Posts Tagged Capsule
State of the Writer: September 2011
Posted by DLThurston in State of the Writer on September 1, 2011
August has come and gone. Here in the DC area we got shaken up by an earthquake, brushed by a hurricane, but we’re still standing. Now we head into another month and it’s time once again for an accounting of who I am and what I’m doing.
Obviously the big news of August was mentioned a few days ago, being first short-listed then ultimately accepted by The Memory Eater. That puts two of my stories in the pipeline for upcoming anthologies. I’m still hearing occasional news about Steam Works, and the guy behind Memory Eater is super enthusiastic, so I doubt either will meet the same quiet end as my ill fated first anthology pick-up. That means I still have three stories out, at least one of which (hanging out at Writers of the Future) I expect to hear news back on this month.
Originally August was going to be about getting back to work on Capsule, but I got hit with the full inspiration for a short story I’ve been meaning to write for awhile called The Ghosts of Venus. Wrapped up the first draft yesterday, and I’ll say it’s first draft good. It needs a lot of work, and it’s going before my beta reading group this week. Speaking of which, check out the new CVS Website. It’s still a little light on content, but it’s also freshly relaunched, it’ll be growing.
August started with the announcement of the Flashathon, and I’ve been posting new information as I have it. If I’m counting correctly today marks 50 days ahead of the event. We’re putting plans in motion to have a few hours of guest inspiration as part of the event, which will be just damn cool if it actually happens. Details will come faster and faster as the marathon approaches, I’m sure.
September dawns with me not sure what my next writing project is. We’re coming up on the deadline for the Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations anthology, but my concept for that is still in a very natal form. I’ve got another story concept that has nothing to do with any current anthology calls but could be good for making a general tour of the journals. Or maybe this time I really will get back to work on Capsule. Anything could happen, it’ll probably come down to what inspiration hits me first.
State of the Writer’s Beer: We’re giving Lazarus Ale a little more time in bottle, so very little New Peculiar was drunk this month. I’m under a promise not to start brewing another batch until we’ve gone through at least another dozen bottles of our current batches.
State of the Writer’s Blog: Added several states to my goal of getting visits from all 50. This month saw the first visits from Alaska, Nevada, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Delaware. This leaves me just Montana, both Dakotas, Arkansas, and Louisiana to go. I knew I should have had Renee pop into my blog briefly while she was in New Orleans. The month also saw the site smash previous viewership numbers with over 275 hits and 400 pageviews. Those are still tiny numbers, but they rapidly growing numbers. It was as recently as May that I crossed 100 hits in a month for the first time. Hopefully with the upcoming Flashathon and publications, numbers will improve that much more.
State of the Writer’s Pseudonymous G+ Account: I said in my last post about the Google+ pseudonym issue that I would feel pretty safe if I made it to the end of the month. Well. I’ve made it to the end of the month. So either the policy is being very poorly enforced, or initials don’t count towards the pseudonym policy. Either way, I’m feeling rather more comfortable that the account will remain.
So now, that’s a month over and retrospective given, let’s look ahead. Onward to September!
September poster product of WPA and released to Public Domain by the US Government.
Fortnightcap: A Warning…
Posted by DLThurston in Fortnightcaps on January 11, 2011
A Warning to CIG Users
A Fortnightcap by DL Thurston
Local area police are issuing a warning to users of cochlear implanted GPS devices, commonly called CIGs, after a recent mutilation and subsequent home robbery in the Tysons area. Leonard Cohen was assaulted by three unknown men on Tuesday night while walking alone through a parking garage back to his car. The assailants, two armed with baseball bats and the third with a scalpel, knocked Mr. Cohen to the ground and beat him unconscious before conducting amateur surgery on his right ear. Their target: his CIG, an older model that still used a small external antenna.
“It was such an old model, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to steal it,” Mr. Cohen said from his hospital bed at Tysons General. “I’d been meaning to buy an upgrade for a year now, I just never got around to it.”
It turns out that it wasn’t so much the device the thieves were after as the information on the device. When Mr. Cohen’s wife Jessica received the news that her husband had been assaulted she rushed to the hospital. Shortly thereafter she got a call from her home alarm service that there had been a break-in and police were being summoned. “I could go back home, or I could be with Leonard, there wasn’t really an option. At the time it all just seemed like the worst possible timing.”
The timing was not coincidental, however. Police arrived in time to interrupt the home invasion, and were able to apprehend one of three subjects. Under examination, the suspect admitted that they had used the “go home” function of the device to lead them to the Cohen residence, then waited in the bushes across the street. When Mrs. Cohen left for the hospital, they took their chance to strike. This matches other reports nationwide of individuals being assaulted for their older model CIGs and having their houses burgled on the same day. Police suspect thieves are targeting the older CIG models as the external antenna makes them more obvious than newer, entirely internal models. They recommend that users of these models consider an upgrade, or at least change their “home” location to the entrance of their subdivision, a nearby grocery store, or even the closest police station.
Mr. Cohen will require a derma regeneration of his ear, but is expected to make a complete recovery. The other two suspects are still at large.
Fortnightcaps are biweekly experimentation into short form fiction. All Fortnightcaps are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. So if you like the story, please feel free to link people back here. And if you didn’t, maybe the one in two weeks will be better.