Alara Rogers

Backstage: Amaldis

Backstage for Amaldis.

I do not remember why, in college, I suddenly got so incredibly butthurt about the genre of sword and sorcery in which noble barbarians always defeat evil wizards with their mighty thews (seriously, does this genre even actually exist or was I going off reviewers' complaints about Conan?), but I did. Because, between a very very competent and skilled barbarian swordsman, a...

Backstage: Five Minutes

Backstage for Five Minutes. 

This story isn't actually wholly original to the Internet. Years and years ago, when I was deep within X-Men comics fandom in the 90's, there was a project called The Common People, about mutants who live ordinary lives, without being superheroes. Alannah Foster was one of five characters I came up with the day I first got into X-Men comics (the others included ...

I Suddenly Find Myself In Class With Amnesia, But I'm the Teacher?!

I couldn’t tell you what the last thing I remembered was, because I couldn’t tell what order any of them had happened in. Was the last thing I remembered sitting in the back of the English classroom, gossiping with Suzy and Chantel, quietly enough that our half-deaf and eighty percent dead old English teacher couldn’t hear us? What about that moment in science lab where I had a beaker and I was pouring liquid into a retort and then there was a bright light and a boom? Or could ...

52 Project #49: She's Got Diplomatic Immunity, She's Got A Lethal Weapon That Nobody Sees

The sky was completely dark – no sun, despite i

Well, damn.

Sorry, guys, got a new job in November 2023 and I fell off the face of the Earth again. Gonna catch up with the 52 Project finally this month, and start posting new stuff no one has yet seen.

Deirdre

Here's a treat for the patrons!

Originall

52 Project #48: Hoodie

Perhaps you have heard a story, much like but not exactly the same as this one, about twin sisters, one beautiful and one very strange. These sisters were not princesses, but the daughters of a Congresswoman, which is a little bit like princesses, but not exactly.

The young Congresswoman had had a difficult pregnancy. The ultrasound showed clearly that she was having one baby, a little girl, but her stomach was distended as if she was having twins. Her doctor suggested a Caesarian. The ...

Backstage: Survival Traits

Backstage for Survival Traits.

This came from a nightmare I had, and remains the most terrifying, to me, story I have ever written. I wrote the story in the early 90's and it still held up with almost no revision, which says something about what I tapped into when I wrote it.

When I wrote it I didn't know that I was autistic -- only that my entire childhood of interacting with other childr...

52 Project #47: Nobody Believes Cassandra

The night after he’d failed to persuade the res

Song of Jane

My crappy attempt at a tribute to my mother, written in iambic pentameter in the style of translations of the Greek epics she loved, as an introduction to my story "Nobody Believes Cassandra."

I speak of brown eyed Jane, who bore me, child

of Dot and Charlie, she who was both fierce

and gentle. What a woman she was! Few

there are who are her like, a lioness,

her body broken, turned against her, such

long years, and yet she never was restrain’d

in he...

November Report On Real Life

Did not, in fact, do any Nano, or any writing at all; I've spent the entire month preparing for the job (which I did in fact get) by cleaning up and reorganizing my home office, doing chores I'd been putting off for months, etc. 

But now I've got this!

Access to my desktop PC again! A place to put all my external hard drives! A setup where I can have a work laptop and be able to hoo...

Been very busy in October

I've been working very hard at getting a job, and I may have landed one, finally; I was told the client had accepted me and as long as I pass the background check, I'm in. I'll know in another week or so. Pretty sure I will pass the background check as long as it's not also a credit check.

"Cold Light" is still waiting for chapters 12 and 13. 12 is the big fight scene. I finally have all of the bad guys ready and am working on choreographing the battle. Most of this month I have actuall...

52 Project #46: To The End of the World

I first visited the Rismel Tower with my father when I was about 10. It wasn’t my first time out of the country, but it was the first time I’d visited the Risilon Archipelago. It’s a beautiful place, warm all year round, with incredible beaches, and the night sky with the Eye of Rusella directly above your head is one of the most amazing sights you can see. It’s easy to understand why the Risiloni thought of themselves as the destined rulers of the world for so long, with the Eye gazi...

52 Project #45: No Rescue

Meg Santoro was enormously tired of plane crashes.

She had joined this hero team because they focused on rescue, not on stopping crime, and she wanted to be able to use her powers to heal, openly and freely. She’d spent too long using them to kill or maim or even just fight. But the leader of the team -- a guy who could fly, was super-strong, and had impossibly good hearing -- was always dragging them off after plane crashes. He could hear the sound of a bolt in a plane wing shearing ...

Backstage: Everybody's Happy As The Dead Come Home

Backstage for Everybody's Happy As The Dead Come Home.

I am not actually a giant fan of Shriekback. I loved the really quiet stuff they did for the Manhunter soundtrack, but I'd actually never heard "Nemesis", the song that the story title comes from, before. Someone I knew in college must have, though, and their contribution to a comic book fanzine I was editing was called "Everybody's Happy...

52 Project #44: A Doll for Vasilisa

The sick woman made her way slowly through the forest, stopping to rest many more times than she thought she should have to. Her eyes moved automatically over the herbs and vines and leaves she saw, checking for anything that would have value to her… but she knew her illness was beyond herbcraft, beyond even magic. Not that she had much of that left.

When she reached the Mother Tree, she sat down on a thick root, breathing hard. “Mother Tree, you’ve given me so much,” she whispe...

