, a face like I had repeatedly been made to lick a lollipop that had someone else’s pubic hair glued to it with sugar glaze. I just started to feel like, why am I doing this? Why am I licking this pubic hair lolly? What’s wrong with me?

It’s not that it’s a bad show. To the contrary — it’s often amazing! It sets up these killer moments. It tells a sweeping tale with a confident hand. Some of the characters (though increasingly fewer and fewer for me) are great, complex, funny, tragic, compelling from snout to tail.

But I gotta quit, man. I gotta tap out. I just can’t do it anymore.

Here, in particular, are three areas where the show loses me. It takes these three things and for me, fails to treat them in a way that I can really understand or get behind —

*oh, and here there be spoilers*

…

*no really, spoilers*

…

*hey no, not kidding, back out now*

…

*WON’T YOU TAKE ME TO… SPOILERTOWN?*

1. Women

Obviously, I’ve spoken on this subject before — (We Are Not Things: Mad Max Vs. Game of Thrones). But, yeep, yoinks, yowch. Last night was a pretty good example of how the show hates its audience almost as much as it hates its women characters, which is to say, a great deal, indeed. It was a parade of hurt and humiliation for the women of Game of Thrones.

It was like they were going for a world record.

Let’s just go through the tally.

We open on three little girls being visibly caned. Painfully and with sharp cries. (I almost turned off the episode right there. Some pedophile caning little girls for his own pleasure right out of the gate churned my stomach. Now that I have a child, it’s one of those things that really rattles me.)

Stannis’ wife hangs herself (after helping to burn her own daughter to death last episode).

Melisandre is humiliated by the defeat of Stannis.

Sansa is almost killed by… whatever her name is, Ramsay’s spurned ex-girlfriend. Sansa does little to take her own agency or power here (except to possibly willfully submit to more pain), but no, no, it’s Theon “Reek” Greyjoy the Burninator of Childrens who saves the day and flings the other girl down to the ground where we watch her head thud bloodily against the stone. (Then he leads Sansa to the castle wall where they just jump, because apparently that’s an okay way to leave a castle.) (I also think we can all agree that when Sansa discarded the corkscrew she used to unlock her room door instead of, y’know, jamming that corkscrew into the very tip of Ramsay Snowbolton’s dingus — we all shared some very real collective disappointment.)

Arya goes blind.

The little Lannister girl is killed (?) by the poison of the Sand Snakes just moments after being totally cool about being a child of incest (“Love you too, UncleDad. HRRK–!”)

Dany is taken somewhere and her dragon is a jerkoff and now she’s surrounded by a whooping war-band of… Dothraki? I don’t even know. (What an excellent visual metaphor for how the show treats women, by the way: a bedraggled dragon-queen all alone, surrounded by a noisy tornado of shirtless men of questionable virtue. See also: a metaphor for being a woman on the Internet.)

And then, of course, the 37-minute Cersei “nude walk of shame through the city.” They shave her head bloody, they strip her down and then she marches full-frontally through the city while the entire city proves that it is basically home to a bunch of cave-people as they pelt her with pretty much everything. Which I guess was supposed to be impactful but just started to feel really gross. And again feels a lot like a metaphor for women on that show or on the Internet — BE SHAMED FOR YOUR AGENCY, WOMAN. BE NUDE AND FLUNG WITH CABBAGE, FECES, AND OTHER UNCERTAIN FLUIDS. Hashtag Gamer-Gate!

That last scene was seriously like, 16 hours long. And the show very clearly wanted us to watch every moment of it. Like she was Jesus dragging the Cross through town. If you tried to look away the show reached out and grabbed your chin and demanded you watch. “DON’T YOU LOOK AWAY,” the show growls through its yellow teeth. “DON’T YOU GO TURN ON ADVENTURE TIME, YOU MOTHERFUCKER. YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS. YOU JUST SEE.”

(I must note that all of this was startlingly well-acted, particularly the bit with Lena Headey as Cersei. And well-written and well-directed and all of that. Again, the problem with the show is not its quality, but rather for me, what it uses its deft skill to portray.)

Compounding this problem is that a lot of the suffering and saving is done by the men — Sansa is saved by Reek, Arya is taught a lesson by Jaqen, Dany is saved by a dragon and then deposited into whirling dudeland, Cersei suffers at the whim of the High Sparrow and then once inside is “saved” by that old creepy necromancer and his new pal, Zombie Mountain Man. Now Dany must be saved by her two dude lovers, and Sansa is in Reek’s hands (remember, he’s a hero even though he burned children alive), Cersei will exact revenge only at the behest of the king, and on and on — it’s women getting hurt and men doing the hurting and the saving.

Brienne, though, hey, she’s still cool.

