WAS1 Productions

One of the perks of running an audio-fiction podcast is that I can pimp my own work on occasion.

Just in time for Halloween, is this flash-fiction mood piece I wrote last fall, The End of October.

I let my old webpage account expire. It had been years since I’d updated it and it had gotten a bit krufty. I kept on thinking I would re-tool the stories archives, but I never got around to it. I did publish an anthology of my general-interest work, New Technicolor Dreams but I have yet to get around to working on a similar collection for my adult/erotic work.

So here is a zip archive of all the stories from my old site, up to 2003. Note this archive contains both general-interest and adult work. Look at the index.html file for descriptions of the files.

If you enjoy these stories, please let me know, and also maybe consider a donation to AnthroDreams to help fund the podcast for audio fiction and perhaps other creative projects.

This was another story I wrote back in November. It’s still in its rough draft. I was hoping to get the time to polish it up, but life and work have continued to be extremely busy, and I haven’t had the time or focus to come back to it. So I decided I wanted to post this rough version, as even with the flaws I know are there, it’s still a nice piece of mood reading.

This is a very personal piece for me. It’s not that I have anywhere near the dark thoughts that the protagonist do, and it doesn’t relate directly to anything in my life. Instead it was the result of a stressful time. During the second half of November, my sister was in the hospital due to various complications from what should have been a routine surgery. She was in quite serious condition at times there, and things kept vacillating between good and bad news for a few days. It ended up being an emotional roller coaster and this story was a cathartic synthesis of that mix of emotions.

I’d remembered the song “Hope” by R.E.M. off their album “Up” in the late 1990s and how I’d emotionally connected with it. My mother had been in the hospital recovering from a surgery when I was first listening to the album. I remembered coming home from visiting her, and although she was recovering well the stanza about the medical procedure still struck a chord with me. That seemed much more relevant this time around.

The whole album struck me as beautifully sad, with songs about pain and loss, loneliness and regrets, but there were also some mournfully hopeful songs in there as well. I’d listened to “Hope” several times on the way home from visiting my sister on a good night. I also listened to some other songs on the album “The Apologist” and “Sad Professor” and then “Walk Unafraid” for one of the hopeful songs.

Listening to those songs was so emotional. It conjured up some of the feelings I remembered from listening to the album the first few times. It also tied in to all the stress and angst and worries I’d had over the past week. It was beautiful and moving and I knew I wanted to write a story to capture that mood. Slowly an idea started to gel for me. It’s a little silly, but I think I managed to pull it off as a mood piece and a bit of speculative fantasy. I also really liked the character and name that came to me this one.

I tried an experiment with this story as I wanted to reference all of the lyrics to “Hope,” so I broke it out stanza by stanza. I had the story flow around it, following the mood of the song somewhat, it wasn’t perfect, but I liked how it came out. It’s by no means a literal interpretation of the song, but I think it’s a nice emotional interpretation of it.

Hope and Alligators
by Will A. Sanborn, 11/27/12
Song lyrics quoted from “Hope” by R.E.M.

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I had this quick idea for a scene. Daylight Savings Time always annoys me. Well the extra hour of sleep is nice, but sunset getting earlier as the days are short enough already, that’s the part I don’t like. So I imagined a conversation with someone who would appreciate it.

Daylight Savings Time
by Will A. Sanborn 11/08/12

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This started out as an idea I’d had since Halloween, which had bounced around in my head until I was finally able to put it together into a complete scene. It’s more of a mood piece than a story-driven plot, but I really like how it came out. It takes a couple of (non-mystical) memories I have from October nights and turned into a sweet love letter to Autumn and Halloween.

I am currently writing furiously to keep up with the word count for NaNoWriMo, so I didn’t have a chance to fully proof read this, so I’m sure there are typos in it.

The End of October
by Will A. Sanborn, 11/05/12

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