New Product - Two Stories - Unfood and Mining the Dream Plane

Here.

These are respectively the best and worst stories I've ever written, apparently. One of the stories was so bad that the writing program at World Con politely suggested, "Maybe you should stop writing science fiction and take up another hobby?" The other one got a note from a small but highly acclaimed publisher, "Good story but not what we're looking for." You guess which is which.

Unfood is about a down on his luck freighter captain whose spaceship gets intercepted carrying illegal cargo. His crew is sentenced to a harsh rock and he gets away scott free, but needs to get them out of prison, so he takes a desperate job to a fat prison ship, designed to FORCE people to lose weight. He finds the place abandoned, and is trapped on board. Talk about counting calories...this is a survival story where any calorie is a good one.

Mining the Dreamplane is about a future in which creativity is much more specialized than it is today. A writer's job is done by seven or eight people, including a crafter, a refiner, etc. But the most 'glamorous' job is the Miner, who goes into a computer simulation called the 'dream plane' to get raw creative stuff which others process. A miner gets stuck in this state when his handler is grabbed by the police and sentenced to wear corporate advertising to pay for his crimes. While he deals with the ramifications, the miner slowly starts to die and have weirder and weirder hallucinations.