Stories That Don’t Belong [EP]

[Title, because I guess WordPress won’t let me use the page as a link?]

Track 1: Grow Up!

Okay, so my “notes” for this consist of… one random deleted sentence and three (3) Nahuatl names and their incredibly tortured English sound-alikes. They do explain where the otherwise¹ incredibly random reference to The Room comes from, tho’! – “Ehecatl” becoming “Oh hey Kate”. (And “Xolotl” became “Charlotte” and “Quetzalcoatl” became “Kestrel”, and I’m pretty sure the latter is also where the otherwise completely² inexplicable feathered boa came from.)

No idea whatsoever where the Britney Spears allusion came from. I’m assuming that I saw “gills”, “lungs”, and – with the whole ‘growing up’ theme in mind – made the obvious³ link.

Other than that it’s… a pretty straightforward –

– straightforward, albeit modernized/urban-fantasized & gender-swapped, reskinning⁴ of the Aztec mythology surrounding Quetzalcoatl and Xolotl.

1. And, honestly, still. ↩︎
2. And, honestly, still pretty. ↩︎
3. ↩︎
4. Gotta get cute with the formatting because default WordPress doesn’t allow full-size images in the footnotes, and I’m not feeling like manually setting up page anchors in the HTML right now to roll my own footnotes although that’s absolutely the kinda thing I’ll probably do eventually because… footnotes; but, anyways, “reskinning”– ↩︎

Track 2: Waking Life

Update (2026/08/31): I, uh, kinda completely forgot how, in the kind & appreciated words of an editor who read this, “[I] embraced to a fault the John W. Campbell precept that a story taking place in the future should make perfect sense to someone from that future, a quality rarely seen in [their] submissions.”

Which is to say that, um… I did extensive research to backstop & world-build an explanation for basically every detail in this… (aspirationally) Gibsonesquely (?) dense 1,600-word story. Almost none of which made it onto the page, 100% intentionally on purpose.

Which in turn is to say that… these notes may be some time in appearing and/or appear — literally — for a single paragraph of text at a time.

Track 3: They Will Have Always Lived in the Castle

[TBD]