R. Lee Smith's Blog, page 9

Serial Saturday Update

Welp, the 100-Day 100k Author’s Challenge ended yesterday, and as we all can see, I failed to the tune of 39,396 words. And that, folks, is a long, slow, sad tune indeed. I’m told by the Challenge Director that I did not fail, because not only do these blog posts count as words, but editing also counts in some fashion. Whatevs, we play hardcore in the Smomestead. No wild cards, no mulligans, no rerolls when you drop your dice and no cop-out edits that count as words. No sir. We FAIL in this house, and when we fail, we get back up and keep writing.

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Or we go to the movies. We go to a lot of movies.

 

 

Anyway, don’t let my rampant apathy discourage any of my writing readers from meeting their NaNoWriMo goals this year. If you are presently rising to the National Novel Writer’s Month challenge, I would love to hear about it!

As usual, I’ll be using NaNoWriMo to finally finish the project I’d be working on anyway, which this year is my 5-Part Five Nights at Freddy’s fanfiction series, Everything Is All Right. And, it being Saturday, the latest chapter of Part III: Children of Mammon, just went up on fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org, so if you are following the series, head on over and check it out. If you’re still not reading it after all this time, one more snippet probably won’t lure you in, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. It’s a really good chapter this week (and I’m not just saying that because I wrote it. I mean, yeah, that’s a factor, but it’s not the only reason). And if you’re waiting for the whole thing to be finished so you can binge-read it, well, maybe this will be the temptation that breaks your willpower! #damnyouRLeeSmith

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At 9:45, Mrs. Campbell and Mrs. Kellar left their respective houses and drove to the church. By the time the congregation had finished their greetings and were ready for the opening hymn, Bats was already on his way to Mason’s house with a plastic bag and Riley trotting sleepily along behind him. It was a long walk in the hot summer rain. They did not arrive until almost eleven, when Freddy went back to Pirate Cove to check on Ana and override Foxy’s program so he could stay with her in the ball pit instead of being forced to the stage. Foxy took it well, suffering only short spasms for a few seconds, but it was enough to bring Ana out of sleep, although not quite all the way to wakefulness.

Watching her resettle in her fitful, mumbling way, Freddy was reminded of Bonnie’s own restless twitches. Putting Ana and Bonnie together in a quiet place might help them both calm down or it might crank them both up. For the moment, it seemed safer to do nothing. He’d look in on them again when the first set ended, Freddy decided, and bring Bonnie with him so he could see her for himself and maybe carry her to the party room if she wasn’t all the way back on her feet. But not yet. For everyone’s sake, he needed this day to pass peacefully.

At nearly the same instant Freddy had this thought, five miles away in Mason Kellar’s backyard, Bats was telling the whole damn world who broke his nose.

Mason listened with a puckered brow and half a smile. He was not yet so far gone that he hadn’t noticed four of his boys had gotten bruised up on the same night, but if he’d thought about it at all, he’d merely thought they’d gotten into a squabble amongst themselves, and if Trigger-Man and Dentist didn’t want him to know about it, then it meant Bats and Riley, of all fucking people, had beat them. Mason had been content to let their various stupid stories stand as fact all week, even if it meant letting them think they’d all fooled him—even Riley—because it just too fucking hot to bitch anyone out. Especially for in-fighting, which was a hard thing for Mason to give two shits about in the first place. And besides, it was funny as fuck when you thought about it. He’d even taken to calling Dentist ‘Dentures’ and the name was starting to stick.

Hearing the truth, that it was Rider’s big-mouthed little bitch who had actually done it was even funnier at first. If four of his guys together could not take one girl down between them, he kind of felt like he ought to be more mad at them than her. So it might have all ended there, except that in the course of his story, Bats let a minor detail slip that it had all gone down at Freddy’s. What his guys and Jack’s were doing together at Freddy’s was one good question. An even better one was, what the hell was Ana Stark doing there when she had that huge house up on Coldslip to rattle around in?

I don’t know, was the communal answer, but upon further prying, Trig added the information that she was building something.

And there, Mason Kellar quit smiling. Because to his way of thinking, there was only one thing Ana Stark could be building at some abandoned restaurant out in the desert and one person she’d be building it for, and if Rider wasn’t going to let his best fucking friend from forever ago come down to fucking California and co-chair the company, he sure as fuck wasn’t going to send his cum-guzzling fucktoy into Mason’s backyard to open up a new storefront.

In three minutes, he had the whole story out of all four involved parties (or three of them anyway. Riley was already stoned and earnestly insisting he had been ambushed by ninjas). He took some time to think, about another three minutes, then took out his phone and dialed Rider. The largely one-sided conversation that followed lasted ten minutes, consisted mainly of threats and profanity, and ended with Rider hanging up on him. He made many phone calls after that, each one lasting only as long as it took to say, “Get over here.”

Roughly four hundred miles away, Rider was also making phone calls, but as Ana’s phone had been off its charger since Friday night and Freddy hadn’t even thought to turn it off, its battery was bone-dry and he could do nothing but leave messages she would not get until it was far too late.

