Christmas Shorts

By Kevin Williams

the GLA Christmas, (parts 1+2) A mountain baby-bot Christmas, a leprechaun’s shaggy-dog Christmas, a few dyraids, UFOs, trees on the moon... All this and more in a collection of designed for animation shorts all based on a Christmas theme..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Williams
• Release date: May 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311872760

Kevin Williams

ANNOUNCEMENT.For my ten year anniversary here? New covers+ upgrades for everything!At a million words a week, I should be done by the end of feb.(Man! Had everything proofed before posting. Shoulda been after.)Oh, the AI rev? Bring it.Stealing market share, capturing a demographic, developing a fan-base?That's the game. Always has been.Unfortunately, so are goons, thieves and legislation. Luckers, people.Latest novels:The Finest Evil in the System : AI Woes Jan 2024FANTASY Aaron+Henna: The Elfin Princess's Kiss may 2023SF: Teddyhunter Rogue planets June 2023BOTH The Finest Evil in the System : AI Woes Jan 2024Shorts : The Finest Evil in the System; Loons, goons + booms.Novels are usually 100,000 words: freebies vary. (And might be ANYTHING!)If you don't fall over laughing at least once while reading, the book is a failure.Other than that, SF is the lit/philosophy of western urbanization.Problem-solvingthe effect of techon peoplevia new mythology.Beware, you MAY learn something. Or think a bit here and there, even in the comics..Cartooning? Does-is-ought. Take a does, show what it is, (is is?) discuss the ought. (ie: table= work-server= that gossips)SF? what if, then what, so what?Fantasy? Any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic. (Characters in conflict over issues)***Readers are welcome to proof-read; if I think it's a good correction, it goes in. (just send an e-mail, book-name + quoted line) Thanks. (One long-suffering reader got a few books dedicated to him.)On a personal note; I've got nearly 2 million words published at smashwords.com now. SF + fantasy novels, cartoons + short-stories.Jeez, lemme see; This whole mess got started in grade school; shorts in HS; novels after. (first one done in pencil.)Dozen or so 80,000 word novelettes (mostly type-writer.); first computer stuff, 80's; novels+shorts.Years of zines, quarterlies, novels, cartoons; (apple-clones, compacts, pcs) '86: BBSing a shorts echo (rogue-bone), blogs and cartooning. I THINK I can add another million words there. Maybe. Most of them are lost unless some old CD backups turn up.2021: Dead tree? If you don't make the best-seller list with your first novel today, you don't get a second. An 8-million web-wonder hit is entry-level stuff. (for movies. An ebook best seller is 10,000 or so) I think my count is 43 currently published over 8 years; and another dozen or so early works lost.******************* WARNING! * Live and live, (long i vs short) tho and thou. I use thou as tho sometimes. It's the most common complaint. Mostly edited out, but I still do.******************Writing has been a hobby of mine since the third grade, and was an ambition even earlier. Cartooning, music + philosophy are other bad habits I keep up. (Plus a few secret ones I'm NOT telling you about, so there!)Zining SF cons with shorts for years (on the freebie table) was a hobby. Well, till charging for intros,(lessons) freebie-table placements and contests became common. It was fun; quarterly editions, mostly. Fantasy, horror (Halloween), children's (Christmas), romantic comedy, (Valentines, st pats) hard SF, on july 1st or world con.Most are in the short-story collections, tho I'm still writing the occasional one today.Enjoy, thanks, pass it on! (Have a day of it, eh?)

Book preview

Christmas Shorts

Copyright 2015 By Kevin Williams

Smashwords License Statement Smashwords Edition. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover Art:

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and similarities to persons living or dead is a coincidence.

Canadian ISBN:978-0-9940155-5-6

ISBN:9781311872760

Note: This is a collection of SF, fantasy, shaggy-dog and blog stories. Christmas stories designed for animation, usually.

Author’s Note: Fan-mail, biz, complaints and suggestions to [e-mail]

Kevin Williams is on

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/packrat2

https://kevinwillpkgd.tumblr.com

He authors an SF series, Teddyhunter: (about runaway teddybear robots), a few books of short stories, comics and the Aaron+Henna fantasy series. The first in every series is usually a free ebook.

Teddyhunter

• Teddyhunter: The Underground

• Teddyhunter: The New World Order

• Teddyhunter: The Nano-zombie War

• Teddyhunter: I Can Get Better In The Parking-lot!

• Teddyhunter: The Neanderthal Gene

• Teddyhunter: New Genes

• Teddyhunter: Baby-Blues

• Teddyhunter: The Underground Railway

• Teddyhunter: Blob2

• Teddyhunter: Rogue Worlds

• Teddyhunter: Right in the Shorts

• Teddyhunter: 2022 shorts

Aaron+Henna

• The Gateway Project

• Girl-Ghost

• Aaron+Henna: The Witch-Wizard War

• Aaron+Henna: The Singing Sword

• Aaron+Henna: The Way of The Rat

• Aaron+Henna: The Terrible Twos

• Aaron+Henna: Summer Rain

• Aaron+Henna: Broken Magics

• Aaron+Henna: Dirty Float

• Aaron+Henna: Dragon-Witch

• Aaron+Henna: Teen Learns

• Aaron+Henna: The Elfin Princess’s Kiss

• Aaron+Henna: Short Stories

UFO Observer (comic)

• UFO Observer Book 1

• UFO Observer Pt Two Book 2

• UFO Observer Part Three Book 3

Shorts!

