#fridayflash Inheritance

When Magomu reaches the platform, he hurries to his brother’s rope. His hands ache, raw and strained from the climb, but he works quickly, struggling against the dullness of his knife. It is an old knife, but not as old as his father's. Not as valuable.

He closes his eyes as the last strands fray and pop. With his eyes closed, he sees his brother's body, broken on the packed earth below, and imagines holding his inheritance to the sun, the blade glittering, while the crowd cheers his name.

WIP Wednesday: Monsters Everywhere

What am I working on? Monsters.

They're everywhere.
Max (my three-year-old) is responsible for the monstrous picture. Random scribbles or a child's interpretation of an Old One who visits in the wee hours of the night? You make the call. It creeped me out for some reason.

Speaking of crazy, who is crazy enough to write a short story with the same title as a novel? I am. Read "The House Eaters" at Rose & Thorn Journal. I imagine this is what might happen to Nick and Tabby (brother and sister from the book) in an alternate universe...

...and what's my fetish with the name Maggie lately?

How I Celebrate a Synopsis

Yeah, the dreaded synopsis. I finished mine for Loathsome, Dark, and Deep yesterday, and to celebrate, I:

1. made beef stew for dinner (yum)
2. drank a bottle of Smithwick's in a chilled pint glass with the stew (double yum)
3. read As the City Sleeps by Stephen T. Johnson to my boys

Okay, As the City Sleeps is the book that should have been written during my childhood.

From the jacket:

Imagine that you are all alone in the sleeping city.
It is is very late at night.

And a quote as inscription:

Night, the beloved.
Night, when words fade and things come alive.

(Antoine de Saint Exupéry)

Oh, joyous shivers. The book is (sadly) out of print. But you must track down a copy. You. Must.

I can't help feeling the first paragraph of Loathsome needs a little tweeking:

For almost six years after Maggie’s death, I’d drowned myself with bourbon on the porch of the only whorehouse in Ecola, Oregon. The will to make a story with what life I had left was gone, vanished beneath the dark boughs of war and betrayal, friends dead and lovers lost. Perhaps the constant haze in which I spent my evenings stunted my voice. Perhaps too much bourbon burned my throat and ruined it, ruined my ability to spin a story just right. But there was safety at the bottom of a glass and a certainty to the numbness I felt all of those evenings as night clamped down her hard, cold fist--a certainty I hadn’t even found in death--not until I turned headfirst into the dark forest, and the bleak hearts of men peeled before me like rotten apples.

Suggestions?

Choose Your Own Adventure

Don't worry. I haven't forgotten about the blob in Curt's kitchen.

This post is mostly about what unchecked expansion means to writers: you, me, most everyone who reads this blog.

If you want to be read, at whatever level, you must learn to brand yourself. It's one of the first lessons I learned when I started. It's the reason I purchased my domain (http://www.aaronpolson.com/) before I had anything worthwhile to slap up there. Being read may (or may not) translate into cash someday. Someday. Meaning, this is about making money. Which, much to my wife's chagrin, is not my favorite topic.

People who know a lot about money like to talk about growth. (hence, "Unchecked Expansion")

I used to work at a bookstore. We talked at length about "expansion". New stores in the chain, new sales in the existing stores, blah, blah blah. Beat Last Year! (i.e., did we make more sales than the same day last year?) Yeah, we checked these things all the time.

I also took calculus in high school. I learned that things do not expand without limits.

A bookstore chain cannot continue to build new stores and sell more each year. It. Is. Impossible. Stores close. Sales drop.

The opposite of expansion happens. Big publishing's revenues are contracting. They've stripped themselves to the bone, merged, hostile take-overed, and now, now people still aren't buying books like they used to. The $9.99 e-book will kill us all. Go ahead, run shrieking into the ether.

