Michael Montoure's Blog, page 6

Give the Gift of Fear This Christmas: Get “Slices” for $8.95!

If you’re out buying your Christmas presents from local businesses tonight in support of Small Business Saturday — a new “shopping holiday” nestled in there snugly between Black Friday and Cyber Monday — then I’m glad to hear it. I think it’s an excellent idea. (Even if it’s an idea that American Express kinda sorta stole from the 3/50 Project.)

Anyway, while you’re finding the right gifts for your friends and loved ones, I would like to suggest you take a moment to consider buying something from the smallest business you know. Namely, me.

I know a lot of the regular readers of this blog already own a copy of my first self-published collection of horror stories, “Slices,” and you’ve given me great feedback and reviews for it. Well, have you thought about buying a copy for the discriminating reader on your shopping list?

If you have, this weekend’s a great time to do it. Right now, you can buy a copy of “Slices” directly from the printer, and if you use this coupon code when you check out:

QJNTLXMT

…. You’ll get your copy for just $8.95, instead of its usual price of $12.95! That’s like four dollars off or something!

This sale will run through Monday, November 26th. (It may stretch into the early hours of Tuesday morning, but after that, that coupon code will be deader than corduroy.)

So grab a copy for Cousin Bob now. Be sure to modestly brag about how cool and ahead of your time you are for buying books from independent writers. He’ll thank you for it. Alternately, he might start giving you a wide berth at family reunions. That might be good, too.

Just use this link: https://www.createspace.com/3490176

Coffin Hop Winner (Finally) Announced!

Hey everyone, Happy Hallo — wait, what? It’s Thanksgiving already? Wait a minute, that can’t be right. Didn’t I say I was going to announce the winner of my Coffin Hop Horror Web Tour book giveaway on November 1st? How could that possibly be three weeks ago?

Well — apparently it was. Man, I’m sorry about that. I may like to build up suspense in my stories, but I try not to do it in real life!

The good news is that part of what’s been keeping me away from this blog for so long is my webseries, CAUSALITY — we’ve been doing a lot of filming, and it’s keeping me busy with set design, props, post-production and more. Good times, but seriously busy. I’m definitely looking forward to having a finished show for you guys to watch, and it really looks like it’s going to happen. That’s pretty exciting.

But in the meantime, I’ve been leaving everyone who entered the contest hanging, and that wasn’t fair. Sorry, everyone.

To make up for it, I tell you what — everyone wins! By which I mean, specifically, the winner of a print copy of their choice of one of my books is: Joanna Parypinski! Congrats, Joanna! Drop me some e-mail at montoure@bloodletters.com and let me know which book you want and where I should mail it to.

So where does that leave the other entrants — namely, Jeanette Jackson, Georgina Morales, liese2, Erma H., Timothy C. Ward, Jason Darrick, and James Garcia, Jr.?

You guys get their choice of any of my e-books! Just send me e-mail and let me know which one you want, and whether you want it in Kindle format, ePub, Mobi, or PDF.

If I don’t hear from the winners in a couple of days, I will contact them by e-mail. (And I really mean a couple of days. Not three freakin’ weeks this time.)

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I know what I’m thankful for this year, and that’s each and every one of you. I really mean that.

Sign Up For My Newsletter And Get A FREE Halloween Story Tonight!

I’m sure you were probably planning on signing up for my newsletter before the end of the day anyway, so you can win your choice of any of the print editions of my books, but just in case you needed an additional reason, how about a free copy of the story I wrote especially for this year’s Halloween?

This one is so new it doesn’t even have a title yet. This was the final story I performed at my reading earlier this month, and people really seem to like it. I know I saw several scared faces out there in the audience, and more than a few tears before the story was over. And as I promised at the end of the evening, that story is going right to my newsletter subscribers’ inboxes tonight.

I’m sending it out around 8:00 PM PST, just in time for you to have something to read while waiting for trick-or-treaters. If you’re not already a subscriber, that gives you plenty of time to hit the form at the top of this page and sign up. I generally send out a newsletter about once a month, so don’t worry about me filling up your inbox.

