Fiction

While I majored in mathematics, I also like to explore my creative side, often through writing. Here are a few of my pieces, all written for classes. Not to be rude, but I am not particularly interested in comments from people I don't know. If you like it great, if you don't, too bad. Unless you want to publish me, of course, in which case, comment on! Under each story are a couple fun quotes from the story, or bits that give a good snapshot idea of what the story is like.

• Random Fiction:
  • Catharsis, a short story about a depressed college student who pours his pain into a piano. This is my favorite of all the things I've ever written.
    • "What an appropriate synopsis of how far his life had sunk: That he was going to a room he had once made out in so he could cry in solitude."
    • "Real music is like a movie: orchestrated, practiced, no random note interfering, no stray strand of hair out of place. This was life, unrehearsed, genuine. The piece was pain and the pain was the piece, and with every note he felt his soul shudder."
  • The Stranger, a longish short story inspired by a homepage I once found with a random search and never managed to locate again. Its set here and now, about a college kid who begins an e-mail correspondence with an innocent rustic teenager as a joke, and the consequences of his actions. A moderately complex story of trust, innocence, manipulation, psychology, and what happens when a person tries to wear too many masks. This one has a lot of fun sentences.
    • "The Web was an ocean, and as a college student Grant had beachfront property."
    • "Attention span exhausted, he turned to other things, things involving alcohol, operating systems, cheap mexican food, cannabis sativa, the theory of computation, cough syrup, and cellular automata. But not all at the same time."
  • Patri's Parable: a Mathematical Myth. My re-telling of a famous and fundamental piece of western mythology. Based on a picture I drew, which said most of what the story says, and I really loved, but most people didn't seem to get (perhaps it was just too densely packed). If you like visual art, you might try studying the picture before reading the story.
  • Silly Story This story was vaguely inspired by Hofstadter, and should appeal to those who are amused by terrible puns and self-ref. It is very silly, and mostly just a vehicle for the jokes. Not at all serious. This story is silly, ok? Get it? Here is a very out-of-context sentence:
    • "The muscled he-god tore the flimsy cotton wrap from the improbably perfect body of the sixteen-year old virgin, who, despite her strict Catholic upbringing, was receiving no sympathy from the reader, probably because she displayed few signs of putting up a struggle."
  • The Meal, a rather tongue-in-cheek medieval romance partly inspired by cheesy romance novels and Like Water for Chocolate. Its about forbidden love and a magic meal, and the main scene takes food waaaay too seriously. It isn't very good.
    • "The spice-tinged boldness of the steak brought heat and desire to the most intimate depths of her character."
• Science Fiction:
  • Mirrorshades, my first short story, loosely based on an Information Society song of the same name. Might be considered vaguely cyberpunk in its style. A brief piece whose main purpose is to let me write fun sentences - 100% style over substance. Also uses the device of alternating a paragraph of narration, then dialogue by one character, then a paragraph of narration, and then dialogue by the other character. Written in high school, so don't expect much - its not very good.
    • "Her black leather boots hit the concrete in front of his face with a solid thunk that reverberated through his intoxicated brain like an imprudent eruciation through a silent church."
  • Dystechia, a short story about a student in a 1984'ish world of high technology who discovers that technology can be used to censor and spy, but also to learn the truth. Not that bad, not that good.
    • "But all this was far from Zack's mind as he got out of bed and dressed, his closet having brought to the front all the clothing he needed for the day, choosing them with a fairly simple algorithm based on parameters about his taste which he entered when he first installed it."
    • "Wake up Zack! This is the twenty-first century; we aren't in the age of railroads and CISC chips anymore."
  • Driving, a sort of old-style SF story, which is written amusingly but I think needs some serious plot work. Based on a real-life experience when trying to rendezvous with friends for a movie. They told me to go to the intersection of the 85 and 101, and, not knowing the area, I went to the wrong one of the two places where those highways intersect, the one in the middle of nowhere. I drove around for rather a while, with the exit that they said was right there refusing to show itself, despite my cellphone calls and re-checking of directions. As I searched, frustratingly, this "what-if" scenario occured to me...
    • "The air was clear, the sky dark, and Phillip Thaddeus Brown's mood stormy as his digital speedometer edged ever closer to needing a third digit. He was on his way to meet some old friends from his days as an undergrad: they were in town for a conference, and as he hadn't seen them for a year or so, they had planned to meet somewhere. While this was normally a happy prospect, he had been forced to wait until his friends finished their work for the day and then went somewhere and called with directions. No rendezvous could be arranged beforehand, as they were a bit sketchy on the location of the conference, a behavior typical of computer scientists faced with questions of concrete geography."

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