At 11:43, in Mammon, Utah, sixteen men spread themselves out over eight motorcycles and one powder blue Crown Victoria and took Cawthon Road out of town. At the Valhalla Racing Stables in Bakersfield, California, Rider sat in silence for almost a full minute, then shut his phone off and got back to what he called work. And at the Edge of Nowhere, Ana slept…

Serial Saturday Update

Not much to report this week, as I spent most of it editing my Lords of Arcadia supplemental story instead of working on my FNAFic or, you know, going out and having a life. However, my innate boringness has paid off and I am pleased to report that I will be keeping at least one of my promises: Tooth and Claw will indeed be available by the end of this year (although I’m still not sold on the title). Heck, it should be up by the end of this month. So yay! And I’m still on schedule to get the anthology together early next year, too (I don’t like that title either. I wish authors could name books like composers name symphonies. You know, it’s not The Land of the Beautiful Dead, it’s just R Lee Smith’s Ninth Novel).

And of course, I have a new chapter up on fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org for my fanfiction, Everything Is All Right, Part III: Children of Mammon. It’s a short chapter, but last week’s was crazy long, so it averages out. Besides, it was an especially fun one to write, as you can see from this snippet:

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Freddy was not known for sympathy, but he had moments of almost telepathic empathy and this was one of them. His ears shifted as he listened to the silence and at last, he nodded. “I. KNOW. THIS. IS. HARD. FOR. YOU. AND. BELIEVE. IT. OR. NOT. I. DO. CARE. BUT. THIS. ISN’T. ABOUT. YOU. OR. ME. TONIGHT. IT’S. ABOUT. AN-N-A. AND. WHAT. SHE. NEEDS.”

“She needs me,” Bonnie said. “She doesn’t need Foxy, she needs me!”

“NO. SHE. NEEDS. SLEEP. BONNIE. SHE. NEEDS. SOME. ONE. WHO. CAN. TAKE. CARE. OF. HER. AND. KEEP. HER. QUIET. AND. MOST. OF. ALL. SHE. NEEDS. SOME. ONE. WHO. CAN. RUN. FASTER. THAN. SHE. CAN. IF. NECESSARY.” Freddy paused, looking around with his ears sweeping left to right. “WHAT IS THAT?”

“I’d let her sleep!” he insisted. “I can take care of her! I c-c-can keep her quiet!”

“YOU. CAN’T. EVEN. KEEP. YOURSELF. QUIET,” Freddy said, then scowled and looked around again. “DO. YOU. HEAR. THAT.”

“What?” Bonnie asked sullenly, but swept his ears around, scanning for sound. Just as he was about to ask what the hell he was listening for, he heard a buzz. Short, low-pitched. Mechanical, not an insect, and after a moment’s confusion, he knew what it was. “That’s Ana’s phone.”

“NO. IT. ISN’T.”

“Yeah, it is,” snapped Bonnie. “It’s just not ringing. It’s doing the other thing, where people type words at her.”

“ON. A. PHONE.”

“Yeah, on a phone! There’s letters on the buttons, aren’t there? You push them in a certain way and they come up on the screen as words instead of numbers. It’s called ‘tech-ing.’ It was just starting to catch on back in Circle Drive, don’t you remember?”

“WHY. WOULDN’T. THEY. JUST. CALL. AND. TALK.”

“Because they c-c-can tech!” Bonnie exclaimed, flinging out his arms. “Jesus C-C—CRISPY CRUST—Freddy, if this was a hundred-d-d years ago, you’d be asking why people c-c-called instead of sending-ing-ing pigeons everywhere!”

Serial Saturday Update

So another Halloween has come and gone with no Trick-or-Treaters here at the Smomestead, which means I’m stuck with five pounds of my favorite fun-sized chocolates. MmmMMMmm…I mean, uh, darn. How deliciously inconvenient.

Despite that, I had a great Halloween/birthday. I made mummy meatloaf…

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This is the only way I make meatloaf anymore.

…and mashed potatoes cut into ghost-shapes with peas for eyes because I never outgrew the urge to play with my food. Me and my dad convalesced from our various ailments together watching The Nightmare Before Christmas, or rather, I watched it and he watched me sing along and act out all Jack’s lines. I tried to get him to paint creepy pictures with me, but he insists he’s not an artist, which I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Painting is to making art like sex is to making babies; sure, it CAN happen, but if we’re honest, most of the time, we’re just having fun (and sometimes, when it did happen, it was sort of an accident).

Anyhoo, here are my non-artistic just-having-fun-on-Halloween paint-doodles. Some of you may recognize the first one as being taken from one of the surrealist paintings from Sims 4. The other one, obviously, is from FNAF. I’d just like to add that I’m super-proud of how that kid turned out. I’m not good at drawing people, even less so kids, and that’s the first one I ever attempted to paint.

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What a great segue into my FNAFiction, Everything Is All Right! A new chapter just went up at fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org, so if you’re reading along, I’m sure you’ll want to click on the link of your choice and get caught up. Hope you like that cliffhanger. Not too much left to Part III: Children of Mammon, and no, I’m still not quite done with Part IV, so the biggest cliffhanger of all may just keep you hanging more than a week. We’ll see. In the meantime, enjoy this excerpt! When last we saw our hero, she was tripping balls in quite possibly the worst place anyone would ever want to be high and hallucinating, on quite possibly the worst night.

