Jamie Marchant's Blog, page 36
December 21, 2013
Christmas Story
Today, I have a guest author, Mysti Parker's, Christmas story to get you in the Christmas spirit. Just four days away.
The Carpenter's Wifeby Mysti Parker Her screams jarred the peaceful night. A donkey brayed. From the rafters overhead, startled doves flew away in a burst of annoyed coos and wing beats. The young woman was no stranger to childbirth, having assisted her own mother on many such occasions in their village. But here they had no one to call upon for help. The thought occurred to her that she might die, that the stunning proclamation had been a dream, that their little family was no more important than any other. Her husband knelt in front of her, holding her knees apart. He didn’t flinch at her cries, nor did he look her in the eye. Only a brief crease in his brow indicated any concern on his part. She treasured that one gesture, listening to his monotone instructions, straining to hear the slightest hint of his love. “Push. Good. Now breathe.” The contraction eased. She allowed her head to fall back on the rolled-up horse blanket he’d provided when the pains began. The months had crept along until this night. She thought about the quiet dinners they shared back home. About all the times when he caught her staring at him while he focused on his bread and lentils. Their stagnant marriage teetered on this one event. She had known all along the doubt remained, but she was so grateful for this man who had taken her in despite everything. He worked tirelessly until his hands blistered and bled. His furniture was highly regarded, yet he never boasted. She admired the pride he took in his creations, and she loved to watch him work. Wood surrendered to his skilled touch. Chisels and saws were like an extension of his limbs. She wanted nothing more than to be the wife he deserved, yet the desire to pick up a doll or chase her younger siblings down the dusty streets still pulled at her heart. And, of course, people still whispered. Another pain. Then another. Wave after wave. Sweat poured from her brow. The surroundings blurred with every excruciating squeeze. She felt the baby leaving the warmth of her womb, coming closer to the chilly night. Would he be all right? What if something she did while he was in her womb caused him to be stillborn or crippled? “Push! I see the head. It’s almost over.” His voice was louder, his eyes wider, sparkling with more excitement than she’d ever seen before. She focused on his face, on the promises of God, and pushed with all her might.
The child came in a sudden whoosh, leaving her weeping with relief and a feeling of emptiness. Her husband caught the baby in the softest bit of cloth he could find, supplied by the innkeeper, perhaps out of guilt for their lowly accommodations. “It’s a boy!” “Is he all right?” The baby cried, easing her fears. Her husband nodded. “Yes, he’s beautiful, like his mother.”
She smiled through her tears at the joy in his voice and his beaming smile. He cut the cord and swaddled him as gently as if he were his own child. Then, he handed the tiny infant to her. She took him in her arms, astonished at how insignificant the boy felt within his wrappings. Red, wrinkly, and bald, he didn’t look like anyone that could save the world. Yet, as her husband wiped tears and nestled close to her side for a better look at their son, she knew that this tiny babe had already resurrected Joseph’s heart. The rest was up to God. ****This story was published in the anthology Christmas Lites . All proceeds go to the NCADV (National Coalition Against Domestic Violence). Grab your copy on Amazon Kindle for just $3.99. Also, be sure to pick up Christmas Lites II and Christmas Lites III . They make great gifts !!!
Buy it HERE!
Buy it HERE!
Buy it HERE!
The Carpenter's Wifeby Mysti Parker Her screams jarred the peaceful night. A donkey brayed. From the rafters overhead, startled doves flew away in a burst of annoyed coos and wing beats. The young woman was no stranger to childbirth, having assisted her own mother on many such occasions in their village. But here they had no one to call upon for help. The thought occurred to her that she might die, that the stunning proclamation had been a dream, that their little family was no more important than any other. Her husband knelt in front of her, holding her knees apart. He didn’t flinch at her cries, nor did he look her in the eye. Only a brief crease in his brow indicated any concern on his part. She treasured that one gesture, listening to his monotone instructions, straining to hear the slightest hint of his love. “Push. Good. Now breathe.” The contraction eased. She allowed her head to fall back on the rolled-up horse blanket he’d provided when the pains began. The months had crept along until this night. She thought about the quiet dinners they shared back home. About all the times when he caught her staring at him while he focused on his bread and lentils. Their stagnant marriage teetered on this one event. She had known all along the doubt remained, but she was so grateful for this man who had taken her in despite everything. He worked tirelessly until his hands blistered and bled. His furniture was highly regarded, yet he never boasted. She admired the pride he took in his creations, and she loved to watch him work. Wood surrendered to his skilled touch. Chisels and saws were like an extension of his limbs. She wanted nothing more than to be the wife he deserved, yet the desire to pick up a doll or chase her younger siblings down the dusty streets still pulled at her heart. And, of course, people still whispered. Another pain. Then another. Wave after wave. Sweat poured from her brow. The surroundings blurred with every excruciating squeeze. She felt the baby leaving the warmth of her womb, coming closer to the chilly night. Would he be all right? What if something she did while he was in her womb caused him to be stillborn or crippled? “Push! I see the head. It’s almost over.” His voice was louder, his eyes wider, sparkling with more excitement than she’d ever seen before. She focused on his face, on the promises of God, and pushed with all her might.
The child came in a sudden whoosh, leaving her weeping with relief and a feeling of emptiness. Her husband caught the baby in the softest bit of cloth he could find, supplied by the innkeeper, perhaps out of guilt for their lowly accommodations. “It’s a boy!” “Is he all right?” The baby cried, easing her fears. Her husband nodded. “Yes, he’s beautiful, like his mother.” She smiled through her tears at the joy in his voice and his beaming smile. He cut the cord and swaddled him as gently as if he were his own child. Then, he handed the tiny infant to her. She took him in her arms, astonished at how insignificant the boy felt within his wrappings. Red, wrinkly, and bald, he didn’t look like anyone that could save the world. Yet, as her husband wiped tears and nestled close to her side for a better look at their son, she knew that this tiny babe had already resurrected Joseph’s heart. The rest was up to God. ****This story was published in the anthology Christmas Lites . All proceeds go to the NCADV (National Coalition Against Domestic Violence). Grab your copy on Amazon Kindle for just $3.99. Also, be sure to pick up Christmas Lites II and Christmas Lites III . They make great gifts !!!
Buy it HERE!
Buy it HERE!
Buy it HERE!
October 25, 2013
Evi Routoula and London Tube
Today, my guest is Evi Routoula, author of London Tube. If you like what you read, leave a comment below and check out her book.
Tell us a little about yourself? I was born in Athens on 1968. Ever since I could remember myself, I wanted to become a lawyer. I managed to do that and I have been working as a barrister since 1997. Besides law, l love literature, theatre, cinema and travelling.
What made you want to become a writer? I have always been writing, journals, thoughts, short stories. Writing has always been for me the best way to express myself.
Could you tell us a bit about your collection?It is a collection of short stories, each one of them having to do with one London tube station. In some stories the station plays a significant part, in others its importance in the plot is indirect. The stories have to do with different passengers and how their use of the London Tube may or may not affect their lives.
Why the London underground? Why intrigues you about it?Ever since I visited London for the first time in my adult life, I got fascinated by London Tube, not only because it is the oldest underground rail network in the world but also because of its spidery construction, of its stations, of the little dark tunnels. Toying with the idea of how many people use it daily and how it might affect their lives was always an appealing thought of mine. That is why I decided to write this book.
Since you’re from Greece, what is your connection to London?My very first trip to London was with my parents at the age of 10. I deeply fell in love with this city, and I kept coming back especially when I grew up. I ended up coming to London at least three times per year, watching theatrical plays, meeting friends and touring around this city that I like so much. The past year I have been living in London permanently.
What gave you the inspiration for your collection?The London Tube and its passengers. The fact that so many different people with their own stories, troubles, worries commute everyday by using the narrow dark tunnels underneath London’s magnificent buildings.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?Of course, my characters have elements from people I know, but they are all fictional. None of them is based on a certain real person. They just all have tidbits from people I know. The only real character is Elisabeth I in the Cutty Sark story together with the rest of the historic personalities that are mentioned there. And the ghost of Black Nun who is mentioned in the story of Bank. These of course are not my characters I just use them in my stories.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?I cannot really distinguish any, but I must say I like Elisabeth I a lot, simply because of her ability to maintain the fragile political games of her time intact and do her will at the same time. A truly remarkable historic personality.
Who are your favorite authors? What do you admire about them?I admire many authors, and I am sure that I will forget names but I am trying here to mention just a few of them. Jack London, Jack Kerouac, Charles Dickens, Isabelle Allende, Jennifer Lash, Jonathan Coe, Jeffrey Eugenides. Among Greeks I like Karagatsis, Costas Tahtsis, Costas Kyriazis, Maria Lambaridou Pothou. And of course Nikos Kazantzakis. Each one of them has given me a lot of things to think about and all of them are wonderful writers.
What is your favorite writing tip or quote?“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other stories or books in the works?I am planning to write a historic novel about the Byzantine era. It needs a lot of work and research, but I am enjoying it a lot. I also plan to write more London Tube stories. There are still too many London Tube stations for me to explore!
Where can we find you online? (please cut and paste links):Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MetroLondinou7Stathmoi7IstoriesAmazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_7?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=evi%20routoula&sprefix=evi+rou%2Caps%2C260&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aevi%20routoula
London Tube:
Seven different stations take part into seven different stories. Seven stations that play a significant role to the lives of different passengers. A trip from the beginning of London tube till nowadays.
Excerpt:
I.ALDWYCH
Mary Chapman rummaged nervously the pockets of her camel-haired coat, looking for her small leather purse. She took out a twenty pound bank note and gave it to the tall thin girl. Mary gave her a shy, sideway look. The girl was trying to count Mary’s change while at the same time she was giving Mary the flower bouquet she had chosen. It was a small bouquet of yellow and pink flowers. Mary was not sure how the flowers were called; gardening had never been her strong point. For her, flowers were just tokens. Tokens of friendship, love, passion, mourning. They were reminders of anniversaries, celebrations and premiers. This bouquet was beautiful, small and modest. She held it with one hand while she received the two pound coin from the flower-girl. She stuffed the coin hastily into her purse and she gave another quick look at the flower-girl. She was not British. This was obvious from her pronunciation and her general appearance. Another immigrant searching for a better life in a foreign country. There were so many of them nowadays. They were coming from all over the world, chased by poverty, by political situations far beyond their fault. They were constantly arriving in search of a better future. They were staying in rooms in north and west London with monthly or weekly rent. They were sharing the kitchen and bathroom with three or more tenants: students, provincials, other immigrants. They were undertaking any job that they could find: waiting, cooking, shop assisting. If they did not cause any trouble and if they were lucky enough they could remain for the rest of their lives here in this foreign part of the world, they would marry, have children and always keep on sending money to those unlucky ones that remained behind. Mary looked at the girl again, she smiled, thanked her and she left. In her mind she wished her “good luck” with the life she chose.
Charring Cross tube station was full of people who were hastily walking in all directions. Mary kept holding the bouquet tenderly in her arms, she got out of the station and started walking along Strand. It was early afternoon and the traffic was heavy. At the opposite side of the street some tourists were posing for photographs in their effort to gather memories. Mary glared at them absent - mindly and a thought crossed her mind; maybe this was the most important thing in this life, to gather memories. Time is passing so fast, nothing is left behind. Time has a magic way of killing everything. Besides, this was the reason for her being here this afternoon. Because of her memories. Mary was not a London resident anymore. She abounded the capital thirty years ago. She had chosen the provincial tranquility of Luton. She was married to a peaceful man. Together they had chosen a small two-store house near the Luton airport. It was a convenient nice house with a small back yard. For Mary and her husband that was the best solution. The cost of living was cheaper in the countryside and the quality of life much better. They did not have any children, but they lived in harmony together, the years were passing by peacefully, a rather calm happiness. Mary had two dogs, two beautiful labradors and every afternoon just before dusk she was enjoying staying in her garden in the company of her dogs. Mary and her husband rarely visited London, just a couple of times per year. They only went there to see a theatrical play or to buy something that they could not find in Luton.
Mary kept on walking along Strand while thinking that this day trip was more of a pilgrimage to her childhood. A pilgrimage to honor her long deceased mother . A pilgrimage to a tube station that did not exist anymore.
She was sitting comfortably at her living room in her little house in Luton and she was watching the news on T.V. She couldn’t even remember which channel, channel 4 or BBC, it didn’t really matter! It was then that she heard for the first time that the Aldwich tube station of Piccadilly line was going to close down for good. She froze in her seat, looking aimlessly at the T.V. screen without really listening. It was much later that she realized that she was actually crying. When her husband got home, he found her sitting there with an empty look on her face, holding a glass of whiskey. Then, that evening in that living room, with the light of the t.v. screen barely visible in the darkness, Mary let herself travel back fifty years, when she was a little girl and she told her husband the whole story.
Months passed since that night, but Mary kept feeling restless, she could not find again her usual calm monotony. She was doing her house work, she was feeding and playing with her dogs, she was making love to her husband, she was going to shop the things she always used to, but something had changed. Something had marked her.
And suddenly, without any previous thought or planning, while she was squashing an orange, or was it while she was filling the dogs’ bowls with water, the idea to visit London just popped into her mind, to go there again. The tube station had been closed for four months, since 3rd October 1994. It was a date she would never forget. She had it marked with a fountain pen on the calendar that hang on her kitchen wall. But the place was still there, Strand was still there, Surrey street was still there. This could not change. And she could go there and see the area. It would be a homage to her childhood memories.
So, one cold day of March, she found herself at Charring Cross station, picking a bouquet of flowers and now, her feet were getting her closer and closer to the place where once Aldwich station used to be.
Mary had never shown any interest in history, events, both local and international were happening without having any meaning for her. She had a simple way of thinking, it was very difficult for her to combine causes and results in her mind. She could never understand how or why a simple parliamentary rule had the power to cause hundreds of deaths in a far away unknown land! But she knew one thing well and that was the history of Aldwich station.
At the point where Surrey street intersects with Strand, Mary turned right. She was at the centre of the biggest European capital, the streets were swarming with people and still no one even thought just for a second, to leave a bouquet of flowers on the cold pavement slabs, in front of the building that once hosted the Aldwich tube station, that afternoon.
She stood there looking at the emptiness, because she could not see anything. In this impressive red bricked building, once, many years before Mary’s birth, many years before Mary’s mother’s birth, there used to be the Royal Theatre of Strand. How many performances much have been held in there. How many actors must have been tested, how many of them must have experienced triumphs and agonies. How many dazzling and successful premiers must have taken place. How many Kings and princess must have enjoyed, comfortably seated in their royal box, lines by Shakespeare and Moliere.
Tell us a little about yourself? I was born in Athens on 1968. Ever since I could remember myself, I wanted to become a lawyer. I managed to do that and I have been working as a barrister since 1997. Besides law, l love literature, theatre, cinema and travelling.What made you want to become a writer? I have always been writing, journals, thoughts, short stories. Writing has always been for me the best way to express myself.
Could you tell us a bit about your collection?It is a collection of short stories, each one of them having to do with one London tube station. In some stories the station plays a significant part, in others its importance in the plot is indirect. The stories have to do with different passengers and how their use of the London Tube may or may not affect their lives.
