writing

New short story “Earth Day” available today!

by ewmurks

I’m excited to announce that my new short story “Earth Day” which received an honorable mention in QSF’s new Clarity anthology is available online today!  Published by Other Worlds Inc., Clarity features 300 word speculative flash fiction stories from across the rainbow spectrum, from the minds of the writers of Queer Sci Fi.

Here is a brief passage from “Earth Day” to whet your appetite:

Carl made this journey every year on the anniversary of his arrival. He needn’t make the effort of course. Dozens of telescopes scattered across Mars afforded better views. But nothing could match the experience of hiking through the thin atmosphere of gas and dust and then touching the void beyond. All with feet planted firmly on the ground.

“Earth Day” is the seventh story I have published in QSF’s anthology series, which includes Discovery, Flight, Renewal, Impact, Migration, and Ink.

So what are you waiting are you waiting for? Get a copy of Clarity today at the links below:

Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BF5GKLRH

Apple Books: 
https://tools.applemediaservices.com/book/6443393268?country=us

Kobo:
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/clarity-43

Discovery

New short story “A Sky Full of Stars” lands online today

by ewmurks

My new short story ‘A Sky Full of Stars” appears in the anthology “Discovery: QSF’s Second Annual Flash Fiction Contest” which goes on sale today! I’m so excited to be included among such a talented and diverse group of writers. All the stories have an LGBT bent, and run the gamut from platypus shifters to alien slug monsters, from carnival horror stories to haunting tales of ships with souls. There’s definitely something for everyone.

You can purchase online today at the retailers below:

Amazon
Kobo
Mischief Corner Books
All Romance Books

Also available in paperback.

Busy as bees

by ewmurks

After a short drought, I’ve been busy as bees. I recently submitted a 12K short story to Dreamspinner Press for an upcoming anthology and it’s my first foray into the m/m romance genre. This week I’m finishing my entry into a flash fiction contest over at Queer Sci Fi and I’ll be participating in #TwitterFiction Festival at @ewmurks on Twitter. And there’s also a novel, a few more short stories and a collaboration with my friend and fellow author Jeff Adams in the works.

It’s nice to finally be writing again.

NaNoWriMo Update: Rough First Day on the Road to 5000 Words

by ewmurks

Five thousand words in and everything has changed. This is not the story I planned to write, but it’s the story I’m writing right now. My original plan was to pick up where I left off on a previous NaNoWriMo from a few years ago, but I scrapped that idea mere hours before I was set to start. This left a vacuum ultimately filled by 1700 plus words of self-loathing prose, describing in incredible detail everything I had done wrong leading up to NaNoWriMo and that any words on the screen moving forward were not worth the pixels they were painted with.

But the next day I thankfully got over myself. There’d been an idea for a short story tumbling around in my head for months so I decided to re-visit it from a big picture point of view instead of just a few moments in time. As the wheels slowly turned in my brain it snowballed into something bigger and more complex, while maintaining a small, intimate story at its heart. I felt like I was on to something, and it gave me something to write about other than simply tearing myself apart.

So that’s what I wrote on day two, day three, and 300 words into day four. I really think I may be on to something. But the month is long, and there are many more words to write. In the end I hope there will be enough words to wipe out the first 1700 as if they had never been written.

Until the next update….

Throwback Thursday – Nanowrimo 2014

by ewmurks

Five years ago I participated in Nanowrimo which is short for National Novel Writing Month. Every November hundreds of thousands set out to write a novel of 50,000 words or more.  In 2009 I tried and gave up after just 8 days and almost 15,000 words. I didn’t know where to take the story, so I stopped. But now I have a pretty good idea how to proceed so will be participating in Nanowrimo again starting this weekend! Wish me luck! For today’s #throwbackthursday, I have a small sample from that original Nanowrimo effort back in 2009. Enjoy.

Conspiracy

She looked briefly at the empty seat next to her, her hands clenched tightly in her lap. Dr. Hooper had worked so hard to reach this moment, for the both of them, and now he was gone. She knew she would have to carry on for the both of them, it’s what he would have wanted. Their work was too important. She looked over at the faces of her team, some young, some old, but bright and eager, and she knew with their help that they would succeed.

Outside she could hear the steady drone of a helicopter approaching. But then the timber changed, the sound taking on staccato, irregular beat, like an overstressed heart. Everyone began to look each other nervously as the sound grew quickly louder, almost deafening.

The opaque glass canopy that served as the auditorium’s ceiling began to shudder.

