Gerald Dean Rice's Blog, page 107

Tab Key, I Divorce You

I'm finding that the tab key is more hindrance than help when it comes to putting a story out electronically.  Particularly for the Kindle.  If you tab long enough, eventually Word starts doing it for you and you have paragraphs formatted differently in one document right there.  When you preview your file in Amazon it looks like you slapped something up haphazardly, but when you take out all indentation *gasp* Kindle does the indenting for you!

Same with Smashwords, but they tell you specifically not to tab.  When submitting for an anthology or to a publisher for anything, I don't ever recall an editor specifically asking for a manuscript to have indents.  So far as I'm concerned indentation is as dead as the dinosaur and cursive writing.

Now That That's Done

Time to get back to the novel.  I'm hoping to revisit Keveny in about a month or so, so I can tidy it up and maybe get it on Smashwords.  I need to take a breather from it and give it a good reading through to work out the kinks.  There were a couple things I forgot about that I would like included.

But I also have something else cool coming up.  I'm up to the second page of it and I included it as a preview to the Smashwords edition to Goners, volumes 1 & 2.

I, Keveny - pt 27

She wasn't Sue. She was Sefra.

 

She'd been Sefra all along. Including when she'd been locked away, mistaken for Sue. I'd been in the hospital and couldn't have known, but just the same, here she was, hating me for not being able to tell her from her twin sister.

 

I let the guilt free the struggle from me and felt myself reabsorb into my body. I didn't understand it—it was beyond comprehension anyway. I was dead, but here I was, locked into my body again. Mine.

 

I raised my arm, regarding my hand. The rhythmic explosions from a moment ago were gone… replaced with—I listened a moment—the beating of my own heart.

 

It was real, even though it should not have been. I could feel myself, by infinitesimal increments, rot. I was not alive. I looked up at Sefra.

 

"I'm sorry," I tried to say, but the words were a garbled mess. Even now the hunger for human flesh was welling up inside me. The most revolting thing I could imagine and yet I craved it. But not her. There was something wrong with her skin, her smell. She was dead in her own way.

 

I turned away from her.

 

"Where are you going?" she said. "Come back! Eat me! You ate her! Now you're both dead! Why not me? Who am I supposed to be now?"

 

Distance and the noises from outside filtered her voice out of my ears, but I could still hear her words, the woman I had loved whom I had hated. The one both dead and alive. I had no idea how long I would last, could last, in this form or when the time came how long I could fight off the craving to eat another living person.

Who am I supposed to be now?

So Far, So Good

I have "30 Minute Plan" up on Smashwords and I'm in the process of working on getting into the premium catalog.  But so far I've had 38 downloads (9 for Goners, which is $0.99) and it's been added to 6 member libraries (7, if you count me).  Hopefully, this passes the sniff test and I'll start getting a couple nibbles.  If I get a good response I may put "I, Keveny" up as well.

I, Keveny - pt 26

If I could have pushed my body into the other room, I would have. I wanted to get in there on the heels of whomever or whatever had gone in first. If Sue still had a gun I wanted to use that other body as cover.

It rammed its shoulder into the door just before it closed, springing it open wide. There stood Sue, in that white dress and…

Sefra?

She looked like something had gnawed on the lower half of her face. Her eyes were dull and what remained of her red hair was sprouted in all different directions. She'd been beautiful once, the love of my life.

My body took her head off with a whipping swing of the baseball bat.

"Dammit!" I screamed. I fell on my knees next to her decapitated corpse, weeping.

"You again," Sue said. "How many times do I have to kill you?" She stepped closer. Too close, and smiled, offering up her arm. "Ready to eat me now?"

It backed away. What the hell?

"Do it," I said. "Eat her. Eat her now!"

It turned its head, backing out of the room. The bat clunked to the floor and she bent to pick it up. She took a meaty swing, hitting my body in the chest, a tiny plosion of air escaping its mouth. My body continued backing away.

"All these years," she said. "All these years! And you couldn't tell!" My body backed up until it fell over the banister, landing on its back on the stairs. The hairs (if they'd been real) on the back of my neck stood as that massive thumping returned. Something wasn't right.

I felt myself rise from the stairs, a tingling sensation in the fingers as my hands pressed down. I began, involuntarily, to draw away from Sefra's corpse and out into the hall. The sound was loud and dominating, only Sue's petite voice casting above it.

"You said you loved me!" she screamed. "You… with her… and you were happy. Each footstep reverberated up my feet, to my shins, my knees and thighs. Air flooded the one lung that wasn't collapsed (though I couldn't feel if I were really breathing). I tried to gather my senses, real or not, as I was wound back to my body like a fish on a line, struggling to keep away. There was something terrible about to happen that I didn't want to see—to know.

