A Christmas 75-Worder #18

I wrote this one to be deliberately ambiguous, to let you, the reader decide what the mechanism for what actually happens is. I also wrote it because, sometimes, things can be really tight at Christmas, but it doesn't take much to turn things around and make a huge difference to an individual.

Robert slipped his card nervously into the cash point machine. He knew things were tight, really tight. He typed his PIN slowly into the machine and waited. He requested his balance and his heart sank. YOUR BALANCE IS: £4.62. TODAY YOU MAY WITHDRAW: £0.00. Tearfully he went to cancel his transaction when the screen blanked out. Then the words: MERRY CHRISTMAS BOBBY MY BOY appeared and the machine dispensed two crisp £20 notes.

I would be interested to know what you think about this one...

A Christmas 75-worder #17

I confess that I do have a fascination with the whole Santa and Rudolph thing, but obviously, having grown up with Neil Gaiman, it's not possible to just write a straight up 'nice' story of a man and his magical reindeer...

They unbolted the door and held the creature at bay with long pikes. It hissed and spat a flaming, sticky liquid onto the ground. It howled as they worked in pairs to distract it and force it into its harness. It thrashed its head and razor sharp antlers, but they got its snapping maw into the iron muzzle. In the semi-darkness it glowed red hot as it filled with fire. Rudolf was ready for flight.

Ho Ho Ho...?

A Christmas 75-worder #16

Another Science Fiction themed Christmas 75-worder, although you will see, I hope that I've given it a little fantasy spin and left the ending open ended, which is all you have space to do in such a short piece.I'll let you draw your own conclusions with this one...

Mars One was Humanity’s first non-Lunar permanent colony. It was small, just 27 scientists and engineers for this one-way trip as they began a lifetime of work to make it possible for those that would follow to return back to Earth if required. Christmas Day was business as usual, but nobody admitted to the clever hoax of hoof prints in the Martian soil or where the non-itinerary gifts left in their bunks had come from.

Hope all your Christmas wrapping is almost done, the clock is ticking and time is almost up.

A Christmas 75-worder #15

This is one of my favourite 75-worders, not just of Christmas, but of any of those that I have written. I was very pleased when this one got picked for publication on the Paragraph Planet website in December 2014 during its seasonal Christmas run of 75-worders.

The attack came from nowhere, the perfect ambush. Biggsy took a head shot and tumbled backwards through the trees and disappeared out of sight as the rest of the patrol dived for cover. For a brief moment Tonky’s world was filled with blinding, stinging shrapnel, but then the thudding impacts stopped. He nodded to the rest, the enemy had not staggered their fire and were now reloading. They broke from cover, snowballs at the ready.

A Christmas 75-worder #14

As I said in a previous post in this series, despite my love of Science-Fiction, I often struggle to do justice to the genre in just 75-words, especially if you throw Christmas into the mix. The idea for this one came to me after stumbling over a re-run of Men in Black and I didn't write it at Christmas (unlike most of my other Christmas themed stories).

The commander read the charge sheet with growing alarm. He looked up at the prisoner and spoke in grave tones. “When we picked up your distress beacon after you’d crashed, you were instructed to lay low, but what do I see here? Use of temporal warp fields, unauthorised use of anti-gravity technology… Abuse of replicators… Turn that morph-field off!” The prisoner complied with the order. White beard became orange tentacles, but the red suit remained.

Well, by this time next week, it'll all be over! Hope your Christmas preparations are going brilliantly...

A Christmas 75-worder #13

This one came to me quite easily, once I'd decided it was going to be a play on words, the story pretty much wrote itself. I like it when that happens!

After Martha hung up the phone on her son she began to fret. Her house was beautifully and tastefully bedecked in subtle golds and silvers of festive decoration and now he said he was going to be bringing his own too, something nasty and modern from his art college no doubt. When she opened the door later, she was momentarily baffled. “Mum, this is Holly,” he said of the pretty girl stood next to him.

A Christmas 75-worder #12

Sometimes all I have is a character, in this case the dad, and I just put them in a scene and see what happens. Usually what happens is I end up with an idea for story that is much longer than 75-words, but at least I have the idea. The rest is just editing.I really like this one, it gets me quite emotional reading it back.

Dad had always been a bit of an emotional flatliner. Never cross, but never particularly excitable either. Nervously, she handed him the envelope and waited. He opened the plain white card and stared at the small black-and-white image. She watched as his eyes scanned the words written next to it over and over again. “Merry Christmas Granddad, see you in a few months.” Tears ran down his cheeks, each one a rare and precious diamond.

A Christmas 75-worder #11

I adore the writings of Neil Gaiman, his short story collection, Smoke and Mirrors, is a particular favourite. I love the way Gaiman takes a familiar tale or character and twists them into something else and Nicholas Was does this brilliantly. I have tried my best to capture the essence of what Gaiman manages so beautifully in this 75-worder...