If you are already a subscriber, thanks! If you signed up in the past couple of days in hopes of winning my Coffin Hop giveaway, sit tight – I’ll announce the winner tomorrow.

In any event, I hope you all enjoy the new story!

Horror Movies, And The Childhood I Secretly Wanted

I never really watched horror movies when I was a kid. I was scared of them. But not for the reasons you might think.

It wasn’t the monsters; I’d had a fascination for monsters as long as I can remember. (I was writing research papers on vampire and werewolf legends when I was about seven years old.) I don’t think it was the blood, or the gore; I found those things slightly nauseating, but I wasn’t really scared of them. I knew that movies were just pretend.

It was the other children. The ones who did watch horror movies. They were the ones I was afraid of.

I had very strict classifications for people back then. I think most children do. I was one of the good kids, the smart kids, the “gifted” kids. The kind of kid the teachers liked, the kind who could happily spend his recess in the library. I liked science fiction movies and writing stories, not sports or cool cars or anything the other kids thought I was supposed to be interested in.

I spent a lot of time reading about horror movies, reading about special effects and makeup techniques. I could’ve told you off the top my head what Dick Smith’s recipe for stage blood was. But actually watching horror movies — that seemed to be the provenance of those other kids. The ones who looked street-tough in their denim jackets and listened to heavy metal and punk music, and when they got a little older, even sometimes actually smoked cigarettes. You know. The bad kids.

Sure, that was judgmental. Like I said, children are.

There was some overlap, of course. I had friends who watched horror movies, or at least claimed to. (You can imagine my surprise when I finally watched Halloween as a teenager, and learned that there weren’t any aliens in it at all, no matter what my classmate had told me, let alone aliens who sliced any trick-or-treaters vertically in half with a samurai sword. Maybe we can charitably assume he was thinking of a different movie.) Some of these friends would sneak copies of Fangoria Magazine into school, and I would flip through their garish, blood-soaked pages, half-fascinated and half-repulsed by what I saw there. I envied those friends, in a distant and slightly scandalized way, for being able to own such things, watch such things, to enjoy such a strange and terrible freedom.

Recently, I got to read a wonderful article in the New Yorker, one that made me nostalgic for someone else’s childhood — a reminiscence of a childhood parallel to my own, yet so different it may as well have happened on another planet. In it, a horror writer examines how his early horror movie habit influenced him as an artist:

 At the time, many of the New York cinemas that showed the movies I liked were disreputable shacks, where marijuana billowed from the back rows, insects nibbled on the candy glued to the floor, and the telephone booths in the lobby provided stages for all sorts of shady theatre. The city had not fallen so far into ruin, however, that my younger brother and I were allowed to stroll into these places unsupervised. Fortunately, our parents were fellow-enthusiasts, and had in fact given us a taste for this peculiar fare. Mom and Dad didn’t believe in censorship. We enjoyed beheadings, disembowellings, sexual assaults—all sorts of flickering R-rated depravity—the way others might take in a Grand Canyon vista: as a family.

[....] If these movies existed, then surely whatever measly story was bubbling in my brain was not so preposterous. The psychotronic movie’s disregard for mimesis, its sociopathic understanding of human interaction, its indifferent acting, and its laughable sets were a kind of ritualized mediocrity. The filmmakers were so inept in their portrayal of any kind of recognizable reality that their creations became a form of grubby science fiction, documentaries an alternative planet. It was certainly not our Earth that they depicted. In what dim corner of the galaxy would the “The Atomic Man” make sense?

[...] Yet, somehow, these Psychotronic Practitioners had scrounged money for their misbegotten operations and conned actors and neighbors into appearing in them. They were unaware of their utter freakishness, unaware that the world found them absurd, as they toiled in the tunnels below the Famous Directors and the Masters of Horror, like clueless C.H.U.D.s. As a kid, I’d got stuck on the idea of monsters as people who had stopped pretending. My psychotronic explorations led me to a new formulation: an artist is a monster that thinks it is human.