As mid-list authors, Brian Keene and JA Konrath have their own models of expansion. I read their blogs. I like to see how these things work. Both are hardworking writers who must continually expand their reach because other parts of their revenue stream constantly contract. A vicious situation, to be sure.

Unchecked expansion doesn't exist. Except in fiction. (Yes, the blue sponge is still growing)

I stepped into two new arenas last week: I listed my Friday flash with #fridayflash and sold two reprints ("Catalog Sales" to Ghostlight and "The World in Rubber, Soft and Malleable" to Triangulation: End of the Rainbow--I love what they did with Dark Glass). I guess you could call it "expansion" or "branding". I just want more people to read my stories. The money (sorry, Aimee) is negligible right now.

So choose your own adventure. Decide how hard you want to work (my hat's off to those making a living at this writing thing). Nothing expands forever.

Writing is nothing if not choosing your own adventure. This is what I chose for Curt:

Curt waits for the gun. The blue mass changes. A shape presses against the skin...a face, fingers.

Gail screams. "Sophia...Sophia's gone!"

Guess she shouldn't have tip-toed downstairs to check on her cow-sponge, eh?

Fucking cows.

#fridayflash Unchecked Expansion

This bit o' flash has a purpose. More on Monday...

The sound of breaking glass yanks Curt from his sleep. Bolting upright in bed, he turns to face Gail, her eyes also blown wide with surprise.

"Downstairs," he mutters.

She nods.

"A burglar?"

"Maybe," she whispers. Without taking her eyes from her husband, she fumbles for the cell phone on the nightstand beside her. "911..."

Curt hops out of bed.

"Curt," she pleads.

"I have to check." His scowl says too much: Three tours in Iraq and I come home to some scumbag in my own home. There's your freedom. He ignores her voice chattering into the phone. At the top of the stairs he pauses and listens for another sound. Nothing. The house is cold.

Too cold.

Curt takes the stairs one at a time, his ears ready the whole time. He wishes for the 9mm in his nightstand drawer, the one Gail isn't fond of, especially loaded with a four-year-old in the house.

He hears the other sound when he reaches the first floor. Wind?

The thing is on the kitchen floor, swollen and blue, stretching across the room. The small table they'd inherited from her parents is clearly broken, smashed under the thing's weight. One leg juts out at a strange angle. The kitchen window above the sink is broken, and chill breeze cuts through the opening.

Curt spies a slip of cardboard on the floor, approaches carefully and picks it up. The blue thing undulates like jelly after someone taps the side of the jar. He can almost hear it breathe.

The slip of cardboard is from the package. They'd bought the Magic Growth Sponge at the checkstand earlier that day to keep Sophia quiet. She'd begged; he'd given in. It was supposed to grow into a cow after soaking in water. A fucking cow.

Curt read the label in the dim moonlight: Continuous Growth.

The thing swells...

"Bring the gun, Gail."

If You Build It, They Won't Come

...or Self-Publishing in the Era of Self-Publishing Part 2

Thanks to Michael Stone for pointing me to Brian Keene's post of January 4th. (I can't seem to read Keene's blog at school...something about "adult language" filters it on our network...go figure.)

Keene starts the ball rolling nicely, and the comments (and there are a lot of them), are almost more insightful. The take home message (in my opinion): Brian Keene would sell a fair amount of self-pubbed books. I wouldn't. Not that I needed 125+ comments on Brian Keene's blog to tell me that.

Yeah, my Mom would buy a copy and that's all great. I'm sure some other folks would, too. Most people in my life wouldn't be able to tell the difference between self-pubbed and anything else, just like they don't know the difference between POD and traditional publishing. People who don't think about and discuss writing everyday...well, they don't think about this schtuff. Duh.

But I'd sell more self-published books now than I would have three years ago. Technology (web, POD, ebooks) allows me to have a voice, but no one has to listen. I have to give them a reason to listen. Keene has done that. Author's with name recognition have name recognition for a reason: consistent, professional performance. Building that audience doesn't happen overnight, and with the weird crap that I tend to write, my potential audience size is probably limited. I'm okay with that. If writing becomes just another job, I'll quit. The stories will make me quit because I won't be writing them. Not the right ones, anyway.