Why the London underground? Why intrigues you about it?Ever since I visited London for the first time in my adult life, I got fascinated by London Tube, not only because it is the oldest underground rail network in the world but also because of its spidery construction, of its stations, of the little dark tunnels. Toying with the idea of how many people use it daily and how it might affect their lives was always an appealing thought of mine. That is why I decided to write this book.
Since you’re from Greece, what is your connection to London?My very first trip to London was with my parents at the age of 10. I deeply fell in love with this city, and I kept coming back especially when I grew up. I ended up coming to London at least three times per year, watching theatrical plays, meeting friends and touring around this city that I like so much. The past year I have been living in London permanently.
What gave you the inspiration for your collection?The London Tube and its passengers. The fact that so many different people with their own stories, troubles, worries commute everyday by using the narrow dark tunnels underneath London’s magnificent buildings.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?Of course, my characters have elements from people I know, but they are all fictional. None of them is based on a certain real person. They just all have tidbits from people I know. The only real character is Elisabeth I in the Cutty Sark story together with the rest of the historic personalities that are mentioned there. And the ghost of Black Nun who is mentioned in the story of Bank. These of course are not my characters I just use them in my stories.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?I cannot really distinguish any, but I must say I like Elisabeth I a lot, simply because of her ability to maintain the fragile political games of her time intact and do her will at the same time. A truly remarkable historic personality.
Who are your favorite authors? What do you admire about them?I admire many authors, and I am sure that I will forget names but I am trying here to mention just a few of them. Jack London, Jack Kerouac, Charles Dickens, Isabelle Allende, Jennifer Lash, Jonathan Coe, Jeffrey Eugenides. Among Greeks I like Karagatsis, Costas Tahtsis, Costas Kyriazis, Maria Lambaridou Pothou. And of course Nikos Kazantzakis. Each one of them has given me a lot of things to think about and all of them are wonderful writers.
What is your favorite writing tip or quote?“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other stories or books in the works?I am planning to write a historic novel about the Byzantine era. It needs a lot of work and research, but I am enjoying it a lot. I also plan to write more London Tube stories. There are still too many London Tube stations for me to explore!
Where can we find you online? (please cut and paste links):Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MetroLondinou7Stathmoi7IstoriesAmazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_7?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=evi%20routoula&sprefix=evi+rou%2Caps%2C260&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aevi%20routoula
London Tube:
Seven different stations take part into seven different stories. Seven stations that play a significant role to the lives of different passengers. A trip from the beginning of London tube till nowadays.Excerpt:
I.ALDWYCH
Mary Chapman rummaged nervously the pockets of her camel-haired coat, looking for her small leather purse. She took out a twenty pound bank note and gave it to the tall thin girl. Mary gave her a shy, sideway look. The girl was trying to count Mary’s change while at the same time she was giving Mary the flower bouquet she had chosen. It was a small bouquet of yellow and pink flowers. Mary was not sure how the flowers were called; gardening had never been her strong point. For her, flowers were just tokens. Tokens of friendship, love, passion, mourning. They were reminders of anniversaries, celebrations and premiers. This bouquet was beautiful, small and modest. She held it with one hand while she received the two pound coin from the flower-girl. She stuffed the coin hastily into her purse and she gave another quick look at the flower-girl. She was not British. This was obvious from her pronunciation and her general appearance. Another immigrant searching for a better life in a foreign country. There were so many of them nowadays. They were coming from all over the world, chased by poverty, by political situations far beyond their fault. They were constantly arriving in search of a better future. They were staying in rooms in north and west London with monthly or weekly rent. They were sharing the kitchen and bathroom with three or more tenants: students, provincials, other immigrants. They were undertaking any job that they could find: waiting, cooking, shop assisting. If they did not cause any trouble and if they were lucky enough they could remain for the rest of their lives here in this foreign part of the world, they would marry, have children and always keep on sending money to those unlucky ones that remained behind. Mary looked at the girl again, she smiled, thanked her and she left. In her mind she wished her “good luck” with the life she chose.
Charring Cross tube station was full of people who were hastily walking in all directions. Mary kept holding the bouquet tenderly in her arms, she got out of the station and started walking along Strand. It was early afternoon and the traffic was heavy. At the opposite side of the street some tourists were posing for photographs in their effort to gather memories. Mary glared at them absent - mindly and a thought crossed her mind; maybe this was the most important thing in this life, to gather memories. Time is passing so fast, nothing is left behind. Time has a magic way of killing everything. Besides, this was the reason for her being here this afternoon. Because of her memories. Mary was not a London resident anymore. She abounded the capital thirty years ago. She had chosen the provincial tranquility of Luton. She was married to a peaceful man. Together they had chosen a small two-store house near the Luton airport. It was a convenient nice house with a small back yard. For Mary and her husband that was the best solution. The cost of living was cheaper in the countryside and the quality of life much better. They did not have any children, but they lived in harmony together, the years were passing by peacefully, a rather calm happiness. Mary had two dogs, two beautiful labradors and every afternoon just before dusk she was enjoying staying in her garden in the company of her dogs. Mary and her husband rarely visited London, just a couple of times per year. They only went there to see a theatrical play or to buy something that they could not find in Luton.
Mary kept on walking along Strand while thinking that this day trip was more of a pilgrimage to her childhood. A pilgrimage to honor her long deceased mother . A pilgrimage to a tube station that did not exist anymore.
She was sitting comfortably at her living room in her little house in Luton and she was watching the news on T.V. She couldn’t even remember which channel, channel 4 or BBC, it didn’t really matter! It was then that she heard for the first time that the Aldwich tube station of Piccadilly line was going to close down for good. She froze in her seat, looking aimlessly at the T.V. screen without really listening. It was much later that she realized that she was actually crying. When her husband got home, he found her sitting there with an empty look on her face, holding a glass of whiskey. Then, that evening in that living room, with the light of the t.v. screen barely visible in the darkness, Mary let herself travel back fifty years, when she was a little girl and she told her husband the whole story.
Months passed since that night, but Mary kept feeling restless, she could not find again her usual calm monotony. She was doing her house work, she was feeding and playing with her dogs, she was making love to her husband, she was going to shop the things she always used to, but something had changed. Something had marked her.
And suddenly, without any previous thought or planning, while she was squashing an orange, or was it while she was filling the dogs’ bowls with water, the idea to visit London just popped into her mind, to go there again. The tube station had been closed for four months, since 3rd October 1994. It was a date she would never forget. She had it marked with a fountain pen on the calendar that hang on her kitchen wall. But the place was still there, Strand was still there, Surrey street was still there. This could not change. And she could go there and see the area. It would be a homage to her childhood memories.
So, one cold day of March, she found herself at Charring Cross station, picking a bouquet of flowers and now, her feet were getting her closer and closer to the place where once Aldwich station used to be.
Mary had never shown any interest in history, events, both local and international were happening without having any meaning for her. She had a simple way of thinking, it was very difficult for her to combine causes and results in her mind. She could never understand how or why a simple parliamentary rule had the power to cause hundreds of deaths in a far away unknown land! But she knew one thing well and that was the history of Aldwich station.
At the point where Surrey street intersects with Strand, Mary turned right. She was at the centre of the biggest European capital, the streets were swarming with people and still no one even thought just for a second, to leave a bouquet of flowers on the cold pavement slabs, in front of the building that once hosted the Aldwich tube station, that afternoon.
She stood there looking at the emptiness, because she could not see anything. In this impressive red bricked building, once, many years before Mary’s birth, many years before Mary’s mother’s birth, there used to be the Royal Theatre of Strand. How many performances much have been held in there. How many actors must have been tested, how many of them must have experienced triumphs and agonies. How many dazzling and successful premiers must have taken place. How many Kings and princess must have enjoyed, comfortably seated in their royal box, lines by Shakespeare and Moliere.
September 27, 2013
Urban Fantasy and Brian Wamsley
This my fourth installment in my series about Urban Fantasy, an anthology of great stories published by KY Story. Today, I'm featuring Brian Wamsley, author of "Deadland Patrol." The anthology is available on Amazon and Createspace. If you enjoy the excerpt of Brian's story, be sure to comment and check out the whole anthology.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
What made you want to become a writer?
I’m not sure I wanted to at first, but I was in a dark place, and I figured at the time that was my only real shot I had at a dream. When I found out how hard and unpredictable it was as a profession, I kind of liked it because if someone pushes you, you push back. It gave me an envelope to push against. If you only think small, you can hardly expect to get big.
Why Urban Fantasy? What about this genre appeals to you?
I read an anthology from the 1960s, The Fantastic Universe Omnibus. The stories were very surprising. It was the thing that scared me a little, too. Who knows how or where we will end up as a people? Urban Fantasy I guess allows us to feel hope for our species. That’s what I like most about it. You get to have hope in a future.
Could you tell us a bit about your story?
My story is about a street racing accident in the future, but I wanted it to have an element of the human condition. I wanted to show a measure of humanity surviving among people in a sterile, engineered world with controlled environments and behavior. American spirit too. We love fast cars, and our nostalgia for them is self-feeding.
What gave you the inspiration for your story?
My Dad and my uncles. They liked fast cars, and I don’t imagine genetics can water that down much; it seems to show up like a dominant trait. lol
Do you believe an apocalyptic scenario such as the one in your story is likely? Why or why not?
Possible I would say, and also likely because of the nostalgia Americans have for cars, a competitive nature and the love of going fast and competition gambling. It’s an exercise of our liberties.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
I think most characters are composites drawn from all the people we know or know of and our own experience. Imagination takes care of the polish and experiences ties it together.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
Probably the boy moonshiner in a Leprechaun story I wrote. I like him because he reminds me of how I would probably be if that character were me.
If you’ve read the other stories in the collection, which is your favorite and why?
Of course I have to say my own because it’s true, and if you aren’t a fan of your own work, it may be hard to get other people on board. It’s gotta be good enough to be proud of.
What’s your connection to the South?
I was born and raised in West Virginia, but I have lived and worked in Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia and North Carolina at different times in my life.
Who is your favorite Urban Fantasy character from another author’s work? Who do you particularly like him/her?
Rush drummer Neil Peart and Kevin J Anderson wrote Clockwork Angels, a novel based on the album. I like Owen in the story because he has ambition and is not satisfied. He is a reacher and embodies the human spirit and pursuit of freedom. What is your favorite writing tip or quote?
My favorite tip is “writing is rewriting,” and Elmore Leonard says something like “…if it sounds like writing…rewrite it…”
What else have you published?
I have another story published by KYPress; it was in the Peripheral Sex issue. “A Jealous Haint”
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other stories or books in the works?
I am still working on short stories. I’m still into that for right now. I do want to do novels again though because it will be better and more familiar now. Guess I got it backwards. Short stories then the novels.
Deadland PatrolA prowler hovered over the street with its light bars strobing; whirling red then blue. It turned and drifted over an old parking lot where two gas burners were crashed. The gullwing door opened and an officer stepped out onto the pavement. She was tall, draped in black, had dark sunglasses. Pants tucked into boots. She looked up and down the street but at four-thirty in the morning, in this run down part of the Old City, there was no one to be seen. There were only a few houses that looked lived in. She opened her tap pad, and walked like a soldier up the street, capturing photos of the evidence. Two sets of tire marks swept through an intersection, the glitter of plastic, polymer and glass on old pavement followed a twisted-helix slide pattern that twirled across the parking lot of a self-serve convenience station and ended at the tires of a Camaro and a Mustang. Both had slid into a brick and stone porch of an old house that had burned down. Little damage to the porch, severe damage to the Camaro; it was bleeding fluids from all-over. The Mustang didn’t look so bad. It sat with the driver’s door open and one of the tires flat. The Camaro, between it and the porch, took all of the crunch. The officer scanned the VIN numbers through the front windshield and stared at the screen. It beeped and she looked up from the pad to see an old man was making his way over from across the street. “Happy New Year’s, officer,” an old man said, hobbling closer with a cane, “Big wreck. They slid into that old foundation there. Must not have been hurt too bad, though. Both of ‘em got out and took off. I know. I saw the whole thing.” The officer looked at her pad, tapped the screen and said, “I will have to take a statement from you. Please remain nearby.” “I’m on my way over to get my morning coffee at the self-serve. I’ll come right back and give you a statement. You can see I got this cane so wherever I am goin, I’m not gonna be going very fast.” He laughed, the officer didn’t. But her expression relaxed. “Happy New Year,” she said, “Go ahead, I’ll make arrangements for a drone transport to come and remove this evidence, then I’ll take your statement. Looks like I need a HazMat cleanup too. ”The old man made his way to the touch screen the size of a door and began to touch out his order. Then he walked with his cane over to another window and returned to the prowler with two cups of coffee, handed the officer one. “Thank you sir, please have a seat in the prowler” she said, the second gullwing door opened and the old man declined. “Oh better not, once I get down in there you might have to help me get back out.” “Very well,” she said. “You get anything on those burners over there?” “No. I got nothing on either of these burners, couldn’t scan any prints either.” “Hmmmm,” the old man said, “I think they had gloves on.” “I want you to tell me happened in your own words. I’m going to be recording so continue only if you acknowledge. Remember,” she said, “recording.” “I do acknowledge.” “Good, Continue please. I understand you saw the wreck and the drivers running away after. That correct?” “Mmmm. Well, not exactly.”
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
What made you want to become a writer? I’m not sure I wanted to at first, but I was in a dark place, and I figured at the time that was my only real shot I had at a dream. When I found out how hard and unpredictable it was as a profession, I kind of liked it because if someone pushes you, you push back. It gave me an envelope to push against. If you only think small, you can hardly expect to get big.
Why Urban Fantasy? What about this genre appeals to you?
I read an anthology from the 1960s, The Fantastic Universe Omnibus. The stories were very surprising. It was the thing that scared me a little, too. Who knows how or where we will end up as a people? Urban Fantasy I guess allows us to feel hope for our species. That’s what I like most about it. You get to have hope in a future.
Could you tell us a bit about your story?
My story is about a street racing accident in the future, but I wanted it to have an element of the human condition. I wanted to show a measure of humanity surviving among people in a sterile, engineered world with controlled environments and behavior. American spirit too. We love fast cars, and our nostalgia for them is self-feeding.
What gave you the inspiration for your story?
My Dad and my uncles. They liked fast cars, and I don’t imagine genetics can water that down much; it seems to show up like a dominant trait. lol
Do you believe an apocalyptic scenario such as the one in your story is likely? Why or why not?
Possible I would say, and also likely because of the nostalgia Americans have for cars, a competitive nature and the love of going fast and competition gambling. It’s an exercise of our liberties.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
I think most characters are composites drawn from all the people we know or know of and our own experience. Imagination takes care of the polish and experiences ties it together.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
Probably the boy moonshiner in a Leprechaun story I wrote. I like him because he reminds me of how I would probably be if that character were me.
If you’ve read the other stories in the collection, which is your favorite and why?
Of course I have to say my own because it’s true, and if you aren’t a fan of your own work, it may be hard to get other people on board. It’s gotta be good enough to be proud of.
What’s your connection to the South?
I was born and raised in West Virginia, but I have lived and worked in Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia and North Carolina at different times in my life.
Who is your favorite Urban Fantasy character from another author’s work? Who do you particularly like him/her?
Rush drummer Neil Peart and Kevin J Anderson wrote Clockwork Angels, a novel based on the album. I like Owen in the story because he has ambition and is not satisfied. He is a reacher and embodies the human spirit and pursuit of freedom. What is your favorite writing tip or quote?
