Lucien began to speak.
K’yaa hrchlu t’yhalikk.
Israel repeated the words, shouting them across the lot, and he saw the Gasher stagger even as it began to come toward him. Lucien continued to rattle off words of the Old Tongue and Israel continued to repeat them, even as the syllables burned at his throat. He began to get a sense of what the words meant, even though he didn’t want to, as he slowly advanced. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: Road Trip Part 5’
As a wanna-be writer, I am often exposed to books and websites and so on that purport to have the secret to writing best-selling books. One almost gets the impression that if one could only eliminate the passive, ensure that the main character works their way through a checklist of actions in the first chapter, never confuses “that” and “which”, and avoid the use of “they” as a singular indefinite pronoun, success would automatically follow. I’ve always been skeptical of writing good fiction through rules, but now comes this. If a computer can recognize a double-entendre, surely a fully-automated best-seller writing program is not far behind. Hard times indeed.
I recently underwent a terrifying experience that I may have to use as the idea for a story, in the manner of horror authors everywhere. Yes, one at a time, over the course of several weeks, I found these in my driveway:
Yeah, I know! Spooky, right? To clarify, for those who don’t have chills running up their spines right now, I’m currently trying to figure out which of the expensive pieces of lawn and garden equipment I own is currently about to fall apart because it is missing three presumably important nuts. Is it the snowblower? The brushcutter? The lawn mower? The chainsaw? The weedwacker? None of them actually appear to be missing anything, of course, which is what makes this so terrifying.
There was a scream from inside the diner, and Israel spun, groping for his keys as he stepped toward the Pontiac. He’d just shaken off the brass knuckles and gotten a hand into his pocket when the back of the car suddenly rose several inches as the hood dipped. He heard the sound of scraping and dimpling metal as something came up the hood and onto the roof, and he threw himself back. He cursed as he hit the ground and the car keys flew from his hand.
There was another scream, and a crash, from the diner as the thing landed on the trunk and paused. So there were at least two of them this time. He wondered if whatever was in the diner was the same as the thing that was crouching on his car. At least, he thought it was crouching. It was hard to tell with Old Ones, because the very way they stood or sat often seemed painful. It was painful to look at, anyway; just trying to perceive it in the uncertain light made him blink desperately as his mind rebelled against the impossible shape of the thing. It was heavy enough to be bowing in his trunk a bit, anyway, as it scanned the parking lot, making a weird gurgling noise. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: Road Trip, Part 4’
Is it possible to project an air of cool while riding a unicycle? I’m not talking about a “Gosh, look at that guy riding a unicycle – that remarkable level of skill certainly is cool”. I’m talking about more of an attitude of bored insouciance put out by the rider. I think it might be possible, but the guy I just saw on my drive home certainly wasn’t pulling it off.
Israel reached under his jacket and drew out the Glock he’d acquired from one of Bryce’s henchmen early on his road trip. All three of the young men took a step back.
“Hey-” began one.
“Oh, this isn’t the half of it, boys,” Israel said. “I’m a bad man, and maybe you should think a little harder about all the bad men roaming around out in the big old world before the next time you decide to hassle someone who just wants to drink a cup of coffee in peace.”
The ringleader of the kids was raising his hands to his shoulders, as if he thought that he would have gotten Israel concerned otherwise. Something he’d learned to do from movies, probably.
“As it happens, though, gunning you all down in a parking lot might attract some attention,” Israel said. He turned and bent to slide the pistol under the driver’s seat, then straightened and pushed down the old-fashioned lock before slamming the door.
“So,” he said. “Do we all still want to get on this merry-go-round, or are we done for the night?’ Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: Road Trip, Part 3’
I recently got a combination hatchet/knife as a free gift from the good folks at Ben Meadows (when not in use, the knife is tucked into the hatchet handle), and I naturally thought it would be useful for working out action sequences involving JT Quinn and her tomahawk and knife.
Unfortunately, it turns out that it is a bit smaller than I expected from the description, as you can see with my harmonica for scale (yes, I am an expert in Blues harmonica. What of it?)
My best bet in working out action sequences would seem to be to find some small child, who would be properly proportioned against a tiny hatchet and what amounts to a paring knife, and turn them loose.
Spring has arrived, here in Central New York, which means that when I walk the dogs I can listen to the peepers, out in the wetter areas (like
all proper writers, I own several dogs – noble beasts with a dignified bearing just waiting to appear on a book jacket). Unfortunately, the dogs are both fine trackers, and they’ve been finding a lot of things that have been buried under the snowpack for four months. So it is that at least once per walk I have to lunge forward and dig some vile object like an old chunk of groundhog corpse out of one of their mouths. Such are the perils of dog ownership in these parts, but I like to think it toughens me up. Unfortunately, my time walking dogs is when I’m supposed to be coming up with clever plot ideas or character names, and I’d prefer to be in a state of quiet contemplation rather than paranoid alertness. I’m afraid my daily wordcount has suffered.
Posting an ent
ry about this may be a bit extraneous at this point, but I suppose it is possible that someone might be reading this blog who hasn’t heard about it elsewhere. 
