A.C.Franklin Fiction

Speculative fiction with engaging characters.

Take me to the woods.

Ko-fi

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  • And How It Grows

    I’m headed to Newfoundland next month to help run a beading class. It promises to be a fun if busy time. We’ll see how well my knee holds up. I managed to injure it skiing back in February, aggravate it last month, and re-aggravate it at least six times this month. I regret nothing except healing slower than when I was a teenager. It does take a bit of effort to see wild trilliums in bloom.

    My yard is often populated by flowers and bees, and in the flower beds I have liverwort:

    A bumblebee on ground ivy.
    A wild strawberry growing from under my deck.
    Common liverwort.

    More interesting than plain grass, that’s for sure. The liverwort gets to stay and improve the soil.

    Progress continues apace on various projects. If not for the upcoming trip, I would have increased my word count target already. As it is, it will serve as a good stress test on what my minimum should actually be. Being able to sit down and work on my writing has led to measurable progress. Who would have thought?

    One of those projects is editing the novel I wrote in university, which has made me think about voice. Technically, it was a failed experiment in voice–a case of trying too hard to align with a specific era of writing. But aside from sentences that are too tangled to parse, there is something compelling buried in it. I’m more than five years removed from it—editing it now, I can see the good in it. It just needs to be cut back. Controlled and directed, much like the ground ivy that the bees so love, but would smother the rest of my yard entirely if it was allowed to.

    Here’s another fragment of rough draft from the work in progress from Day 1:

    The cave Misaki had gone down teemed with colour and life—with sound. Oren found themselves distracted by it all: the humming of fish, the crunching of crabs, the groan of ice under tension, creaking and clattering in their ears. To see a whole host of creatures wasn’t as surprising to them as it should have been. They never understood why some called Qaunic a dead world. Perhaps, for those who never dipped below the surface, they only ever heard Tith’s desolate wailing, Toth’s sloshing. But there was nothing dead about the way the ice sang under their feet.

    They moved to the dance of it, arrhythmic, cautious. Edge out with a toe, shift weight and spread it over the full foot to ease over spikes and lighten the step—the movements that had helped see them named Kraischild.

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    1. Unknown's avatar

      I love the contrast between ‘dead world’ but underneath the surface, so much life. Looking forward to more.

  • Growing Plants, Growing Word Counts

    I already had to start weeding. There’s an incursion of gout weed that refuses to be quelled, and will need constant culling to be managed. I have a number of other plans for the garden–transplant some of the sumac thicket that’s sprung up, split down the irises, cut back the roses and lavender, mow the clover patch to let the wild strawberries gain more ground…always things to do.

    I did increase my minimum weekly word count. I’m hoping that I can continue to increase it as I regain my stamina. Just this week, I completed the rough draft of the anthology story, and noted down a few things for edits. I still want to let it cool before I go in with the carving knife. No title yet, but titles are always tricky.

    Editing of the previously completed novel is building up steam, too. (Allow me the pun–it’s nominally steampunk.) Two chapters edited so far. I love seeing the red on the horizon of everything that will soon start going wrong.

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    1. Unknown's avatar

      I love the contrast between ‘dead world’ but underneath the surface, so much life. Looking forward to more.

  • Sunlight, what a concept.

    The birds are saying it’s spring, no matter how much my friends say it’s not. I agree with the birds.

    Progress continues on multiple fronts. I’ve submitted a story proposal and some flash fiction to anthologies. The story proposal was accepted. I’ll provide more updates later, but for now, consider checking out Duck Prints Press! They have a new Kickstarter coming up.

    Since beginning this endeavour, I’ve exceeded my target for a consistent number of words per week, every week. That is my very boring, very important goal right now: consistency. In spite of some sudden and not-so-sudden demands on my time (bathroom repairs), if I can manage that, I can make this work. So far, the track record looks promising.

    And, last but not least, I’ve posted a new story to the site. Check it out:

    Pioneer Species, Annual and Perennial
    Plant a flower, kiss a girl, save the world.

    Leave a comment

    1. Unknown's avatar

      I love the contrast between ‘dead world’ but underneath the surface, so much life. Looking forward to more.

  • Day 1

    The sky is grey, there’s snow in the air, and I think that today will be a good day.

    Welcome to the official launch of my website. Currently, it offers free stories that I have previously published online. I hope to add more, as well as some excerpts of my longer completed works. Once they are properly edited and formatted, I intend to sell those longer works on my ko-fi.

    I will be providing regular updates on my progress; consider following if you’d like to see more from me. For now, have a sneak peak of one of my works-in-progress:

    The barren oceans of Qaunic churned into a white foam in the wake of the ice breaker. It was an old, sturdy ship, well-suited to the name “Fidelity.” The red paint had been scraped off its bow and repainted time and time again. Weld lines showed where patches had been added and sealed to become part of the whole.

    There was no ice for it to break on this trip—all the ice was, paradoxically, already hundreds of metres deep beneath the waves. The tension and pressure together threatened to tear the unstable sea floor apart under the force of its own buoyancy. Icebergs drifted in the distance, created by the quick and violent breaches that buoyant force could cause. The terraforming that had melted Qaunic had only been partially successful; the process had only thawed a thin belt of ocean surrounded in yet more ice when the orbital solar focus had burnt itself out. The planet remained bitterly cold and inhospitable, though that had never stopped its stubborn inhabitants.

    Fidelity cut through the grimness in cheerful colour, defiant of the seas that had sunk so many of its brethren even as it was used to recover their corpses, even as that metal was used to patch its own skin. It pushed onward, as reliable as its name implied. It would go on to the very last.

    Leave a comment

    1. Unknown's avatar

      I love the contrast between ‘dead world’ but underneath the surface, so much life. Looking forward to more.