My favorite tip is “writing is rewriting,” and Elmore Leonard says something like “…if it sounds like writing…rewrite it…”
What else have you published?
I have another story published by KYPress; it was in the Peripheral Sex issue. “A Jealous Haint”
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other stories or books in the works?
I am still working on short stories. I’m still into that for right now. I do want to do novels again though because it will be better and more familiar now. Guess I got it backwards. Short stories then the novels.
Deadland PatrolA prowler hovered over the street with its light bars strobing; whirling red then blue. It turned and drifted over an old parking lot where two gas burners were crashed. The gullwing door opened and an officer stepped out onto the pavement. She was tall, draped in black, had dark sunglasses. Pants tucked into boots. She looked up and down the street but at four-thirty in the morning, in this run down part of the Old City, there was no one to be seen. There were only a few houses that looked lived in. She opened her tap pad, and walked like a soldier up the street, capturing photos of the evidence. Two sets of tire marks swept through an intersection, the glitter of plastic, polymer and glass on old pavement followed a twisted-helix slide pattern that twirled across the parking lot of a self-serve convenience station and ended at the tires of a Camaro and a Mustang. Both had slid into a brick and stone porch of an old house that had burned down. Little damage to the porch, severe damage to the Camaro; it was bleeding fluids from all-over. The Mustang didn’t look so bad. It sat with the driver’s door open and one of the tires flat. The Camaro, between it and the porch, took all of the crunch. The officer scanned the VIN numbers through the front windshield and stared at the screen. It beeped and she looked up from the pad to see an old man was making his way over from across the street. “Happy New Year’s, officer,” an old man said, hobbling closer with a cane, “Big wreck. They slid into that old foundation there. Must not have been hurt too bad, though. Both of ‘em got out and took off. I know. I saw the whole thing.” The officer looked at her pad, tapped the screen and said, “I will have to take a statement from you. Please remain nearby.” “I’m on my way over to get my morning coffee at the self-serve. I’ll come right back and give you a statement. You can see I got this cane so wherever I am goin, I’m not gonna be going very fast.” He laughed, the officer didn’t. But her expression relaxed. “Happy New Year,” she said, “Go ahead, I’ll make arrangements for a drone transport to come and remove this evidence, then I’ll take your statement. Looks like I need a HazMat cleanup too. ”The old man made his way to the touch screen the size of a door and began to touch out his order. Then he walked with his cane over to another window and returned to the prowler with two cups of coffee, handed the officer one. “Thank you sir, please have a seat in the prowler” she said, the second gullwing door opened and the old man declined. “Oh better not, once I get down in there you might have to help me get back out.” “Very well,” she said. “You get anything on those burners over there?” “No. I got nothing on either of these burners, couldn’t scan any prints either.” “Hmmmm,” the old man said, “I think they had gloves on.” “I want you to tell me happened in your own words. I’m going to be recording so continue only if you acknowledge. Remember,” she said, “recording.” “I do acknowledge.” “Good, Continue please. I understand you saw the wreck and the drivers running away after. That correct?” “Mmmm. Well, not exactly.”
September 13, 2013
Urban Fantasy and Rebecca Daff
This my third installment in my series about Urban Fantasy, an anthology of great stories published by KY Story. Today, I'm featuring Rebecca Daff, author of "Virtually Living." The anthology is available on Amazon and Createspace. If you enjoy the excerpt of Rebecca's story, be sure to comment and check out the whole anthology.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Tell us a little about yourself?
I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, and I attended Catholic school with my four siblings. But it wasn’t until my first year of public school that I engaged in writing fiction. I don’t know how I ever lived without it!
What made you want to become a writer?
I did some creative writing for the first time in my sixth grade English class. The act of creating my own characters and worlds felt so natural. It was then that I knew I wanted to write stories for a living.
Why Urban Fantasy? What about this genre appeals to you?
Fantasy, in general, appeals to me. I love writing about subject matter far outside the norm—the extreme “what if”s."
Could you tell us a bit about your story?
“Virtually Living” is about a woman obsessed with a life-simulation game. She completely immerses herself in a fictional world, thereby failing to connect to the real one. She gets away with her “absenteeism” until she gets sucked into her computer and is forced to actually live in the program. It’s up to her to find a way to escape or be caught up in a digital world forever.
What gave you the inspiration for your story?
Playing a popular life simulation game.
Do you believe the problem described in your story is applicable to today’s society? Why or why not?
Most decidedly so. Most of us are so caught up in technology, we forget what it means to be truly present in our own lives.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
Some are caricatures of people I know. Others come from a remote corner of my brain.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
The story is written in third person, limited to Doreen. So I’d say she’s my favorite because we experience the tale through her perspective.
What’s your connection to the South?
I live in rural Kentucky.
What is your favorite writing tip or quote?
“Show. Don’t tell.”
What else have you published?
My short story, “Chunky Monkey,” is in KY Story’s Dysfunctional Family Anthology. It’s now available on Amazon.com.
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other stories or books in the works?
I will continue writing short fiction, but I have plans to write novels in the future.
Where can we find you online?
Twitter: @RebeccaLDaff
Virtually Living
“I am your opus,I am your valuable,The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.I turn and burn.Do not think I underestimate your great concern.”—Sylvia Plath
Doreen watched the computer screen as Viola ate forkfuls of green, steaming nachos. What to do next? There was that cute guy down the street, but would Viola go for him? Were their likes and dislikes compatible enough for them to get married and start a family? Doreen didn’t want her creation to be alone. “Today will be sunny with temperatures in the low to mid-80s.” Nate London, the local weatherman, grinned at her from the TV, slicing through her concentration. She grabbed the remote off the end table and muted him. His plastered smile never faltered, and he continued to mouth words like “great” and “sunshine” while jabbing at the cities behind him. Doreen closed her laptop and placed it on the stained cushion next to her. Her bones and joints popped when she stood, but it felt good when she reached her long arms over her head and stretched. Her fingertips almost brushed the small apartment’s ceiling. Readjusting her shirt to cover her slight paunch, she walked to the window to check out Nate’s hype. A thin film of grime covered the mini blinds, and she made a mental note to clean. She pried open a couple of slats with her fingers. What do you know? Nate was right. Outside were blue skies sprinkled with what he called “decorator clouds.” She wiped her fingers on her jeans, leaving a smudge, and paced the worn blue rug. I should do something today. People do things on Saturdays. Yard work. Visiting people. But Viola. She’s just about to meet someone who’ll change her life. She gave her computer one last look before walking to her bedroom to change. Viola would have to wait. For now.***Doreen Blevins stared at the screen. The University of Kentucky Wildcats were up 14-7 at the half, and while the commentators were projecting an early season win, she didn’t hold much hope. Her brother, Jacob, handed her a cold soda and sighed, plopping down on the other end of the couch. “So how’s work?” he asked. Tapping the can, she shrugged. “It’s work.” “Nothing new to report?” “I’m a cashier. I take money.” “Second half!” Jacob scooted to the edge of the couch, leaning forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “Come on Cats!” Doreen sat back and opened her soda, the pop and hiss melding with the crowd’s cheers. Jacob turned up the volume. “Get the chips,” he said. Once in the kitchen, Doreen opened the cupboard and discovered several bags of snacks. “What kind?” she yelled. “I don’t care,” Jacob yelled back. “Oh, come on!” There was some illegal contact on the field. The choices were overwhelming. Cheese-flavored. Sour cream and onion. Barbeque. “What kind do you want?” “Just pick one!” “Just tell me what kind to get!” “God! The sour cream and onion!” “Okay!” Doreen tossed him the bag and sat down. Jacob muted the TV. “Was it really that hard?” he asked, tearing open the packaging. “Am I just magically supposed to know what you want?” “No, but if someone tells you they don’t care, then you just pick something and let them deal with it.” “Whatever.”
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Tell us a little about yourself? I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, and I attended Catholic school with my four siblings. But it wasn’t until my first year of public school that I engaged in writing fiction. I don’t know how I ever lived without it!
What made you want to become a writer?
I did some creative writing for the first time in my sixth grade English class. The act of creating my own characters and worlds felt so natural. It was then that I knew I wanted to write stories for a living.
Why Urban Fantasy? What about this genre appeals to you?
Fantasy, in general, appeals to me. I love writing about subject matter far outside the norm—the extreme “what if”s."
Could you tell us a bit about your story?
“Virtually Living” is about a woman obsessed with a life-simulation game. She completely immerses herself in a fictional world, thereby failing to connect to the real one. She gets away with her “absenteeism” until she gets sucked into her computer and is forced to actually live in the program. It’s up to her to find a way to escape or be caught up in a digital world forever.
What gave you the inspiration for your story?
Playing a popular life simulation game.
Do you believe the problem described in your story is applicable to today’s society? Why or why not?
Most decidedly so. Most of us are so caught up in technology, we forget what it means to be truly present in our own lives.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
Some are caricatures of people I know. Others come from a remote corner of my brain.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
The story is written in third person, limited to Doreen. So I’d say she’s my favorite because we experience the tale through her perspective.
What’s your connection to the South?
I live in rural Kentucky.
What is your favorite writing tip or quote?
“Show. Don’t tell.”
What else have you published?
My short story, “Chunky Monkey,” is in KY Story’s Dysfunctional Family Anthology. It’s now available on Amazon.com.
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other stories or books in the works?
I will continue writing short fiction, but I have plans to write novels in the future.
Where can we find you online?
Twitter: @RebeccaLDaff
Virtually Living
“I am your opus,I am your valuable,The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.I turn and burn.Do not think I underestimate your great concern.”—Sylvia Plath
Doreen watched the computer screen as Viola ate forkfuls of green, steaming nachos. What to do next? There was that cute guy down the street, but would Viola go for him? Were their likes and dislikes compatible enough for them to get married and start a family? Doreen didn’t want her creation to be alone. “Today will be sunny with temperatures in the low to mid-80s.” Nate London, the local weatherman, grinned at her from the TV, slicing through her concentration. She grabbed the remote off the end table and muted him. His plastered smile never faltered, and he continued to mouth words like “great” and “sunshine” while jabbing at the cities behind him. Doreen closed her laptop and placed it on the stained cushion next to her. Her bones and joints popped when she stood, but it felt good when she reached her long arms over her head and stretched. Her fingertips almost brushed the small apartment’s ceiling. Readjusting her shirt to cover her slight paunch, she walked to the window to check out Nate’s hype. A thin film of grime covered the mini blinds, and she made a mental note to clean. She pried open a couple of slats with her fingers. What do you know? Nate was right. Outside were blue skies sprinkled with what he called “decorator clouds.” She wiped her fingers on her jeans, leaving a smudge, and paced the worn blue rug. I should do something today. People do things on Saturdays. Yard work. Visiting people. But Viola. She’s just about to meet someone who’ll change her life. She gave her computer one last look before walking to her bedroom to change. Viola would have to wait. For now.***Doreen Blevins stared at the screen. The University of Kentucky Wildcats were up 14-7 at the half, and while the commentators were projecting an early season win, she didn’t hold much hope. Her brother, Jacob, handed her a cold soda and sighed, plopping down on the other end of the couch. “So how’s work?” he asked. Tapping the can, she shrugged. “It’s work.” “Nothing new to report?” “I’m a cashier. I take money.” “Second half!” Jacob scooted to the edge of the couch, leaning forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “Come on Cats!” Doreen sat back and opened her soda, the pop and hiss melding with the crowd’s cheers. Jacob turned up the volume. “Get the chips,” he said. Once in the kitchen, Doreen opened the cupboard and discovered several bags of snacks. “What kind?” she yelled. “I don’t care,” Jacob yelled back. “Oh, come on!” There was some illegal contact on the field. The choices were overwhelming. Cheese-flavored. Sour cream and onion. Barbeque. “What kind do you want?” “Just pick one!” “Just tell me what kind to get!” “God! The sour cream and onion!” “Okay!” Doreen tossed him the bag and sat down. Jacob muted the TV. “Was it really that hard?” he asked, tearing open the packaging. “Am I just magically supposed to know what you want?” “No, but if someone tells you they don’t care, then you just pick something and let them deal with it.” “Whatever.”
September 12, 2013
T. S. O'Neil and Tampa Star
Today, the guest on my blog is T.S. O'Neil, author of Tampa Star. Read about him and an excerpt from his book. As always, I love to hear your comments.
Tell us a little about yourself?
I am 53 years young and originally from Newington, CT. I went to undergraduate school at Northeastern University in Boston and have an MBA from the University of Phoenix in Technology Management. I spent a good amount of time in the military; first as an enlisted Marine in the Marine Reserve, then about ten years on active duty as an officer in the Military Police Corps of the U.S. Army, and I finished out my career in the Army Reserve.
During that time, I travelled a lot of the world, picked up Spanish, as the Army sent me to language school and managed to have a lot of fun and mostly managing to avoid combat. While most sane people look at the being shot at as merely a life threatening situation, those in the military look at it as an opportunity for career advancement.
As a careerist, I was an abject failure as I was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Meaning wherever I happened to be, peace was breaking out like mad.
I was supposed to jump into Omar Torrejo Airport with the Rangers during Operation Just Cause, but instead I went on to the MP Officer Advance Course. The invasion took place in December of 89, as I drove home to Connecticut for Christmas break members of my former unit parachuted into glory. Later, as I sat in Panama enjoying the new era of peace and prosperity, Operation Desert Storm took place. My luck finally caught up with me, and I spent part of a tour in Iraq. Other than a couple of nights of rocket fire, the period in Iraq was relatively peaceful.
I got out of the military and eventually gravitated to the IT Field. I am currently an IT Architect for a healthcare company. I live in Seminole Florida with the love of my life, Suzanne, and we are getting married on Oct 4th of this year.
What made you want to become a writer?
I have a very active imagination and was always getting into trouble in grade school for day-dreaming. I think being a fiction writer is a great endeavor in that you get to invent your own reality and create a different world.
What genre do your works fall into?
Thriller.
What about this genre appeals to you?
I think it’s interesting to impart thrills and suspense into the plot and ensnare the reader in the action. My military background allows me to place believable technical and operational characteristics into the storyline that lends a certain level of credibility to the characters and story.
Could you tell us a bit about your most recent book and why it is a must-read?
I published Tampa Star late last year, and it is my first book. It’s the story of a father and son that’s told in two parts. The first part of the book starts in the early seventies in the aftermath of the Viet Nam war. The father, Char, is a Seminole Indian and former Green Beret who is wounded by a dead guerrilla in the aftermath of a firefight. He is subsequently evacuated and discharged with a bum leg.
Char moves to the Florida Gulf Coast, gets a job, meets a girl and life seems to be going his way, until he falls in with the wrong crowd and things spiral out of control from there.
The second part of the book picks up in two thousand and four when the son, a former Recon Marine Officer, is discharged and travels to Florida in search of his father.
The story has a host of villains you will love to hate, including a corrupt cop, a Mafia Capo and a Russian ex-CIA interrogator.
I think the story has a lot to offer as the characters are richly drawn and are believable. I takes place in and around Florida and is written in the “Florida Glare” style of authors like Elmore Leonard and Laurence Shames. It’s got the same style of witty, realistic and somewhat caustic dialog that they are known to employ.
What gives you inspiration for your book?
