Tag Archives: Fiction

Silence

Posted on by
Reply

for Eric


I’ve heard a silence described as “smothering”, a kind of dense and enveloping silence that crushes not just sound but even the thought that you could make a sound.  I was quite fond of that figure of speech, until I started working at Elm Park Library.

At Elm Park Library, the silence is smothering.  And once in a while, we find the bodies; asphyxiated as if smothered by some cloth that is never left behind.

It’s always the loudest patrons, those who don’t afford the library the respect it deserves. They’ll make too much noise, then they’ll grow quieter and we’ll go about our business assuming some other patron has just asked them to keep it down.  Then the closing time bell will ring, and all bar one will head for the exit.  One who sits, eyes open, not breathing, gaze locked on whatever book was in their hands when the silence came and smothered them.

They closed us down every time, of course.  Police and forensics scoured the scene, but it was always the same.  Asphyxiation, no prints, no DNA, no fibres, and the library re-opened until the next time.

The final straw came in the Autumn one year, when they knocked down the theatre opposite us.  Demolition balls and pneumatic drills, hammers and shovels banged and crashed at all hours, and my once-peaceful library was peaceful no more.  Fewer patrons came each day, leaving me alone with that awful noise, until again the smothering silence came.  One day at noon, it struck.  Builders, plumbers, electricians, twenty-seven in all, their last breaths taken in harmony as they fell to the ground.

That was the end of Elm Park Library, then, though of course they could prove nothing. The doors were battened shut, books left on shelves since no-one dared enter to take them. Perhaps the silence itself reads them as it drifts through the deserted aisles, finally at peace.

Between musty hardbacks and settling dust, Elm Park Library has nothing now but silence, a smothering silence, a dense and enveloping silence.

Edge Case

Posted on by
Reply

The man I assumed to be George sits down heavily across the table from me, sighs, and brushes a sweat-drenched lock of hair back behind his ears.  He wears the same exhausted expression as all Americans who come over here thinking the humidity and the smog “can’t be that bad”, and discover that they are in fact much, much worse.

“Vikram, right?” he asks.  I nod, expecting an introduction on his part, though none is forthcoming.

“So,” he jumps straight in with, “you know what the machine is, right?”

I nod again.  “The first 3D printer capable of printing its own parts.  I expect the whole town knows that by now.”  Today the town, tomorrow the world.  “But tell me, why here?  Why now?”

George closes his eyes and almost whispers his answer.  “The algorithm.”

The algorithm is as much of a success as the machine itself, maybe much more so, and certainly more jealously guarded by the company’s lawyers.

“Could you explain what it does, why it is so successful?”

The man looks even more weary now.  Although I’m the first journalist to score an interview, I get the feeling he’s explained it to shareholders a hundred times before.

“It started with a couple of Californians, a few years back,” he begins.  “They invented this machine, the first one that could build all its own parts.  That was the crucial moment in the technology, their ‘singularity’, if you will.  They realised that this thing could bootstrap the market, revolutionise the world.  But they were too expensive, and no-one was buying them.”

A waiter deposits two beers in front of us, but George doesn’t look up.

“So they hit on this idea of exponential growth, economies of scale.  They could set their printer making another one.  Then once that cycle was complete, their two machines could get on with making another two.  Eventually they’d be so quick and easy to produce that the only cost would be the raw chemicals, the plastic, and cheap manual labour.”

“So that’s why they chose India?”

“Not yet.  Back in the States, they started this website, with the algorithm behind it.  It said:  ‘Right now, these things are expensive, but eventually they’ll be dirt cheap.  Pay us now — if you pay a lot, you can have one tomorrow.  Pay us little more than the base cost, and you can have one when the economies of scale make them that cheap.’  So they were expecting a few thousand-dollar customers, and maybe a few hundred customers that would be happier paying a hundred dollars if they had to wait a couple of months.”

“There’s more than a few hundred machines out there,” I say, recalling row after row, warehouse after warehouse filled with clacking machines and the smell of hot plastic.  “What happened?”

“China happened.  Brazil.  Nigeria.  India, too.  It turns out that the algorithm had something of an edge case — the price went as low as thirty dollars, provided you didn’t mind waiting years for your unit.  Americans were too rich and too impatient to even consider that.  But it appears that thirty dollars is affordable by a lot of people in the developing world, especially when the machine is pitched to them as a transformative technology.”

