Ini adalah cerita pengalaman pertama seorang lelaki mature yang dah kahwin tapi lama tiada hubungan intim dengan isterinya. Apakah pengalaman pertamanya dengan seorang gadis muda dari office dia

A collection of my contest submissions too short to standalone. Mostly an archive for me, but feel free to peruse!

建中二年（七八一年），唐德宗(李適)發動削藩戰爭，但因社會和政治條件不成熟，建中四年（七八三年），因朝廷賞賜有失公平，激起涇原兵變，致使戰亂接連爆發，德宗倉皇出逃到奉天（今陝西乾縣），早年入朝面聖卻被軟禁在京城的前盧龍節度使朱泚在譁變軍士的擁護下稱帝，改國號為秦。涇原之變時，長期討逆伐叛的朔方節度使李懷光因奸臣盧杞畏罪挑撥而見疑於德宗，自危之下鋌而走險加入了叛亂陣營，因在這次戰爭中，有四人稱王，兩人稱帝，即朱滔稱冀王，王武俊稱趙王，田悦稱魏王，李納稱齊王，朱泚稱秦帝，李希烈稱楚帝，故又稱二帝四王之亂。最後幸賴依靠宰相李泌及大將李晟、渾瑊等人協力平亂，經歷艱難險阻，終於擊破朱泚、李懷光聯軍，德宗才得以重返長安。奉天之難之後，涇原兵變後，大唐天子的威嚴完全掃地，中央權力進一步削弱，應對地方的藩鎮割據更顯得無心無力，大唐此時內憂外患，為了抵御吐蕃的入侵，宰相李泌制訂了“北和回紇，南通雲南（南詔），西結大食、天竺”，以困吐蕃之外交政策。

England 1694—

Constantine Every is the daughter of infamous pirate captain Henry Every, the richest and most elusive pirate alive. Until one day, she suddenly wakes to become a hostage of her father's greatest enemy and Devil of the Atlantic, Captain Thomas Tew. While Tew hunts for her father and his hoard of riches, Constantine is thrown into a cruel world unlike any she's ever known. She's sure her story is finished until she meets Edmund Hemingway, the ship's cabin boy. The two fight to stay alive on the nightmarish pirate ship as they travel across vast oceans and mysterious lands to find Henry Every and his enormous fortune. But the southern winds are rough and tides will turn. And no one, not even Constantine herself, is sure they'll make it out alive.

***Book One of The Bastard Girl Series ***

極光系列【前傳】

西元二十二世紀末，地球的兩大強權國家發起戰爭。西方與東方⸺歐美大西洋聯邦、亞洲太平洋人民共和國，表面上激烈對立，實際上卻在暗中主導互利共生的戰爭經濟體系。邪惡已經蔓延到腳下，人民還是無法起身反抗。此時，他們⸺滅絕之戰反抗軍出現了。

Maeve Connor, 32, is a special education teacher who believes her boyfriend of five years will finally propose during the holidays. To her horror and shock, her boyfriend drops a bombshell that not only will he not propose, but he doesn't love her anymore. Her hopes and dreams have been dashed before Christmas, and she believes she is doomed to never find true love. That changes when she meets the handsome CEO Treyton Bledig.

Treyton, 50, is the CEO and a werewolf. However, it is not just any ordinary werewolf, but the Alpha of the Bloodraven Pack in California. Despite all of his success, he lacks success in his love life. Although he couldn't find his mate, he married and had a child. However, he and his wife divorced, and Treyton is again left alone, making him feel alone, bitter, and jealous of those with someone for Christmas. However, when he meets Maeve, everything changes for him; she is his mate.

This is their Christmas story.

电影中挣扎，梦幻中玩笑。    是非名利，得意失意，弹指成灰。    文者见文，诚者见诚。淫者见淫，蠢者见蠢。    东汉末年分三国，烽火连天不休——好吧，跟这没关系。　此文小众，玩笑至上。　基本内容，力求简洁。言外之意，请翻资料。    向前辈致敬。

on one side of our house, but that was not why; I could hear the regular sigh of his breath when we watched TV together. “A minor circulatory thing,” I overheard him tell the other neighbour, but that was also not why because I could hear the steady ba-dumpof his heart when I put my ear on his swollen belly. He just did not likethe heat, I decided, like he did not like Coke but I did. The afternoon heat would drive us to the depths of the old stone church or the blasting chill of the video mart where we gazed long and hard but usually came away empty-handed. Sometimes we would ride the air-conditioned subway, end to end, with Dad trying to hide the yawns that split his jaw wide as the Don Valley.