Elmore Leonard, may he rest in peace, taught me to believe that you can and should try to write the way people speak. People are funny and say lots of humorous things in all sorts of tense situations.
I believe some of the funniest guys in history are Service Members; a catch all phrase for Soldier, Sailors, Airmen and Marines. I think it’s because they are often living in austere conditions and have lots of time on their hands. Someone once said that war is interminable boredom punctuated by moments of terror. An active imagination is what keeps you in good spirits and help you fill the void or salve your fear. I bet King Leonidas was an especially funny guy to be able to crack wise when confronted by hundreds of thousands of Persian Soldiers. “Come get them,” is, if not the first bad ass line in history, probably the best known.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
Inspiration for the character of Char Blackfox, the main protagonist in Tampa Star and Starfish Prime, came from various places. Some of his character was based on a few of the old Vietnam era soldiers and Marines I met when I first entered the service back in 1977.
Some parts of Char’s history came from a real life. In the book, Tampa Star, Char was wounded by a dead guy in Vietnam. This actually happened to a Platoon Sergeant I knew in Korea in almost exactly the same fashion.
The Platoon Sergeant nearly lost a leg because he killed a VC guerrilla and then pulled the rifle away from the dead man while his just dead finger still enveloped the trigger. He had to be reclassified as an MP because he was no longer fit enough to serve in the infantry.
Char’s son Michael is more the new strain of service member; more cerebral, but still willing to kick ass and take names.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
I would say Char Blackfox is my favorite character because he is the first one I developed, and he is sort of an older version of me. Life has kicked Char around a lot, but he always comes back swinging. I made him a Seminole Indian in honor of the tribe and their place in Florida History. I heard about some battles fought here during the First and Second Seminole War and thought them to be great warriors.
What is the biggest surprise that you experienced after becoming a writer?
That I didn’t become a rich, well known and bestselling author overnight. Seriously, though, the mount of marketing and promotion that you have to do to become a known commodity is daunting. Writing the book appears to be the easy part.
Is there any particular author or book that influenced you either growing up or as an adult?
Another great book is Tough Guys Don’t Dance by Norman Mailer. It’s a book that I loved reading and a movie that was very entertaining, at least to me. The protagonist, played by Ryan O’Neal, is watching his world crumble all around him; his wife leaves him, he can’t stop drinking and oh yeah, there’s two heads in a bag in the basement, and he is left trying to figure out how they got there. I would always watch the movie when my life was at a low point and it would allow me to say: “Well, at least I don’t have it as bad as that guy.”
Do you have a day job in addition to being a writer? If so, what do you do during the day?
I got out of the military and eventually gravitated to the IT Field. I am currently an IT Architect for a healthcare company.
What is your favorite writing tip or quote?
Elmore Leonard famously said; “try to write the stuff people want to read and leave the rest out.”
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other books in the works?
Starfish Prime will be released early next year. I am about ninety percent done with Starfish Prime, the second book in the Blackfox Chronicles. This time, Michael Blackfox is pulled back into the Marine Corps. Since he has been out, a new Special Operations unit has been formed, and his skill set makes him uniquely qualified for their current mission. He is forced to join or watch his father be sent to jail for the crimes he committed inTampa Star.
Where can we find you online?
Website: www.tsoneil.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/timbones.oneilTwitter: @tselliot3Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Tampa-Star-Blackfox-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B00A6DSN5A
Others: http://www.amazon.com/T.S.-ONeil/e/B00DK8VL1Q/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
Book Blurb
Char Blackfox is a Seminole Indian and former Green Beret maimed by a dead guerilla in Viet Nam, Hell-bent on extracting revenge against the Aussie tycoon that wronged him. He falls in with the wrong crowd; two small time Irish-American hoodlums, a corrupt cop and an exiled Rhode Island Mafia Capo. In 2004, a combat hardened Force Recon Marine is released from active duty and returns to Florida to find his estranged father, one of the original robbers still on the run from his former partners.
Excerpt
Chapter 22 - Eidetic Eddie Doyle
Detective Doyle sat in his small windowless office surrounded by mementos from over thirty five years of police work, mostly as a homicide detective, and felt tired. He was 58 years old, and had been a policeman for over half his life. He wanted to retire when he hit forty years on the job, if his bum ticker held out that long.
Pinellas County Sheriff Department needed good detectives and Eddie was one of the best. They called him Eidetic Eddie, as he was known for his uncanny ability to remember little details about cases that frequently resulted in an arrest and conviction.
In 1985, Eddie investigated the death of a prostitute on Rt. 19 in Dunedin. A drugged out hooker had fallen in front of an eighteen wheeler and was killed; pretty straight forward actually—death by Mack truck. For all intents and purposes, the case should have been an open and shut case, and it would have been, if not for Eddie’s uncanny memory.
Eight years earlier, Eddie sat in on a roll call briefing concerning a pimp named “Smooth Earle” who carried an ivory cane with a handle made of a gold death head skull with red ruby eyes which was often used to motivate some of his girls to apply themselves harder.
A Medical Examiner had conducted a preliminary investigation of the prostitute’s corpse at the scene but didn’t notice anything strange at the time, until Eidetic Eddie pointed it out—among the many wounds on the woman’s horribly mangled body was a strange circular gash above her left eyebrow. Upon closer examination, small gashes clearly denoted the eyes, nose and mouth of a skull. Better still—a small red ruby was deeply embedded in one of the wounds.
An autopsy was ordered and it was determined that the blow above the eye had killed her and all the other injuries occurred postmortem. A subsequent search of Smooth Earl’s vehicle, a pimped out 1984 Ford LTD, turned up the cane with one missing ruby eye. Earl copped a plea to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life at the Okaloosa Correctional Institution.
It was said that Eddie’s short marriage to another officer ended because Eddie’s computer like recitation of everything that had ever happened to him, and to her for that matter, drove her to distraction; No anniversary or birthday was ever forgotten and most arguments about “who said what” were essentially rendered moot as Eddie’s version was always the most accurate.
In a phrase, Eddie made his wife totally “bat-shit crazy.” She asked for a divorce and quickly moved in with a motorcycle cop said to have a Neanderthal level I.Q— he heard they were quite happy. Since then, Eddie bought a boat and took up fishing in the gulf.
After he was diagnosed with a heart murmur, Eddie made movement towards retirement, but his longtime friend, Sam Waller, who also happened to be the Pinellas County Sheriff, asked him to take a less hectic position in Internal Affairs. He had been there for the last three years and although the pace was calmer, he found investigating other cops to be disagreeable.
The other cops seemed to feel the same way; overnight, Eddie went from local celebrity to pariah. Still, the hours were good; once and a while he would get called out for an officer involved shooting, but it was mostly a nine to five existence, with weekends free. Since he was representing the long arm of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department, he dressed in business casual, normally Khaki pants and an American Eagle Outfitters Polo Shirt—he had a different color for every day of the week.
As a service revolver, Eddie wore an ancient stainless steel snub nose, Colt .38 left exposed on his belt. The younger cops joked that Eddie would have better luck throwing the revolver at a suspect rather than shooting at them.
The Sheriff himself asked Eddie to have a talk with Deputy Guy Handley regarding “being found handcuffed to a thug in a cheap motel in High Springs.” The Sheriff, having a penchant for understatement, mentioned that the facts and circumstances surrounding the incident involving Handley seemed “a bit odd.”
Handley had been a problem child from the start, but they had never been able to prove anything against him. Rumor had it that he collected protection money or other services from the numerous massage parlors and strip clubs located within the county. But that was just a rumor and without substantiation, stayed that way.
Handley was very careful to always have a reason for visiting a locale that might include checking to see that no minors were being served or that the maximum occupancy was being violated. He was always one step ahead of the regular Internal Affairs types.
Eddie remembered Guy Handley. How could he not? He remembered everyone he ever met, but Handley was an odd duck. Eddie had been involved in a scuffle with a suspect that resulted in a dislocated collarbone and he was given he was given admin tasks to do until he healed up. One of the more onerous tasks given him during light duty was the conduct of background investigations of new hires and Guy Handley was one of these. Eddie quickly learned that Handley had been fired from the Tampa Police Force for excessive force a few years previously.
Still, that was a long time ago and the incident was not serious enough to warrant criminal charges. Just some punk who got a beating during an arrest, “old style police work” that Eddie did not specifically approve of, but he was familiar with the emotions that caused it. “Testosterone poisoning,” his wife used to say.
He gave Handley the benefit of the doubt and put a positive spin on the background investigation—Pinellas Sheriff Department needed deputies at the time. Another thing that Eddie remembered about Guy Handley was that he was found trespassing on private property on Halloween Night in 1974.
Even if he didn’t have an eidetic memory, he would have never forgotten that night. An unexpected storm battered the coastline with record producing waves and was later found to be responsible for the sinking of a local cruise ship, the Princess of Tampa. Eddie was a patrol deputy at the time and had responded to a report of a prowler at a waterfront mansion in Tierra Verde.
Handley was found soaking wet and semi-clothed, his shirt having been stripped off him in the heavy surf. He was also beaten up and bloody and claimed to have fallen off a party boat and been bashed on the rocks trying to make land. Doyle and a partner gave him a ride to a local motel and that was the last official action taken in the case.
Later that night, a fellow deputy apprehended an escaped bank robber by the name of James O’Brien, walking across the causeway and a large yacht was found washed ashore at Fort DeSoto. What were the chances that any of these events were related to Guy Handley?
The current incident was dialed in by a deputy up near Gainesville concerning Handley being found beat-up and handcuffed to a twenty-something tattooed hoodlum in a local motel. Strange stuff, that. Looks to the contrary notwithstanding, the thug was clean; no rap sheet, no wants or warrants—at least one tied to the last name he gave upon his arrest.
So, the plot thickened. He figured that Handley would “Lawyer Up” before any interview as that was the standard operating procedure employed by the Pinellas County's police union. The rumor mill also claimed that Handley was an associate of Sally Boots as he had been seen on numerous occasions in a strip club Sally owned by an undercover narc that Eddie had known for years.
Whatever Handley was doing near Ginnie Springs might have had something to do with the old gangster. The association was deniable and he figured that he had little to gain by calling him in for an interview. It would put Handley on notice that he was being watched, but little else.
The hood was spending time up in the Gainesville Jail thanks to an unregistered firearm found in his pocket. There might be another way to approach this case, thought Eddie. He might just take a trip to the Gainesville jail and stop by the Sherriff’s station near Ginnie Springs just for good measure.
Eddie looked at the information sheet supplied by the Gilchrist County Sheriff’s Department. The suspect’s name was Vito Viticoltore. Eddie looked at the mug shot. The thug was wearing a “wife-beater” t-shirt, one without sleeves, sometimes called a muscle shirt. He was heavily tattooed and looked like he spent a lot of time in the gym.
Something about the thug’s last name struck him odd; “Hey, Falcon, what the fuck does Viticoltore mean?” He shouted into the squad bay. Mike Falcon, a short stocky detective in the burglary division stuck his head into Eddie’s office. “How the fuck would I know? I was born in Maryland!”
“Come on, Cocksucker, I know your parents came right off the boat from Sicily” countered Doyle.
“Jeez, Eddie, did you ever once forget one thing?”
“You know the answer to that, now answer my question!”
“I think it means Winemaker. Are you happy now, douchebag?”
“Yes, yes I am,” replied Eddie.
The next morning Eddie left his houseboat before the sun was up and arrived at the Gainesville Jail just after breakfast. He had stopped at a Burger King off the Interstate and bought a sausage, egg and cheese croissant and large coffee, and brushed the remnants off the sandwich off his Blue Polo shirt as he walked in the Gilchrest County Jail. Eddie asked for the duty officer, identified himself and asked to meet with the suspect. He was escorted into an interview room to see the suspect, who had been denied bail as he was considered a flight risk.
“What the fuck you want with me, pig?” Spat Vito Viticoltore through the interview screen. He was even more pleasant in person than Eddie had hoped. The thug was dressed in a prisoner’s trademark orange jumpsuit and wore both hand and leg cuffs, chained together and locked to his chair which severely limited his movements.
They sparred verbally for a little, and Eddie got the distinct impression that the thug thought he held the upper hand. “You got nothing but a misdemeanor gun charge on me and you know what? It’s not my gun. It belongs to that cop, Handley”.
“Yeah, but what was it doing in your pocket, stud?” Countered Eddie. “Doesn’t matter, fuck-stick, as soon as my lawyer gets here, I will be out on bail.” Eddie knew that might probably be true, but in this case he had a hole card that he decided to show. “Actually, I am not here to ask you about that, he countered, I am more interested in your last name.” “What the fuck do you want to know about my last name?”
“Well, the funny thing is that when we run the name; Viticoltore, it comes back clean, so that either means you are clean, which I severely doubt or that’s not your real name.“ The hood looked away inadvertently and then caught himself and stared at Eddie with cold, venom filled eyes.
“I thought about the name and found out it means “Winemaker,” did you know that kid?” The thug said nothing, so Eddie continued. “So I thought about it and I did a search of the known associated database that the FBI runs; see we have read access to it, and I did a search on the term “winemakers” and lo and behold, I came up with a Mustache Pete by the name Carlos “the Winemaker” Gambochinno. Sound familiar?” He is an old gangster, a made member of the Patriarca crime family, and a known associate of a local gangster by the name of Sally Boots; ever heard of him?” He asked the thug and then continued as if he already knew the answer.
“It seems this scumbag had several children; one of them, a Vito Gambochinno, is currently wanted for armed robbery in the state of Massachusetts. Here is a picture of him, said Eddie as he held the picture up for the thug to see. I think you will agree that he bears a sticking resemblance to you, right down to the tattoos. So, I wouldn’t worry about making bail right now, but if you want to cooperate and start telling the truth about why you were handcuffed to Deputy Handley, I think we could work out a deal.”
“It had something to do finding something valuable that had been hidden for a long time is all I was told. Handley told me to work this guy over until he took us to his old man.”
“And the guy’s father knew where the valuables were hidden?” Asked Eddie.
“Yeah, but the cocksucker turned the table on us, came flying through door like the terminator or some shit,” the hood smiled tentatively.
“What was the guy’s name?”
“I didn’t ask—it was just a job to earn some coin while I was….”
“On the lam?” Eddie offered.
“On vacation,” corrected Vito.
“OK, Vito that will keep you from getting shipped up north for a while. How would you like to get transferred down to Pinellas County, we got lots of great Italian food down there?”
“Sure, replied the hoodlum, this place thinks a baloney sandwich is a Grinder.”
Tell us a little about yourself? I am 53 years young and originally from Newington, CT. I went to undergraduate school at Northeastern University in Boston and have an MBA from the University of Phoenix in Technology Management. I spent a good amount of time in the military; first as an enlisted Marine in the Marine Reserve, then about ten years on active duty as an officer in the Military Police Corps of the U.S. Army, and I finished out my career in the Army Reserve.
During that time, I travelled a lot of the world, picked up Spanish, as the Army sent me to language school and managed to have a lot of fun and mostly managing to avoid combat. While most sane people look at the being shot at as merely a life threatening situation, those in the military look at it as an opportunity for career advancement.
As a careerist, I was an abject failure as I was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Meaning wherever I happened to be, peace was breaking out like mad.