“So how many of these thirty dollar orders did you get?”

“Two hundred and fifty million.”

We make eye contact across the table.  He knows I’m doing the math; there’s no way you can’t when given numbers like that.

“Seven and a half billion dollars,” I say.

His reply is simply, “Yeah.”

That simple figure, that immense sum of money, is the one simple reason for the craze sweeping this town and doubtless others like it.  The one simple reason that shops are closing, offering their floor space up to the machines.  The one simple reason that living-rooms have chairs piled up against the wall while these clicking, clattering, self-replicating machines take pride of place.

“Will this craze die out?” I ask George.  “Will it take over the cities too before it’s done?”

“I don’t know,” is his answer.  “I just don’t know.”

George himself seems sympathetic, though perhaps it’s just exhaustion.  But somewhere out there is a faceless body of shareholders, for whom we are not people living in a bustling port town.  We are labourers, living in a ramshackle town-sized factory, generating unimaginable profits, tirelessly fulfilling orders at the edge case of their algorithm.

International Date Line

Posted on by
Reply

My eyes snapped open, jolted from the depths of sleep by a slow burning somewhere in my hypothalamus. Heart-rate rising, breaths quickening from once a minute to once every few seconds. The hum of the engines and the light of the glaring LCD screen in the back of the next seat slowly worked their way into my consciousness.

I enjoyed it for a moment, that feeling of waking up after a Winter hibernation. It had been at most six hours since take-off, but in that blissful minute where the cynoprene wears off and the axitogen kicks in, it might as well have been six months. I counted off the seconds since I’d woken. 70, 71, 72. The shivers set in, right on cue, as my body figured out that it could regulate its own temperature again. I felt every tickling scratch of the pointless in-flight blanket and every creak of my neck as I shook the sleep out of my system. 80, 81, 82. I grimly held my focus on the screen in front of me until at last my pupils contracted, and let me see the little icon of a plane inching its way closer and closer to a dotted vertical line. Another thirty seconds, maybe.

My eyes flashed from seat to ceiling and back again, speeding up now. Everything was brighter, clearer, every touch like a tiny bolt of lightning. 115, 116. The little plane was so close now. “04:15 February 11″, read the tiny white text in the corner of the screen, and then, as if nothing was even slightly strange about it, “04:15 February 10″. That’s it. International Date Line. The middle of the Pacific, so far from land that not even the satellite networks bothered to cover it. A complete communication blackspot. Perfect.

I clicked off my seatbelt and stood up, correcting myself in a microsecond as my leg muscles briefly rejected my control.  Syringe in my right pocket, alcohol swab in my left.  I patted my pockets to make sure, as if there was ever a reason to doubt.  Tunnel vision was kicking in then, the whole of my experience narrowing down and speeding up.  One glance up the near-empty cabin, one back down.  Silence.  I slipped out into the aisle, adopting a nonchalant walk that could easily belong to an innocent passenger.  And there was the target, sitting alone, hand stuck out from under his blanket.  I passed him on my left, one lightning-fast swipe with the alcohol swab, not stopping.  Into the bathroom.  Wait thirty seconds for the anaesthetic to do its work.  Flush, to maintain cover.  Then back down the aisle, him on my right this time, syringe out, jab down, the compressed air forcing whatever was in there straight through the skin and into the bloodstream.  He didn’t stir.  Back to my seat, not looking back.  Sit down.  Check no-one’s looking.

Breathe.

No-one had noticed me, I was sure, and it had to be that way.  Fail at the first stage, and I’d be reprimanded; fail at this and I’d be going down for murder.

Back down the aisle again, one sly reach to the side, and I plucked his monitor out of his pocket.  A tiny LED blinked furiously, the device so full of rage that its owner’s heart had stopped, but too far from satellite coverage to report it.  I almost felt sorry for it in the bathroom a minute later, as I took the sharp edge of a plastic airline dinner-knife and levered its battery out.

I could feel my own heart rate slowing as I neared the end.  I grabbed the small sachet of powder from my back pocket and mixed it carefully into a sink full of water.  In went the swab and the syringe, all traces of my DNA burning off them.  As I slid the monitor in too, I noticed what else I’d taken from his pocket — a photograph, clipped to pocket size.  A man, woman and child, smiling for the camera.  A family.

Into the solution it went, pigments slowly drifting from the paper, erasing the memory.