If my name is my brand (and as a writer, it is), I want readers to know what to expect. I want them to be happy they spent fifteen minutes in my head. Well, maybe not happy, but fulfilled in some way. Freaked out, maybe.

So will I self-pub a book of my work? Maybe. Someday. I think cost has to be correlated to name recognition, though. Little name = little price. Clear the path for potential buyers to take a chance on you. And for the newbie who hasn't, at the very least, made the rounds of the small press and semi-pro markets who thinks his/her short story collection/novel is going to the top at the low Amazon.com POD price of $16.95...good luck with that.

WIP Wednesday: Brain Splatter

I'm juggling two short stories right now, one without a prospective market (why do I do that to myself) and one that's lighter than I usually write.

Both are about 1/2 done.

The first finds four men in an Antarctic research post. No, it's not The Thing or a riff on "Who Goes There?" I wanted isolated, and a tiny research post in Antarctica was about as remote as I could muster. Then the rest of the word goes dark (no satelite feed, no radio, nothing). Did I mention a stranger shows up - *poof* - literally on their frozen doorstep crying about "all the dead people"?

From "The Last Listening Post":

“Invaded by whom?”

The question came from across the room. Lieutenant Frank Garry, tall and lanky with close-cropped hair the color and consistency of straightened steel wool, stood with arms crossed in the doorway linking the administration building with the main corridor. His face was a mask, a near-perfect replica of any recruiting poster in an Army office in any shitty little town in America. The mask turned down in a scowl.

“There’s a man,” Lehman gestured.

Gardner stood at the lockers, his bright orange parka hanging loose on his shoulders, unzipped. His hands clutched the collar of another heavy coat. His eyes traveled between Lehman and the lieutenant.

“Security first.” Garry didn’t flinch. His face barely moved as he spoke.

“He’ll die.”

“Doctor, you might be the reason for our little oasis in this frozen hell, but I’m in charge of keeping you alive. I’m in charge of security.”

God, how I love tension.

The other piece, "The Trouble with Breadcrumbs", goes something like this:

I wanted to ask, but really, what was the old man going to say, “Your fake mother has taken the house and moved it. Left this one instead”?

It was my sister that worried me anyway, especially since Dad went AWOL, so I went to the door of the wrong house and twisted the beaten-brass knob, squeak-squeak, until the door nodded and bowed open. Inside, I found a regular dust and cobweb carnival, tumble and twist in the light. A feast of untrodden planks, wood which had forgotten it was wood lay in lazy-grey lines on the floor. The walls leaned in, once having ears but now must have been hard of hearing.

“Hello?” My question went out like a sonar ping, and came back in a whispered, “Go away.”

So I did.

Self-Publishing in the Age of Self-Publishing

Remember when Lars Ulrich of Metallica went "crazy train" over Napster? Now most musicians purposefully give away mp3s of their music. Funny how times change.

I don't mind giving away some of my stories. (Flash Fiction Fridays, duh.)

But I won't self-publish a novel. Not yet. And I'm glad I didn't start handing out short stories on my blog when I started writing.

When you self publish (be it POD or traditional or what-ever), you eliminate competition. Yes, competition sucks sometimes. Yes, the system has inherent "unfairness". Yes, there is a bit of nepotism out there. And name? Man, once you have one, you can write your ticket. Have you ever read an anthology and felt the strongest stories came from "unknowns" while the best-sellers punted? It happens. Too much, in my opinion.

But competition breeds a better story. It makes writing better. It's made me work harder; I know that much. And yes, competition brings rejection (or losses, however you want to frame it). Yesterday, it brought three to me: one from a long-time short list, another from a pro market, and a third from a market that just decided to close, bang. I hated "writing" for a couple of hours yesterday, but I'll keep writing. It's what I do. And "unfairness" is just another excuse.

