Augustus watched the sunrise from the floor-to-ceiling window of the 97th floor boardroom. They had worked through the night, but the contract was finished. Everyone but he and the client had gone home. He was the fifth-richest men in the world, and this sale would multiply his fortune. But could he really give up his control of Midas Corp? Could he leave The City behind? A rainbow parachute descended past him. A punky girl in black leather dangled from it. She met his eye and gave him the finger. He crossed back to the table and signed.
The City: 002: Augustus
September 30, 2014
The City, Writing 140 Characters, Augustus, Drabble, Fiction, Midas Corp, The City, The Smiling Man 1 Comment
The City: 001: Dawn
September 29, 2014
The City, Writing 140 Characters, Dawn, Drabble, Fiction, Midas Corp, The City, Writing 21 Comments
Dawn loomed over The City. She stood and watched the rising sun filter through block after block from her vantage on the roof of Midas Corp. Tower. She had climbed up without light, making the perilous trip by memory and relying on a FAQ when the going got tough. There wasn’t anything up here, but it was the best view short of buying your own plane. And who had the credits to waste on something like that? This was her city, and she was its vagabond master. It was a new day, and below her adventure was waiting. She Jumped.
I’ve Got a Mailing List!
July 10, 2014
Hey folks!
I’ve finally bitten the bullet and set up a fancy mailing list for you to subscribe to! Click the button on the side or use the link below!
Sign up for my mailing list!
List members will get special announcements, discounts, prizes, exclusive fiction, and anything else I can come up with! Be a Hugh J. O’Donnell hipster and like me before I’m cool!
Of course, I’ll keep your email to myself and I won’t bombard your inbox. You can expect one or maybe two messages from me a month. You’ll even be able to select what types of messages you want. Like my writing? Check that box! More of a podcast fan? Select that one instead.
Thanks for the support!
Seriously, sign up!
Drabble-Beers in the Night
June 13, 2014
Writing Balticon, Drabble, Writing Leave a comment
Here’s the second drabble I wrote for this year’s “Dueling Drabbles” panel at Balticon 48. The prompts for this one were: San Francisco, A Private Eye, and a bottle opener. Enjoy!
The detective huddled into his coat and stepped out into the chilly July night. San Francisco winter. He was searching for a needle in a city of haystacks. He passed darkened storefronts and seedy alleys. Dive bars and the kind of places where a man found salvation, and lost his soul. He kept searching. That wasn’t what he was looking for tonight. He thought about his client, a dame with the kind of looks that made a fireman play with matches. She was waiting for him.
Finally, he came back and gave her the bottle opener. “Next time, buy cans.”
Donations For Life
May 13, 2014
Writing Drabbles, Fiction, Gaming Leave a comment
He found a likely corner and put on the little red hat. It was kind of a cliche, but people expected it. He set up the bucket and rang the bell. Somewhere time ticked by. One more coin, he promised himself. Then, he could get out of the cold. Someone tried to dip their hand in the bucket. He couldn’t have that, So he ran out and jumped on the thief’s head. There was a satisfying bop. Somewhere, a chime rang. That made a hundred coins. Which meant an extra life. The Save a Princess Foundation was finally getting somewhere.
Fiction: The Space War
May 4, 2014
Writing Fiction, The Space War, Writing Leave a comment
The Space War began twenty-five light years from Earth. Mankind had never actually managed to figure out a way past the speed of light, so our exploration of the stars progressed slowly, with whole generations losing contact with home just to set foot on the soil of distant worlds. The first dozen or so missions visited dead, Mars-like worlds, and the general public lost interest in deep space exploration. Then, the Hawking IV craft was lost.
The initial reaction was one of puzzlement and sadness at the tragedy, though no one could confirm what, exactly, the tragedy was from sifting through the quarter-century old data. The Hawking V was sent to continue the mission, with special cameras designed to record everything the crew saw. Before it too was destroyed, it sent back murky, unfocused footage of an attacking space craft.
There was a tightly controlled panic in Mission Command. The enemy craft had been too quick to film, and overwhelmingly powerful. The Hawking wasn’t able to gather much data before it was destroyed, but two things were clear: We weren’t alone in the universe, and the company wasn’t friendly. The distance between stars made communication with our own ships nearly impossible. Finding a way to speak with the aliens was out of the question. Eventually, they decided that war was the only option.
The carefully released information caused a predictable wave of chaos and fear, but in the wake of the riots, mankind showed a resolve it never had before. All of humanity banded together, buried their differences, and worked together to protect themselves. The next few decades saw huge advances in scientific achievement. Humanity built a great fleet of warships that would travel far out into space, and face our unknown enemy. Outposts were built, and we made ourselves ready for the coming conflict. More ships were mysteriously lost.
Finally, there was the ultimate breakthrough. A team of scientists developed a method of time-travel that would allow troops and armaments to seem to go faster than the speed of light. The next fleet could arrive as soon as it left, or even before it was built! The war could be over in months instead of years. The generals in command agreed to the plan. Earth and its neighbors were nearly stripped bare to provide resources for it. If mankind was safe at last, the cost would be worth the price.