I drained the sink, picking each item out with rubber gloves and dropping them carefully into the bin before flushing again and heading calmly back to my seat.

50mg cynoprine, tablet, dry-swallowed.  And sleep claimed me again, tears still rolling down my cheeks as the little icon of a plane flew on, ever further from the dotted vertical line.

Memoirs of a Goldfish

Posted on by
Reply

With apologies to Arthur Golden and @Tontonis.

Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet fish bowl,

We’re sitting in a quiet fish bowl.

We’re swimming in a quiet fish bowl.

Because we’re fish.

I’m not a fisherman’s daughter.

I’m a fish’s daughter. Yes. Maybe.

I don’t remember my father.

Because I’m a fish.

Was that bubbling thing in here yesterday?

Anyway, what were you saying about geisha?

My sister was a geisha, you know.

Or maybe just a koi carp. I forget.

Oh look, food!

Yummy pellety food.

Did I mention that I was a fish?

De-Li’s Little Mistake

Posted on by
2

Oh boy. Yet again, a children’s television programme has driven me to the brink of insanity. I return bearing this. The worst thing of all is that I’m sober, though I have the sudden desire not to be.

If you haven’t watched Waybuloo before, you should probably experience the saccharine horror on iPlayer before reading this travesty.

Crack-crack-crack, came the noise from the sky.

“Look! Whizz-cracker!” said Lau-Lau, and the other Piplings joined her to watch.

“That not whizz-cracker,” said De-Li.

“Not whizz-cracker?”

“Not whizz-cracker. 90-millimetre anti-aircraft gun.”

“Oh. Pretty 90-millimetre anti-aircraft gun.”

Just then, the Piplings heard the familiar chimes of the mystical device that somehow controlled their lives, and like every other day, they were compelled to obey its call.

“Yogo?” asked Yojojo.

“Yogo!”

“Debate finer points of anti-aircraft warfare after Yogo,” said De-Li.

And off they went.

Lined up in front of the nameless device, each Pipling took their allotted turn in the ritual, announcing a shape into which they would have to contort themselves.

“Tree!” said Nok-Tok. And they tried to look like trees.

“Shell!” said De-Li. And they tried to look like shells.

“Monkey!” said Yojojo, which all the others thought was probably cheating. But the machine was watching, so they did it anyway.

“Fish!” said Lau-Lau. They tried to look like fish.

Then, at long last, the device began to chime its song again. It had been appeased for now, and the Piplings tiptoed quietly out of the clearing in case it heard them and summoned them back to dance once more for its entertainment.

Back near their houses, the Piplings were looking out again at what lay beyond their tiny verdant world.

“Why rest of Nara so brown?” asked Nok-Tok.

“Cheebie last week say End Times coming,” said Yojojo. “Cheebie parents say something about ‘Jee-sus’.”

“Lau-Lau wonder why Cheebies leave, go back to brown place,” said Lau-Lau.

“Cheebies say something about ‘Soma’ wearing off,” said Yojojo. “Cheebies go back to get more.”

“Oh,” said Nok-Tok. “Make sense.”

Another noise entered the Piplings’ world from across the horizon — this time, a more human noise.

“Cheebies?” asked Yojojo.

“Cheebies!” exclaimed Lau-Lau. But they turned and looked, and didn’t see quite what they were expecting to see.

“Why Cheebies so old?” asked Nok-Tok.

“Why Cheebies carry assault rifles?” asked De-Li.

“Play Peeka?” asked Lau-Lau, who was always a little slow on the up-take.

“Yes, Lau-Lau,” said De-Li. “Play Peeka right now. Play Peeka really, really well.”

So the Piplings hid themselves in logs and pots and up trees, not sure what to make of the new kind of Cheebies they had seen.

It soon became clear that, not being five-year-olds asked to look for CGI creatures they couldn’t see, the new Cheebies had somewhat of an unfair advantage when playing Peeka. The Piplings were soon rounded up and made to sit back-to-back in the Yogo clearing.

“What new Cheebies names?” said Lau-Lau, still not fully grasping the situation at hand.

One of the Cheebies stepped forward.

“Sergeant Arrowsmith, US Marine Corp,” he said. “Are you the inhabitants of this place?”

“Lau-Lau not know word in-habbit-uns.”

The sergeant sighed. “Do you live here?”

“Yes!” said Lau-Lau happily. “Piplings live here!”

