[CT] QOA; fiction

[Daniel Moran]

I've added two Star Wars short stories to QueenOfAngels.com -- "A Barve 
Like That," about Boba Fett; and "Empire Blues," which is about a character 
you see for about two seconds in "Star Wars." A third and much longer 
piece, "The Last One Standing," which follows Fett from his youth to his 
old age, should be up sometime in the next week or so.

I'm scanning in old fiction this last week. I scanned in "When Your name is 
November," "The Song of Camber and S'Reeth," and am about to scan and OCR 
the sf/western novel I wrote when I was about 15. All are horrifically bad, 
and all are plotted pretty well. Surprising to me -- they're virtually 
unreadable (and I don't mean, unreadable-by-me-because-I'm-embarrased by 
them; I mean, unreadable) -- and even so, because I've had to read them as 
I was scanning them in and reformatting them, I see the bones of stories 
that work just fine, once you get past the cardboard characters, 
screamingly bad dialog, awful world-building skills, and complete lack of 
internal consistency. Anyone out there who thinks they have no natural 
talent to write -- No. It's plain from the evidence that _I_ have no 
natural talent to write. So hang in there.

Memory is treacherous. I thought that "November" was the oldest of my 
Continuing Time stories, but going through these ancient mss. I think I 
must be wrong. "November" is set in a recognizable Continuing Time -- there 
are no glaring continuity issues, no screeching lapses of terminology or 
whatever. (Well, one; the spacelace tunnels don't exist yet. There's a 
third stupid FTL drive instead of spacelace tunnels.) But aside from that, 
it's my universe as I recognize it today.

"Camber" is barely recognizable as a Continuing Time story, except that 
people refer to the Continuing Time all through it. Camber's not even a 
night face, in this draft. (Night faces don't appear to exist; nor does the 
Zaradin Church, which really startles me; they came in together and they're 
an _old_ part of the CT.) But apparently this is older.

After that I've got about 30 short stories I'm going to scan in; I may post 
some of them, as written, on QOA. ("A Day in the Life of a Telephone Pole," 
in particular. I wrote it when I was 12 and it still works fine -- aliens 
invade the Earth in spaceships that look just like telephone polls. It's so 
stupid it's charming.)
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