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Ana ran forever through the night with the wind always against her, herding her with slaps of rain, but somehow ended up back at Freddy’s, falling out of the storm and against the playground fence. Did the dream end there? Maybe, but the dream was a nightmare and nightmares begin again. When she raised her head and opened her eyes, she saw the blind staring eye of a camera, aimed not at the sandbox or the swings, but at the broken plastic feet that were all that remained of Tumble’s twin brother, Rumble.

It was hard to see. There was no blinking red light with this one; it had long ago succumbed to the young snipers of Mammon, but although the lens was a dry socket and its body was pocked with holes, its apparent death was a lie. It was a machine, after all. Machines never really die.

Unreasoning terror washed over her, its chill immediately followed by a hot rush of rage. She climbed the chain-link fence, up and over, landing badly and skinning her knees, but that didn’t hurt and didn’t matter. The camera was all that mattered, but it was mounted just under the overhanging roof, well out of her reach. How to get there?

Lightning flashed, outlining the scuttled hulk of the pirate ship climbing toy with silver light.

There was no plan, only movement and sensation. The knotted ropes were wet and frayed, slippery in her hands even as they cut into her. The deckboards were rotten; if they’d been dry, they would have broken under her weight, but swollen with rain as they were, they only sagged. The mast was already leaning, its rusty base pulling up the boards around it as a fallen tree’s roots pull up the earth. It needed only a push in the right direction and once it was in motion, it could not be pulled back and set right again.

Ana pushed. The crow’s nest where brave children had once stood watch over the invisible seas that filled the desert smashed apart when it fell. The mast bounced, cracking loudly on each impact, and lay crooked on the ground. It was too heavy to lift, so she was forced to pull it around in a clumsy semi-circle, tripping over playground toys and her own boots, leaving a trail of soggy splinters as the wood crumbled in her hands. Once leaned up against the building, the top of the mast easily touched the overhang, but it lost several inches when she put all her weight on the first rung.

Ana climbed. Decaying rungs broke off in her hands and the mast wobbled and dropped with each step. She knew she wasn’t going to make it, but she almost did…

Serial Saturday Updates

Well, here we are, another week behind me and not a lot to show for it. Still fighting that infection (thanks for all your well-wishes! My readers are the best!). Looks like I’ll be spending my birthday at home watching The Nightmare Before Christmas instead of dressing up and seeing my friends. Like, the ONE time of year when I actively seek out parties…

So I haven’t exactly been having a bundle of laughs here at the Smomestead, but I’m feeling much better now. Shout-out to my good friend Keely, who surprised me with this beauty:

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…made by artist of oddities and entrepreneur of vulture culture, Jayne Strange. Isn’t that beautiful? Best birthday ever, infection and all. Keely, you are awesome!

So while I convalesce under the kindly watchful gaze of Galahad, I’ve managed to get a little work done. A very little. Have you ever tried to write a human/animal-shaped robot sex scene while you had a fever of 103? I mean, yeah, most people would assume that’s the ONLY time anyone would write that, but for me, that’s Tuesday. Except last Tuesday, when what should have been a normal, run-of-the-mill human/animal-shaped robot sex scene came out reading like it was guest directed by David Lynch. And I…may keep it. It’s weird, but let’s be honest here, it’s not the weirdest pairing I’ve ever written.

Anyway, while I wasn’t the most productive person ever, the latest chapter of my Five Nights at Freddy’s fanfiction IS up over at fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org for those of you reading it. And for those of you who aren’t…well, it’s still there. Are you sure I can’t convince you to get in on some of this sweet, sweet fanfiction action?

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Over the next few hours, the power situation slowly stabilized and long defunct systems came on. Stagnant air began to circulate through the building’s true ductwork, while in the crawlway, rotary mechanisms squealed in protest as walls assumed their default positions. Pipes knocked and rusty water dripped from bathroom faucets. When she opened the freezer, she was met by a gust of foul yet distinctly cooler air. In the South Hall, a light came on in Miss Kitty’s Sarsaparilla Saloon and the animatronic mice within kicked their tiny heels and squeaked to the rhythm of their endless can-can. In Foxy’s Treasure Cave, stalactites glowed with eerie colored lights and the sounds of dripping water and ghostly whispers came from recessed speakers. And everywhere, little red lights on the sides of cameras stopped blinking and simultaneously switched to a steady red glow to show the master monitoring array in the basement had just come on.

Swampy was the first of the New Faces to move, turning his head as Ana walked through the dining room, following her with the burnt-out sockets of his eyes. And with Ana’s startled, “Oh hell no, you did not just do that!” still echoing in the air, a sepulchral groan emanated from the lobby, followed by a chicken-fried drawl: “WELL, HOWDY YA’LL AND WELCOME TO FREDDY’S!”

One by one, they all came to life, hinges shrieking and brittle plastic cracking as they resumed their old routines with all the single-minded, senseless purpose of a zombie horde. Soon, Peggy once again waved from her signpost and told barnyard jokes in her sweet, hayseed voice; Swampy stole swallows from his jug and heckled the show in a friendly, redneck way; in the gym, Tumble warned kids who weren’t there to beware of yetis who also weren’t there; Tux stood in his corner by the West Hall exit, regularly pretending to straighten his painted-on gloves and brushing dust from his shoulders as he waited for curious little guests to come to him with Google-able questions, ridiculously concerned with his appearance for someone whose head was just eyes and teeth mounted to a metal pole.