I've learned to cherish the challenge that writing brings. I don't love competition, but I love what it's done to me. I love chiseling away at a story because I know it isn't good enough, not yet. I want them all to be that story, the one readers want to share. Wouldn't have happened without competition. It wouldn't have happened if I gave up. There would be no thrill, no joy if I self-published from "go".

So I won't self-publish a novel. Not yet. But I don't mind sharing bits and pieces; I know I need to in today's writing world (remember the Metallica lesson?) Flash fiction = free mp3s, right?

Henry Barlow's Ghosts

I met Maggie Farnsworth before I left for the war. She was a few years younger than me, fifteen at the time, and a beautiful girl—her hair always held waves, her eyes a powerful green like the darkest buds in spring. She had a laugh that some might have seen as too bold in a girl, a great, romping laugh that could break through the most serious façade. Sometimes, she fell down laughing so hard. We met at a barn dance the summer I left for the army; she’d just moved to town with her folks.

I stole a kiss the last night, hungry for more. Maggie said she’d wait.

Perryville happened. Tim died in front of me, possibly killed by my own bullet. Another hot bit of lead tore my face apart, and I lay in the hellish forest with other dying men for days. When I could sit up, when I could write a letter, I sent one to Maggie. She replied that “the grace of providence” spared me, for her. Those words squeezed my heart.

But it wasn’t the grace of providence. No, hell played a cold joke by sparing me.

I came home after the war, scarred and much older. Maggie had grown, too, blossomed into a vibrant, beautiful woman of eighteen. Her eyes still cooled like a summer pond, her hair still invited me in with its dusky folds. We married and headed west, away from home and memories of dead friends.

We pushed on to Nebraska, outside of Omaha. I purchased a stake of land, a mule. We carved a dugout from the prairie, and lived underground like rabbits. The dugout always reeked of the earth, but when I held Maggie close, when I felt her smooth skin, pressed my face into her waves of hair, and slipped inside those green eyes, I forgot myself.

After a few years, we built a small house. I bought a few more acres and hired a short, angular man named Stephan Wolzyck to help out. Times were still hard, but it was an honest struggle.

The prairie had its own beauty—rolling grass in every direction, few trees, and few reminders of my hellish week among the dying. The wind would whisper across the vast plain and push waves of green and gold along with it. We worked; we ground our fingers into the soil and prayed for a return. Maggie lost the last traces of the girl I’d met at those barn dances in her face, but her eyes always held magic.

“I’m going to have a baby,” she whispered to me one night.

They came the next week. Stephan’s brothers.

There wasn’t much law out on the frontier then. Indians skirmished with settlers, and some men found it easier to take and destroy than work their own hands in the earth. Rumors burned around our neighbors about a band of outlaws raiding isolated farmsteads. Reluctantly, I bought a gun.

They came when I was in the field. Stephan had headed to the house for water from our pump. I heard Maggie’s scream, and it sliced into my heart like a dagger of ice. I dropped the plow handles and ran over the clods of newly-turned earth. She howled with pain—a mournful, aching sound I hadn’t heard the likes of since the war. My rifle was at the side of the dugout—we still used it for the animals. I grabbed it and crept around.

She lay on the ground with a dark stain between her legs. Blood. Three men stood over her, all rough and dark, spotted with filth and dirt, the last still pulling on his trousers. It was Stephan Wolzyck.

God, what they’d done.

“Get away from her,” I said. My hands shook as they lifted the rifle. Maggie’s head raised a little, and I caught a flicker of green eyes behind the tears. Her hair hung in limp, wet strands on either side of her face. With her lips pinched in a sob, she shook her head slowly.