I was supposed to jump into Omar Torrejo Airport with the Rangers during Operation Just Cause, but instead I went on to the MP Officer Advance Course. The invasion took place in December of 89, as I drove home to Connecticut for Christmas break members of my former unit parachuted into glory. Later, as I sat in Panama enjoying the new era of peace and prosperity, Operation Desert Storm took place. My luck finally caught up with me, and I spent part of a tour in Iraq. Other than a couple of nights of rocket fire, the period in Iraq was relatively peaceful.
I got out of the military and eventually gravitated to the IT Field. I am currently an IT Architect for a healthcare company. I live in Seminole Florida with the love of my life, Suzanne, and we are getting married on Oct 4th of this year.
What made you want to become a writer?
I have a very active imagination and was always getting into trouble in grade school for day-dreaming. I think being a fiction writer is a great endeavor in that you get to invent your own reality and create a different world.
What genre do your works fall into?
Thriller.
What about this genre appeals to you?
I think it’s interesting to impart thrills and suspense into the plot and ensnare the reader in the action. My military background allows me to place believable technical and operational characteristics into the storyline that lends a certain level of credibility to the characters and story.
Could you tell us a bit about your most recent book and why it is a must-read?
I published Tampa Star late last year, and it is my first book. It’s the story of a father and son that’s told in two parts. The first part of the book starts in the early seventies in the aftermath of the Viet Nam war. The father, Char, is a Seminole Indian and former Green Beret who is wounded by a dead guerrilla in the aftermath of a firefight. He is subsequently evacuated and discharged with a bum leg.
Char moves to the Florida Gulf Coast, gets a job, meets a girl and life seems to be going his way, until he falls in with the wrong crowd and things spiral out of control from there.
The second part of the book picks up in two thousand and four when the son, a former Recon Marine Officer, is discharged and travels to Florida in search of his father.
The story has a host of villains you will love to hate, including a corrupt cop, a Mafia Capo and a Russian ex-CIA interrogator.
I think the story has a lot to offer as the characters are richly drawn and are believable. I takes place in and around Florida and is written in the “Florida Glare” style of authors like Elmore Leonard and Laurence Shames. It’s got the same style of witty, realistic and somewhat caustic dialog that they are known to employ.
What gives you inspiration for your book?
Elmore Leonard, may he rest in peace, taught me to believe that you can and should try to write the way people speak. People are funny and say lots of humorous things in all sorts of tense situations.
I believe some of the funniest guys in history are Service Members; a catch all phrase for Soldier, Sailors, Airmen and Marines. I think it’s because they are often living in austere conditions and have lots of time on their hands. Someone once said that war is interminable boredom punctuated by moments of terror. An active imagination is what keeps you in good spirits and help you fill the void or salve your fear. I bet King Leonidas was an especially funny guy to be able to crack wise when confronted by hundreds of thousands of Persian Soldiers. “Come get them,” is, if not the first bad ass line in history, probably the best known.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
Inspiration for the character of Char Blackfox, the main protagonist in Tampa Star and Starfish Prime, came from various places. Some of his character was based on a few of the old Vietnam era soldiers and Marines I met when I first entered the service back in 1977.
Some parts of Char’s history came from a real life. In the book, Tampa Star, Char was wounded by a dead guy in Vietnam. This actually happened to a Platoon Sergeant I knew in Korea in almost exactly the same fashion.
The Platoon Sergeant nearly lost a leg because he killed a VC guerrilla and then pulled the rifle away from the dead man while his just dead finger still enveloped the trigger. He had to be reclassified as an MP because he was no longer fit enough to serve in the infantry.
Char’s son Michael is more the new strain of service member; more cerebral, but still willing to kick ass and take names.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
I would say Char Blackfox is my favorite character because he is the first one I developed, and he is sort of an older version of me. Life has kicked Char around a lot, but he always comes back swinging. I made him a Seminole Indian in honor of the tribe and their place in Florida History. I heard about some battles fought here during the First and Second Seminole War and thought them to be great warriors.
What is the biggest surprise that you experienced after becoming a writer?
That I didn’t become a rich, well known and bestselling author overnight. Seriously, though, the mount of marketing and promotion that you have to do to become a known commodity is daunting. Writing the book appears to be the easy part.
Is there any particular author or book that influenced you either growing up or as an adult?
Another great book is Tough Guys Don’t Dance by Norman Mailer. It’s a book that I loved reading and a movie that was very entertaining, at least to me. The protagonist, played by Ryan O’Neal, is watching his world crumble all around him; his wife leaves him, he can’t stop drinking and oh yeah, there’s two heads in a bag in the basement, and he is left trying to figure out how they got there. I would always watch the movie when my life was at a low point and it would allow me to say: “Well, at least I don’t have it as bad as that guy.”
Do you have a day job in addition to being a writer? If so, what do you do during the day?
I got out of the military and eventually gravitated to the IT Field. I am currently an IT Architect for a healthcare company.
What is your favorite writing tip or quote?
Elmore Leonard famously said; “try to write the stuff people want to read and leave the rest out.”
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other books in the works?
Starfish Prime will be released early next year. I am about ninety percent done with Starfish Prime, the second book in the Blackfox Chronicles. This time, Michael Blackfox is pulled back into the Marine Corps. Since he has been out, a new Special Operations unit has been formed, and his skill set makes him uniquely qualified for their current mission. He is forced to join or watch his father be sent to jail for the crimes he committed inTampa Star.
Where can we find you online?
Website: www.tsoneil.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/timbones.oneilTwitter: @tselliot3Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Tampa-Star-Blackfox-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B00A6DSN5A
Others: http://www.amazon.com/T.S.-ONeil/e/B00DK8VL1Q/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
Book Blurb
Char Blackfox is a Seminole Indian and former Green Beret maimed by a dead guerilla in Viet Nam, Hell-bent on extracting revenge against the Aussie tycoon that wronged him. He falls in with the wrong crowd; two small time Irish-American hoodlums, a corrupt cop and an exiled Rhode Island Mafia Capo. In 2004, a combat hardened Force Recon Marine is released from active duty and returns to Florida to find his estranged father, one of the original robbers still on the run from his former partners. Excerpt
Chapter 22 - Eidetic Eddie Doyle
Detective Doyle sat in his small windowless office surrounded by mementos from over thirty five years of police work, mostly as a homicide detective, and felt tired. He was 58 years old, and had been a policeman for over half his life. He wanted to retire when he hit forty years on the job, if his bum ticker held out that long.
Pinellas County Sheriff Department needed good detectives and Eddie was one of the best. They called him Eidetic Eddie, as he was known for his uncanny ability to remember little details about cases that frequently resulted in an arrest and conviction.
In 1985, Eddie investigated the death of a prostitute on Rt. 19 in Dunedin. A drugged out hooker had fallen in front of an eighteen wheeler and was killed; pretty straight forward actually—death by Mack truck. For all intents and purposes, the case should have been an open and shut case, and it would have been, if not for Eddie’s uncanny memory.
Eight years earlier, Eddie sat in on a roll call briefing concerning a pimp named “Smooth Earle” who carried an ivory cane with a handle made of a gold death head skull with red ruby eyes which was often used to motivate some of his girls to apply themselves harder.
A Medical Examiner had conducted a preliminary investigation of the prostitute’s corpse at the scene but didn’t notice anything strange at the time, until Eidetic Eddie pointed it out—among the many wounds on the woman’s horribly mangled body was a strange circular gash above her left eyebrow. Upon closer examination, small gashes clearly denoted the eyes, nose and mouth of a skull. Better still—a small red ruby was deeply embedded in one of the wounds.
An autopsy was ordered and it was determined that the blow above the eye had killed her and all the other injuries occurred postmortem. A subsequent search of Smooth Earl’s vehicle, a pimped out 1984 Ford LTD, turned up the cane with one missing ruby eye. Earl copped a plea to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life at the Okaloosa Correctional Institution.
It was said that Eddie’s short marriage to another officer ended because Eddie’s computer like recitation of everything that had ever happened to him, and to her for that matter, drove her to distraction; No anniversary or birthday was ever forgotten and most arguments about “who said what” were essentially rendered moot as Eddie’s version was always the most accurate.
In a phrase, Eddie made his wife totally “bat-shit crazy.” She asked for a divorce and quickly moved in with a motorcycle cop said to have a Neanderthal level I.Q— he heard they were quite happy. Since then, Eddie bought a boat and took up fishing in the gulf.
After he was diagnosed with a heart murmur, Eddie made movement towards retirement, but his longtime friend, Sam Waller, who also happened to be the Pinellas County Sheriff, asked him to take a less hectic position in Internal Affairs. He had been there for the last three years and although the pace was calmer, he found investigating other cops to be disagreeable.
The other cops seemed to feel the same way; overnight, Eddie went from local celebrity to pariah. Still, the hours were good; once and a while he would get called out for an officer involved shooting, but it was mostly a nine to five existence, with weekends free. Since he was representing the long arm of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department, he dressed in business casual, normally Khaki pants and an American Eagle Outfitters Polo Shirt—he had a different color for every day of the week.
As a service revolver, Eddie wore an ancient stainless steel snub nose, Colt .38 left exposed on his belt. The younger cops joked that Eddie would have better luck throwing the revolver at a suspect rather than shooting at them.
The Sheriff himself asked Eddie to have a talk with Deputy Guy Handley regarding “being found handcuffed to a thug in a cheap motel in High Springs.” The Sheriff, having a penchant for understatement, mentioned that the facts and circumstances surrounding the incident involving Handley seemed “a bit odd.”
Handley had been a problem child from the start, but they had never been able to prove anything against him. Rumor had it that he collected protection money or other services from the numerous massage parlors and strip clubs located within the county. But that was just a rumor and without substantiation, stayed that way.
Handley was very careful to always have a reason for visiting a locale that might include checking to see that no minors were being served or that the maximum occupancy was being violated. He was always one step ahead of the regular Internal Affairs types.
Eddie remembered Guy Handley. How could he not? He remembered everyone he ever met, but Handley was an odd duck. Eddie had been involved in a scuffle with a suspect that resulted in a dislocated collarbone and he was given he was given admin tasks to do until he healed up. One of the more onerous tasks given him during light duty was the conduct of background investigations of new hires and Guy Handley was one of these. Eddie quickly learned that Handley had been fired from the Tampa Police Force for excessive force a few years previously.
Still, that was a long time ago and the incident was not serious enough to warrant criminal charges. Just some punk who got a beating during an arrest, “old style police work” that Eddie did not specifically approve of, but he was familiar with the emotions that caused it. “Testosterone poisoning,” his wife used to say.
He gave Handley the benefit of the doubt and put a positive spin on the background investigation—Pinellas Sheriff Department needed deputies at the time. Another thing that Eddie remembered about Guy Handley was that he was found trespassing on private property on Halloween Night in 1974.
Even if he didn’t have an eidetic memory, he would have never forgotten that night. An unexpected storm battered the coastline with record producing waves and was later found to be responsible for the sinking of a local cruise ship, the Princess of Tampa. Eddie was a patrol deputy at the time and had responded to a report of a prowler at a waterfront mansion in Tierra Verde.
Handley was found soaking wet and semi-clothed, his shirt having been stripped off him in the heavy surf. He was also beaten up and bloody and claimed to have fallen off a party boat and been bashed on the rocks trying to make land. Doyle and a partner gave him a ride to a local motel and that was the last official action taken in the case.
Later that night, a fellow deputy apprehended an escaped bank robber by the name of James O’Brien, walking across the causeway and a large yacht was found washed ashore at Fort DeSoto. What were the chances that any of these events were related to Guy Handley?
The current incident was dialed in by a deputy up near Gainesville concerning Handley being found beat-up and handcuffed to a twenty-something tattooed hoodlum in a local motel. Strange stuff, that. Looks to the contrary notwithstanding, the thug was clean; no rap sheet, no wants or warrants—at least one tied to the last name he gave upon his arrest.
So, the plot thickened. He figured that Handley would “Lawyer Up” before any interview as that was the standard operating procedure employed by the Pinellas County's police union. The rumor mill also claimed that Handley was an associate of Sally Boots as he had been seen on numerous occasions in a strip club Sally owned by an undercover narc that Eddie had known for years.
Whatever Handley was doing near Ginnie Springs might have had something to do with the old gangster. The association was deniable and he figured that he had little to gain by calling him in for an interview. It would put Handley on notice that he was being watched, but little else.
The hood was spending time up in the Gainesville Jail thanks to an unregistered firearm found in his pocket. There might be another way to approach this case, thought Eddie. He might just take a trip to the Gainesville jail and stop by the Sherriff’s station near Ginnie Springs just for good measure.
Eddie looked at the information sheet supplied by the Gilchrist County Sheriff’s Department. The suspect’s name was Vito Viticoltore. Eddie looked at the mug shot. The thug was wearing a “wife-beater” t-shirt, one without sleeves, sometimes called a muscle shirt. He was heavily tattooed and looked like he spent a lot of time in the gym.
Something about the thug’s last name struck him odd; “Hey, Falcon, what the fuck does Viticoltore mean?” He shouted into the squad bay. Mike Falcon, a short stocky detective in the burglary division stuck his head into Eddie’s office. “How the fuck would I know? I was born in Maryland!”
“Come on, Cocksucker, I know your parents came right off the boat from Sicily” countered Doyle.
“Jeez, Eddie, did you ever once forget one thing?”
“You know the answer to that, now answer my question!”
“I think it means Winemaker. Are you happy now, douchebag?”
“Yes, yes I am,” replied Eddie.
The next morning Eddie left his houseboat before the sun was up and arrived at the Gainesville Jail just after breakfast. He had stopped at a Burger King off the Interstate and bought a sausage, egg and cheese croissant and large coffee, and brushed the remnants off the sandwich off his Blue Polo shirt as he walked in the Gilchrest County Jail. Eddie asked for the duty officer, identified himself and asked to meet with the suspect. He was escorted into an interview room to see the suspect, who had been denied bail as he was considered a flight risk.
“What the fuck you want with me, pig?” Spat Vito Viticoltore through the interview screen. He was even more pleasant in person than Eddie had hoped. The thug was dressed in a prisoner’s trademark orange jumpsuit and wore both hand and leg cuffs, chained together and locked to his chair which severely limited his movements.
They sparred verbally for a little, and Eddie got the distinct impression that the thug thought he held the upper hand. “You got nothing but a misdemeanor gun charge on me and you know what? It’s not my gun. It belongs to that cop, Handley”.
“Yeah, but what was it doing in your pocket, stud?” Countered Eddie. “Doesn’t matter, fuck-stick, as soon as my lawyer gets here, I will be out on bail.” Eddie knew that might probably be true, but in this case he had a hole card that he decided to show. “Actually, I am not here to ask you about that, he countered, I am more interested in your last name.” “What the fuck do you want to know about my last name?”
“Well, the funny thing is that when we run the name; Viticoltore, it comes back clean, so that either means you are clean, which I severely doubt or that’s not your real name.“ The hood looked away inadvertently and then caught himself and stared at Eddie with cold, venom filled eyes.
“I thought about the name and found out it means “Winemaker,” did you know that kid?” The thug said nothing, so Eddie continued. “So I thought about it and I did a search of the known associated database that the FBI runs; see we have read access to it, and I did a search on the term “winemakers” and lo and behold, I came up with a Mustache Pete by the name Carlos “the Winemaker” Gambochinno. Sound familiar?” He is an old gangster, a made member of the Patriarca crime family, and a known associate of a local gangster by the name of Sally Boots; ever heard of him?” He asked the thug and then continued as if he already knew the answer.