As the afternoon lengthened into evening, it began to rain again, although not with the same punishing force. The storm seemed to crouch over Edge of Nowhere, bored and restless, slapping at the pizzeria now and then, but mostly biding its time. Waiting, as Ana waited, for Mason to arrive.

Serial Saturday Update

So I haven’t been feeling well lately. I know, I know. What a surprise. I thought I might be coming down with some mutant version of the flu, one that caused all the secondary symptoms–achy joints, dizziness, fatigue–and none of the primaries, like a runny nose or cough, or you know, ANY visible proof that I was sick and not just lazy. Oh, and fun fact time: I never had my tonsils out as a kid. For the first half of my life, they never gave me trouble. Then we moved from Washington State to Oregon and I guess the move introduced my (secretly overworn) immune system to new bugs and presto! The next time I got a harmless cold, it felt like I was swallowing marbles. Over the years, it got better…and then we moved to the Midwest. For the last week, I’ve been choking from the inside-out, but no sore throat, no stuffy sinuses, not even a headache.

This morning, one of my surgery scars opened. Turns out I didn’t have the flu. I had a massive weirdly pain-free infection.

Okay, so that was gross and I apologize, but I turned on the computer for the first time this week and got slapped in the face by an outpouring of tremendously touching concern, and I just wanted to let everyone know (yet again) that I wasn’t ignoring you and I’m not dead, just medically fragile, which is a condition that is often as gross as it is inconvenient.

In the meantime, although I managed to do nothing except edit and am only falling further and further behind on Part IV of Everything Is All Right, my FNAF fanfiction, I have the next chapter of Part III: Children of Mammon uploaded and ready to read over at fanfiction.net or archiveofourown.org, whichever your preference. Also, for all my loyal readers who have been waiting more than a year for me to finish this behemoth and get back to work, I do feel bad for how long I’m making you wait, so I’m going to try and scrape together enough of my short stories to make a decent anthology. Don’t expect high romance. The content ranges from dark to pitch black, as I never intended any of it to be read by anyone and it probably shouldn’t be.

If nothing else, I will be soon be releasing a supplemental novella for The Lords of Arcadia series (a subplot cut for length, now reconstructed and fleshed out to some 50k words), concerning the lycan and some of the former captives from Gabriel’s camp. There were several other subplots culled from The Army of Mab, and it was always my intention to write them up and release them all together, but I may never get around to that, and this novella is already written. I’ve held on to it long enough. Look for it before the end of the year; working title as of this moment is Tooth and Claw. The anthology should show up sometime early next year. I haven’t thought of a title yet. I’ve been thinking about it all week, lying on my bed of pain, and the best I came up with was Love Bites and Butt Stuff. I’ll try again when I’m not running a fever, but I’m open to suggestions.

But right now, tonight, I can offer you only another chapter of the damn few remaining in Children of Mammon. Enjoy!

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It stopped raining sometime in the night, but Ana was not fooled. The storm was not over, merely catching its breath. She took advantage of it while she could however, making the run to Hurricane only through the combined powers of all-wheel drive and mulish determination. She saw no one at all on the flooded roads, which was not surprising, as it turned out, because they were all at the WalMart. A simple grocery-and-battery run took nearly four hours, but then she was back in the basement at Freddy’s, working on the condenser.

The next time she raised herself out of that other-world where everything was metal and wire and all the parts fit together only one way to make a working whole, it was almost two in the afternoon. For hours, she had been unaware of her body except as its limitations correlated to the work she wanted it to do. Now a litany of physical complaints registered all at once, each convinced it was the most pressing and needed all her attention. She was hot, sweaty, filthy, thirsty, had a headache, a backache, a buttache, sore knees, dry eyes, dry mouth, an empty stomach and a painfully full bladder, and also, she might be going a little crazy because she had brought only three lights down here and they were all three in front of her trained on the condenser and yet she could see her shadow.

Ana puzzled over this for way too long before arriving at the conclusion that this didn’t mean she was crazy. It meant she wasn’t alone.

“If you’ve come to kill me, do it now, before I have to stand up,” she said.

Freddy’s grunt was at least half-growl. “THAT. ISN’T. FUNNY.”

“I’m not completely sure I’m joking.” Ana shifted with effort from a sitting position to a kneeling one, and from there, groaning, onto her feet. “How long have you been watching me?”

“ABOUT. AN. HOUR. THIS. TIME.”

“This time? There were other times? Sheesh, I was good and out of it, wasn’t I? Any visitors while I was playing around down here with my fucking back to the door like a dumbass begging to be murdered?”

Freddy shook his head, watching her gather her tools. “ARE. YOU. DONE. FOR. THE. DAY.”

“With this, yeah. It’s fixed.”

Freddy’s reaction to this news was underwhelming to say the least. She’d seen this bear—well, okay, not this bear, but clearly a bear with most of his same programming—gush over some crayon scribbles like the kid had presented him with the frigging Mona Lisa, but single-handedly repair the only cosmic energy condenser on Earth and what did she get? A nod. Just one. With his eyes only half open and completely level. Look up callous disregard in the goddamn dictionary and that was the picture to accompany it.

“‘Holy shit, Ana, are you sure?’” she asked herself dryly. “‘That’s amazing. I am legit amazed. My bearish flabber is fucking gasted. If I had a gold star, I’d give you one. If I had two gold stars, I’d give me one for believing in you so hard.’”