The tail rotor crashed through the ceiling first, leaving behind a gaping hole and raining thick chunks of jagged glass down around them. Jessica dropped to her knees immediately covering her face. A few moments later the fuselage of Marine One came down and skated across the length of the ceiling, leaving behind a gash of twisted glass and metal. As the noise from the rotors began to fade a little, Jessica raised her head.

The explosion that followed caused what little glass that was left in the ceiling to come crashing down.

Jessica kept her head down… The last thing she wanted to do was to look up.

Throwback Thursday – Star Trek: There Be Dragons

by ewmurks

Today’s #throwbackthursday  is a little Star Trek fan fiction from my high school days. Enjoy.

Star Trek: There Be Dragons

“HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A DRAGON, MR. SPOCK?”

James T. Kirk let the question hang in the air for a moment, as his first officer studied his cards. Spock had managed a marvelous run over the past half hour and had mostly depleted Kirk’s chips. The captain was desperate. He should never had opened his mouth. Spock, with the deliberate coolness of a practiced card shark, was drilling him into the ground.

“Mr. Spock?” Finally the knife-edge brows appeared above the cards.

“Captain, how can I continue to play with any degree of success as along as you continue this ploy to distract me?” The brows disappeared below the edge of the cards again, almost like magic.

“Is it working?”

“No, Sir.”

A chuckle came from corner. McCoy leaned against the wall casually, observing the game from across the room. McCoy had distanced himself from the captain as his luck had waned.

“Seriously, Mr. Spock. Have you ever seen a dragon before?” Glancing over at the grinning doctor and then back to his captain, Spock laid his cards down and folded his hands over them.

“If you are referring to the V’akvelsksis of Aengameron III-”

“No Mr. Spock, I mean a REAL dragon!” Kirk laid down his own cards and heard Bones pull up a chair.

“A REAL dragon sir. The term dragon is relative, depending exclusively on a culture’s-”

“Don’t you know what a dragon is?” McCoy leaned forward, relishing as always, his chance to upstage the Vulcan. “It’s a giant snake with wings that breathes fire and eats virgins.”

Not one but two brows rose.

Throwback Thursday – Waiting

by ewmurks

Today’s #throwbackthursday is from a writing class back in 2005. Enjoy.

Waiting

I pulled out my wallet and thumbed idly through it: twenty-four dollars in cash; a couple of maxed-out credit cards; a family snapshot; a picture of my wife and one each of my two daughters. I dug deeper: old insurance cards, a library card and a receipt from an Italian restaurant down the street. At the bottom was a photo, flipped over, with a message carefully written on the back…

All my love, Mary…

I turned it over. It was an old picture, mostly faded now, but the smile and the dark eyes were unmistakable. I rubbed by finger along the edge, roughened by age and a little bent from sitting in a wallet far too long. It felt a little disrespectful, pulling it out only now, but I held it tightly. After a time, I sat it carefully on the nightstand, propping it up against a small vase of flowers. It seemed to watch over her, fixing those steady dark eyes on her frail body, given volume by the blankets wrapped around her. I glanced down at my watch… it was almost time.]

I reached over and hit the red button. There was a gentle whir of the motor as the camera began to record. I took out the notepad from aside pocket and flipped it open to a page already half-filled with notes and began to write:

9:45pm.
She seems to be resting peacefully now. A sort of calm before the storm she had warned me. Even the monitoring equipment is quiet. I have set up camera and lights and have started recording, not quite certain what to expect. She said there would be rattling and soft groan before it started, and later to keep my head bowed and my eyes closed, no matter what I heard, smelled or felt. She was rather particular on that last point, as if my life might depend on it. I really hadn’t given it any thought until now and it doesn’t give me much comfort.

I put the pen down and stood up. I thought about getting a cold drink from the vending machine in the hallway but didn’t want to take a chance of missing anything. Instead I walked over to the window and looked down into the grounds below. A narrow path cut its way down through the center,lined by street lamps circa 1900. Leaves lined the path and now and then a gust of wind would catch them and spread them about. I opened the window.

A blast of cold air rushed in. I hadn’t realized how warm the room had gotten and the cool night breeze stirred my senses. Suddenly the autumn wind had brought new life into a room where another life was failing. I looked over my shoulder back at her, imagining for a moment that she would look up at me and smile one last time, reach out her hand to hold mine and tell me that everything would turn out alright. It was then that I saw her take her final breath, her chest rising and falling for the last time. The steady hum of the EKG was drowned out by the wind and the rustling of leaves outside.

I almost didn’t hear the rattle.

Finishing…

by ewmurks
Other than having the discipline to sit down and write the words, which many writers struggle with, "finishing" what I have started may be the hardest thing of all...