[Introduction: Melanie Stormm continues her humorous series of posts about the misdirected emails she’s been getting. Stormm is a multiracial writer who writes fiction, poetry, and audio theatre. Her novella, Last Poet of Wyrld’s End is available through Candlemark & Gleam. She is currently the editor at the SPECk, a monthly publication on speculative poetry by the SFPA. Find her in her virtual home at coldwildeyes.com. Wipe your feet before entering.]

AN ARK OF SUB GENRES

Hello, all! Melanie here.

It’s rained quite hard here in New Hampshire. Our town flooded, a few roads were washed away, and some residents lost access to the outside world altogether. My house was mostly spared but nonetheless acquired a foot of water. Two weeks later, we’ve finally got the musty smell out of the air, although there are so many fans in my basement, I’m afraid we might drift skyward like a house balloon.

We haven’t heard from Writer X for a couple weeks, either. As it turns out, Cradensburg, NH, received significantly more flooding than we did, and her hands were full.

Remember that entire wing X hired gnomes to add to her house? I know this will come as a surprise to many, but when gnomes throw up square footage in the course of one or two weeks, there are a few architectural drawbacks.

Without further ado…

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Subject: Ark replacement

Dear Gladys,

I would have written you earlier but I had trouble getting flights home from Mount Ararat. Ever since 2020 the airlines have become incorrigible!!!

First, we couldn’t find a direct flight from Mount Ararat to Cradensburg, NH which is just mind blowing that an airline would never think to connect these two VERY IMPORTANT PARTS of the map!!! Fortunately for us, I was able to put together a very nearly ALMOST direct series of flights that saved at least $30 per ticket. When I mentioned we’re all writers, they told us they would give us extra air.

Secondly, on the first leg of our trip from Yerevan to Hong Kong, they promised us complementary pretzels but ran out of them while we were still over Saudi airspace!!! Then, on the fourth leg of our return trip from Melbourne, Australia to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, we threw a high altitude hula party but the stewards informed us the airline has a strict policy about serving alcoholic beverages to passengers who are only wearing body paint, to say nothing of the pigs swinging around on stripper poles. You can’t have a hula without pigs, Gladys!!!!!

Of course I had to reel things in. You know how those far future science fiction writers fly. They are wild and free. But by the time our passports were returned on the tenth leg of our return trip we had worked things out.

Anyhoo, you’re probably dying to know how my writing is going. Things were going quite nicely and my boyfriend, award nominated fantasy writer Tod Boadkins, and I were having an ordinary Monday afternoon writing in the writing wing of our house. Tryxy was also having a particularly lovely day. He had just perfected his rainy day playlist so that it was nothing but a #MOOD, and he had brushed #bestkitten, trimmed her claws, and finally removed the very last of her cat hair off his favorite terry track suit.

Sometime after that, our house began to float. First there was a loud crack as the new wing tore away from the original cape cod structure, and then we were drifting. At first it was enjoyable. Do you ever drive around and look into people’s windows? Of course you do, it’s enormous fun. Well, what if you could stay in the comforts of your own home while floating through the neighborhood and seeing whose calico cat is sitting in the window and who is watching television in dingy boxer shorts???

But after a couple hours of that, the rains fell in earnest and Main Street Cradensburg turned into rapids. The house began to pitch this way and that and when Tryxy’s statue of Lil Nas X dislodged and went flying through the house, I lost at least a third of my faberge eggs (THEY’RE MY LATEST OBSESSION, GLADYS!!!) Something had to be done, but when I threw open a window to cry for help, that’s when I learned someone else had already beaten me to the punch and was crying for rescue out there.

It was a small writing critique group who had gathered on this rainiest of days during a flood watch and there they were, stranded on top of a porch with their latest works in progress and a speckled pony. We stuck our arms out the window and rescued them all before the tidal wake of our house swept them all away!!!!

Once the writers, the works in progress, and the pony were safe indoors, we had another problem on our hands: THE HOUSE WAS PITCHING SOMETHING AWFUL!!! If I didn’t act quickly, I would lose another third of my faberge eggs and Tryxy would lose his lunch!!!

Fortunately for us, we spotted another lost soul standing on the roof of a floating SUV with their laptop held high over their head lest their short stories be wiped from the earth!!!! Tryxy made kind of life preserver from a rope and a deflated exercise ball and flung it out to that poor writer!!! The writer threw her laptop onto the exercise ball, plunged into the water, and splonked around as we drew her in to safety.

We had quite a crowd in the southern part of the floating wing what with the speckled pony and all. But there was news of another flock of writers stranded on the roof of an Aroma Joes, clinging to their cats, and the rapids were already carrying us in that direction!!!