After ten years of work, the scientists unveiled their finished time machine. The ship was sleek and fast. It was outfitted with bleeding edge weapons technology. Due to the stresses of time travel, the ship was unmanned. It launched to its destination, and transmitted instantaneous data back to Command. There was a ship at the coordinates. The generals and scientists were ecstatic. When they saw the vessel clearly, however, their joy turned to shock. The vessel had Hawking IV, IDSA stenciled in bright white letters on the side. For they had met the enemy…
The Plan for 2014: The Page of Awesome
February 22, 2014
Writing marketing, Writing 1 Comment
My goal for 2014 is to act more professionally as a writer, and to keep myself motivated. In order to complete this task, I have to keep myself working. When I began submitting short fiction in 2009, I created a spreadsheet to keep track of what I’ve sent where. It has been very helpful, and when I reviewed it late last year, I discovered that I have a tenancy to let a story sit after it gets rejected. This doesn’t do me any good.
I also noticed that I let my blog go fallow, writing in fits and spurts rather than consistently. I want to have a steady output of work in 2014. This means not just showing up at the page, but being visible to editors, and my audience. So I devised the Page of Awesome.
The Page of Awesome is the front page of a very handsome writing notebook I received from my In-laws this Christmas. It works much like my submission-tracking spreadsheet. Each time I make progress in one of my goals for the year, I make a tally mark, and I’ll be posting my goals throughout the year. But unlike systems like the Magic Spreadsheet, which track showing up at the page, I’m keeping track of work that I send out into the world. My goal is to have three-hundred tallies on the page by the end of 2014. Here is how the page breaks down:
Short Story Submissions:
This is probably the most important box for me personally. The most important skill for a writer, even more than craft, is overcoming the sense of rejection inherent in submitting fiction. A rejection, particularly a form rejection, feels like a punch in the gut. And you’re going to get rejections FAR more often than you will acceptances. Sharing your work is the real wall a writer needs to climb over. Having a slush pile myself for The Way of the Buffalo helped. It became much easier to empathize with the mysterious editors behind the rejection emails when I was writing them myself, looking for the right words to say that the story was good, but not what I wanted. It was also good to get a sense of what kind of stories go into a slush pile, just how towering they can get, and what are good stories, and what are bad ones. But I was still letting stories go idle after they were rejected. So the first part is dedicated to short story submissions to magazines, and I’m hoping to send out at least 100 in 2014. I have five active stories in rotation right now, and I’ve got maybe three or four short stories that need just a little more editing before I send them out. So far I’ve been able to add one new story a month. I’m averaging one to two months per rejection, so I should make this goal fairly easily, I hope.
Podcast Releases:
This will almost certainly be the shortest of the three columns, because I release about two episodes a month, and I’m not great about keeping to a set release schedule. I’m hoping that I can use this motivation to keep me going regularly, and I still have The Dark Wife to finish, so this might be a solid 50 by the end of the year. I’m also hoping to take part in this year’s “31 Days of Podcasting,” so that will add to my numbers as well.
Blog Posts
Finally, there is this humble blog, which you may have noticed I’ve been a bit more active with this year. I’m still not the kind of blogger who posts every day, but I’ve been trying to implement more regular, recurring features, and increasing my output. I’m trying to get at least two posts out a week, and ramping up from there. I’d like to post 100 articles this year.
So how am I doing so far? Not including this post, my stats are:
Short Story Submissions: 9
Podcast Episodes: 3
Blog Posts: 13
I’ll certainly update this figure on the blog as the year rolls on, to let you know how this current motivation experiment plays out.
#dragoncant
August 31, 2012
For geeks with tight budgets, Labor Day weekend can be tough. It seems like everywhere you look, friends are having fun at the biggest conventions of the summer. From Pax in Seattle, to Chicon in Chicago, to Dragon*Con in Atlanta. Everywhere you look, tweets, pics, and posts are going up in celebration of the end of the con season. But the solution isn’t to turn off the computer and hide from the stream. Come to Dragon*Can’t instead!
Dragon Can’t is an UnCon, devised by S. V. Allie, Brand Gamblin, and Nathan Lowell, this is a virtual con held in social media, chats, hangouts, and video conferences. It’s all the fun panels, readings, and socializing from cons, but without the long lines, expensive food, and con funk. You should definitely check it out at dragoncant.com.
I’ll be doing a live reading over G+ Hangout on air at 8PM Est on Saturday, Sept. 1st as part of Dragon*Can’t. I’ll be reading from a new Novella coming soon, announcing a project for January 2013, and doing Q and A. You should totally come!
360,000 words: A Goal for 2012
December 1, 2011
This year, I decided I was too busy to participate in National Novel Writing Month. And maybe this was a good decision. I got a lot done that I wouldn’t have if I was writing a fifty thousand word manuscript. But what I didn’t do was write. I wanted to show up at the page, and without the structure of Nanowrimo, I didn’t. I wrote 5,400 words of fiction in November. I released three podcast episodes, and did recording and production work on others that will be released this month. I didn’t do badly, but I didn’t do as well as I would like.
So I’m going to try something else.
I believe in Nanowrimo. But November is only one month a year, and a year is a long time. Fifty thousand words is a lot to write in a month. I think a more realistic goal is to write a thousand words a day. But some days are more difficult than others. This is the challenge I’m giving myself:
Thirty Thousand Words a month, 360,000 words for 2012.
I still have a month before the new year, but I’m going to start working now. This isn’t just going to count fiction, either. Blog posts, reviews, everything. I’ll be tracking my progress here. If you are a writer, I hope you’ll join me. If the world does end in 2012, let’s write like there’s no tomorrow.
Hugh J. O'Donnell 