– Learning from Science-Fiction B-movies : The New Yorker

The convenience store near my house had a small section of videos available to rent. Sometimes I would paw through their horror movies, just as intrigued and horrified by their covers, avidly reading the descriptions on the back.

I can clearly remember to this day that one of the movies I picked up and looked at over and over again was called Chopping Mall. It apparently had something to do with security robots malfunctioning in a mall and killing people. It’s easy to see why I kept coming back to this one. Star Wars already left me with a huge interest in robots, and the idea that this movie was both science fiction and horror captured my imagination.

But even if I thought for a minute that my parents would’ve allowed me to watch such a movie, it never in a million years would’ve occurred to me to actually ask if I could rent it. I just wasn’t the kind of kid who would watch such a thing.

Or at least, that’s what I liked to tell myself.

The truth was, my fascination for horror movies wasn’t going away, and neither was my hunger to read about them and talk about them and maybe even make my own someday. I do remember watching a few of them when I was a little bit older, when my parents finally got basic cable, and I was allowed to stay up later and watch movies on my own — wonderful pieces of schlock like Night of the Comet and Night of the Creeps.

But my real education, a solid grounding in horror movies that were actually good — that didn’t begin until I was an adult, until I was living on my own and finally realized that I could now rent and watch anything my little black heart desired. Until I was able to finally claim that strange and terrible freedom as my own.

Over the years, my mind has often gone back to that convenience store, to the movie stores of my youth, thinking about the movies I looked at and never rented. I’m gradually tracking them down and watching them one by one. (Or several all at once.)

So you might imagine, I’ve been meaning for years to finally watch Chopping Mall. You might think something that obscure would be too hard to track down, but I’m lucky enough to live in the same town as Scarecrow Video, and they have it, of course. They have everything, basically. I’ve stared at it a few times on their shelves, flipped it over and read the back, and have always told myself, “Nahhh, not this time.” I knew I’d watch it someday.

Tonight, Central Cinema is actually showing Chopping Mall and that equally classic film, Maximum Overdrive, as their Halloween event. Am I going? Oh, yeah. You bet I’m going. And I’m sure it’s going to be just as terrible as it sounds.

But I owe it to myself. To the child I was. And to the child I secretly wanted to be.

Coffin Hop 2012: Indie Horror Giveaway!

The Coffin Hop Horror Web Tour (October 24-31, 2012) is your chance to win great horror fiction and fun Halloween prizes! This year over a hundred horror writers have signed up for this, and it was a lot of fun last year, so I’ve been looking forward to doing it again.

(Technically, I’m a day late for this party. Sorry! Yesterday was crazy-busy. The cool kids know you never show up to a party the minute it starts, anyway.)

All you need to do is go to coffinhop.wordpress.com and you will find links to participating sites. Every one of them will be running a contest — visit as many of them as you like, hell, visit all of them, see what they’ve got on offer. You weren’t getting anything done at work today, anyway.

As for me, I’m giving away a print copy of one of my books! If you win, you can just visit that page, let me know which one you want, and I’ll have a copy shipped to you.

All you need to do to enter is subscribe to my newsletter — you can use the form at the top of this page — and then leave a comment on this post. That’s it! Also, you could try sacrificing a live goat. I’m not promising that it will help your chances, but it couldn’t hurt.

I’m not going to be spamming the hell out of you or anything — I only send out my newsletter once a month at most, and you’ll like it, I promise. The sneakier among you are thinking, hey, what’s to keep me from unsubscribing as soon as the contest is over? Well, nothing, if you wanna be like that. I see how you are.

What if you’re already a subscriber? Hey, I don’t mean to leave you out. No, of course you’re still special to me. Come on, baby, I wasn’t even looking at all those other potential subscribers, don’t be like that. Anyway, just drop a comment here and you’re good to go.