“Just having fun, buddy.” Stephan stepped closer to me. He smiled, showing his fouled teeth, the yellow wrinkles of his eyes. Pointing his weasel’s nose. “She been wanting it. Making eyes at me. Your whore here screams awfully loud—”

I shot him. The lead jumped from my gun with a deafening crash, a roar of thunder across the empty prairie. The man spun backwards—in my memory, his fall takes a full minute. The birds overhead slowed to watch. The other men lifted their guns. I heard two more shots: the first went through Maggie’s throat, the second tore into my chest. There were more bullets, two more that punctured my body, but I didn’t hear them. One of the men stood over me and spat on my face—I remember the warm spittle sliding down my cheek, working over the grooves of my scar.

I lay for an eternity, surely dead I thought, but then another thought forced me from the ground.

Maggie.

I struggled to my side, burning with pain. My blood mingled with the dust to make an obscene mixture of mud as my hands clutched at the ground and pulled my body forward. God, the smell of that mud. She was dead of course, her housedress blackened around the violation in her white throat. Her eyes lay open, but empty of the vibrant shine they once held. I remember touching her arm, how her skin was still warm.

(from Loathsome, Dark, and Deep)

WIP Wednesday: The Big Feelings About Genre

Horror this. Sci Fi that. Fantasy whatever.

This isn't the post I intended to do. I intended to go all "I think Loathsome, Dark, and Deep is about as good as it gets and my query is coming along nicely thank you very much blah blah blah."

No. I'm going to talk about identity instead.

Genre identity.

I'm a member of the HWA because being a member of a professional organization is the right thing to do. I've always felt that way. I joined the NEA when I started teaching. Do I agree with everything the NEA does? Hell no. Do I agree with the HWA's policies? Doubt it.

But I know I'm not a horror writer.

Oh yeah, I write horror. Really dark sh*t sometimes. (Nothing pleasant at all about "The Distillery" forthcoming in Necrotic Tissue.) But mostly I just bend the rules of reality. Cyborg children. Clockwork birds with souls. Dead people who are neither zombies nor vampires. Books that don't require magic words for the magic to work. Implants that make men want to eat each other. (Okay, that one was pretty horrific.) And don't forget the goldfish.

Sometimes, I look at other writer's websites, and say to myself "ooooh, look how he/she has tailored everything (graphics, words, etc.) perfectly for horror/sci fi/fantasy/what-have-you". Then I feel a little sad. "What's my schtick?" I ask.

But I know what I write. It's usually dark if not horrific. It's weird. At the best of times, it touches something universally human. At the other best of times, it's entertaining enough. I'm still working to become a better writer (read: I haven't quit yet). I want those best of times to hold hands and skip tra-la through every word, sentence, story, and book with my name on it. That's a big job.

So does lack of a clear cut genre identity really hurt? Commercially, maybe. I dunno.

By the way, Loathsome, Dark, and Deep is done. Done. Done. It's a wonderful historic-adventure-science-fantasy-horror novel. I hope you can read it some day.

Tuesday Grab Bag

Here's your free schtuff for Tuesday:

A piece of haunting ambient music, "Gentle Now, Ghosty", from a longer work of love songs for ghosts on which I'm working. (look, I'm no professional musician, okay?)

A lovely Amazon comment about "Former Vocations" (a poem in A.P. Fuch's Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes):

"...'Former Vocations' (Aaron Polson) provides marvelously personal snapshots of the end of it all." - from Anton LeCancre "horror geek"

A recommendation for Rio Youers' Mama Fish over at Skull Salad Reviews (BT's send up of the latest from The New Bedlam Project has been imported over there, too).