“ARE. YOU. DONE.”

“Not yet, give me a second. ‘And am I happy about this? Why, I’m jubilant. Delighted. Positively adlubescent. I’m as happy as a clam in high tide and pleased as a pig in warm shit.’”

“COLORFUL.”

“‘I am so proud of you,’” said Ana, flipping some switches and giving the primer a few good cranks. “‘Of course, I knew you could do it all along, but it’s still damned impressive. I appreciate all the work you’ve done, but this? This is really above and beyond. Great job.’ Thank you, thank you, but seriously, bear, shut up. I need to listen.” Beneath her hand, the primer grip had begun to vibrate.

Serial Saturday Update

Ahhh, Autumn!

I know it’s officially been fallish for some time now, but here where I live, it’s only been in the last few days that temperatures have dropped from summery heat and boggy humidity to something humans can tolerate, or at least, wilting little windflowers of humanity like me. I anticipate that by this time next week, I’ll need to have the heat on. When the weather changes in the Midwest, it happens quickly and with conviction. The trees haven’t begun to change yet, but again, here where I live, the change is sudden, spectacluar and soon over. By Halloween, I fully expect that all those green, leafy trees out my window will be as so many charred bones clawing up a winter-white sky.

So I don’t have brilliant displays of foliage yet, nor crisp dead leaves crunching underfoot, nor that pleasant chill in the air, nor the singular satisfaction of snuggling under a quilt in the morning instead of waking up. But hey, I got pumpkin pie spice flavored creamer to put in the coffee and stores full of Halloween decorations, so it must be fall!

I’ve been a little under the autumnal weather this week (surprise, surprise), so I kinda sorta forgot that it was Friday until, well, it was Saturday. Nevertheless, I had my latest chapter of my fanfic, Everything Is All Right, Part Three: Children of Mammon, edited and ready to go, so if you’re reading along, head on over to fanfiction.net or archiveofourown.org and check it out. As usual, here is a snippet, containing what is quite possibly the most diabolical sin of foreshadowing I’ve ever committed. Shame on me. Enjoy!

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The week passed, intolerably uneventful. Each morning, she woke up and went to work, mowing grass, trimming hedges and maintaining public parks. Every evening, she holed up at Freddy’s, pretending trouble would never find her until she started to believe it, but a part of her was always tense, waiting. Her world had become a jack-in-the-box, when every day was just another turn of the crank. Although the music was playing now and the tune was peaceful, that could stop at any moment and the puppet come leaping out. All she could do was keep her head down, stay sober, and make it to the weekend.

So naturally, it was the worst weekend of her life. Overused and hyperbolic as the phrase might be, this time it was true. Worse than the frantic weekend her mother had taken her out of Mammon, because as frightening as that had been, her mother had been too preoccupied with her own terror to beat on her too bad. Worse than the weekend she’d spent in the hospital after the accident, mostly because she couldn’t remember too much of that and most of she did remember was that her mother was finally dead, which trumped the minor inconvenience of almost drowning. Technically even worse than the whole Springtrap business to come, since she wouldn’t make it through the whole week.

It began at midnight, at the very genesis of Friday, when Ana was torn from yet another nightmare by the sound of a bad fan belt screaming up the parking lot. She had taken to sleeping with a hammer close by; it was in her hand before she knew she was awake and then her bare feet hit the tiles running. Slivers of light came through the plastic covering the windows in the West Hall as the car came right up close to the lobby. Car doors opened and slammed. Crouched low, peering through the plastic, Ana couldn’t make anything out beyond the blinding headlights, but she could hear voices. Younger than the sort Mason ran with. Jack’s? But no, she could hear a female voice mixed in the others and there had been no girls allowed in the Kellar kingdom. Just a bunch of random teens then, come to fuck around at Freddy’s in the middle of the night, as one does in a small town without cows to tip.

They had clearly been here before, enough to know the doors were new. After a short conference, one of them reached for the handle because apparently the kid thought someone would take the time and trouble to install heavy-duty doors but not to lock them. He let out a yelp, then an unsteady laugh, and said in a tone that was trying for outrage to cover the unease, “It bit me!”

Several figures crowded closer. The bluish light of a cell phone came on at the center of their huddle. Someone said, “Holy shit, man, you’re really bleeding.”

“It’s the ghost of Billy Blaylock,” the girl among them declared in her I’m-not-just-cute-but-also-badass-tee-hee voice. “He wants to drink your blood.”

Billy Blaylock? Her surprise over the fact that the local hooligans knew about her uncle melted almost immediately into profound annoyance that they had appropriated his death into some ridiculous urban legend, like that of the hungry ghosts of miners in the quarry and secret experiments out at the abandoned military base.

The group laughed a little, but the guy really was bleeding, so they all piled into the car again and drove off to find less injurious fun. That fan belt really needed to be looked at.

As soon as they were gone, Ana went around and double-checked all the doors to make sure they were locked. She met Freddy doing the same thing and of course, he took one look at her and told her to put some beaver dam clothes on or go back to bed. She didn’t feel a strong urge to be obedient, but she did have work in the morning, so she went back to bed and dreamed of crawling endlessly through the maze in the ceiling, pursued by the bleeding corpse of a crying child.

