So Lafferty, Vonnegut, and van Vogt Walk Into A Bar...

Completed a new short story last night, about 4700 words.  That's three stories in four months; I'm pretty sure that's a record for me. 

Title is "Julius Jeremiah and The Time Machinist", and it's spun off this old fragment of writing I posted about back in January.  I think of it as "R.A. Lafferty meets Kurt Vonnegut meets A.E. van Vogt meet the Marx Brothers."  It's a little on the weird side.  Just a little.

Let it stew for a few days before re-reading and revisions.

Last week I started going to a monthly writers group that meets at the local library.  I'm not certain if I should submit this particular story there.  Hard to tell from one meeting, but I may be the only person in the group who writes sf/fantasy.  That doesn't always work out well.  Science fiction on a more than Star Trek level sometimes requires at least a passing familiarity with the tropes and memes of the genre's past, otherwise it can just be confusing.

(My mother rarely read science fiction, and generally considered it, oh, trash.  She told me once, in my late teens, that she'd tried reading one of the books off my bedroom shelf to see if she could figure out why science fiction appealed to me so much.  She said she could not make heads or tails out of the book, she could not figure out what was going on, that it utterly confused her.  Thinking she might have gotten hold of something like Brian Aldiss' Barefoot In The Head, I asked what the title or author had been.  "I don't remember," she told me.  "but it had a spaceship on the cover."  That sure narrowed it down; I'm still not sure what she tried to read.  But Mom didn't know the 'language' of sf, and I think that's a major reason why she might have found it perplexing.)