During our last summer together, we stayed for a week at Dad’s parents’ cottage. It was possible to position your lawn-chair near the lakeshore in such a way that no other dwelling was visible. The green was rich, impenetrable. “Just like Mario World, innit, Chief,” Dad said to me. The cottage, with its splotches of red and white, looked indeed like a giant Mario mushroom. Its windows were large and high and faced the lake, and inside, its floors were the colour of golden honey.

“More like Grimms’ world,” Mom said. She stared into the dark pines.

Beside the cottage was a shingled lean-to in which someone—my uncles, perhaps—had stacked hundreds of pieces of wood about the size of children’s forearms. The wood in the lean-to seemed to wall off the Mario cottage from the rest of the world. Most afternoons, Dad would sit with his chair in the shade while I splashed in the water, chasing silvery fish with a net. Mom rattled about with dishes and dustpans and eventually emerged, toting a thick yellowed paperback.

Sometimes I would look up and see Dad’s chair empty. “Dad, Dad!” I would rush out of the lake, scanning the shady spots nearby, hollering until Mom dropped her book. Once we had to walk far in from the shore, up a pine needle path, until I saw Dad, sitting on a boulder like a natural throne, calmly surveying his realm. He nodded gravely. I hid my tears. I had to. I could not explain my relief.

Dinner was macaroni, boiled to near-pudding consistency on the wood-burning stove, unless we felt too hot, and then it would be crackers from tins, crackers until our mouths went dry. We listened to news from the wind-up radio. Mom had no patience to wind it so she’d fake a sore arm, and say to me: “Chief, give it a turn.”

My parents spoke to each other by trading words back and forth like two parrots tenderly passing a nut between powerful beaks.

“Cards for evening?”

“Cards for evening.”

“Where would we be without our cards?”

“Without our cards—nowhere, that’s where.”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere looks a lot like here.”

“But here we have cards.”

“Maybe nowhere has cards, too.”

“Shuffle the cards, why not.”

“Why not, it’s a routine procedure.”

“Oh, we know about routine procedures.”

“Routine procedures, ‘nuff said.”

“Give ‘em to Chief, why not.”

“Chief, shuffle.”

“There you go, they are chiefly shuffled.”

They would carry on with these bursts of verbal keep-up, like practice badminton where players aim only to keep the birdie in the air. This was the way we spoke in our family; not like those other conversations my parents had with doctors, full of long and exhausting sentences that started in one place and ended in another place, always worse.

At night we slept in the smallest bedroom of the cottage, Dad and I on spongy sleeping pads. Our sheets were worn to the limpness of complete surrender, and Dad would pick up the corners like delicate silk. Mom laid claim to an old army cot that squeaked with every movement. She trained herself to sleep half the night on one side, half the night on the other. Dad snored, which bothered Mom in the city but was encouraged here in the forest because it kept the porcupines—or worse—at bay. “Lights out!” Mom would say as she blew out the candle, leaving just the red pin-prick where the tip of the wick used to be. I would stare until it shrank to nothingness, while Dad gently touched my hair with his fingertips. I never asked him if he watched the ember disappearing, too.

Every morning I kept myself lying down until Mom or Dad woke up. I imagined I was under a Spell of Immobility until the ogre next door, the one who stockpiled arms, left to go pillaging, whatever that was. I splayed the fingers of my hand on the honey-coloured floor like I was stuck to flypaper. Birds called urgently from the trees, but no one under the Spell could wake. I could see the slack lips of Dad’s face and the moisture collecting on the lower corner of his mouth.

Then Mom would move, the squeaking of the cot sounding like the wretchedness of dreams rubbing off. Her eyes always searched first for him, then me. Catching my eye, she, too, tried to stay motionless. I tried to make Mom gasp by crossing my eyes until the muscles in my eye-sockets hurt. Or I silently curled my lip in a scowl until my gum dried out. It was our little game while we waited for Dad to wake up. I stared at his brow, or sometimes just looked out the window at the Mario-green leaves pressing themselves, like faces of curious onlookers, against the glass. His waking caused me to feel joyful, giddy, strong.

Then my parents would rise, paw through the contents of drawers until they discovered a pot, teabags, and matches for lighting the wood stove. How had the other one slept, they were anxious to know, and each of them gave surprisingly detailed answers. Occasionally they remembered to ask me how I had slept but, as an absurdly deep sleeper, I never had anything to report.