Serial Saturday Update

Yes, folks, you read that right! I actually got my act together and published another chapter of my FNAF fanfic on schedule! Gold star for me!

And here is where I was going to write up some of the notes I took from one of the Penned Con panels I attended, but I FRIGGING LOST THEM! For real. Lost where? How? No idea. I can only assume the maid who cleaned my room back at that motel with the brick-hard beds ended up with them. Hopefully, she was inspired to write that book she’s had floating around at the back of her head for the last few years, since that was the point of the panel and the subject of all those notes I took. So I got nothing, which I feel really bad about, not just because my content has been awfully thin of late and I took all those notes and stuff, but also because it was a legitimately awesome panel and I wanted to spread the love. Sadly, this is the best I can do.

The guy who gave the panel was Ben Hale, author of The Lumineia Chronicles and co-author of a how-to series on writing, the first installment of which, Write Like A Boss, came out yesterday. I believe the next one, Publish Like A Boss, comes out next month and the third (and final) part of the series, Market Like A Boss, comes out the month after that. If you are at all interested in writing, I encourage you to check these books out. The guy is like liquid motivation poured into a blue chambray shirt.

He writes Young Adult mostly and mentioned that he has a ‘clean’ romance coming out soon, so I did not introduce myself, since he wouldn’t have heard of me or if he had, he sure wouldn’t have had a great opinion of my work, but he was awesome and the stuff he had to say about writing applies toward every writer and any genre. Seriously, National Novel Writer’s Month is coming up (November!), so if you’re thinking about joining and need that kick in the pants, check Write Like A Boss out. It’s, like, five bucks, the cost of a super-large coffee drink at your local coffee shop. Not saying it’s better than the coffee or that if you only had five bucks, you should go for the book, but hey, if you have ten bucks, you can get both and avoid the conflict.

It’s now after midnight and officially Saturday, so I guess I’d better get to pimping MY books instead of Hale’s. If you’re reading Everything Is All Right, head on over to fanfiction.net or archiveofourown.org to check out the new chapter. If you’re still not reading along, check out this sample and maybe, just maybe, I can convince you to come to the fanfiction-side. We have coffee.

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Bonnie still didn’t know how late Ana worked on a normal day, or even if this was a normal day, given that she’d lost this job once already. So it was a long day, waiting without knowing when she’d show up, but oddly enough, it was Freddy who seemed to feel it the most. He started out, like Bonnie, watching the road between sets, but by noon, he was breaking his routine to steal a peek out the windows even in the middle of an act. By three, he was growling, at first only occasionally, but more and more as time went on, until it was a constant presence, underscoring every word and filling all the spaces between them, and just when Bonnie thought it couldn’t get any worse, it stopped completely.

Freddy didn’t talk much, as a rule. He’d probably said more in the short time since Ana’s moving in than he had in all the years since this restaurant had closed. But even without conventional language, the bearish grunts, hums and grumbles that were Freddy’s preferred mode of communication were usually more than enough. And when he was quiet, really quiet, that was never a good sign.

It built all afternoon until, right in the middle of the five o’clock set, Freddy stopped singing, tossed his microphone carelessly to the back of the stage and went into the gym.

‘Okay, then,’ thought Bonnie, trying like hell to have a sense of humor because getting mad was too easy and going black was getting even easier. ‘You do that and me and Chica will just finish out the set alone like a couple of chumps.’

A few minutes later, Freddy came out again, only to stand in the back of the room in that unsettling silence while Chica and Bonnie limped a three-animatronic performance along without him. At length, his head turned. He looked at the table for a while, then moved it back against the wall where it had come to belong since Ana’s arrival. He studied it, so quiet, then touched a sagging part of the curtain where the staples had been torn out. His ears shifted; that and the sound of his cameras whining as he looked around was the only sound he made.

And then, moving quickly, decisively and above all, silently, Freddy began to clean up. Only he didn’t just clean up. He cleaned out.

He started with the cardboard boxes that used to be her closet, flattening the ones that had already been partially crushed and keeping the undamaged ones intact, but taking them all away, clear out of the room. He cleaned up the few candy wrappers and empty drink cans that had accumulated in her living space and put them in one bag, cleaned up the uneaten junk food and unopened cans and put them in another. He gathered all her scattered clothes, folded them, and took them away too. He left the punctured inflatable mattress, but took her sleeping bag. He took the sign she’d made down off the wall. And when it was all gone, when there was nothing left of her but the table where she used to sleep with the torn curtain sagging off one side, Freddy came back to the stage, but didn’t take his place on it. He sat beside the stairs, took his hat off, and was quiet.

Don’t Panic!

I apologize for the unexpected silence, folks, and for missing last week’s chapter upload on my FNAFiction. It was unintentional, I assure you. As some of you may know, I went to Penned Con in St. Louis, where I thought I’d be able to freely access the interwebz via the hotel wifi, but I was wrong. I could not stay connected more than a few seconds and after struggling with it for a few hours, I gave up and resigned myself to a weekend without social media. Which I didn’t miss, to be honest. I also had to resign myself to missing my chapter upload for Serial Saturday, and THAT hit hard.

I suppose there’s nothing stopping me from uploading it now. Better late than never and all that, but the world isn’t going to end if I just give it a miss and pick it up again on schedule. As my sister Cris said, it’ll be good practice for when all my faithful readers have to wait for the fourth book to be finished. …yay.