“And do I understand correctly that you are in possession of a machine known as the ‘Anything Machine’, which is capable of generating any object known to the user?”

“Yes! Anything machine!”

De-Li kicked Lau-Lau’s ankle sharply, and got a gun pointed at her for her trouble.

“Play nice,” said the Marine on the other end of the gun. He sneered down the barrel.

“You will take us to this machine,” said the sergeant.

The Piplings were marched at gunpoint to another clearing, where the Anything Machine sat.

“Good,” said Arrowsmith. “You will now use this machine to produce for me an LGM-30 Minuteman ballistic missile with a single warhead, targeted at Moscow.”

“No!” gasped De-Li, and wished she hadn’t.

“Nok-Tok not know what that is,” Nok-Tok said. “Machine not work when not know what making.”

“The pink one knows, sir,” said the Marine who’d pointed the gun earlier.

“Pink creature,” said the sergeant, pointing his own rifle at Lau-Lau. “Make the fucking missile, or I shoot the stupid one. No tricks.”

De-Li took one look into Lau-Lau’s wide staring eyes, and turned her attention to the machine. A few seconds of thinking, a few seconds of trembling ground and burning air, and off the missile flew into the sky.

They waited, and waited. Minutes passed.

Then, over the horizon, a brilliant flash lit up Nara’s sky.

“Good,” said the sergeant, hefting the Anything Machine onto his shoulder. “Tie the creatures up and make them walk. We’re heading back to base.”

Years later, the once-green patch of Nara was as scorched and blackened as the rest of the land. A gust of wind separated the last of the four glittering crystals from the Yogo device, and it splintered into a thousand tiny pieces on the ground. Never again would it call the Piplings to perform for it — the Piplings were free at last. But the Piplings had not been seen since that day they and the Anything Machine were taken. If they still somehow lived, they were the last things to live on Nara.

“Dreaming Awake”: Time to Stop Pretending

Posted on by
Reply

A little over ten years ago, my friends and I began a collaborative fiction project that we named “The Fanfic”, though it bore little resemblance to fanfiction as it is commonly known. Rather, it was something like a ‘fanfic’ of our own invented characters, thrown together in a neutral setting.

Over time, like most poorly-thought-out teenage ideas, it fell by the wayside — it was simply too difficult to manage, and too difficult to get the writers to write to any kind of schedule.

After that was abandoned, I took on the characters and the setting that had developed, and they became the first inklings of a computer roleplaying game to be called “Dragon’s Claw”. But back then I had precious few of the skills required to create a game, so that one sunk under the weight of practical realities too.

It was reborn once more in around 2002, when I figured that I should go the one route that didn’t involve perstering other writers or learning to write a game — making it a book instead. Under the new title of “Dreaming Awake”, the characters and settings developed much more fully. But again, there it stopped.

Why did it stop, and why am I now declaring it to have, in all likelihood, stopped for good?

Though I love the setting — I have explored it in many short stories and even shorter biographies for some of the original characters — it’s the other characters that I have difficulty with. I don’t mean to belittle the effort my friends put into defining their characters in the early days, of course, but writing about them feels somehow wrong. It’s the same reason I don’t write fanfiction (unless extremely drunk); it’s just so strange to write for characters that are fundamentally not my own.

And therein lies the second problem. One of the characters that has stuck around from the early days of the project is very much my own: Tsuki. As a humble farmboy who nevertheless has Ultimate Cosmic Power sealed away inside him, reading TV Tropes’ “Marty Stu” page is like reading the kid’s life story. And though I love him dearly as a character, I just can’t write about him with a straight face now I’m not 17 years old.

So, all in all, I think it’s probably high time I stopped pretending that “Dreaming Awake” will ever be a novel in its own right. I have written plenty of short stories set in its world, and doubtless I’ll write many more. But as a story itself, it’s too firmly wedded to characters I can no longer write for.

Deus Ex Macchiato

Posted on by
Reply

This story was originally written for the website “a thousand words”. You can see this story on “a thousand words”, plus rate it, comment on it, and post your own short stories by creating an account!

“There are patterns in everything,” the woman said, her eyes still focussing somewhere far beyond the table. “In the cards of the Tarot, the flickers of light in a crystal ball, the leaves twisting and turning in a pot of tea.” Tiny pockets of air bubbled to the surface of her cup as an iceberg of cream broke off and sank into the abyss. “And so there are patterns in this.”