Tryxy suggested that if there were going to be any more people climbing aboard this vessel, could we—for the love of god and hiphop—come up with a way of organizing them so that our weights were evenly distributed and we could be done with this horrible pitching back and forth.

This is when I concocted the Ark of Subgenres System, also known as the A.of S. S.!!! I sprang into action designating that fantasy writers fill the rooms to the north, science fiction to the south, and horror fill the rooms in the west. Four-legged people could take the upper floors and I installed Tryxy as Manager of that particular Mess.

But then my boyfriend, award nominated fantasy writer Tod Boadkins, said what about Weird? And I said, What’s Weird? And he said, No, weird fiction I mean, where do we put them? And I said, You’re right, this is a disaster waiting to happen.

So then we determined that since there are more rooms on the north and south sides of the house, that some of the rooms abutting the west would be assigned to weird.

How do we know which side to put a weird writer on? North or South? By weight? my boyfriend asked.

By weight???? Don’t be preposterous, I said. If their work is weird but has things that behave like magic or is set in the past, we’ll put them in the Weird Fantasy rooms to the north. And if it’s weird but has advanced technology or is set in the future, then we’ll put them in the Weird Science Fiction rooms to the south. 

Crisis averted, said my boyfriend.

Only that’s when our floating house went spinning by a group of young writers who had congregated in a rapidly deteriorating treehouse. Most of them wrote Corrective Harry Potter Fan Fiction that seeks to undo the damage that She-Who-Will-Not-Be-Named is doing to witches and wizards everywhere so, before we knew it, the north end of the house was over populated and my faberge eggs quivered perilously from the northern edge of the display case.

There were still three writers who had not been assigned rooms and none of them knew what genre they belonged to exactly. We quickly asked them to describe their latest works in progress and, wouldn’t you know it, two of them were science fiction. I became very excited because one of them was a triple threat. He was very smart, very good looking, and fantastically fat. Unfortunately, when we came to the third of them, she announced that she wrote science fantasy and then we were stuck moving people into different rooms all over again!!!!

Science fantasy is its own genre, Gladys!!!!!

That was when we passed the pet shop. We sent out rescue crafts and quickly passed all the cats, puppies, ferrets, iguanas, birds and tarantulas into the house and Tryxy developed his own little organization system and assigned them to rooms two by two.

No one was expecting the talking pigs. We passed an abandoned animal farm on Dead Mist Hill and collected three alapacas, one goat, and six pigs whom a mad scientist/pole fitness instructor had trained to talk.

That’s when award nominated fantasy writer Tod Boadkins said, What about talking animals?

They go up to Tryxy, I said.

No, I mean are we failing to account for talking animal stories?

They’re fantasy, I said.

Yes, but if we’re putting weird fantasy down near horror, shouldn’t we put fabulist fiction at the other end? It’s starting to tip a little westward and if we keep going this way, we’ll end up in Maine, he said.

But before we could do anything about it, one of the science fiction writers came back out and said, What if my story has a ghost? Do I still belong in science fiction?

Weird science fiction, Tod BOadkins and I said in unison.

But what if the ghost isn’t weird, what if it’s a retelling of The Christmas Carol but in space? asked the writer.

And then we had to rearrange everyone all over again. Meanwhile, Tryxy was on the upper floor in hog heaven, you know how he loves animals. However, it turns out that there is only so much pet hair a terry cloth tracksuit can sustain without become an irreversible ball of fluff and the alpacas were particularly affectionate and the goat ate Tryxy’s favorite sandals.

Before anyone had anytime to settle in, we passed a barn with about thirty writers and their cats taking refuge on the roof and two of them were slipstream and one of them wrote comic books. No matter how we arranged and rearranged, the sudden influx of wet, clingy, disgruntled cats threatened to capsize the whole vessel and we hit a whirlpool and spun clear across New Hampshire, up through Maine, and into the Atlantic.

Fortunately, we had a room with at least two Christian fantasy writers who were able to provide ark-steering instructions and I was able to gain control of things and land us safely on Ararat and book all our trips back home.

Or what was left of my home. When Tryxy, #bestkitten, award nominated fantasy writer Tod Boadkins and I got back, we were greeted by a tiny cape cod with a hole in the back of it, a statue of Lil Nas X in the front yard, and absolutely nowhere to put my remaining faberge eggs!!!!

Pages next week Gladys!!!!

xox,

X

ONCE, BACK

IN THE

ANCIENT CITY

OF NINEVAH,

THERE WAS

A FLOOD

AND I

ARRANGED ALL

THE ANIMALS

TWO BY

TWO ON

A BARGE

AND GOD

SAW AND

WAS LIKE

THAT’S SO

COOL, SHOW

ME THAT

AGAIN AND

I SAID

NO AND

GOD SAID

FINE, I’LL

ASK NOAH.