Finally, a list of imagery generated by one of my classes (I love me some imagery):

Sight
vibrant, sparkling, gleaming, dull, dirty, filthy, glossy, lustrous

Sound
screech, squeal, ding, rumble, muted, congested, crunching, crackling, gurgle, swoosh, swish

Taste
fruity, bitter, sour, sweet, tart, spicy, foul, bland, savory, tangy, stale, fresh, rotten, rancid

Touch
gritty, grainy, poky, knobby, oily, slimy, smooth, rough, bumpy, prickly, sharp, puffy, fluffy, dry, wet, slick, pocked

Smell
foul, stinky, raunchy, stench, skunky, dusty, musty, floral, pungent, smoky, fishy, musky

We spent about ten minutes generating the list. What other magnificent words could we add to the list?

Beating the Spartans by 100

...this being my 400th post (or so says Blogger...all hail Blogger).

So, whoot. I celebrated by watching five stories slide into "short list limbo" over the weekend. Man, I know how to party. And now, I wait. And wait.

Sometimes waiting pays off...like hearing the news that "Cargo" has made the cut for the Blade Red Dark Pages anthology. Whoot! Mr. Tomlinson has kept me on the proverbial pins and needles with his updates, and now I can wipe my brow. A little. Edits forthcoming...

Speaking of edits, I sent back The House Eaters and I've arrived at the rip-snorting, action-packed portion of Loathesome, Dark, and Deep...which means I'm almost done with my final edits. Which means I need to write a query letter. And a synopsis. And shove some bamboo splinters under my nails--er, not that last one. But I guess it shows how I feel about the querying process, huh?

Off to teach. My students (those who didn't freeze over the weekend) should be here soon.

Like Nature TV, Only Weirder

"Courtship", a flash fiction of the bizarre variety, is up at Everyday Weirdness today. Enjoy your weekend.

And lock your windows.

Thaw

He woke from the dream and immediately rolled over to find her, but she was gone. His hand found damp sheets and a soaked mattress.

"Molly?" His heart thrum-thrummed in his chest, and he feared the silent house would be the only answer.

"In the kitchen," she called.

He hopped from the bed, nearly skidding into the wall when his socks slipped on the hardwood. She was there, standing at the kitchen window, her white arms folded across her chest.

"I had a dream." He reached out and touched her shoulder. His eyes sank to the puddle on the floor at her feet. "I was worried about this."

Her eyes, walnut brown so dark they often looked black, stayed on the window. "Nothing's melting out there."

He pulled his hand back. He'd expected a puff of frost as she spoke, but nothing. His mouth opened and closed while he tried to find the right words. "Look--don't go. I'll turn off the heat. Wear my coat. Just--just don't leave me, okay?"

The Tundra

By tundra I mean my front yard. The twelve inches of snow from Christmas has yet to melt, and we've added another foot since then. Now, before any Northeasterners start to poo-poo our paltry two feet of snow, might I add our projected high temp for the day is 5 Fahrenheit? That equates to -15 Celsius. Then you add wind chill, and our 5 degrees feels like -15 Fahrenheit (-26 Celsius). If you live in Canada, North Dakota, Montana, or Antarctica, mock away. We still have Caribou, Maine beat.

Brrrrr.

So I bring you Jack London's "To Build a Fire". If you've never read it, you're in for a treat. I think H.P. Lovecraft owes a bit to London and other Naturalists--they were the first writers to remind us that the universe doesn't really give a shit.

Have a frosty one.

WIP Wednesday: Polishing the House Eaters

2010 has been all about the edits thus far. I'm steadily working through another revision of Loathesome, Dark, and Deep and just yesterday received the first round of edits on The House Eaters. I'm happy to report no major issues with only a few items which I needed to address.

But yeah. Editing.

Things are pretty tense for our small crew in Loathsome. Halfway up the river, they've lost a boat...and most of their supplies.

“We only have enough food for one more day.” Olson’s white fingers massaged his forehead. “One day, Barlow. Everything else is at the bottom of the river—”

“Because you dropped the wheel, you son-of-a-bitch.” Silas clenched his fist around the stock of his rifle. “You shirked your god-damned duty, Olson, and now the rest of us have to pay for it.”

