Author: Ada Hoffmann

20. Taylan

She expected me to dance with her. Innocently, like we had when we were two little girls in the fourth grade.

“Taylan” is a micro-story – under 200 words – that I wrote as an experiment, for a microfiction magazine called Leodegraunce. The theme of the issue was “Elegance”. I managed to write a quasi-love triangle (one of the loves being, probably, platonic) in that length and make it work, and Leodegraunce bought it.

This led to a short burst of wanting to write ALL OF THE MICROFICTION, as you can see below.

23. Feasting Alone

The chewing, smacking sounds. The smell. Someone had taken pity on the man and given him a program to conjure up the virtual ghost of food. He squatted on the floor, guzzling obscenities: salt pork, chocolate, rigatoni, grapes.

“Feasting Alone” was written for the Leodegraunce theme, “Seven Deadly Sins”. I noticed that, out of the seven, people didn’t usually have much to say about Gluttony, and that when they did, it was usually facile fat-shaming. Or, occasionally, a critique of modern food corporations; but that wasn’t where I wanted to go with the story, either. I wanted to write about food, and an excess of food, and why characters might be disturbed by this, in a way that had nothing to do with anybody’s body shape or supposed health.

I ended up with a tale of a virtual world in which people couldn’t remember the appeal of food anymore, or why anyone had bothered to put up with the chewing sounds and other potentially overloading byproducts of eating in the past. (Yes, I have been overloaded by people’s chewing sounds before. And scrapey cutlery sounds, UGGGH. It is one of the things that is usually under control when I take my meds, but it is a thing.) Despite all this, learning to live with food again might be the only way to understand a lonely and overwhelmed stranger. (Comfort eating, for me, is very much also a thing.)

It wasn’t a very good story at 200 words, and Leodegraunce didn’t want it. On the advice of a beta reader, I expended it to about 700. It worked much better at a more typical flash length, and it sold to AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review.

30. Ribbons

When they put Marnie in solitary she started to pick at her fingertips.

At some point, Leodegraunce announced that they were making an anthology, and that I could submit up to TEN microfics! I proceeded to go wild and write so many microfics that Krista D. Ball asked if I was on drugs.

Most of the microfics were not very good, but “Ribbons” stood out from the pack. “Ribbons” was, in its first incarnation, less than 100 words long (I later expanded it to exactly 100) and TERRIFYING.

It didn’t sell, either to Leodegraunce or other venues (and the anthology ended up folding before it was printed), but Krista still says it’s the scariest thing she’s ever read, and whenever I look at it now, I smile and think of her.

37. Space Pops

Once they notice real limitlessness, all they can do is grow to match it.

“Space Pops” was written, not for Leodegraunce, but for the AE Micro 2012 contest, which happily published it. It features deep space and people cheerfully exploding. I think it is tied with “Ribbons” for my favorite microfic, but the tone is very different.

47. The Wives of Miu Fum

We found a cave in the side of the mountain and built Miu Fum a death-house as large and well-furnished as any living man’s.

The only other one from the large batch of Leodegraunce-inspired microfiction that I still like. “The Wives of Miu Fum” is the tale of a funeral. I ran out of markets for it, so I published it on my Livejournal in 2013 as an experiment.

Pro tip: don’t ever publish work you care about on Livejournal (or Dreamwidth, or WordPress, or whatever). You will feverishly wonder for the rest of your days if it is Terrible, if No One Likes It, if you are a Terrible Presumptuous Author publishing Bullshit in your journal and expecting people to care about it, or if anyone even read it at all. Send things to editors and get paid, and you might still wonder those things, but at least you’ll have money and one person’s approval. Oh well. It was an experiment and I learned things.

I’m pretty sure I put this one in the collection out of sheer cussedness. Enjoy!

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

18. The Dragon-Ship

Half-alive, prow cruelly pointed, undulant through the slow currents of spacetime: these were the ships that slipped like sea-snakes into galaxies no chemical thruster could reach.

A science fiction prose poem, never before published. This one is what it says on the can.

19. The Screech Owl Also Shall Rest There

Your love is mine, even if you don’t know it yet. Your life is mine. And, darling, new darling, I take what is mine.

This story was my first collaboration with my friend Jacqueline Flay. We’ve since collaborated on two other stories – one that is set to come out in Persistent Visions next year, and another that is still out on submission.

The nice thing about working with Jacqueline is that she nudges me to take more risks, and to explore territory I wouldn’t necessarily have built a story around on my own. “Screech Owl” is a sexy, kinky, violent, angry story about a Neolithic vampire and her loyal pack of humans. The gradual development of cities poses problems for her and her way of life. How do you cope with a change so massive, when it happens so slowly that a mortal might not notice it happening?

I did some research for this one, but probably less than the topic deserves. The initial impulse to write a Neolithic story came from a chapter of Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s “Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years,” which I read on a whim. The temple that features prominently in the story is inspired by this one.

“The Screech Owl Also Shall Rest There” was intended for a small-press anthology about vampires and tattoos, but Jacqueline and I had a contractual dispute with that publisher and the story was dropped. (In retrospect, I… still think it wasn’t a good contract, but I could have handled the situation much more tactfully than I did.) It eventually made its way into a different anthology by an equally small press, “The Death God’s Chosen”.

There are no owls in the story; the title is an obscure Bible reference that probably makes sense only to me.

Song Pairing: Jacqueline says the theme song for this one is In This Moment’s “Bloody Creature Poster Girl”. Who am I to disagree with Jacqueline?