Sue met my body at the stairs and pounded her forearms against its chest. "You monster!" The words were a strangled sob as her head dipped. I could feel her fingernails digging into me as realization slowly clicked into place. I could feel the last vestiges of me fighting against it, as if my body already knew and realization were flooding over the barriers of my subconscious; a freeze-frame of a wave of dawning terror poised to come crashing down on top of me, held still long enough for me to gaze up in awe at its entirety.

I, Keveny - pt 25

The closer we got to the front door the louder it got. Something large was moving. The sound was familiar, but if I'd had a brain it wouldn't have registered. But the sound of it terrified me for some reason and it was getting closer.

By now my body was walking on its own and I lifted off the floor an inch or two. I went ahead to scout, gesturing for my body to stay back from the door. A shot I hoped was random cracked the threshold above my head and I ducked, reflexively. I scanned around to see a man in the distance wrestling with a zombie, slowly being overpowered as he was forced to the ground.

I heard a woman's voice from upstairs. It had to have been Sue. Before I turned I noticed from the corner of my eye someone right in front of me. I turned back and saw Wynn on his hands and knees, bloody. I'd missed him the first time because he was caked from head to foot in filth. Some of it had to have been his own because he looked like he was dying.

"Betrayed us…" He mumbled. "She betrayed us all…"

My body shouldered past me and for a moment that movement grew loud in my ears. I knew it was something I'd heard before but it was a distant memory. I couldn't place it. It lessened as I looked to the sky and all around me, hoping to figure out what it was.

I didn't notice until it was right on top of Wynn, eating him.

"Oh, no!" I screamed. "Stop-stop-stop!"

It only paused a moment to regard me, but returned to chewing off a sizable chunk of Wynn's neck. The life drained from his eyes and he went lacks in my corpse's hands as it went on eating for several minutes. I tried to go back inside and found the tether had loosened somewhat.

"I hate you," I said to my body and the look on its face indicated it felt much the same way. "Upstairs." It moved ahead of me and that sound returned again. It was like a giant pounding on the earth. My mind drifted as my corpse dragged me upstairs.

A door slammed just before we got all the way up. And locked.

"I bet she's in there." My body headed toward the door. "Wait-wait," I said. "Remember what happened last time." I looked around. "We have to find something." The pounding was louder than ever, but I had to push it away, to concentrate.

I pointed to one of the other doors. "In there. Let's look for something we can use."

My body shuffled into the other room and inside there was a pile of junk. A broken bed frame, the mattress urine-stained and propped up against the wall with a window. Pieces of a gutted television littered the floor, a microwave stood up on its side (still plugged in) and what looked like a long loop of copper coiling.

"Check behind the door," I said. My body shoved it roughly out the way, slamming it. Bingo! An aluminum baseball bat. It grabbed it, even slung it against its shoulder like someone about to step into the batter's box.

The door was a little more difficult, though. With one eye, I guess my body's depth perception was off. It kept grabbing and missing the knob.

"Hold on," I said, hearing someone else come up the stairs. We listened to slow footsteps slowly make the way to the room next door, the one that had shut just as we came up.

"Sister!" a woman's voice said. "You're finally here!"

Sue.

"Let's go," I said. It finally grabbed the doorknob after a few more tries and opened the door.

Chop-chop-chop

I'm going through "30 Minute Plan" so I can put it up on Smashwords.  Man, did I make a lot of typos!  Simple stuff, but you're not supposed to catch errors in a first draft.  It's just stuff I'm surprised I goofed on in the first place.  Should be up today, though.

I, Keveny - pt 24

Don't know how I knew it—it was kind of like the first time I saw the word 'renege'. I'd never spelled or read it before, but as soon as I saw it, I knew what it was.

 

"How'd that get in there?"

 

It clamped its mouth shut and stared at me. Low light trickled a window in as the sun began to burn at the horizon. We were back in the basement.

 

"Let's get out of here," I said and turned for the stairs. I wasn't more than five feet away from it when I felt pressure on my chest as if I'd been pushed or tugged by something. I looked at my old body and tried for the stairs again.

 

Another yank.

 

My body shuffled forward a couple steps and all of a sudden I could put my foot on the first step. I was tied to it before, but I was supposed to have more room than this. I thrust my leg up the next step. My body stumbled and fell over.

 

"Crap."

 

The rules had definitely changed. I went back to it and put a hand under its arm before thinking about it. It leaned on me for support, but that scary nowhere-thing didn't happen this time.

 

My mind drifted back to Sue. It had been ten years since I'd seen her last. Climbing up the stairs, supporting my own zombified corpse, I wasn't so sure I wanted to see her again. A decade ago she'd tried to kill me. I could only imagine she'd succeeded this time.

