My Writings

(Or: I've got more talent than I usually remember)

This is a collection of various things I've written. Most of its pretty short as I don't write as a primary interest, and in fact generally find myself too busy to do a lot of fictional writing nowadays.

The bulk of this material was generated in the early 90's. I don't have exact dates for most of it. Most of it has been distributed electronically before on Gainesville BBS's or other systems. None of it is really classifiable as a particular sort or style of prose.

All of the material is copyright by Jeff Mercer (that's me), 1996-2000 unless otherwise indicated. Feel free to distribute but please credit me, and contact me before using any material for commercial purposes.

WARNING!

These writings may contain something that offends you. There's no sex, very little violence, hardly any profanity... But it still might offend someone. Remember, if you don't like it, stop reading it. Thank you.

Fiction

GrayMan - My favorite piece. I wrote it to express a very complex and hard to explain set of emotions I had about life...
COMPWAR.DOC - Back when Dedaparamaxxinos Productions was in full swing (we're on furlough now due to the Federal goverment shutdown), this thing was started called COMPWAR.DOC which ended up becoming almost entirely my baby. It's very funny material, as is its cousins, the DEAD.DOC series of stories.
Time - Just a short little diddy. For some reason I always imagine this being read in a sort of eerie, sing-songy voice. I don't have the guts to actually do that, though.
Why It All Hurts - Yes, I used to be very bitter. Does it show?
Whirlwind's Voice - This is my second-favorite piece (next to GrayMan). It's history is interesting. It started off as just lyrics for a non-existant song, inspired by the excellent Walter John William's novel, "Voice Of The Whirlwind". Not too long after that, I was seriously getting into the newsgroup alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo (which I haven't visited in ages) and decided to post something on my Birthday. So I worked a sort of "video" around my lyrics. While it didn't integrate into the actual story lines going on at the time (Crystal Li, the Mechanics, etc.), the style was, I feel, just right.
Homo Postmortemus vs. The Glass Goblin - This bit was actually a co-operative effort between me and Fred Hicks back when we were both active on the First Church of Cyberspace BBS (now offline, sadly). It was a back-and-forth posting spree of a battle between our two RPG characters. I was Homo Postmortemus, the dead soul, while he was The Glass Goblin, SuperWimp. :)
SolarState - I wrote this back in 1991, shortly before Christmas day. It reflects a mental state I was in when going around shopping with a friend and it felt, literally, like a warm spring day...

Non-Fiction

Last Modified: August 30th, 2000
Jeff The Riffer aka Jeff Mercer / riffer@afn.org