Category Archives: Reblogs

City Code Snapshot: YVR

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If this all sounds familiar, it’s hopefully because you remember this post from last year, and not because all my posts about flying sound the same (although I suppose that would be its own commentary on the nature of the gig these days…).  I’m reposting this Rhapsody in Blue and Green about my favoritest of all airports for the benefit of those among you who may wonder why (or, for that matter, how) I set my upcoming erotic romance almost entirely on Vancouver International Airport property.  You Again? is a short, sexy love story about When Henry Met Zack that gets kinda hot kinda right away.  Sure, to the casual reader, it’s about sex, it’s about expectations, and it’s about beauty and the eye of the beholder.  But if it’s True Romance you’re looking for, remember: Greater love hath no man than a flight attendant for his favorite airport. 

YVR totemWhen last I featured a City Code Snapshot, it was of our isolated airport layover in Houston.  I am a frequent and vocal critic of — OK, whiner about — lengthy airport layovers and their high boredom factor, as you will by now have noticed.  Thus I feel like there is a certain amount of poetic justice in the fact that my very favorite of all airport layovers — the one for which I single-mindedly bid to the exclusion of any other factor, and for which I shamelessly whore myself on the trade board — is in one of the most glittering and glamorous cities in North America.

I don’t care if I never see downtown Vancouver on a layover again, as long as we continue to luxuriate in these posh airport digs, and from me that’s pretty big talk.  The five-star hotel is not just attached to the airport, but is perched feet from the USA Departures terminal, and the view from the relaxation chamber that other hotels might try to pass off as a mere “room” is very often of the airplane that has delivered you there.  But not to worry: if this reminder of your fast-approaching a.m. departure threatens to foul your mood, the blinds are easily closed, noiselessly and automatically, at the push of a button beside your comfy bed.  Continue reading →

If It Ain’t Broke

There are few things I love as much as I love The Golden Girls, which is why I love these Valentines!  I can’t take credit for whipping them up (you know I would if I could), but I’m happy to post them here for the third year in a row for you to Snip and Send (or, well, hand deliver — today is the 14th.).

Yeah, it’s a Hallmark holiday, but what the hell?  I figure any excuse to celebrate love — be it for your partner, your smoldering secret crush, or priceless television comedy — is something you might as well seize.

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I love a good writing project.  I write better and more freely with my eye on a submission deadline, or a word-count goal, or a photo prompt than if I’m just writing to see what happens.  Early on, my writing group, the Open Book, got in the habit of starting meetings with exercises wherein we’d all whip out a few words for a few minutes on a given topic or song or bouquet of flowers, and then share the results by way of bringing us all together and getting the ball rolling.  As an extension of this, our favorite pastime, this year we’ve decided to build an anthology of short, original work.  Not just from the “members” of the group, but also from like-minded cousins and grandmas and passersby, reflecting the fluid, Come Ye Who Wish philosophy that governs most of our meetings.

Loving prompts the way we do, we decided we’d all be more likely to participate more fully if we had a theme, and the topic of Food, it will not surprise regular readers of Mister S. to learn, met little resistance (and might actually have been the only theme idea we even entertained).  Thus was Twelve Months of Tasty Morsels born.  Here at the beginning of month four, the antho is still taking shape as a blog which, at the end of the year, will be compiled into a little book of poetry, 100-word stories, and food haiku, the proceeds from which our group plans to donate to an as-yet undesignated local non-profit dealing with the art of writing and/or the fight against hunger.

This 100-word story, “Nothing Fancy,” is a reblog of my (just-submitted) February entry.  Visit the blog if you have a taste for this sort of thing, see what my writing buddies are up to, and, if you find something yummy, please enjoy!

Tasty Year: A Food Anthology

A 100-word piece by Michael Thomas for February

Nothing Fancy

“I just did some chili in the crockpot,” he squeaks, chin down. “It’s nothing fancy.” It’s February, I almost had to cross country ski over here, the kitchen window’s steamed over and the whole place smells of slow-cooking cumin and crackling fire. My veins are packed with snow and my eyelashes are icicles — him in that green sweater’s all the “fancy” I need. Can of beans, hunk of meat, let’s eat. “I figured a ton of garlic was OK,” he’s saying. “Only person I’m planning on kissing is you.” And just like that, I’m warm inside before I’ve eaten a bite.

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My latest short story, “Hot Shots,” focuses on the Olympic aspirations of handsome young Beau, whose Life’s Primary Ambition is to become an Olympic athlete, so that he can then have sex with as many other Olympic athletes as possible.  “Hot Shots” turns into a romance as Beau warms up to his coach, but this funny article seems to foretell (or at least fantasize about) the true-life version of my original idea, an Olympic Village gone hook-up mad!  I just got way more excited about watching the Olympics on TV.