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

15. Turning to Stone

Time flees,
and when the sound begins, you’ve run too far
ahead to hear.

A poem about an actual real-life autistic meltdown/catatonia thing that happened. Nor is it the only time I have had catatonia. Catatonia is a Thing.

I went through an unusual number of drafts with this poem. Folks on the poetry forum I was using at the time didn’t seem to get it no matter what I did. (Was it a drug trip? A lot of people seemed very intent on the idea that I was writing about a drug trip.) But they did have many useful suggestions, and they made the poem a stronger beast.

Putting the verses of the poem into first person was a very late development; earlier drafts were more distancing. The refrains in parentheses are also very altered from what they were in the early drafts. I wanted the people around the “stone woman” to be ironically admiring, expecting there to be something magical and powerful about her when in reality it’s just that she can’t move or talk right now. But that version of the lines didn’t connect with anyone. Adding some more realistically harsh external comments made them more powerful. It was also surprisingly painful to do.

The poem’s rhythm, which I rather like, was with it from the beginning.

I eventually worked up the nerve to stop posting drafts on the poetry forum and send it to Stone Telling, where Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan had yet more suggestions for edits (mostly about the enjambment). The published version is up here. Rose has told me that it’s still one of their favorite Stone Telling poems.

17. The Self-Rescuing Princess

Did you expect this: matted hair,
dress in the unsexy kind of tatters,
holes at the elbows and filth in the seams,
fingernails black, face scarred?

In 2013, and in the thick of processing some of my own traumas, I decided that the phrase “self-rescuing princess” made my hackles rise. It’s a common term of fan approval for female characters who don’t wilt around waiting for A Man to rescue them. It made me think thoughts about what it is to be rescued, to be in need of rescue, to have the need for rescue be presupposed but the idea of who is responsible for it to be in question. About the idea that, whatever horror might enter into a person’s life, a Good Person must remain self-sufficient in dealing with it and its aftereffects. (A relative of this idea is that the idea that these horrors are “for a therapist to deal with” and must never under any circumstances become an inconvenience to one’s actual friends.)

The resulting poem says a lot of things that I’m not sure I entirely agree with. Clearly, some part of me did at the time. (One thing I would certainly do differently if I was writing it again is the line that references Wonder Woman. I don’t think I really understood what that character was about at the time.) It’s still a fun rant, though – good enough for the editor of Lakeside Circus in 2014, though, and now good enough for MONSTERS IN MY MIND.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

13. Evianna Talirr Builds a Portal On Commission

Here’s the thing. Atoms lie.

First published in the 2014 HWA Poetry Showcase, this is the first official appearance of a character of mine who’s bounced around through a number of different settings and plots, including my out-on-spec novel. She’s one of two characters whom I built the novel around, and who existed before the rest of that setting did.

Here, you can find her luring an unnamed character into a portal to another universe in which he (?) will immediately cease to exist because the laws of physics no longer support his molecular structure. As one does.

14. The Mother of All Squid Builds a Library

“Foolishness,” said the whales again, and they swam back to the upper worlds, eating two of her bodies on the way without even saying thank you.

I wrote this as a birthday present for Bogi Takács; it’s the first and only story I’ve ever successfully written as a present. (Unless you count the rambling, badly spelled tale I once free-wrote for A. Merc Rustad, in which Elric of Melniboné meets Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid and Lovecraftian sea-witch hijinks ensue.)

Bogi was kind enough to make the process easy by listing story tropes that e liked: these included cephalopods and hive minds, especially if the hive minds were not presented as a bad thing. I ended up with a strange, almost fairy-tale-like flash story about a hive mind of squid. (At least one beta reader mistook it for a children’s story, which… Please don’t do that. There is flaying. A child who likes death and creepy stuff would probably enjoy it, but otherwise… don’t.)

After I showed the story to Bogi, I submitted it to the Friends of the Merrill Collection Contest (which it won) and then to various magazines, including Strange Horizons, which published it in December 2013. It’s free to read there. Out of all the stories I have ever written since then, this is still the one with my favorite title.

Song Pairing: Even aside from the fact that the literal voice of a literal whale is important in the story, there is no better accompaniment for this weird little undersea story than George Crumb’s beautifully weird piece of undersea chamber music, Voice of the Whale.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

11. A Certain Kind of Spider

The male of the species knows we want him.

This is an early poem from the point of view of a black widow spider. Pretty self-explanatory, really, and a good thematic pairing for the murderess protagonist of “Lady Blue and the Lampreys”. It’s also the only poem I ever had published in Star*Line, before I decided that I wasn’t very interested in Star*Line or the SFPA, really.

(The sign-language aspect of the poem was added rather hastily, when a beta reader asked how the male spider was still talking after the narrator had already eaten his head. Oops.)

12. The Siren of Mayberry Crescent

She snaps her jaws together.
Silence is golden.

A poem about the domestic life of a siren who, Little Mermaid-like, has gone on land with a lover who cannot deal with her voice.

The inspiration for this one came from a minor D&D NPC who was a siren (actually a “sirine”, which, in typical D&D monster fashion, is rather different from the original myths). I started wondering what her home life was like and how she felt about it. Inevitably the poem wandered from that starting point and went somewhere else, and some uncomfortably personal stuff also crept in.

This poem was published in Mythic Delirium #29. It was nominated in the long category for the Rhysling Award that year, which was my first-ever Rhysling Award nomination. (The second, “The Giantess’s Dream”, was in the short-form category, and was published too recently to go into this collection.)

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.