2. Suffering

The show approaches human suffering with (to me) increasing cheapness. It’s nearly always spectacle and rarely always authentic or honest. That’s okay, usually, for a show like this — though certainly once in a while I like it when genre work actually tries to unpuzzle human emotions rather than just fling itself against them like an animal trapped in a Plexiglass box. Here, though, suffering is nearly always played for spectacle and surprise. They want your jaw to drop and your pants to soak through with pee because omg no they didn’t. But it often feels like they don’t really want to actually deal with the suffering in a meaningful way — it’s quick, mean, almost shallow. (Cersei actually gets close to it, and despite the pain of her walk of shame, Headey actually sells the emotion and makes you sympathetic for one of the most hated characters in the show. And her feelings as a mother are often sharply-drawn.)

Plus, it’s just suffering all the time.

I feel like we need oxygen in the show.

Some humor. Some moments. Some humanity.

You get them here or there, and they’re welcome and well-executed when they come.

But for me: not enough nowadays.

3. Death

The show similarly treats death as spectacle — and it works in that regard, narratively, when you use it sparingly. But the show takes its thematic motto (ALL MEN MUST DIE AND USUALLY PRETTY HORRIBLY IT’S NEVER LIKE A HEART ATTACK OR A SLIP DOWN SOME STAIRS IT’S ALWAYS ‘GUY GETS HIS PENIS CHOPPED OFF AND THEN FIRED THROUGH HIS SKULL WITH A CROSSBOW WIELDED BY THE HOWLING ZOMBIE OF HIS OWN FATHER’) pretty seriously. Almost too seriously and eagerly. Almost like a young Orson Lannister smashing beetles.

This is very much a personal thing but there’s a line you cross where you say oh no no character is safe and then once you kill off too many it becomes no, really, everybody is going to die, so it’s not even worth being surprised anymore, just be resigned to it, yawn, oh another death, oh and there’s another, and another, and that guy, and her, and hey I liked him, and oh she was horrible, and I think I’m going to go have a snack now, please send me a spreadsheet tallying all the dead-people data points in the morning for my recap.

It gets a little boring.

And it’s also somewhat disruptive, narratively speaking. Characters have arcs to fulfill. They are woven into the quilt of the narrative. But when you kill too many of them, the quilt stops demonstrating a pattern — it no longer looks like the end result will be a cohesive thing, a thing of vision and design but just some haphazard tangle of meaningless fabric-scraps. Death robs the narrative of shape and opportunity when used so quickly. Death becomes a series of check-boxes instead of the fulfullment of an arc. It’s bread and circuses. It’s a gladiator arena whose dirt floor is soaked with red.

(And it’s also a problem with TV, I think. So many shows become WHO WILL DIE THIS WEEK rather than WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE CHARACTERS. Death becomes a titillating expectation. Tune in to find out who gets hit by a car / mauled by a bear / killed by a hobo / crossbowed in the face by a dick-arrow.)

Granted, the show does often try to make the deaths add up — meaning, they culminate tragically, as a result of the character’s actions. They make their beds and then they lie in them, often quite dead. But more and more, it feels like in this storyworld what earns you death is literally anything at all. “Ah, she once looked at Cersei askance. A tragic death is earned again as she is torn apart by Westerosi coyotes on a tavern floor as the tavern patrons watch and visibly masturbate! All deaths are earned! All men must shit themselves upon morbidity! VOOLAR MORGLOBULIN!”)

Death works in the show and it’s woven into the theme.

But for me, it’s again become too much.

I get it. We all die. But the weekly reminder is wearing me down.

And So…

I’m out. Can’t do it anymore. I like grim and I like dark but this feels like grimgrimgrimgrimdarkdarkdark (aka GRRMDRRK™). I can only watch a show like this for so long before I feel gutted. I like the tragic thrill of watching horror movies (and make no mistake, Game of Thrones is basically a medieval mashup of a slasher film and a zombie movie), but horror movies are like, 90 minutes for a reason. Seeing this every week mostly just makes me upset. (See also why I had to check out of both the comic book and the show of The Walking Dead.)

It’s a shame, because it’s a show with some truly wild, wonderful moments — the riding of dragons and the death of gloriously cartoonishly evil villains and that super-amazing-bad-ass scene of all those scary-ass White Walkers pouring over the walls as they attack Jon Snow and the Wildlings (pro-tip: new band name if Scalzi doesn’t steal it first).

But I gotta say bye.

It’s okay if you still like it! No judgment. This is about me, not about you. It’s still a great show. Talented people are making it awesome every week. You do you. Me do me.

Maybe after the show is all done I’ll binge watch the horror and purge the toxins.

But week to week, can’t do it anymore.

Because right now, I’m rooting for the White Walkers.

*holds up foam finger*

*White Walkers #1*

woooooooo

So many stories begin with a dead body.

A dead body is a gateway to mystery.

A story to be solved.

The aftermath of incident that leads to further incident.

It works across a variety of genres, a plethora of storytelling styles.

Dead bodies: they do a story good.

AND SO, today’s flash fiction is precisely that — I want you to take your story and it must begin with a dead body. That’s it. That’s the only stipulation. In the first paragraph you must introduce a dead body. Doesn’t matter the context or the genre. But you gotta check that box marked

[ ] DEAD BODY.

You get 1000 words, as usual. Due by the 19th, at noon EST. Post the story at your online space, then drop a link in the comments below so we can all go check it out.

Begin.