If you’re here because of the Coffin Hop, and this is your first time here at BLOODLETTERS — welcome! I know you’ve got a lot of other blogs to visit, but you should take a moment to check things out here. A few posts of mine that I especially think you might like include “You Hereby Are Granted Permission”, “Horror, Real Life, and Happy Endings: The Shootings in Seattle”, and “Growing up Haunted”. Thanks!

Seattle Halloween Horror Reading, This Friday, October 19th!

That’s, like, two days from now, isn’t it? I’m sorry for the short notice — between the book launch for Permanent Damage, getting ready to start shooting “Causality” again this weekend, and a genuinely spectacular bout of stomach flu, I’ve been scattered as hell lately. But, yeah, so, Halloween. I do readings. You may have heard.

Look, I made you a pretty graphic!

As you can see, we are once again back at Wayward Coffeehouse, since it failed to burn down, go out of business, or get condemned as a result of the Montoure curse after my last reading there back in June. (We’re assuming that since I’ve already closed the place down once, it’s now developed an immunity to my baleful influence.) If you’re in Seattle, I hope to see you there!

Look, a map! (Sorry, I’m a little punchy.)

View Larger Map

EARLY HARVEST: A Horror Reading with Michael Montoure

October 19th, 2012 8:00pm-10:00pm

Wayward Coffeehouse, 6417 Roosevelt Way NE #104, Seattle WA

Wayward Coffeehouse, our gracious hosts
The listing for Wayward on LibraryThing, because why the hell not
The event listing on Facebook, if you would like to RSVP and invite your friends
The event listing on Google Plus, in case you’re too cool to use Facebook

The ONLY Book Promotion You Should Ever Do

You might wanna go grab a cup of coffee — this is kind of a long one.

I’m going to get to the subject of the title of this post in a minute, but first, I want to talk about the blog post that inspired me to write this.  It’s a post from Dean Wesley Smith, whose advice I usually listen to and respect, and with good reason — as he points out in this post, he has published over a hundred novels and has been making a living with his fiction for over thirty years.But in his latest post, “The New World of Publishing: Promotion,” he basically tells writers not to worry about promotion, saying, “Authors do not sell books. Publishers sell books.”

Even though he goes on to say that the situation is different for self-publishers, that caught me up short. With all due respect, I honestly don’t think that’s true anymore — at least, not for the majority of writers. I’ve read a ton of articles and interviews that say that for the most part, the promotional efforts that publishers will perform for new and mid-list writers have dried up and disappeared, as they have focused their energies on promoting the few books they think will be blockbuster hits. Everyone else is saying that even traditionally-published writers have to do their own promotion these days, which is what’s driving many writers — myself included — into the arms of self-publishing. So, honestly, it feels to me like he’s writing about a world that doesn’t really exist any more.

Aside from saying that writers should just sit back and let the publishers take care of things, he also warns against specific kinds of promotion:

3… DO NOT spend all your time promoting your book through reviewers or bloggers or worrying about bad reviews or even caring about any of that. A complete waste of your time.

5… DO NOT blog about writing or your writing process. No real book buyer cares.

While I agree that you shouldn’t worry about bad reviews, and I agree that one shouldn’t spend all one’s time courting reviewers and bloggers, I don’t think it’s a waste of time. Everything I’ve read indicates that getting more reviews on your Amazon listings, for example, does affect your sales.

As for “don’t blog about writing” goes — I see that advice a lot, and I don’t really get it. I understand how that would work for non-fiction writers — as he says, “If you are doing books with cooking, blog about cooking” — but I don’t see how that makes sense for writers of fiction.

I suppose it comes from the idea that non-writers wouldn’t care to read about writing. Even if that’s true, if your blog only attracts other writers — well, other writers are “real book buyers,” too. But I don’t think it is true. I think today more than ever, with the disintermediating  effect of the Internet, people care more about getting personal insights into the artists whose work they admire. I’m not an actor, but I love to hear actors talking about their methods. I’m not a musician, but I like to hear about what it’s like to tour and perform. I would think the same would be true with writing.