After their pot of “brawny brown” my parents would rustle around until they discovered oatmeal and raisins for breakfast. They cooked these in a battered aluminum pot, blackened on the outside and grey as a rainy sky inside. I did not like oatmeal, nor, I suspect, did they, but out of sheer novelty at the Mario cottage, we spooned the sticky gobs of stuckness into our mouths, chewed twice, and swallowed. It held all morning.

Afterward Mom scoured the oatmeal pot with gravel at the lakeshore. We cleared brush or rambled along the main path, which extended to the roadway where our car was parked among the tall grasses for the week, its wheel wells looking like smooth animal haunches, ready to pounce and drag us back to the world of video marts and milkshakes.

Clearing brush mystified me. Mom told me it was like combing tangles out of her hair, and every piece of forest needed this untangling so that fire would not happen so easily. What did she mean: “piece of forest”? And worse, was her hair susceptible to fire? Dad laughed, tentatively, at my questions and taught me how to tell the difference between dead sprigs and live.

“Hey, look at the big pile-a brush, Chief!” Dad meted out encouragement, until my parents, on some prearranged signal, would straighten up, have a look at what we had done, and stop for the day. I could never see the bigness or the clearness like they could; our puny efforts were overwhelmed by the forest pressing in.

We saw few people along the main path, and those neighbours we met knew Dad’s parents, not us. One morning while I hunted for frogs a woman, dressed in black, with grey hair and smudgy glasses, came up to Dad where he stood in the shade.

The woman made making the usual observations about summer weather and then asked: “You’re Frank’s son, aren’t you?”

This bothered me because I did not think of Dad as anyone’s son. He was not a child like I was, therefore, how could he be someone’s son.

“Yes.” Dad looked carefully into her face, as if he almost recognized her.

“We haven’t been introduced but Frank told me about your case,” she said. “It is unfair—completely unfair,” Her mouth tightened; I could tell she was preparing herself either to say a lot or to say something bad, or maybe both.

At the mention of “case” Dad’s eyes darted to mine. “Well.” His tone held finality in it. He looked about for Mom. “Well— ah—missus—we should be moving along. Gotta get Chief here home for lunch.”

“Blackburn,” she said, “I’m Gladys Blackburn.”

I forced myself to remember her name—like Ali Baba memorizing “sesame” as the key to the cave: “Gladys, bad is, Gladys, bad is,” I whispered all the way home.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Dad, nodding. An untruth, I could tell because he did not extend his hand. To Dad, a handshake following an introduction was practically a physical reflex but for some reason he did not touch her.​​​​​​​

In the seventh installment of "The Land of Spade," "The Second Jewel War," the stakes are higher than ever as legendary warriors and mages clash in an epic battle for ultimate power. As alliances shift and betrayals unfold, the land trembles under the might of powerful jewels and ancient magic. Kaipo and Joker face off in a relentless struggle, their abilities pushing the boundaries of reality itself. Meanwhile, the enigmatic Ivel and the rogue High Mage Zack engage in a duel that will reshape the fate of the universe. With masterful storytelling and breathtaking battles, this gripping tale of power, betrayal, and redemption will leave you on the edge of your seat, desperate to discover who will emerge victorious in the war for the Jewels.

'The next batch of players will be arriving soon.'

'Remember to act your part well. Don't step out of bounds. Don't go out of character or you'll suffer the consequences.'

In the game world, Faye was nothing but an NPC who owned a bookstore. That was all the players saw, and that was what she was known as, but what if she was more than that?

After a meeting with the 'main character' of the game, things take a turn for the NPC Faye and she becomes more aware of her status and the world around her, more than she ever did before.

He limped from the wreckage and sat by a rock to gather his bearings. He was a boy, he recalled, living on the mountain island King's Peak. He was born in Buffalo village, and...

"vampires, wolves, and witches, but youstop believing when genies are involved?"

───────────

𝐏𝐔𝐓 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐒 𝐓𝐎𝐆𝐄𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑,

೯⠀⁺ NORA, the last of the wish-givingcoven. the only one to suffer the fateof living in a lamp. submitting herselfto the low-life, greedy humans. sheloathed it. sure, the powers coursingthrough her bejeweled body made herfeel lively. but as her coven was destinedto be, she was always powerless. untilhe came along. his lack of mortality andfrightening power all felt so different.until, a monster of a man caught onto hermaster's trail. he was forced to flee andleave her behind. as with her master nolonger there, she was yanked back intoher jeweled lamp. however, decades later,she's summoned in front of a witch. abennet witch.

𝐌𝐀𝐊𝐄 𝐀 𝐖𝐈𝐒𝐇 . . . . . ( klaus fanfiction ).