“But why not tea leaves, anyway?” I said. “I mean, this is a cafe. They sell tea.”

“I don’t like tea.”

I paused, waiting for the cunning response that never came. “Fair enough,” is all my brain could manage.

“Ah!” the woman almost shouted, and I looked around guiltily. If anyone else had been startled as much as me, they weren’t showing it.

“Mmm,” she said, waving her hands over her cup, wafting the vapours toward her face.

“What is it?” I asked, “What can you see?”

“Mmm, yes, yes… Yep, this is definitely good coffee.”

“What?”

“Good coffee. Thank you.”

“Are you taking this seriously?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, right,” she said. I shot her a withering look, but I don’t think she noticed.

“Mmm,” she said again, as the cream slowly spread white ripples over the surface of the coffee. “You will meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Well, you will! I mean, how many tall, dark-haired men are there in this country? A million, ten million? Chances are you’ll find one of them attractive.”

“Probably. But that’s not exactly helpful, is it?”

Another dollop of cream dipped below the surface.

“Wait!” she said. “You’ll marry this one.”

“Really? How handsome, exactly?”

“Oh, very, very.”

She wafted the smell of coffee towards her again.

“Definitely. You will meet him not far from here, in a shop, maybe a clothes shop. Yes. Not long after your divorce, maybe only a week.”

“My divorce?”

“I’m afraid so. But things aren’t exactly going well at home, are they? It’ll be worth it in the end.”

“How do you–”

“You’re intrigued enough about tall, dark and handsome strangers that you’re willing to pay a crazy lady to stare at coffee, for a start.”

“But–”

“Nice ring, too.”

I covered my left hand with my right, hiding the ring, though for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why.

“Platinum, lotta’ diamonds. Couldn’t have come cheap. Must be a big earner, this man of yours, money’s important to him; too important. But it’s not to you.”

“Whatever makes you–”

“Paying, crazy lady, coffee?”

“Oh.”

“It’ll hurt at first, but it’ll be for the best in the end, trust me. It’ll be better for him, too, if that’s any consolation. And for your daughter.”

“Oh come on, how do you know about Isobel?”

The fortune-teller peered closer into her cup.

“See this little blob of cream here, the way it’s spiralling slowly out towards the edge of the cup?”

“Really? That represents my daughter?”

“Nah, there’s a picture of her in your purse. Saw it when you were buying the coffee.”

“Oh.”

I finished the last of my coffee, picked up my bag, and stood.

“Look,” I said, “no offence or anything, and I admire your detective work, it’s just… I was expecting something a bit more, you know, mystical.”

She was engrossed in her cup again, staring down something invisible deep inside it.

“Huh,” I said, not really knowing what else would be appropriate, and turned to leave.

“The twelfth of November, twenty-thirteen,” the fortune-teller said to my receding back. I stopped.

“What?”

“Twelfth of November, year of our Lord, twenty-thirteen. Write it down. Thanks for the coffee.”

I started walking again, not sure what to make of our encounter. Clearly, the woman was a quack. She’d not gleaned a single mystical bit of information out of that cup. And what was with the date?

Some time later, the date thing was still bugging me, so I wrote it down just to get it out of my head.


Time passed, and that scrap of paper got buried in my handbag, then found and played with by Isobel, and ended up who knows where. By the time winter came around, the divorce had gone through, and my daughter and I were alone in the house. But by that time, I’d forgotten all about the strange woman who told people she could see the future in the melting cream of a macchiato.


Year upon year fell behind us, until the day we were redecorating the kitchen, and my then-husband pulled a tiny scrap of a notebook page from underneath the fridge.

“Honey,” he asked, “why’s there a piece of paper with our wedding date on it down here?”

I took the note from him, stared at it, my eyes widening by the second. I looked up at my husband, his handsome face under a mop of dark hair. I didn’t say a word, just sprinted for the car, drove across town as fast as I could to the old cafe where the woman had sat, asked everyone, breathlessly, if they could remember her, if they knew where she was, where she lived.

“But one of them gypsy folk, she was,” the owner said. “They never hang around, and just as well, for everyone reckons they cause no end of trouble.”

