Them: Part 1

    Hello! My next short story, Them, starts today! I think this will be the last one before I take a break for Summer holidays and return with some fresh ideas in September. The blog will keep running on Fridays... most Fridays lol. I'm going to steal away some time with my kids while they still like me and I'm terrible at planning so I don't know when the time will happen that I get to steal. :D

Story Shares is a non-profit helping bring literacy to struggling adult and teen readers. Click the image above to check out this great cause!

This was my submission last year to Story Shares. Click the image to learn more about the book and the cause!

Pitch parties help match writers and mentors. Click the link above to read more about PitchWars and PitMad!

    In other news, June has started off slow and wonderful. I've kinda caught up on keeping the house clean and I've gotten some writing done! Please understand that a kinda clean house is my standard (all of us have Dropsie: we often drop things in our hands on any surface near where we're standing instead of putting stuff away) so having it cleaned up to normal is great for me. A quick tidy-up is all that's required before friends come over this weekend for a Crafty Day :)
    The writing side of things, on the other hand, is freaking awesome! I didn't get to write for all of May because of how crazy and busy things were. My small manuscript had stopped telling itself like the short story it's meant to be so I'd been ignoring it these past few months until it was ready to behave. Well was it ever ready! It's still longer than the word cap allows, but I have a completed draft to edit :D This Story Shares submission might just get out this year like I was hoping it would. Yay!
    I also did some reading in my big manuscript. Mostly to get back into where the characters are and what they'd been up to when I'd left them. The good news: all the new ideas I had in May appear to fit in really well and I'll be able to start on that again fairly soon. The bad news: all the new ideas I had in May appear to fit in really well and I want to put in all of them right now... Is there any way that the hours in the days to come can be lengthened to accommodate all the writing I need to do now? Asking for a me... lol.

​    In fun news, there was another pitch party for PitMad on Twitter yesterday (June 6)! It was a great display of all the amazing books that will be coming out in the next few years. My schedule didn't let me participate at all, but this morning I did a quick search and WOW is all I can say for the cool stories Writers on Twitter are creating. Don't know about pitch parties? Check out the link above!
    Hope you have a great weekend!

1. First Contact

Year 1B (one year Before)
        It had been mid-May. The seventeenth. Some people had hailed it as the end, many as the beginning. We’d all seen the movies where our world or our Human race was threatened; Star Trek, Independence Day, The Day The Earth Stood Still, etc, etc...
        This wasn’t any of those – even if people tried to make it out to be at the time.
        A few governments toppled. Most just froze and let their militaries handle things the only way that scared people in groups know how to do: badly. A couple actually managed to hang on to what little order was left. After, most of us just moved on and adjusted. We are an adaptable race when we are forced to be.
        The first craft had been small and landed in Europe. The dense civilian population had made it impossible to cover up (even though the EU tried really, really hard for those first few weeks). But the news was wildfire from the start and cover up efforts went basically ignored. The Scout – as we came to call the craft – simply sat in a park in downtown Prague and, as we later learned, listened to our radio and satellite broadcasts. After a few days, it left.
        The second one came on June second, this time landing in Tokyo. It had a semblance of familiar looking technology and the world’s top scientists were able to determine that it was a communication device. There was no existing message, but there was a lot of recording equipment. We took pictures, popped open panels, took video footage... then we would approach with tools made to dig deeper and the panels would close of their own accord and our best and brightest would simply sit and stare at it, confounded as to why they couldn’t dissect it.
        A then unknown poet wrote a short stanza of welcome and gave it to his sister, who was an assistant to one of the scientists. On June sixth, when nobody was looking, she pressed the Play/Record button and hurriedly read the poem. Kobayashi Reo and Hinata were recorded in the short history between The Scout and The End as having committed treason against Earth and were both shot dead by firing squad on June ninth. Fear. The Contact 1 – as we came to call it – had left on June sixth a couple of hours after the recording was made, carrying only the poem and some clear images of a nervous Hinata as she read it.
        Seven more Contact type probes came on June twenty-eighth, landing all over the world. Fear turned to terror and the message of the friendly poem that was blamed for welcoming this invasion was ignored as governments set to sending back scripted speeches. Contact 2 to 8 all left after only a few days and people hunkered down in their homes and waited for what would happen next.
        We found out After that nearly all the speeches had been tampered with by private messages tacked onto the recordings either at the beginning or the end. While many cowered, there were more of us who wanted to know, and to say hello. It was exciting for so many of us.