“It seems this scumbag had several children; one of them, a Vito Gambochinno, is currently wanted for armed robbery in the state of Massachusetts. Here is a picture of him, said Eddie as he held the picture up for the thug to see. I think you will agree that he bears a sticking resemblance to you, right down to the tattoos. So, I wouldn’t worry about making bail right now, but if you want to cooperate and start telling the truth about why you were handcuffed to Deputy Handley, I think we could work out a deal.”
“It had something to do finding something valuable that had been hidden for a long time is all I was told. Handley told me to work this guy over until he took us to his old man.”
“And the guy’s father knew where the valuables were hidden?” Asked Eddie.
“Yeah, but the cocksucker turned the table on us, came flying through door like the terminator or some shit,” the hood smiled tentatively.
“What was the guy’s name?”
“I didn’t ask—it was just a job to earn some coin while I was….”
“On the lam?” Eddie offered.
“On vacation,” corrected Vito.
“OK, Vito that will keep you from getting shipped up north for a while. How would you like to get transferred down to Pinellas County, we got lots of great Italian food down there?”
“Sure, replied the hoodlum, this place thinks a baloney sandwich is a Grinder.”
September 6, 2013
Urban Fantasy and Tera Fulbright
Next up from the anthology, Urban Fantasy, is Tera Fulbright, author of the story, "Fires within the Blank Page." The anthology is available on Amazon and Createspace. If you enjoy the excerpt of Tera's story, be sure to comment and check out the whole anthology.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Tell us a little about yourself?
I’ve been a fan of SF/F since first reading CS Lewis in the 4thGrade. In addition to writing, I’m active in con-running, pirate re-enactment and RPG’s.
What made you want to become a writer?
I honestly don’t know. I’ve been writing since high school both fiction and non-fiction. I’ve been playing D&D since high school and writing about the characters in several different games. Then, once I started meeting writers at cons, I realized it was something I could do and others might want to read.
Why Urban Fantasy? What about this genre appeals to you?
I like the modern setting with magic. I like mixing elements of high fantasy (elves and magic) with everyday human struggles.
Could you tell us a bit about your story?
It’s the story of a runaway young girl who finds herself helped by a circle of witches.
Your story involves witches. Any particular reason you chose this type of supernatural creature? What fascinates you about witches?
I’ve had several friends who were practicing Wiccans. For me, Witches have always been about believing that there is more out in the universe than just what you can see and touch.
Do you believe witches could be real? Do you wish they could?
I certainly believe Wiccans/Witches/NeoPagans/Insert-term-here are real. But casting spells that mimic Harry Dresden…not so much. Do I wish they could? Absolutely.
What gave you the inspiration for your story?
The first line came from a challenge given to me by a writing group. The rest came out of my love for old used bookstores and a couple fun visits to New York.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
The adults are all real people. Kelsey is more imagination.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
Right now? I’d have to say Morgan Collins. She’s the heroine in my urban fantasy WIP. She’s a middle school teacher who finds she has a calling for magic and, of course, to save the world.
What’s your connection to the South?
I moved to NC after high school to go to college and stayed. Then I married a southern boy. J I love living where I am - close to the beach and close to the mountains.
Who are your favorite Urban Fantasy authors? What do you admire about them?
Jim Butcher probably tops the list. I love how he throws problem after problem on top of his characters until you think there is now way they are going to solve everything, but then he does. I also love his characterization of some of the magical creatures. I’m also a fan of Faith Hunter and Devon Monk.
Who is your favorite Urban Fantasy character from another author’s work? Who do you particularly like him/her?
Oh, so many to choose from…I don’t know that I have a real favorite. I tend to like characters though that are the love interest of the main character but who have a deeper purpose. (Eric Northman, Zayvion Jones)
Do you have a day job in addition to being a writer? If so, what do you do during the day?
I do. I work in Talent Management for the Center for Creative Resources.
What is your favorite writing tip or quote?
Butt in Chair. “BIC.” I’m also kind of fond of …
"Q: So, why do you write these strong female characters?Whedon: Because you're still asking me that question."--Joss Whedon
What else have you published?
My first short story, "History in the Making," was published in the anthology Rum & Runestones in 2010. My second story, "Faith," was published in Michael Ventrella's Tales of Fortannis: A Bard's Eye View. In 2012, my third short story, "Anne Bonny's Child," was included in Spells and Swashbucklers, the follow-up to Rum & Runestones. Recently, I had a fourth story, "Knight's Gambit" published in Michael Ventrella's second Tales of Fortannis anthology, A Bard in the Hard.
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other stories or books in the works?
I currently have my first novel with an editor! I have two other novel series in the beginning stages, and I’m always working on several other short stories.
Where can we find you online? Blog: http://www.terafulbright.blogspot.com/Website: http://www.terafulbright.com/Twitter: @terafulbright
Excerpt from "Fires Within the Blank Page"
There wasn’t a flake of snow on the ground, but the city was dark and freezing. Kelsey could feel her toes growing numb inside her inadequate sneakers as she walked briskly down the empty street. I’m beginning to think this whole running away thing was a bad idea, she thought to herself, as she pulled her thin coat closer around her. She hadn’t taken into account that at 16 she didn’t have a good way to make any money. And she’d gone through everything in her piggy bank to buy the bus fare from small-town Asheboro, North Carolina to the big city of New York.
Outside a used clothing store, she got a glimpse of herself in the window reflection. She stopped. It was no wonder that every store or restaurant she’d been in had taken one look at her – in her worn jeans and thin coat, with her heavy make-up to hide the bruises and the run of stiches down her right cheek - and said they weren’t hiring. The streets were beginning to empty of passerby’s and Kelsey looked furtively around. She continued to walk.
As she passed by an old bookstore, it began to sleet. The rain turned sleet came down so heavily that she was quickly soaked through. Cursing silently to herself, she hesitated outside the bookstore window. Looking inside at the rows and rows of books, she made the sudden decision to enter. She had always loved books. They were the only constant safe place in her life. So, even if they weren’t hiring, maybe she could at least get warm and dry before returning to the shelter.
A bell rang as she opened the door and stepped into the store. A middle-aged redhead poked her head around the corner of a bookcase, a stack of books towering in her hands.
“Welcome to The Four Corners. Can I help you, dearie?” the woman asked in a faded Irish accent.
Kelsey shook her head. I’ll warm up first before I ask about a job, she thought to herself.
“Okay, feel free to look around. There is coffee, tea and hot chocolate along the back wall if you need something to warm you up. I’ve got some fresh scones comin’ out in a bit.”
Kelsey nodded her thanks as she moved slowly toward the back wall. Hands shaking with cold, she poured some coffee into a paper cup and took a sip. The coffee was so hot, it scalded her tongue but the pain didn’t bother her – it was nice to be warm. Still cradling the coffee in both hands, she began to wander the aisles.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Tell us a little about yourself? I’ve been a fan of SF/F since first reading CS Lewis in the 4thGrade. In addition to writing, I’m active in con-running, pirate re-enactment and RPG’s.
What made you want to become a writer?
I honestly don’t know. I’ve been writing since high school both fiction and non-fiction. I’ve been playing D&D since high school and writing about the characters in several different games. Then, once I started meeting writers at cons, I realized it was something I could do and others might want to read.
Why Urban Fantasy? What about this genre appeals to you?
I like the modern setting with magic. I like mixing elements of high fantasy (elves and magic) with everyday human struggles.
Could you tell us a bit about your story?
It’s the story of a runaway young girl who finds herself helped by a circle of witches.
Your story involves witches. Any particular reason you chose this type of supernatural creature? What fascinates you about witches?
I’ve had several friends who were practicing Wiccans. For me, Witches have always been about believing that there is more out in the universe than just what you can see and touch.
Do you believe witches could be real? Do you wish they could?
I certainly believe Wiccans/Witches/NeoPagans/Insert-term-here are real. But casting spells that mimic Harry Dresden…not so much. Do I wish they could? Absolutely.
What gave you the inspiration for your story?
The first line came from a challenge given to me by a writing group. The rest came out of my love for old used bookstores and a couple fun visits to New York.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
The adults are all real people. Kelsey is more imagination.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
Right now? I’d have to say Morgan Collins. She’s the heroine in my urban fantasy WIP. She’s a middle school teacher who finds she has a calling for magic and, of course, to save the world.
What’s your connection to the South?
I moved to NC after high school to go to college and stayed. Then I married a southern boy. J I love living where I am - close to the beach and close to the mountains.
Who are your favorite Urban Fantasy authors? What do you admire about them?
Jim Butcher probably tops the list. I love how he throws problem after problem on top of his characters until you think there is now way they are going to solve everything, but then he does. I also love his characterization of some of the magical creatures. I’m also a fan of Faith Hunter and Devon Monk.
Who is your favorite Urban Fantasy character from another author’s work? Who do you particularly like him/her?
Oh, so many to choose from…I don’t know that I have a real favorite. I tend to like characters though that are the love interest of the main character but who have a deeper purpose. (Eric Northman, Zayvion Jones)
Do you have a day job in addition to being a writer? If so, what do you do during the day?
I do. I work in Talent Management for the Center for Creative Resources.
What is your favorite writing tip or quote?
Butt in Chair. “BIC.” I’m also kind of fond of …
"Q: So, why do you write these strong female characters?Whedon: Because you're still asking me that question."--Joss Whedon
What else have you published?
My first short story, "History in the Making," was published in the anthology Rum & Runestones in 2010. My second story, "Faith," was published in Michael Ventrella's Tales of Fortannis: A Bard's Eye View. In 2012, my third short story, "Anne Bonny's Child," was included in Spells and Swashbucklers, the follow-up to Rum & Runestones. Recently, I had a fourth story, "Knight's Gambit" published in Michael Ventrella's second Tales of Fortannis anthology, A Bard in the Hard.
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other stories or books in the works?
I currently have my first novel with an editor! I have two other novel series in the beginning stages, and I’m always working on several other short stories.
Where can we find you online? Blog: http://www.terafulbright.blogspot.com/Website: http://www.terafulbright.com/Twitter: @terafulbright
Excerpt from "Fires Within the Blank Page"
There wasn’t a flake of snow on the ground, but the city was dark and freezing. Kelsey could feel her toes growing numb inside her inadequate sneakers as she walked briskly down the empty street. I’m beginning to think this whole running away thing was a bad idea, she thought to herself, as she pulled her thin coat closer around her. She hadn’t taken into account that at 16 she didn’t have a good way to make any money. And she’d gone through everything in her piggy bank to buy the bus fare from small-town Asheboro, North Carolina to the big city of New York.
Outside a used clothing store, she got a glimpse of herself in the window reflection. She stopped. It was no wonder that every store or restaurant she’d been in had taken one look at her – in her worn jeans and thin coat, with her heavy make-up to hide the bruises and the run of stiches down her right cheek - and said they weren’t hiring. The streets were beginning to empty of passerby’s and Kelsey looked furtively around. She continued to walk.
As she passed by an old bookstore, it began to sleet. The rain turned sleet came down so heavily that she was quickly soaked through. Cursing silently to herself, she hesitated outside the bookstore window. Looking inside at the rows and rows of books, she made the sudden decision to enter. She had always loved books. They were the only constant safe place in her life. So, even if they weren’t hiring, maybe she could at least get warm and dry before returning to the shelter.
A bell rang as she opened the door and stepped into the store. A middle-aged redhead poked her head around the corner of a bookcase, a stack of books towering in her hands.
“Welcome to The Four Corners. Can I help you, dearie?” the woman asked in a faded Irish accent.
Kelsey shook her head. I’ll warm up first before I ask about a job, she thought to herself.
“Okay, feel free to look around. There is coffee, tea and hot chocolate along the back wall if you need something to warm you up. I’ve got some fresh scones comin’ out in a bit.”
Kelsey nodded her thanks as she moved slowly toward the back wall. Hands shaking with cold, she poured some coffee into a paper cup and took a sip. The coffee was so hot, it scalded her tongue but the pain didn’t bother her – it was nice to be warm. Still cradling the coffee in both hands, she began to wander the aisles.
August 30, 2013
Urban Fantasy, an anthology of Southern urban fantasy
The anthology, Urban Fantasy, published by KY Story, is a collection of stories with supernatural beings and events exploring contemporary themes. It contains a story by yours truly--"The Bull Riding Witch--and is now available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats (http://www.amazon.com/Urban-Fantasy-anthology-misc-authors/dp/149033016X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377354125&sr=8-1&keywords=9781490330167).
To get you excited about the anthology, I am interviewing the other authors and making available an excerpt of their stories. I plan to publish one interview every Friday until I've interviewed everyone in the collection. First up is John Biggs, author of the story, "In an Instant." If you like what you read, please comment and check out the rest of the anthology.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Tell us a little about yourself?
I’m one of those people who wanders aimlessly until he finally winds up exactly where he was supposed be.
I fell in love with a hometown girl who lived down the block from me, but not till she went away to college.
I was born in Southern Illinois, but found a home in Oklahoma (by way of Maine).
I’m a dentist by training, but gradually shifted to writing. I did that in the slowest way possible, by editing the Oklahoma Dental Journal and writing research articles until boring facts and stilted syntax no longer satisfied me. Then I switched to fiction.
What made you want to become a writer?
I couldn’t stop myself. I tried my hand at writing fiction about ten years ago and was immediately hooked. There are no twelve step programs around, so I’ve stuck with it.
Why Urban Fantasy? What about this genre appeals to you?
I’ve never written a story with a market in mind. I wrote a series of linked short stories that evaluate the fall of civilization from an Oklahoma point of view. I know that sounds a little odd, but Oklahoma is a special case. Native American culture is alive and well here. There are cowboys everywhere you look. Religion plays a major role in Oklahoma society. We have the most fanatic sports enthusiasts in the world.
I’ve managed to place nine of these post apocalyptic Oklahoma stories. Some in literary magazines, some in horror venues, and some in fantasy publications. I found KY Stories in Duotrope and hoped “In an Instant” would be a match.
Could you tell us a bit about your story?
After society collapses, looting and shopping are the same thing. Raj, my protagonist, is trying to scrounge groceries from an abandoned Buy For Less, when he is captured by a roving band of men led by The Colonel. The men have no women. Raj looks like a pretty good substitute to most of them until they find a five year old girl named Mary. Raj takes charge of Mary. He manages to keep her safe until the band of men find a cache of ecstasy. Now he must decide whether to give her up and save himself or risk his life and try to save them both. As the title suggests, he has to make this decision “In an Instant."
What gave you the inspiration for your story?
Raj, my protagonist, is East Indian. I came in contact with a number of people from that part of the world and found their culture compelling. I wondered how these people might react to a complete absence of order.
Do you believe an apocalyptic scenario such as the one in your story is likely? Why or why not?
I think it is very likely. An enduring idea of Newtonian physics is that things proceed from order to disorder. Everything breaks down. The ruins of failed civilizations litter the planet. Ours is bigger and more technologically dependent, so it’s likely to fall harder than most and leave a bigger mess.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
All of my characters are an amalgamation of people I’ve known.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
Danny Riley, the protagonist of my second novel—still in process—is my favorite character. He is a classical outsider: a Laguna Pueblo who grew up on the Navajo Reservation and moves to Oklahoma in search of his missing family. Danny is capable of overcoming every obstacle that confronts him. I used him at various stages of his life in “Try-to-kill-you-days," in Cactus Country I anthology, and in Boy Witch, a story that won the grand prize in the 80th annual Writers’ Digest competition.