I’ll have more for you all on Saturday, but I did want to tell everyone who may have been concerned that I’m okay! I was just at a hotel with terrible wifi (and brick-hard beds, but that’s another rant). Anyhoo, I’m back now and sorry if I scared anyone! All is well with me!

Serial Saturday Update

Penned Con is a week away, which means I have seven days and six nights to flip my sleep schedule on its groggy head so that I’m awake during the days (shudder) and can do normal day-things with my fellow humans. And let me tell you, I am already counting the days until the Con is over and I can go back to staying up all night and sleeping all day, because this sucks. I mean, yah, you CAN eventually train a night-owl to function during the days, kind of like how you can train a left-handed person to use their right hand: It will never feel natural or look pretty, but no one cares if you’re happy as long as you conform.

I have been nocturnal as long as I can remember. Longer, even. My mother used to tell me that when she’d wake up in the middle of the night, she’d often find me quietly watching TV or flipping through a picture book when I was three or four. It got to the point that she’d just say goodnight and go back to bed. I clearly had no trouble getting in and out of my crib, and it pretty much guaranteed I’d go down for a nap in the afternoon when she wanted one, too. She was a morning person, like my dad, so I have no idea where I got it from. I was just comfortably nocturnal right up until I started school, when I became uncomfortably nocturnal and stayed that way for the next 13 years. Then I started working and…well, let’s just say the best part of being a writer is setting your own hours.

Anyway, I’m exhausted, so I’m going to upload early tonight, take some Zzzquil and go to bed at the ridiculous hour of 10 o’clock. Sheesh. On a normal day, I should be thinking about what to make for lunch right about now. But it is not a normal day and won’t be until October 2nd at the earliest, which is when I get home from Penned Con, so please head on over to ff.net or a03.org to enjoy the newest chapter of Everything Is All Right, Part Three: Children of Mammon and wish me a pleasant trip and pleasant dreams!

 

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The morning meeting was already underway when Ana opened the door to Shelton Contractors and all heads turned when she walked in. To judge from appearances, Shelly had just finished telling them half of them were about to be downgraded to part-time labor, but he had obviously not gotten around to announcing her triumphant return. After a moment of silence in which the stares ran the gamut from incuriously surprised to slack-jawed horror (that was Wyborn, uncharacteristically sitting alone in his usual spot. Slater, who should have been slouched beside him, was nowhere to be seen), Big Paulie slammed his coffee cup down on the reception desk and swung on Shelly with a bellowing, “What in the blue blazes is she doing back here?”

“Office,” Shelly said coldly. “Now.”

Big Paulie bulled his way through a roomful of staring men and into the boss’s back room with Shelly right behind him. The door slammed, but the room was far from soundproofed. Everyone got a good earful, from the I-won’t-work-with-that-whore-dropped-piece-of-trash to the I-don’t-like-it-either-but-I-got-a-business-to-run to the I-gave-you-thirty-years-of-my-life to the I-paid-for-them-too-so-don’t-pull-that-crap-on-me-now.

Ana poured herself the last of the coffee and started a new pot brewing, waiting for the fireworks to fizzle out. She kept one eye on Wyborn as she drank it; he kept both eyes on her.

After a little more yelling back and forth, Big Paulie banged his way back out of the boss’s office and straight out the door, making sure to shoulder-check Ana on the way. Hot coffee sloshed onto her shirt, not only scalding her tits, but then sort of exposing them through the wet t-shirt. The urge to dash the rest of the coffee over Big Paulie’s bald head and then hit him with the empty mug was strong, much stronger than it would have been if she’d only had some sleep, but he was already gone.

“You all right?” Shelly asked as Ana dabbed at herself with a handful of paper towels.

She nodded, jaws clenched.

“Get yourself one of the company shirts in back. The rest of you, listen up. Hageman, think you can fill Paulie’s shoes for the day down at town hall?”

Ana left them to reconfigure the chain of command and went into the supply room to find a shirt close to her size and change. When she reappeared, once more all heads turned. Ana tossed her wadded-up shirt in the trash—her Mordor fun-run shirt, one of her favorites—and picked up her coffee. She drank it, defiantly.

“And that brings us to outdoors maintenance,” Shelly said after a moment, turning to Morehead. “As of today, Stark here will be in charge of that department. I trust you to show her how it’s done. The two of you will also be responsible for general upkeep around here. Wyborn, Bisano, on Wednesdays and Fridays, you two will be helping out under Stark’s supervision. Questions?”

Bisano tossed off a shrug that said he’d be looking for another job anyway, Morehead seemed relieved more than anything, and Wyborn looked like Shelly had reached out and given his nuts a twist.

Ana said, “I could use Wyborn today too, if you don’t mind.”

“Peep,” said Wyborn, probably not deliberately.

Serial Saturday Update

Welp, it was a big, big day here at the Smomestead. In fact, it was State Fair Day. So we loaded ourselves up and trundled up the road to the fair.

This was not my first outing since surgery, but since the few others I’ve undertaken have been trips to the grocery store, it’s safe to say this qualified as a Herculean trial as far as I was concerned. I brought my wheelchair, but honestly (and perhaps stupidly), I hoped to use it pretty much as a walking aide and a place to stash heavy bottles of water. I actually thought I’d be able to walk pretty much everywhere.