He had bitten off the jingle bells from his suit. The icy wind penetrated his thin frame through the holes in his green and gold jacket. The tips of his pointy ears were frozen. The sack, as his Master’s magic wore off, became heavier with each desperate stride. A glance backwards into the dark revealed a demonic lantern of red. “After him Rudolf!” the terrifying voice boomed out. He was never going to make it.

It should be noted that my eight year old daughter, Yvie, has a slightly different idea of a demonic Rudolph than I do.

A Christmas 75-worder #10

You can blame my fellow WordWatchers member Julian for this one. Julian had the idea for an 'alternative'  series of Christmas cards that started off with something traditional, recognisable and 'nice' and then, on the inside, twist it into something macabre.So this 75-worder is an expansion of that idea. Enjoy. Or , indeed, not...

The children had nagged me for months in the run up to Christmas. They had begged and pleaded and I admit, that in the end, just for an easy life, I gave in. Despite the constant warnings about it being for life and not just for Christmas I ordered a puppy. However, I have to say, I was rather disappointed. The children too seemed quite upset by the lack of flavour and barely touched it.

A Christmas 75-worder #9

It turns out writing Christmas themed Science Fiction is quite hard, or at least I have certainly found it to be the case. I have written several that will never leave my hard drive, but there are also a few that I'm pleased with. They seem to work best if they're 'Christmas with a twist' where the twist is the Science Fiction element.Well, here's the first Science Fiction (ish) 75-worder  I wrote that I was actually happy with. Enjoy (I hope!)

Above them the stars sparkled diamond white against a background of inky blackness. Snow floated gently through the air and their breath billowed out as clouds of white as they sang their Christmas Carols. At the end of the service there was an exchange of small and simple gifts and they returned to their duties. The atmosphere of the observation deck was returned to normal and the spacecraft continued its exploration of the asteroid field.

A Christmas 75-worder #8

This is one of those 75-worders that coalesced from several different tiny fragments of stories I'd heard over the years. It made me smile writing it, so I hope it does the same when you've read it.

When they couldn’t find the brandy Grandpa brought out a dusty old bottle from the back of the larder, after sniffing the contents, he poured it onto the Christmas Pudding. As dad approached with the lit match there was a white flash and a scream as a high velocity silver sixpence hit Granny on the forehead. Scattered across the kitchen, superheated sultanas went bang. Of the pudding itself, nothing remained, save a charred sprig of holly.

Until next time.

A Christmas 75-Worder #7

The Christmas period lends itself, not unsurprisingly, to the Fantasy genre. Although it took me a while to start to be pleased with my fantasy based Christmas stories I was really happy with this one. My take on the origins of the Christmas Tree...

He found her covered in snow. Her skin glistened in the moonlight as he gently lifted her free. She was cold to the touch, barely a breath in her body. He carried her back to his cabin, carefully fed her the last of his soup and wrapped her in his only animal skin blanket. When he woke in the morning she was gone but a magnificent pine had rooted where he had laid her down.

Until tomorrow!

A Christmas 75-worder #6

I wrote this 75-worder a couple of years ago when Yvie, my snowflake creator, was just six years old. Those years have flashed by and, while we still have a believer in the house, I think this may be my last year as Father Christmas (and indeed, my 500th 75-worder was on that very subject and I may share it with you all later...)

It has been a week since I shaved and you sit on my knee and rub your hands across my cheeks, giggling at the sensation. You rub at my chin, where the hair is all but white and declare that I am turning into Father Christmas. I smile, thinking of years of glasses of whisky and half eaten carrots and bedroom creeping and hope I have a few years left with my secret identity still intact.

Until tomorrow (I hope!)

A Christmas 75-worder #5

I remember writing this particular 75-worder after listening to a particularly depressing news section on the radio. While I accept these things happen and they should not be ignored, it felt, at the time, as if there was a concerted effort to destroy what little Christmas spirit I had...

I turn off the radio, I drop the newspaper into the bin. I don’t want to know about the traffic chaos, closed schools or the delayed flights. I clasp my cup of hot chocolate and wait. Soon the first few flakes tumble past the window then disappear, but eventually, as I sip, the world turns white. Magical, sparkling, crisp, clean and virginal. Momentarily perfect. I look into the garden and see a snowman not yet made.

I felt much better about the world and myself when I finished writing it.

A Christmas 75-worder #4

This 75-worder was one of my first, but I only recently transferred it to the format you see here. I'm happy with the concept, although I'm still not quite happy with the font...It remains one of my favourite 75-worders too and one of the few that I've subsequently gone back and give a title to, The List of the Lost, in Paragraph Planet terms this would have been simply, He was a creature of lists, had it ever been published.