What’s your connection to the South?
I have several connections. My mother’s father was a coal miner from Kentucky. He moved his family to Southern Illinois in the early 1900’s.
Williamson County, where I was born, had such strong southern sympathies during the civil war that it succeeded from the Union. The succession only lasted until General John A. Logan and the Union Army convinced them the idea was never going to fly.
I live in Oklahoma, which is sort of a southern state, and my first novel, Owl Dreams, is being published by Pen-L Publishing out of Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Do you have a day job in addition to being a writer? If so, what do you do during the day?
I am now retired. I was a faculty member at the OU College of Dentistry and also maintained a private practice in the specialty of Endodontics.
What is your favorite writing tip or quote?
Write every day.
What else have you published?
My first novel, Owl Dreams, will be released by Pen-L Publishing in mid November.
“In an Instant” is my thirtieth published short story. Other stories from the linked post apocalyptic series have been published or accepted for publication in: Pravic, Kansas City Voices, Open Road Review, Constellations, Mystic Signals, Lightning Cake, Clerics Charlatans and Cultists, andRuined Cities Anthology.
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other stories or books in the works?
I am currently working on two novels. Trial Separation is an 80,000 word magical realism piece that re-introduces Danny Riley, the hero of some previous short stories.
Popsicle Sticks is also magical realism. It is a 50,000 word novel which draws on Native American witchcraft.
Where can we find you online? Blog: http://johnbiggsoklahomawriter.comThis site is currently under construction. It will contain both a website and a blog.Website: http://www.johnbiggswriter.com/index.html This site is present but inactive. It will be replaced by the blog site listed above.Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JohnbiggsoklahomawriterPintrest: http://pinterest.com/johnbiggs73162/boards/
Excerpt
In an Instant The clock on our kitchen wall stopped months ago along with everything else that works on electricity, but my mother checks it anyway.“Still five o’clock,” she says. “In India, mothers don’t measure time with machines.” “All the really important things happen in an instant.” She kisses me on the cheek, brushes the spot with her fingertips and tells me, “You’re a man now, Raj.” Just like that. “Things change when the world falls apart.” Her Bengali accent turns everything she says into Eastern wisdom. “Now looting and shopping are exactly the same thing.”“You see, Raj? Whether you’re in India or Oklahoma City.”“Well . . .” I’d have more to say if my accent came from the other side of the world. She puts her hands on my shoulders so I’ll have to pay attention; so I’ll know Bengali-Okie-men have to listen to their mothers. “Hunger makes all the difference, especially if someone’s already broken into the grocery store.” She hands me a shopping bag made of recycled plastic. “Think of it as an adventure.”My first assignment as a man is stealing dinner from the Buy for Less.
The rioters made a mess of things. Broken glass, pools of dried blood, piles of crumpled clothing that might have bones inside. I keep my eyes on the back of the store and my mind on canned goods.Chef Boyardee, Vienna Sausages, Starkist Tuna.I take careful baby steps through the deepest darkest part of Buy for Less, back where the seafood and meat have turned into a maggot factory. No wind inside the stores to move the odors around. They settle in layers that burn my eyes and turn my stomach but I’m still hungry enough to eat canned tomatoes and beets and wash them down with grapefruit juice. The looters left plenty of those things when they ran through the store days ago and cleaned out all good stuff: Wolf Brand Chili, Beer, Diet Coke.I’m opening a can of sour croute with a one of the twenty blades on my Swiss Army knife when bright lights shine on me from two directions.A voice behind one of the lights says, “Show us your hands, Jose.” So I drop the knife and the sour croute and push my fingers toward the ceiling. Pigeons roosting in the girders shift positions, not sure if I’m reaching for them. They coo to each other—making plans.The voice calls me a “Goddamned Mexican.” I hear a dollop of saliva splatter on the floor. I hear the hammer of a pistol click into the danger zone.“I’m not Mexican,” I say before I can stop myself. I point to the American Flag pin my mother made me wear to prove I’m patriotic. I draw a finger under the Kiss me! I’m an Okie! legend on my T-shirt. “My name’s Rajneesh Patel,” I tell the pair of sealed beam lights. “I’m Bengali, not Hispanic.” The word Hispanic comes out like an obscenity—with accents on hiss and panic. “My friends call me Raj.”
To get you excited about the anthology, I am interviewing the other authors and making available an excerpt of their stories. I plan to publish one interview every Friday until I've interviewed everyone in the collection. First up is John Biggs, author of the story, "In an Instant." If you like what you read, please comment and check out the rest of the anthology.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Tell us a little about yourself?
I’m one of those people who wanders aimlessly until he finally winds up exactly where he was supposed be.
I fell in love with a hometown girl who lived down the block from me, but not till she went away to college.
I was born in Southern Illinois, but found a home in Oklahoma (by way of Maine).
I’m a dentist by training, but gradually shifted to writing. I did that in the slowest way possible, by editing the Oklahoma Dental Journal and writing research articles until boring facts and stilted syntax no longer satisfied me. Then I switched to fiction.
What made you want to become a writer?
I couldn’t stop myself. I tried my hand at writing fiction about ten years ago and was immediately hooked. There are no twelve step programs around, so I’ve stuck with it.
Why Urban Fantasy? What about this genre appeals to you?
I’ve never written a story with a market in mind. I wrote a series of linked short stories that evaluate the fall of civilization from an Oklahoma point of view. I know that sounds a little odd, but Oklahoma is a special case. Native American culture is alive and well here. There are cowboys everywhere you look. Religion plays a major role in Oklahoma society. We have the most fanatic sports enthusiasts in the world.
I’ve managed to place nine of these post apocalyptic Oklahoma stories. Some in literary magazines, some in horror venues, and some in fantasy publications. I found KY Stories in Duotrope and hoped “In an Instant” would be a match.
Could you tell us a bit about your story?
After society collapses, looting and shopping are the same thing. Raj, my protagonist, is trying to scrounge groceries from an abandoned Buy For Less, when he is captured by a roving band of men led by The Colonel. The men have no women. Raj looks like a pretty good substitute to most of them until they find a five year old girl named Mary. Raj takes charge of Mary. He manages to keep her safe until the band of men find a cache of ecstasy. Now he must decide whether to give her up and save himself or risk his life and try to save them both. As the title suggests, he has to make this decision “In an Instant."
What gave you the inspiration for your story?
Raj, my protagonist, is East Indian. I came in contact with a number of people from that part of the world and found their culture compelling. I wondered how these people might react to a complete absence of order.
Do you believe an apocalyptic scenario such as the one in your story is likely? Why or why not?
I think it is very likely. An enduring idea of Newtonian physics is that things proceed from order to disorder. Everything breaks down. The ruins of failed civilizations litter the planet. Ours is bigger and more technologically dependent, so it’s likely to fall harder than most and leave a bigger mess.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
All of my characters are an amalgamation of people I’ve known.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
Danny Riley, the protagonist of my second novel—still in process—is my favorite character. He is a classical outsider: a Laguna Pueblo who grew up on the Navajo Reservation and moves to Oklahoma in search of his missing family. Danny is capable of overcoming every obstacle that confronts him. I used him at various stages of his life in “Try-to-kill-you-days," in Cactus Country I anthology, and in Boy Witch, a story that won the grand prize in the 80th annual Writers’ Digest competition.
What’s your connection to the South?
I have several connections. My mother’s father was a coal miner from Kentucky. He moved his family to Southern Illinois in the early 1900’s.
Williamson County, where I was born, had such strong southern sympathies during the civil war that it succeeded from the Union. The succession only lasted until General John A. Logan and the Union Army convinced them the idea was never going to fly.
I live in Oklahoma, which is sort of a southern state, and my first novel, Owl Dreams, is being published by Pen-L Publishing out of Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Do you have a day job in addition to being a writer? If so, what do you do during the day?
I am now retired. I was a faculty member at the OU College of Dentistry and also maintained a private practice in the specialty of Endodontics.
What is your favorite writing tip or quote?
Write every day.
What else have you published?
My first novel, Owl Dreams, will be released by Pen-L Publishing in mid November.
“In an Instant” is my thirtieth published short story. Other stories from the linked post apocalyptic series have been published or accepted for publication in: Pravic, Kansas City Voices, Open Road Review, Constellations, Mystic Signals, Lightning Cake, Clerics Charlatans and Cultists, andRuined Cities Anthology.
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other stories or books in the works?
I am currently working on two novels. Trial Separation is an 80,000 word magical realism piece that re-introduces Danny Riley, the hero of some previous short stories.
Popsicle Sticks is also magical realism. It is a 50,000 word novel which draws on Native American witchcraft.
Where can we find you online? Blog: http://johnbiggsoklahomawriter.comThis site is currently under construction. It will contain both a website and a blog.Website: http://www.johnbiggswriter.com/index.html This site is present but inactive. It will be replaced by the blog site listed above.Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JohnbiggsoklahomawriterPintrest: http://pinterest.com/johnbiggs73162/boards/
Excerpt
In an Instant The clock on our kitchen wall stopped months ago along with everything else that works on electricity, but my mother checks it anyway.“Still five o’clock,” she says. “In India, mothers don’t measure time with machines.” “All the really important things happen in an instant.” She kisses me on the cheek, brushes the spot with her fingertips and tells me, “You’re a man now, Raj.” Just like that. “Things change when the world falls apart.” Her Bengali accent turns everything she says into Eastern wisdom. “Now looting and shopping are exactly the same thing.”“You see, Raj? Whether you’re in India or Oklahoma City.”“Well . . .” I’d have more to say if my accent came from the other side of the world. She puts her hands on my shoulders so I’ll have to pay attention; so I’ll know Bengali-Okie-men have to listen to their mothers. “Hunger makes all the difference, especially if someone’s already broken into the grocery store.” She hands me a shopping bag made of recycled plastic. “Think of it as an adventure.”My first assignment as a man is stealing dinner from the Buy for Less.
The rioters made a mess of things. Broken glass, pools of dried blood, piles of crumpled clothing that might have bones inside. I keep my eyes on the back of the store and my mind on canned goods.Chef Boyardee, Vienna Sausages, Starkist Tuna.I take careful baby steps through the deepest darkest part of Buy for Less, back where the seafood and meat have turned into a maggot factory. No wind inside the stores to move the odors around. They settle in layers that burn my eyes and turn my stomach but I’m still hungry enough to eat canned tomatoes and beets and wash them down with grapefruit juice. The looters left plenty of those things when they ran through the store days ago and cleaned out all good stuff: Wolf Brand Chili, Beer, Diet Coke.I’m opening a can of sour croute with a one of the twenty blades on my Swiss Army knife when bright lights shine on me from two directions.A voice behind one of the lights says, “Show us your hands, Jose.” So I drop the knife and the sour croute and push my fingers toward the ceiling. Pigeons roosting in the girders shift positions, not sure if I’m reaching for them. They coo to each other—making plans.The voice calls me a “Goddamned Mexican.” I hear a dollop of saliva splatter on the floor. I hear the hammer of a pistol click into the danger zone.“I’m not Mexican,” I say before I can stop myself. I point to the American Flag pin my mother made me wear to prove I’m patriotic. I draw a finger under the Kiss me! I’m an Okie! legend on my T-shirt. “My name’s Rajneesh Patel,” I tell the pair of sealed beam lights. “I’m Bengali, not Hispanic.” The word Hispanic comes out like an obscenity—with accents on hiss and panic. “My friends call me Raj.”
August 29, 2013
Margaret McMillion and Personal Baggage
I wrote Personal Baggagebecause I enjoy the escape that reading gives me--to sit down with a book and be transported into a more exciting situation than the one in which I live and to read about characters who are very different from the people I know. I wanted to paint pictures with words, to introduce unusual characters and behind-the-scene events that intrigued me, and to pull readers into the exciting world of nursing. I had a wealth of material, gathered over a long period of time, so when I retired and one of my children gave me Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, and my sister introduced me to David Starnes, and he offered to help me, and my husband bought a beautiful computer desk and a Hewlett-Packard machine for me, I ran out of excuses for not trying, at least, to work on a manuscript. As a child, I was taken with Cherry Ames and her adventures in different nursing situations. My ambition had always been to become a nurse and, although marriage and starting a family took me off course, when I needed to make money, I chose to work toward an associate degree in nursing at a nearby community college.I was a registered nurse for thirty years: working as a floor nurse, as an emergency room nurse, in obstetrics, in home health, in critical care, and in Oncology. I found that the same basic skills were required wherever I worked, but I added new skills and new friends each time I changed settings. Book Blurb
Personal Baggage: A Tale of Marriage, Medicine, and Murder (ISBN 1461156440) by Margaret McMillion shares the story of a dedicated nurse who, while employed at a big city hospital, uncovers a dangerous game of abuse and profiteering made possible by a broken health care system.When Penny Pewitt decides to take on a second nursing job at a large hospital, she hopes to secure extra income for her family. Instead, she discovers exploding changes in health care and resulting illegal practices that endanger not only patients, but also anyone threatening to expose the system. Meanwhile, Penny’s relationship with her husband,Johnny, is disintegrating. She blames him for her unhappiness while his time is consumed with the pursuit of other interests. As Penny encounters patients, colleagues, family members, and medical duplicity, she gains the confidence and maturity needed to see things in a new light. In an effort to defuse Penny’s growing obsession with hospital intrigue, Johnny arranges a visit to her great-grandparents’ hometown. As past meets present with shocking results, the trip comes to mean much more than he intends.
“I was inspired to write by my life experiences and my delight at becoming immersed in stories by great authors,” McMillion says. “Set against a background of Medicare fraud, this is an exciting story about one nurse's adventures in her profession.”
ExcerptSUMMERCHAPTER ONESummer sunlight sent a golden glow through the outstretched wings of a hawk floating on currents of air above Dixiana, Mississippi on an afternoon in the year 1991. Without warning, the flier plunged straight at a house cat lying on the roof of a small red car. Springing up from her nap, the long-haired calico hissed and slashed as the powerful predator swept past.From a weed patch in the center of the driveway circle, a woman rushed to rescue her pet. Comforting the animal, she stumbled past a bed of yellow zinnias and sank into a Pawleys Island hammock beneath the protecting arms of a live oak tree, whose leafy canopy danced softly on a honeysuckle breeze. The kitty kneaded Penelope Augusta Nichols Pewitt’s stomach and purred while the hawk circled slowly overhead. two strands converged in the middle forming a Y. Disrupting the shimmering letter, Penny placed her daughter’s cat on the ground as a small mutt with the high bellowing.
“I think you scared it, Callie.”
At the sound of Penny’s alto voice, the fluffy feline looked up. Under usual circumstances, a small droplet of moisture rested at one corner of the animal’s mouth, but happiness accelerated her salivation rate and she had drooled from both corners until the bark of a beagle joined them to announce that their neighbor was waving from her front yard.
Like her father and grandmother before her, the older woman lived in the temple style house in which she was born: Oakden, with tall ceilings and three layers of bricks between the walls of rooms unaltered for generations. If the truth were known, she had preserved her heritage by permitting thousands of strangers to walk through her home and gawk at her family’s possessions.