We were at the fair for six hours. I spent easily half of that time sitting on my dizzy, exhausted ass while someone pushed me. Oh well.

Other than that, I had a great time! I petted a porcupine (not as prickly as you’d think) and a wallaby (so soft, like seriously guys, all the soft) and a bison! Also goats and sheep and cows and ponies and such. We spent at least an hour looking at the animals. The rabbits were especially awesome. I had fun pointing out all the breeds I used for the Freddyland animatronics from the Bunny Patch.

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Alas, there were no purebred lapine lavender badasses present.

Suffice to say, we are all pleasantly exhausted, and I was looking forward to collapsing facedown on my bed, and probably on my cat, Waffles, since my bed is his third-favorite place to sleep (the second being on top of the stack of winter blankets in my closet and the first being behind my life-size inflatable Jack Skellington next to the bed….don’t judge me), when I was reminded that tonight is upload night.

Crap. I mean, Yay.

So if you are reading along on my Five Nights at Freddy’s fanfiction, Everything Is All Right, Part Three: Children of Mammon, head on over to fanfiction.net or archiveofourown.org and check out the latest chapter! If you still haven’t started reading, perhaps I can convince you to give fanfiction about animal-shaped robots haunting an abandoned pizza parlor with this enticing snippet! Probably not, given that none of my other snippets have apparently had any effect on you, but hey, what have I got to lose? And while you’re reading, I can finally go collapse.

Oh. Hello, Waffles.

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So the time passed. Ana moved about, her work measured out by short spates of work-noise followed by long silences, then more noise in new places, and more silence. The quiet was never peaceful. Freddy came and went, somewhat less regularly than he’d been apt to in the past. At times, the two of them met in the hall, exchanging serious talk in a comfortable manner as two ships passing on a misty night, trading words of warning before sailing on.

Foxy sang songs and told stories. Between sets, he waited, propped up in the bow or pacing in his cabin or sitting on deck. It was just another day after all, and like all days, it ended.

A few minutes after nine, he gave all the little kiddies who were not here a final farewell and shut himself down. At ten, his eyes opened again. And at a quarter after two in the morning, he heard the door to the East Hall creak open.

Foxy, propped up on his elbows in the bow of his ship, swiveled his ears in that direction, but did not take his eyes from the tricky business of walking a doubloon across the bare bones of his fingers. Freddy had passed through not six minutes ago, so it was either Chica or Ana, and when the door shut without an invitation to come to the arcade, he knew which.

“Ahoy, lass,” he said in the flattest, least-ahoyingest tone he’d ever heard come out of his speaker. He hadn’t planned to or anything. It was just there, almost a taste in his mouth and the taste was bitter. “How’s the roof c-c-coming along?”

“What? Oh Jesus, you don’t even know. The roof is done,” Ana said, her boots tromping down the ramp toward him in a slow, noisy gait, heavier than she was. Tired. “Well, not done-done, but done enough. As done as I ever hoped it would be. Nothing left but the interior stuff and I’ll get to that in my own time, assuming I have any.”

“A d-d-difficult job done well.” Flip went the coin, fake gold color gleaming in the light of his eyes. It landed on his fore-knuckle, face-up. His own face. He couldn’t tell if it were grinning or snarling. He flipped it again without walking it, caught it and put it in his pocket. “Good on ye, and all that. Now why-why—WHY CAN’T PIRATES PLAY CARDS?—why don’t ye sound happier about that-t-t?”

“We had an incident Saturday night.”

“Oh aye?” he said, like he didn’t know. Because as far as she knew, he didn’t.

“Aye,” she sighed and by the sound of it, sat herself on the front row bench. “Some guys broke in. We got into it a little bit. I let them get away, so…”

Foxy dug his hook into the deck rail, gouging up splinters and flicking them idly over the side. “So?” he prompted.

“So what happens when you let the bad guy get away, Captain?”

“Makes for a b-b-better story, in me opinion.”

“Only if I’m alive to tell it.”

“And the likelihood o’ that be…?”

“I’m an optimist, so we’ll call it fifty-fifty.”

“Ye need Chica to t-t-tell ye what optimism means, luv. I don’t think ye has it quite right.” He worried his hook in as deep as it would go and broke out a chunk of wood almost the size of his finger. “Ye bring a b-b—BOTTLE OF RUM—with ye by any chance?”

“Sorry, it’s Sunday. Liquor stores aren’t open. I’ll pick some up tomorrow after work.”

“Yer working again?” he asked idly, scraping the new chasm clean before digging into it some more.

“Jeez, I really need to come here more often. Yeah, I’m working. Same place as before. We’ll see how it goes this time, but I hope to get a few month’s pay before I’m out on my ass again.”

“Telling ye, that ain’t optimism. Ye c-c-coming aboard?”

“No. I’m not staying.”

“Course not,” Foxy muttered, the words little more than a low hum through his speaker. Louder, he said, “Well, thanks for stopping in t’port, lass. FAIR WINDS AND A FOLLOWING SEA.”

A few seconds passed, silent. Then he heard her boots scrape as she stood up.

“Don’t go,” he said and then sat, staring at the hole he’d carved into the rail of the ship, wondering who’d said it, because he never would.