(Also, I really have to stop and ask — did Dean Wesley Smith honestly just use his blog about writing to tell people not to blog about writing? Really?)

But anyway. How does he think self-published writers should promote themselves? I’ll give you the list, here — I’m not going to quote the whole thing, but to boil it down to just the subject headings:

Write the next book. [....]
Be nice. [....]
Never [...] talk about politics or religion. [....]
Make every book better in writing skills. [....]
Keep learning the business of publishing. [....]
Sell short fiction to major magazines. [....]

There’s something I notice about this list that strikes me as odd. Now, to my mind, I would loosely define “promotion” as, “any activity that you do that gets your name and your work in front of new eyes.” And the first five items on this list don’t do that. Only the last item does, and it’s a great suggestion, because, as he says, you get paid for doing it. Which is nice.

Finally, his last completely discouraging piece of advice is:

Don’t even bother [with promotion] if you only have ten or so titles out. Start promoting select titles when you get past twenty-five or more titles. A total waste of time before that because you get no reader rebound to your other work.

Now, I can see that promoting once you have twenty-five books out (which for me, at my current pace, should happen sometime around the year 2024) would have a lot more effect, I can’t honestly believe that promoting your current books before you reach that point is a total waste of time. Not worth putting a ton of effort into, maybe, given the return on the investment of your time. But for my part, I’ve noticed that my promotional efforts have started to move the needle, however slowly, on my sales. This is, as he always points out himself, a long game, and I think this will pay off over time. If you’d like there to be an avalanche someday, then it’s never too soon to start rolling pebbles down the hill.

Okay. So. I think indie writers should be promoting themselves. What kind of promotion should they be doing?

I’m glad you asked.

First of all, though — does promoting a book work at all? For anyone?

Here’s the problem I keep coming back to — most of the advice I see out there comes down to, “study what successful writers are doing, and do that.” But we don’t know what promotion methods are successful. We can’t know. All anyone can tell us is, “I did this, this, this, and then this, and after that my sales took off!”

So, okay, you think — I’ll just repeat what Author X did, and then my sales will take off, too! If only it were that deterministic.

When I read “Let’s Get Digital: How To Self-Publish, And Why You Should”, by David Gaughran — which is a book I’d recommend, by the way — I was particularly interested in the section in the back called, “Success Stories,” which was several first-person accounts from people who have done well with self-publishing. I noticed the same common thread coming up again and again — their stories usually went, “I did this, this, this, and then this, and then I kept doing those things, and nothng happened. But then suddenly my sales took off! I don’t know what changed!”

They don’t know. They can’t tell you. The main thing that drives the sale of books is word-of-mouth, recommendations from friends, and God knows what these authors did to make that happen — some random combination of tactics that eventually put their books in the right hands at he right times to reach that critical mass.

Basically, the highfalutin way to say what I’m talking about here is that correlation does not imply causation. Those writers could just as easily have told us that they wore their lucky underpants every day until they started selling books, but it doesn’t mean that A lead to B.

You know all this, if you’re a struggling self-publisher. You’ve read all the advice — start a blog, you have to be on Twitter, you have to do giveaways, and on and on and on and you’re thinking, “But I’m already doing all that!”

As I’ve said before, no one in self-publishing really knows how all this works. Traditional publishers don’t know how to sell books, either, really. If they did, then the industry wouldn’t be in trouble right now. And as I’ve said before,  The fact is, some books just sell like mad and some just don’t.

I think you do need to put yourself out there if you want a chance to be noticed. But the success of any promotion you do is really going to come down to just that — chance. But you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.