• Shorts From All Over

• Christmas Shorts

• The Apprentice’s Shorts

• The NWO: The Orderlie’s Silent Spring V2.

• Bogus Shorts

• SF Shorts

• By The Shorts

• 2021 Shorts

• 2022 Shorts: Odds and Ends

• Shorts 2023

comics

• Friday The 13th Sex-cult Problems

• Stalking Millionaires

• The Pour Witches of Fenwick

Canada

• The Cold Grows, The Roads Shrink P2

• The Maple Dyraid Life

sf • JoyToy:Singularity

FEITS

• The Finest Evil In the System: Omnibus

• The Finest Evil in the System: Goons, Loons and Boons

• The Finest Evil In the System: AI Woes.

***

chapter 1 crissy

What’s an engineering grad say to an arts grad? I’ll have fries with that.

And Arts answer? You’ve misspelt McDonald’s on the check again, sir.

Smiling, Cheri walked away from my desk. I ogled as best I could without breaking out howling. Heavens, she puts a lot of leg into her smile, doesn’t she?

Watching her walk away felt like an addicting activity so, tearing my eyes off her double teardrop butt, I tried to remember what it was I’d been working on before she trashed my concentration with those dulcet tones.

It was no use. I STILL had a picture of her rear in my mind and it was starting to do interesting things. The rest of me cheered her on, except that tiny bit that wanted to keep the rent paid. I was smitten.

Paul looked more than a little unsympathetic as he clacked away on his terminal, chewing away at another favor for his three-piece friends. He was connected and they kept the lines open with all sorts of garbage requests. Cold shower time already, eh? Don’t ya just hate it when she wears that flasher skirt?

Whimper. I agreed and forced myself back to my work. Space Service had discovered sapient (what else?) trees and I was supposed to, from my desk, write a program that’d set up communications with them. A conscious conifer that networked thru taproots and I had to adapt an AI to it.

We’re gonna need a second class saint to lumber thru my program, how bout you?

He blushed and didn’t answer. Another request to copy the wheel and claim it as an original, obviously.

I just hope they have a full medkit to poll these trees with otherwise…

Timber?

The pun fell flat as I guessed my way thru the rest of the configuration. It’d be 2 years before this planting in idiocy got back to me anyway.

Sagacious gimmickry didn’t help without testing and I wasn’t about to volunteer for another 4 years of jury-rigged kludges. I’d put my time into field engineering already.

I punched the program thru and logged the entry.

Communications were aboard, they could leaf.

And listen to the bark all they wanted.

They got even with me for that. Naturally.

***

Merry Christmas! HA HA HA! My wince must’ve been nasty ‘cause Crissy turned around and put her big baby blues on me.

I do wrong, no? came chirping out as I sputtered protests at her innocence.

You do wrong, YES!, Crissy. I sighed and wiped the weary tears away. It goes HO, not HA!

Her great big eyes looked puzzled and the Christmas ornaments drooped a little. I sighed and tried explaining to the tree why HA didn’t work here.

Again.

It’s hard to hurt a puppy, even when the puppy looks like a swamplog in drag, but I was being paid for it. I kept explaining things to Crissy till I was sure she had it this time.

Trying to ignore the usual crowd of alien watchers that stopped to stare, I explained the difference between ho, ha and hi to my charge, the ambassador from Swampland, a newly discovered planet with people of its own.

It didn’t sink into Crissy’s skull, err… trunk. Bark. whatever… very well. I could tell that by the way she trotted gaily thru the mall going HA HA HA! to everyone she met. So far most had enjoyed having a mobile Christmas tree talk to them.

English was the least of my problems. If I wasn’t careful, some sharpie was gonna try and unload his whole shop on her again. Crissy would rather ‘deroot’ as she said, than be blunt to a pushy salesman.

My charge was a little on the wimple side at the moment and I didn’t want to reason with another coffee-shop lawyer on what made a binding contract with not-quite-diplomatic immunity. My idea of reasoning with these yahoos made that a blood-sport anyway.

Crissy was already a charter member of The Useless, Sleeping, Thumbfooted Boneheads Club, the Cheap Thrills R -US club, the Masons AND the local PTA. Explaining washroom breaks to my boss only went so far and I couldn’t afford to leave her to any more predators.

Today’s problem was the season. Every try to explain Christmas to some whose idea of religion was adding fertilizer (RAW stinking FRESH fertilizer) to a bucket of slimy mud, then standing in it for a while?

She did, however, like the tree decorations and wore as many as she could hang on her branches. Nobody had told her the trees we dragged in were dead. Or that the holiday was based on somebody we’d strung up for rabble-rousing.

Then the pirate ship appeared on the horizon.

Literally. A pirate ship on Horizon TV, the latest wall-set.

A video shop was showing clips from the latest epic, you know the one, the rim-shot where a beauty gets fed to the volcano. The shot was of her doing a graceful dive, then skittering around on the hot lava as her clothes burnt off in shreds? A good clip. She moved like grease on a hot griddle, screaming beautifully the whole time.

Crissy didn’t like the rowan tree some idiot had left in the background in the rim shot.

This was worse than the dog’s little mistake.

Worse than her attempt to give advice to, yes, you guessed it, Bush.

I avoid Druids now, by the way. BOY, do I avoid Druids.

Now I’ve gotta