52 Project #43: Dev Environment

People always want to know, how did I come up with it? And what they mean is, it’s so obvious, why was I the first, in centuries, millennia, of people practicing magic? Yeah, so the fact that magic became obscenely hard between the 15th century and the mid-20th had something to do with it, sure, but surely someone smarter than me should have come up with it? Someone from a great magical family, generations of mages, steeped in lore? Some prodigy who was doing magic since t...

Backstage: The Last Boy

Backstage for the story "The Last Boy":

I have been haunted by James Tiptree Jr's "The Screwfly Solution" since I first read it. The story presents a very, very bleak vision, one it's almost impossible to see hope in. I saw a path for humanity to survive, but it was one that demanded terrible sacrifices.

When I first saw this story in my head, many years ago, it was... drier, than this. Le...

52 Project #42: Lineage

The air outside Jiangpao International Airport

52 Project #41: The Blood Mage

Ailurin was five when she learned what she was.

Her older brother, a lanky eight, had just run away with her favorite doll, laughing. Ailurin ran after him, screaming “Give her back!”, but the boy was too entertained by his sister’s impotent rage to heed her. He ran straight up to the pond, grinned malevolently at his shrieking sister, and tossed the doll into the pond.

And then swayed on his feet, dizzily, his skin – ruddy from exercise – turning pale as snow. Ailurin s...

Didn't fall off the face of the Earth again

I've just been busting ass on trying to finish Cold Light (The Cold At The Heart of the Light, my novel about a supervillain trying to save her nemeses' mentor's baby.) I did really well in the earlier part of the month, but work obligations and other stuff has been taking more of my time in the latter half.

I don't know if posting a novel to your Patreon impairs your ability to get it traditionally published. I've seen some short story markets saying "we don't want this unless...

Backstage: The Court of the Lion King

This backstage is for The Court of the Lion King, story #28 of the 52 Project.

I had a dream, related to the song "Drawn to the Rhythm" by Sarah MacLachlan, about being part of a group of people, like two or three people, walking down to the sea. The dream was peaceful; the story idea I got from it was not.

Farla are a species I made up a long time ago, like, 12 or something. They're gr...

Backstage: The Pale Bro

Here's what I wrote about The Pale Bro when it was still in concept phase:

I was talking with @sollidnitrogen yesterday about horror because he’s a big horror fan and I was kind of  using him as a sounding board for a problem I’m having, which is that I  would like to write horror using charac...

2023-09-11 20:09:20 +0000 UTC View Post

52 Project #40: Angel of Darkness, Demon of Light

Tala par Kyleth, Darkchild, had been on the road for 12 nights, heading home. There had been no unpleasant incidents thus far, and she fervently hoped things would stay that way. Tonight, however, was a warm, moonless night, the kind the creatures of the night liked best, and the stink of demon was on the air. She would be extremely fortunate to make it through the night without having to deal with some sort of disaster.

The best thing to do, she decided, was to find the demons first, a...

52 Project #39: Seista Nikita

Once upon a time, in a distant province that never appeared on any map, probably because either a. it was too small to bother with or b. someone bribed the mapmaker, or possibly both, an evil beast called the Culare reigned. (It was pronounced like “Cool air”, but if anyone tried to spell it that way, the Culare would eat them.) Some said the Culare was an experimental mutation; others, an ecologist gone mad. The Culare was an intelligent lion-like being with teleportation powers who took...

Backstage for "Marc Snowfrolic and the Quest for Biscuits"

Backstage for Marc Snowfrolic and the Quest for Biscuits, #26 of the 52 Project. I was halfway there at this point, still trucking along at 1 story a week.

A while back I came up with an idea for a horror story where there was an entire town of werewolves, called Rema, where the twist was that they were only human during the full moon, and wolves the rest of the time. I don't remember what the p...

Backstage for "Where The Winds of Limbo Roar"

Backstage for Where the Winds of Limbo Roar, #25 of the 52 Project. The title is based on "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" by Blue Oyster Cult, and that would actually have been a better title, but I used it already on an X-Men fanfic.

writing-prompt-s on Tumblr provided the prompt, "The psionics in your battalion are m...

52 Project #38: All We Wanna Do Is Eat Your Brains

This is a songfic based on Jonathan Coulton's "Re: Your Brains". Trigger warning for zombies, but this is more comedic than dark.

***

The fifth floor of the six-story Peaceful Pines Towne Centre shopping mall was entirely occupied by the business offices of the real estate company that owned and managed it, and many other similar shopping malls.

It was divided into two halves, the west side and the east side, with elevators in the center, and locked, heavy wooden doors betwe...

Backstage for "The Princesses and the Peas"

This is one of my most popular stories, "The Princesses and the Peas", #24 of the 52 Project.

It's a really popular meme on Tumblr that the princess from the fairy tale "The Princess and the Pea" is autistic. I've seen it multiple places, both before and after I posted this story. I decided to ask the question, why is it valuable to the queen that the woman to marry her son the prince should be ...

Backstage for Firedance

Backstage for Firedance, #23 of the 52 Project.

As a preteen I read Harlan Ellison's "Again, Dangerous Visions", a collection of New Wave, absolutely edgelord, science fiction whose raison d'etre was to push the boundaries of what was allowed in print. There was a lot of sex, violence, and futility stories about the world being dark and horrible. This inspired me greatly, and for some t...