Let me finally get to the point of all this — the only kind of book promotion you should ever do, as promised:

Make sure you’re doing all your promotion from a solid base. By this I mean, make sure that you have your own website to drive people to, at a domain name you’ve registered yourself, to attract your fans, and make sure you have your own e-mail newsletter, to keep your fans. You don’t want to rely too heavily on Facebook, Twitter, or any other platform that belongs to someone else. They could go out of business — no one’s too big to fail — or kick you off for some perceived violation of their terms of service. Or maybe just lose popularity. Years ago, every writer was told they had to have a Myspace page, that Myspace was where all their potential fans were. I really hope the writers who advocated this didn’t rely on it as the only point of contact with those fans.

Only do promotions you can genuinely afford. Two things — first, you have to be able to afford the time, by which I mean, you can’t let it cut into your writing too much. (I don’t really care if it cuts into your television-watching time, or your Internet-surfing time. But if it cuts into the writing, into the actual thing you’re trying to promote, well, that’s a little counter-productive.) Second, you have to be able to afford the money, if you’re doing any kind of advertising or paid promotion. (I’m not convinced that advertisements can be all that effective, but try it if you want to.) By “afford” it I don’t just mean, “Can I scrape together enough cash and still be able to buy enough Top Ramen to last the month?” I mean more like, “If I spend this money and it doesn’t lead to a single sale, will I be able to just laugh it off?” If that makes you think twice, then forget about it — concentrate on any of the free methods of promotion that exist instead.

Only do promotions you can “fire and forget.” It’s hard, really hard, to track which of your promotional efforts directly led to sales — there are ways and means, none of them perfect. By all means, if you want to attempt to keep track, then take a shot at it, but I think it’s not going to be worth spending a lot of time and stress over. Just do a bit of everything you want to try and keep at it. Constantly trying to figure out if you’re doing the right thing is only going to lead to ulcers and sleepless nights.

Only do promotions that would work on you. This is probably the most important suggestion on this list. You write the kind of fiction you’re interested in — at least, I assume you do — so you are a perfectly fine example of your own target market. Think back to the last promotion that worked on you. Did Author X’s promise of a free e-book convince you to sign up for his newsletter? Did the review quotes that Author Y posted on Facebook convince you to buy her book? Emulate the very tactics that you find enticing. Conversely, if Author Z kept posting links to his Amazon author page every hour until you unfollowed his account and swore you’d never buy one of his books as long as you live, then maybe you don’t want to be doing that. Never assume that your readers are gullible rubes who will fall for any old marketing tactic that you’d be too smart for.

Only do promotions that you enjoy. Look, since this really is all just kind of a crapshoot anyway, and since life is too damn short as it is, I think this is a big one: if you’re doing promotions that you don’t enjoy, stop. Seriously, just stop, and do something that you do enjoy instead. Do you like participating on message boards? Great, do that! Would you rather interact with people on Twitter? Great, do that instead! Mind you, if the truth here is that there isn’t any kind of promotion you enjoy doing, then, well, you might have to reconsider whether or not you’re actually cut out for this. If you just want to write, if you don’t have it in you to be a bit of a huckster, then great, just write for your own enjoyment — but if you want to be a published writer, if you want to get your writing out to the widest possible audience and maybe even make a living while you’re at it, then you’re going to have to hustle a little. Some of it can be fun. Find the parts of it that are and concentrate your efforts there. I’m not just saying this for the sake of your own enjoyment — if you keep doing promotions that you don’t enjoy, if your heart’s not really in it, people will see through that. If you can’t bring your own authentic, genuine excitement to bringing people your work, then they’re not going to have any enthusiasm for reading it.

That’s about it, really. Anything else you think is missing from this list? Let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading.