 

She'd been the girl of my dreams and at the time, my boss' daughter. She was sweet and demure and didn't mind a rough-edged lunkhead hanging off her. I'd always been afraid to approach her, for fear of reprisal from her father.

 

But he didn't mind. Well, not after someone shot him in the brain. The culprit turned out to be Sefra's twin sister, Sue. Sefra had asked me to capture her alive. That even if her sister had killed their father, she was the only family she had left and didn't want her killed. I quelled my own thirst for vengeance and eventually caught up with her. Sue had been insane for some time and when I fetched her for my love she'd almost carved my head off.

 

I'd spent the better part of a month recuperating in the hospital. But the groundwork had been laid; what I started, the police finished and Sue had been locked away forever. At least I'd thought so.

 

I grabbed the doorknob and it took on that rubbery feeling. No, I wasn't going to move anything solid.

 

"Door," I said and my body grabbed it and turned, swinging the door open.

 

It was quiet up here. And cold. The air raised goosebumps on my undead arms. Odd. That was a physiological response reserved for the living, so far as I assumed.

 

I'd figured how it worked, but not why. When Daniel and I had stepped off the porch we'd both been drawn back to my body. I resumed my original place—tethered to my dead body. But it seemed as if Daniel had been converted to fuel or something for it to run on. Perhaps that was what zombies truly fed on, souls. It was just too much to think about right now, plus the fact that if that were the case then I'd consumed the only friend I had left in either world.

 

It wasn't hard to figure where everyone had gone. A trail of blood led to the back door, a sprinkling of corpses here and there along the way. Madsen, Hinkley, Gary and Edrick (who I guessed wasn't as dead as he'd originally appeared). Good soldiers to a man, all felled because of her.

 

One way or the other, Sue was going to die by my hands.

I, Keveny - pt 23

I stood. Where ever I was, it was dark. There was a moment of panic as I thought I was back in that place, but then there was someone's voice nearby. I could feel my feet beneath me on the floor. It felt odd.

 

I kneeled and put my hands on the floor, cold concrete. This wasn't right. I hadn't been able to touch anything since… since… well, whatever the hell had happened to me.

 

Was I back?

 

"Hello?" I said and listened for my voice to reverberate back to me. Nothing. But I didn't know where I was—it didn't mean anything necessarily. I was at least semi-corporeal, but that didn't mean alive.

 

I felt around for a light. Nothing but smooth walls directly in front of me. The feeling was nice, much more appreciated than when I'd been alive before, like a man whose spouse had finally returned to him. Something hit my finger as I strafed the wall. A switch! I flicked it, or at least tried to, but the switch went soft like a water-filled balloon and my hand kind of bounced away, an arc of electricity trailing up to my elbow.

 

Daaaaaaaaaamn, that hurt. Bad. I stood there, intermittently sucking my fingers and shaking out my whole arm. Okay, still dead. But what had changed? I mean, why could I touch stuff now? And a lot of good it did me—a ghost who had managed to give himself a third degree burn.

 

"Nnnnnnnn." I spun around. Ghosts weren't supposed to be afraid. I chanted, "I'm-not-scared-I'm-not-scared," over and over like a mantra. If I had a heartbeat, it would have been racing.

 

It was still dark but my eyes were beginning to adjust. There, on the floor. A body rising slowly. A moment later I could make out the shape of the head, ears and shoulders. Me.

 

"Oh, it's just you," I said. The sigh of relief was real enough to my ears. It approached me, the steps slower than before, the head canted to the side. It kind of looked like it had had a stroke. It came close enough to where I could make out its features.

 

Oh yeah, shot through the eye.

 

"How are you even…"

 

I stepped back.

 

There was something in there!

 

"Open your mouth," I said. Its jaw creaked as it complied (I'd always had a teeth-grinding problem), I peeked and there it was. Small, cloudy and blue, but it was in there.

 

A soul.

Took a Lil Break

I'm trying to wrap up a few things and get things set to start a couple things and continue to work on other things so "I, Keveny" kinda sorta fell by the wayside.  But stay tuned, at noon the next entry will be up and I'm hoping to put the finishing touches on it this week. 

 

I'm also going to put it up on Smashwords for free.  I'm not sure if I'll do it in sections or just one big freebie, but it'll be there shortly after wrap.  I might put up the other two stories as well, but I'm not sure.  I think this one is a little more polished than the other two or maybe I just don't feel like redrafting three stories right now.

 

Friday before this past weekend I wrote "The Beggar's Bowl" which had been in the back of my mind for some years.  I'm happier with how it turned out than how it stood in my brain (there is even a beginning I wrote some time ago, but I don't know where that is).  I submitted it to an antho, but I'm kind of wishy-washy as to whether or not I want it in there.