Olson’s lip trembled. His grey eyes found mine and pleaded for help. “I—I didn’t—”

“Better off if that bullet found your neck instead of poor Hiram’s, at least he wouldn’t have left us out here with no food.” Silas advanced a step toward Olson, leaning forward with his head protruding like a bird of prey. “You make me want to vomit...”

I think they're in love. Fun stuff.

The Big Hazy Rejectometer...it's GOOD!

Speaking of looking for an agent in 2010, literary agent Janet Reid breaks down a number of rejections on her blog (all after requesting full manuscripts). Scary.

As an English teacher, I'm well versed in the haze of writing well. Some of Ms. Reid's stats are very helpful (structural problems, starts too slow, characters are caricatures...). Then we have "Just plain not good enough".

What, exactly, does "good enough" mean?

Good is uber-subjective right? We all know when we've read something good. Of course, I often read the Year's Best collections (at least skim each story, looking for the real gems), and think "Really? That got in here?"

So how do you know good? Do you have the internal compass to "know"? Can someone be taught how to recognize "good"?

I score high school students' papers with a rubric called 6-traits. Each trait--voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, ideas and content, and organization--receives a number rating (usually from 1-5). We can pretend that it's math, only it isn't math. It's still subjective.

Sure, I can quantify further. Five grammatical errors = 3 in conventions, etc. But, in the end, subjectivity creeps in. (How do you quantify voice?)

So, I really want to know: what defines good, at least in your opinion?

Goals 2010 and Other Updates

I suppose I need to put together a "goals" post or else I won't have anything upon which to reflect at the end of the year. Make sense?

Just like last year, there are things I want out of 2010. Some I can control; some I can't.

What I can do:

1. Always have at least one story in front of a pro paying market.

2. Finish my final pass of Loathsome, Dark, and Deep and have it ready to query/submit in February. (Get on this one, eh?)

3. Write my fifth novel*--a ghost/suspense/YA thing with no title but one hell of a first line:

When I was younger, I imagined numerous ways to kill my sister just to see if she'd come back and haunt me.

4. Write at least one high quality story a month (or 12/year). I've gotten better at letting my stories "age" before editing. I'll do even better this year.

5. Buy something from the small press every month. And read it. And review it for Skull Salad. More than one would be sweet.

I would like the following to happen as well, but these items require outside "assistance":

1. Land an agent/sell a book.

2. Sell another story to a pro paying market.

Speaking of that pro-rate sale, my first such sale is to Blood Lite 2, an anthology of humorous horror from the HWA edited by Kevin J. Anderson. The story: "The Unfortunate Persistence of Harold Francis Beamish". Why I'm stoked: exposure. Pocket Books is the publisher which means Blood Lite 2 will find its way to many bookshelves in genuine brick-and-mortar stores. I'm glad I took the chance and subbed.

Oh, and things are coming along with The House Eaters. My editor sent a "head's up" email that she was about halfway through. All smiles here.

Enjoy your week...and ignore the post-holiday blahs.

*good God...fifth novel?

Ten Years Late

Millie woke to a clacking sound, a rhythmic tic-tic-tic-tic outside her window.

"Jerry?"

The shape next to her mumbles and rolls over. "Mmmmm."

Millie slides out of bed, flinches when her feet touch the cold wooden floor, and goes to the window. She parts the blinds. Sunlight forces her back for a moment, but her eyes adjust. What she sees drives a spike through her already hangover-addled skull.

The street below is devoid of cars. Now covered with ruddy cobblestones, she traces it to the distance and finds the source of the sound: a black carriage, polished to a high gloss, pulled by two horses.

"Jerry. My God. It's happened."

"Mmm...what?"

Millie's mouth hangs open but her tongue can't form around the three little syllables: Y-2-K.

___________

Yeah, lame, but I haven't stayed up until 2 AM in a long, long time. Too bad the kids didn't get the memo to sleep in until noon. Happy New Year! Resolutions forthcoming.