Wednesday Writing Links for October 10, 2012

Hmmm. Okay, so I don’t seem to be managing to post these once a week — the last one was about a month ago, now. But I’ve still been collecting links for you all, and here are the latest:

My Self-Publishing Thoughts After 50,000+ Ebook Sales | Lindsay Buroker (Now there’s a headline that makes you want to pay attention to what she has to say, doesn’t it? Most of this is advice I’ve already heard, but it’s nice to have it all laid out in one place.)
Lessons Learned From 1 Year As A Fulltime Author Entrepreneur | The Creative Penn (Since I’m planning on going fulltime myself pretty shortly here — details on that soon — this post also grabbed my attention.)
Karen Woodward: Want Help With Editing? Try Free Editing Programs (I’m always skeptical of software solutions for checking grammar and style, but she’s found a few here that are at least starting to look promising.)
Business Plans for Indie Authors (This is a fantastic three-part resource, with actual detailed examples. I’m definitely going to sit down with this and come up with a plan of my own soon.)
Books bloggers are harming literature, warns Booker prize head judge | The Passive Voice (Whining from the old-school ivory-tower gatekeepers, horrified that mere unwashed proles can actually express their opinions about books these days. Much hand-wringing ensues.)

“Permanent Damage” Teaser Ten: MELT THE BULLET, BLUNT THE KNIFE

Just one day left until the release date for Permanent Damage. Ten stories. One last  teaser to whet your appetite, give you a hint of the plot and the feel of the stories.

This time, meet a security expert who hasn’t been hired to keep thieves out — but to keep something in . . . .

MELT THE BULLET, BLUNT THE KNIFE

On the screen, the young man began taking off his clothes, setting them aside. “What, uhh — what exactly am I looking at?”

“Shh. You will see.”

Rory was getting a little uncomfortable watching this. “He, uhh, he certainly has a lot of tattoos,” he said.

“Ahhh. Yes. My son, he still believes in the old ways, yes? To the vory v zakone, these tattoos, these are a man’s whole life.” He tapped the screen, finger tracing an eight-pointed star on his son’s chest. “Everything he’s done, everything he is. That’s how the world knows you, how they know to show you respect, loyalty, dedication. Honor. Fear.” His eyes flicked sideways, taking in Rory’s expression. “It’s a commitment, you see. In prison, the tattoos are done with needles or guitar strings, razors, inked with urine and soot. Infections, they happen often, and sometimes people die, all for the sake of these marks. Everything you are, you wear in the skin. But suppose you could change the skin. You would change the man, wouldn’t you? Change the man into something else.”

The young man on the screen was untying something bundled up in rough paper with twine. Something dark.

“Change him, perhaps, into something more than a man.”

______

“Permanent Damage” — Available Monday!

“Permanent Damage” Teaser Nine: A SUDDEN LOSS OF CABIN PRESSURE

Two days left until the release date for Permanent Damage. Ten stories. A teaser every day for each story to whet your appetite, give you a hint of the plot and the feel of them.

In a time when a machine can predict your death with 100% accuracy, a woman looks for something else to be certain about . . . .

A SUDDEN LOSS OF CABIN PRESSURE

Jemma looked at it over her glasses. A Machine-of-Death card that read “PLANE CRASH” in big block letters. Rebecca had signed and dated the other side. To Derek. Falling for you.

“Someday, Jemma, I’m going to fall right out of the sky.”

“You don’t know that,” Jemma said. “It might mean a plane falls on you, or — ”

“Don’t start,” she said. “Point is, you know what Derek’s says? EARTHQUAKE.” She took the card back and slid it back into the box, closed the lid. “And I cannot, cannot for the life of me, see any possible way those two deaths could be connected.”

Jemma frowned. “Okay — and?”

“And, that means when I die, he’s not there. I fall right out of the sky, Jemma, and I do it alone.” She wasn’t looking up at her. “I don’t want to be alone when that happens. And I can’t get it out of my head, and I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life with a man who’s not going to be there for me when I need him the most.”

Jemma slid her glasses back up the bridge of her nose. “What — you think the whole point of a relationship is to have someone next to you when you die?”

“Well — yeah.” Rebecca looked up helplessly. “Can you think of a better reason?”

______

“Permanent Damage” — Available Monday!

“A Sudden Loss Of Cabin Pressure” is based on the MACHINE OF DEATH concept created by Ryan North. The concept is used with permission.