When I began the “experiment in the bare bones of storytelling” that spawned the notional Pirates of the Caribbean sequel trilogy, I expected the second and third installments to be cursory follow-ups to the first episode, The Eye of the Wind.

But, as I fleshed out Cat o’ Nine Tails and True Colours, I realized that even these tent-pole sketches merited closer treatment. Eventually, I decided to move the sketches themselves to pages, so they would be accessible from the face of the website. The main page is here.

Now, you can find them in the menus above, under Fiction. The final installment will be posted soon!

“Tea, Robot?” by Nathaniel Tapley, concerning the middle-class Englishman in sci-fi, and “Wedging the Door Open: Discussing the Weird” by Jeremy L. C. Jones (with quotes from authors too many to list) at Clarkesworld magazine.

Also, the submission guidelines at Clarkesworld magazine, which lists “talking cats” as the 3rd item on its hard sell list.  This makes me want to submit “Reading Cats” to Clarkesworld, just to be obnoxious.

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Anyone who has ever spent more than a week on a social media site (which used to mean one of several places, but now pretty much means Facebook) has encountered the Page-56-Line-5 Game.

The game goes like this:

Open the book closest to you (not your favorite!) to page 56.  Copy line 5 from that page as your status, and explain the rules in a comment.  No cheating!

Typically this results in a forgettable, unidentifiable line even in the most well-written and easily recognizable work.  But, the other day luck was with me when the 56-5 Game reared its hackneyed head.

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skimmington /SKIM ing ton/ n A ceremony in which a man whose wife beat him or cheated on him was publicly ridiculed.

The skimmington had its heyday in English villages several hundred years ago.

–Depraved and Insulting English, by Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea.

Today I set out for DC’s King Library to buy a few books in their used bookstore.

Now, I know this is generally a No-No, but the books I buy are almost always older and obscure academic books that are either out-of-print or would never blip my radar unless I stumbled across them at a library sale or used book store.  So, technically there’s no replacement factor; the authors aren’t being robbed of royalties they would otherwise receive.

But, unknown to me when I set out, the King Library store is only open on weekdays.  Undaunted, I decided to walk down the street toward the White House, a few blocks east of which is a Borders^®.

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