“Though they do say,” he continued in a whisper, “that some of their women have a gift, and can tell your future from the twisting, twirling patterns of the leaves in a pot of tea.”

a thousand words: Finishing Touches

Posted on by
Reply

The vast majority of user-reported bugs and requested features on “a thousand words” have now been sorted out. As requested by my co-conspirator Eric, we now have an ‘adult content’ filter based on a date of birth field in users’ profiles, and a ‘report’ button to bring problematic stories and pictures to the attention of the moderators. There’s also a DeviantArt-style “request critique” option to let users know what kind of comments you’re looking for.

Timestamps have been fixed, “no stars yet” ratings introduced, and text field policies such as “mustn’t be empty” have been added across the site. A few rendering issues in IE have been sorted out, so it now looks much the same across all platforms.

The biggest change is unfortunately something most of you will never see — the moderator console. Picture submissions and reported stories/pictures now sit in queues that can be dealt with by moderators. An item entering a queue triggers an e-mail to all mods, who are invited to review it and make changes as appropriate. Once changes are made, the affected users are then e-mailed to let them know what happened (and in the case of reported items, to give them a chance to challenge it).

There’s one major feature request that’s not yet been implemented: file uploads. Once in the system this would allow users to submit pictures from their hard drives rather than from the web by URL, and would allow moderators to copy URL-linked pictures to the site to avoid hotlinking. (At present we don’t hotlink, but we do therefore have to copy pictures to the site manually using FTP.) It could also allow users to use a non-Gravatar picture for their profile.

Depending on how things go, that may or may not be ready by tomorrow night. On Saturday morning I jet off to sunny Saudi Arabia, so any changes not made by then are going to remain unmade for a while. From that point it’s in Eric’s capable hands as to whether she wants to release the site or not. Even if the site does advance to release status, I’m still taking bug reports (they’ll sit in my inbox until I get back), so keep on letting me know what’s broken and what you’d like to see added!

a thousand words: Alpha, Beta

Posted on by
2

“a thousand words” has now reached a stage where every feature that I give a damn about is implemented. Thus, we’re opening it up to a limited beta test to iron out the wrinkles and get a list of any features potential users would like to see us launch with. If you’re bored or simply have a love of breaking other people’s shit, head along to http://athousandwords.org.uk and see what hell you can raise. As the Big Red Box Text warns you, really don’t submit any work of fiction you care about, just in case some kind soul finds an SQL injection vulnerability and trashes the database.

Since last time I bored the hell out of you all, voting and commenting has been implemented, registration has been fixed, filtering HTML tags from submissions has been added, as has a word count and the picture selector on story submission. There’s been a bunch of behind-the-scenes tweaks to improve security too.

The one feature that Eric definitely wants is a way to mark stories according to their content. We could do this in several ways — I would prefer, if anything, to just have a “not for kids” option on each post and a Date of Birth field associated with user accounts, so we can hide stories as required. Other options include a range of ratings (U, PG, 12, 15, 18…) or tags for certain content (violence, sex, language) so people can avoid whatever they’re picky about.

This probably ought to come with a Report button so that users can report incorrectly rated stories, and I would add a similar feature to report pictures. (Picture submissions are moderated, so Goatse isn’t going to make it through anyway, but the mod team might miss subtler things like licencing terms and copyright infringement.)

At that point, all that’s left on my list is the admin interface and anything that users suggest during this beta. Hopefully we’ll be ready to launch by the time I depart for sandier shores at the end of the week!

a thousand words: Hot Profilin’ Action

Posted on by
Reply

A few days’ laziness (by which I mean a few days’ Starcraft) have passed with not much work being done on “a thousand words”. That came to an end tonight, with a productive evening resulting in a working profile system so that users can now add and display personal information, change their registered e-mail address and password, etc.

There’s now a database backend for the voting and commenting systems, which will be complemented by their GUI pages tomorrow night.

Once that’s done, that’s the last of the main functions out of the way and we’re basically down to tweaks. I think we ought to, in no particular order:

  • Decide on what formatting users can add to stories, and filter for it
  • Add a word count, and possibly limit submissions to e.g. 600-1400 words
  • Add a means of reporting stories and pictures for e.g. copyright issues
  • Add a means of rating stories, so users can mark them as containing sex, violence etc.
  • Create an admin interface, so we don’t just have to run the site with raw SQL queries
  • Add ranks, etc. (incentives for achieving high Total Stars)
  • jQuery up some of the main bits to improve user experience
  • Implement the scrolling list of pictures for users to select when creating a new story

At that point, I think it should be ready for open beta. Hopefully we can get it all done within a week, before I depart for internet-less shores!