Misty Vanlandingham shaded her eyes. “I need to ask you something,” she called.Penny climbed out of the hammock, sauntered down her driveway, and crossed Oakwood Street, where heat waves rose from the pavement into air thick with the watermelon fragrance of freshly mown grass.
Misty spoke in a tone Jackie Kennedy might have used in a comment about the Rose Garden, while her glistening face bore witness to the temperature in massive Oakden on one of the stickiest summer days Mississippi had dished out. “A brand-new pair of black lace undies disappeared from my laundry basket and I think your dog might be the culprit.”
Long past the puppy stage, Penny’s dog Zac seized any opportunity to swipe the neighbors’ papers. He dug up flower beds with joyous barking and pilfered trophies from all over town: a cell phone which rang incessantly, several hats from a baseball cap to a bonnet, and innumerable shoes from the porch of their Japanese friends. In fact, until his masculinity was removed, he had distributed his DNA all over town.
Penny attempted to imagine her neighbor in black lace undies. “I’m sorry. I really try to keep him out of your yard.”
Misty acknowledged the apology with a wave of her hand, collected mail from her box, and smiled at Penny. “How are things with you?”
Avoiding a direct reply, Penny shifted her gaze to the mailbox. “Did you see in the paper that the county has sold River Park Hospital to the corporation that built Jacksonville Medical Center?”
“No, but I know many hospitals are struggling because Medicare and insurance companies have cut back reimbursements.”
Penny faced her neighbor. “I’m changing jobs: I am going to work full-time at the Jacksonville hospital.” She paused, afraid her friend would disapprove. Jacksonville Medical Center, a new 300-bed hospital, was 75 miles northeast of the town of Dixiana. Penny would begin her new job the next morning.
Misty nodded and Penny continued. “Three twelve-hour night shifts or thirty-six hours a week will qualify me for full-time benefits, and I can still work day shift in Dixiana every other Saturday and Sunday on the Baylor Plan, which pays time and a half for each hour of weekend work.”Misty widened her eyes and smiled. “That hospital in Jacksonville is larger and more progressive than ours. You’re wise to make a change before the situation here grows any worse. It’s a long commute, though. Be careful driving home in the mornings!”More than a profession for Penny Pewitt, RN, nursing was her avocation yet something was missing. Neither nursing, with its multiplicity of demands, nor the animals her children, Tom, Dick, and Harriet, had abandoned to her care filled the emptiness they had left behind.Tears stung Penny’s eyes. Her steps in deciding had been littered with second thoughts, but Misty agreed with her. Recently named Dixiana’s Citizen of the Year, Misty managed the Garden Club and organized pilgrimage house tours for the entire town. God knew Misty understood business!
Her decision validated, Penny looked both ways before stepping into the street. A shiny black car was slowly approaching from the left, allowing her ample time to cross, but after she had taken a few steps, the vehicle accelerated, its motor roaring as it surged forward. Startled, Penny raced for her front yard, jumped the curb, and reached grass only a few steps ahead of the speeding compact, which scraped against the concrete curbing before swerving back into its proper lane.
Unnerved, Penny felt every heartbeat like someone was kicking her in the chest again and again. Had the driver tried to run her down? It was lucky that both she and Zac had escaped injury! She sprinted over her lawn while Zac scampered ahead of her. His short hair was mostly white, but in places the white faded to a brownish tan, making him appear perpetually dirty. She collected her yard gloves and kneeling pad and coaxed him into his pen. Reaching far back into his little house, she discovered several dog biscuits, a chewed-up bone, and a large pair of black-lace panties. Zac met Penny’s glare with silent adoration.Entering the house from the garage, Penny undressed in the laundry room and tossed her muddy yard clothes into the washer. Yesterday’s rain had made the weeding job messy. She envisioned her immaculate, stylishly-dressed mother. As a child and even later, Penny had thought that when she grew up, she would live in heels like her mother, a minister’s wife who wore gloves more often than Michael Jackson.
The jangling phone called her into the kitchen, where she snatched up the receiver and plopped into a chair. She braced her elbows on the table. “Hello?”
“Penny, something bad has happened here!”
The urgent sound of her sister Faye’s voice sent Penny’s blood racing.
“Reva phoned from Westview to tell me Dad knocked her down and yelled at her, that he’d call the police if she didn’t leave, but she said she would stay until I got there, if I came quickly.”
“Oh great!” Penny stood up, barely able to listen to what might come next. Her mother’s mental status had declined at an alarming rate since coronary by-pass surgery two months ago, and her father, a retired Presbyterian minister, was unable to manage his home. Reva Ryder was their most recent housekeeper.
Faye continued, “I drove out there as fast as I could. Reva said she had taken issue with something Dad was doing to Mom, and when she interfered he told her to get out. Then he pushed her and she fell.”
After a pause Penny’s voice quavered, “So...what happened next?”
“Well, I assured Reva that we know she did her best and that she’s a wonderful person and I apologized for Dad’s acting like that.”
“And then Daddy asked her to forgive him?”
“Are you kidding? No, he was very agitated, even after Reva said she’d never be back and left, he still looked really mean. So I have just now come back to my office.”
Penny pictured Faye’s office in the Charleston Chamber of Commerce building, the soft folds of her sister’s skirt swinging as she paced. “Faye, did you leave them alone?”
“Well...Mom was in bed and Dad seemed calm. I’ve got to find another housekeeper! I have a couple of leads but I need somebody who can start tomorrow.”
Penny had assumed that when the need arose she would be the one who would take care of her parents in the same way in which her mother had cared for her grandparents, but it had turned out that she and her husband, Johnny, a high school coach and history teacher, depended on the income from her job at Dixiana’s River Park Hospital where she had worked for nineteen years.
Penny, torn between obligations at work and her parents’ needs, walked barefoot through her kitchen, across the den, and down the hall to the bathroom. She was standing in the shower running hot water on her head when Faye called again. Grabbing a towel, she scurried to the telephone beside her bed while water dripped onto her rug.
“Things are looking up! I asked two ladies from the church to carry Mom and Dad their lunch and check on them tomorrow and the next day, then I can cover the weekend, and I have the phone number for a young widow who wants to work while her kids are in school. Let’s hope she’ll start on Monday.”
Later that afternoon, Penny was slicing Roma tomatoes with a steak knife when Johnny arrived. Her husband crowded their small kitchen like a boulder, exuding an earthy odor of dirt and grass.
His deep voice filled the quiet house. “Sorry I’m late. What have you been up to?”Penny wanted to keep supper conversation away from her new job. “I made tuna salad.”
“Sounds good. Just give me a minute.”
While Johnny shaved, showered, and dressed for an Investment Club meeting, Penny, who was worried about passing Jacksonville Hospital’s qualification tests for RNs, worked on a practice sheet of drug calculations at the kitchen table. For some reason, math was harder for her than it used to be, and it had been a while since she had grappled with problems like these because manufacturers packaged most drugs in individual portions. The hospital pharmacists dispensed the others already measured, and nurses only double checked the doses.When Johnny came to the table his face was crimson; sunburn had erased his freckles. He patted down his damp, sandy-grey hair, pulled out a chair, and sat in front of his plate, pressing a finger against the wireframe nosepiece of his eye glasses. “Thanks for waiting supper. Peter Puckett came by the field to show off his trophy wife, and then I had to finish mowing.”
“Did you finish?” Penny asked, not listening to his reply. Johnny knew Mr. Puckett, the hospital’s administrator, better than she did. Her husband could say something chummy to anybody, and he knew everybody because he volunteered for everything; he volunteered out of sheer habit! He was a serial do-gooder who could chop down all the telephone poles in town and still qualify for citizen of the year.
One could say there was nothing wrong with taking an interest in people, but Johnny, a Dixiana native, not only wanted to know their names and who their relatives were, but also he wanted to help them. He said he must repay the debt he owed his stepfather, a gentle man who had been his “Pop” since Johnny was ten years old. Before they married, Johnny had told Penny about his father’s illness, the agonizing six weeks before leukemia killed him, and the lost little boy he became at the age of seven.
“And hickory dickory dock,” Johnny said.
Penny looked at him.
“You’re not listening. Why did you ask me if you didn’t want to know? You don’t give a flip about what I do.”
Penny felt hollow in her abdomen. What he said was partly true.
Getting up from the table, Johnny stood at the refrigerator with his glass of iced tea. He looked like he was puzzled about something, and the solution was written on the linoleum. “I thought you liked sports when I married you.” He glanced at Penny with an amused smile. “We went to the football games and you came to all my baseball and basketball games. You know?”
“But we were dating then. I loved you, not sports.”
Johnny settled into his chair and stared at her with alligator eyes, his mouth a tight seam. He started to speak, but Penny needed to make her point before she forgot what it was.“You came to my choral performances, and I didn’t know music made your head ache—not until we went to Handel’s Messiah and you threw up in the church!”Not blinking, Johnny said, “I guess I should have figured it out when you didn’t come to our boys’ games...”
Penny interrupted. “But when the boys played you were always there and I was at work or washing or cleaning. I guess you remember that none of our children helped around the house.”She closed her eyes, lowered her head, and pinched her nose. Almost inevitably, she recalled an evening when she had compiled lists of age-appropriate chores and presented one to each child at supper. The children complained and Johnny said the lists were a bad idea. She suffered again the desperation of that rock-bottom moment when he didn’t support her, and she walked out of the house, got into her car, and drove all the way to Louisiana. Finally, she turned around at an EXXON station and returned home.
To a certain extent, Penny had enjoyed her children more when they were young: so cuddly, cute, and so eager to learn. As they grew older and after she became a nurse, their needs multiplied in the dark. Penny had once believed that if she tried hard enough she could be a perfect mother; Dr. Spock’s falling-apart paperback was her Bible. But as time passed, she became a survivor, struggling with one day’s catastrophes only to face new obstacles the next. She remembered working eight-hour night shifts, ten on and four off, and dragging herself out of bed before the children arrived home from school. After supper and baths, when they were tucked in, she sometimes cried as she folded laundry before returning to the hospital to work again.
Johnny restored the subject. “Anyway, we’ve got that field the best it’s ever been. Man, it’s going to be fun to play on! Big Time!”
Penny ran cold fingers through her faded-blond hair, inhaled, gripped the edge of the table, and shifted in her chair. Her bare toe touched his shoe, and she jerked her foot back as though it had been burned. She felt so upset she couldn’t sit while Johnny explained the hot stock tip he planned to present to his club. She marveled at the way he kept his emotions under control and wondered whether he masked them or never even experienced them in the first place. Johnny’s disinterest in her was stunning. She felt a twinge of pressure on her bottom lip and made herself stop biting it. No wonder her lipstick never stayed on.
She doubted that her husband would notice the tears standing in her eyes when he told her goodbye: Johnny was gifted with not noticing. Too busy to need her, he didn’t see her, not really. Her life was unraveling, and she was grasping at the threads; all the good times were over.
Surely, one might agree that when a relationship fell apart there should be a sign to show that something life-changing had happened—not like this: just keeping on keeping on. Even lovemaking, which her mother described as “your privilege to do something for your husband,” had become just another chore before Penny could sleep.
After cleaning up the kitchen, Penny fed Callie and Zac and retired to her room. She needed rest to be at her best the next day, but her thoughts returned to the week during which she had agonized over whether to apply for the job in Jacksonville. She had asked Johnny’s opinion, since he always had one, and the ability to see through a problem to the choices and to calculate the consequences. Fittingly enough, he had pointed out the extra driving time involved and the increased cost of operating her Chevette and then he said, “It’s your call, of course, but do you think it is wise to change jobs when you’re fifty-three years old?”
Penny’s uncertainties swarmed in. She must have been crazy to think she could work in Jacksonville! It took all her energy just to make it from one day to the next, and yet she was vegetating in Dixiana. At the big hospital, she would learn to manage Swan lines and assist with pacemaker insertions and she could take part in new procedures she had only read about. She wanted to work in a larger hospital, and she had already accepted the job!She was ready to move on, done with doing what everyone expected of her. She had attended a small church college and selected the Bible as her major which failed to prepare her for the working world. The realization that she had to work outside their home came upon her like a locomotive: a tiny speck in the distance which became larger and larger until, with a deafening roar when Harriet was only four, Penny had left her crying at day-care and returned to college.
Although starting work with an Associate Degree in nursing bore no resemblance to the experiences of her childhood literary heroine, Cherry Ames, Penny stuck with it because there was no other choice: they had no money for music lessons, no money for braces, no money for clothes. On Johnny’s salary, their family of five had met the requirements for reduced prices on school lunches.
Besides, tomorrow would be a new beginning when people would not know her. She would be smart and careful and kind, and wash her hands before and after every patient contact. Yes! This was her opportunity to become a better nurse.
Determined to make a good first impression, Penny selected her outfit carefully: black slacks, a silky gray blouse, and her new Bass flats. With her clothes laid out and the room tidied, she propped up in bed and scribbled a letter describing Zac’s panty theft to her parents. They enjoyed receiving mail, and Penny made her story entertaining.
She turned off the lamp and lay down, trying to focus on the side effects of commonly-used drugs, but her thoughts were muddled by little black cars zooming back and forth as she drifted toward sleep.
On that August evening, Penny had no idea that she would soon be swept into a realm of greed, intrigue, and, ultimately, murder.
About the Author
Margaret McMillion, a retired nurse, was born in Conyers, Georgia and spent her youth in Charlotte, North Carolina and Natchez, Mississippi. McMillion earned a bachelor’s degree from Rhodes College and an associate’s degree in nursing from Columbia State Community College. In addition to her career, she is a wife, mother, grandmother, and lifelong writer.
Find Margaret online:
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1461156440
Book Preview: http://bookpreview.info/personal-baggage/
August 23, 2013
Demons in the Big Easy, for free
My novella, Demons in the Big Easy, is free today at World Literary Cafe:http://www.worldliterarycafe.com/content/get-your-free-ebooks. If you haven't read it already, get your free copy now. Read the first chapter below.
Demons in the Big Easy
Chapter 1
Shivering in the cold, Cassandra leaned on her staff as she stood over the snow-covered graves of her husband and four of her five children. Her long, white hair was loose under her hood, and she stooped with age. A storm was just over the horizon, and her bones ached. Curse these old bones of mine! The staff was of heavy oak, so she didn’t know if it were more of a help or a hindrance, but she didn’t dare leave home without it. One never knew these days when one might run into a demon. Something had made the veil thinner, making it easier for them to cross into her realm, and it was Cassandra’s job to send them back where they belonged.
Cassandra sighed wearily. She was getting too old for this kind of thing. She should have trained an apprentice to take over years ago, but she’d never been able to find a young person with the necessary talent. Arwain, her oldest, had had it, but he’d died before she’d had him half trained. A demon had come upon the village when Cassandra had been busy playing the role of midwife. At sixteen, Arwain had been eager to prove his worth and had taken on the demon on his own. By the time Cassandra heard the news, it had been too late. Arwain had managed to banish the demon, but only at the cost of his life.
She patted Arwain’s gravestone. It had been nearly forty years, but she still felt the loss. “Why, son? Why didn’t you run to me instead of toward death? The village needs you now. I won’t be with them much longer.” Cassandra half-smiled at the thought. She’d soon see Arwain again as well as her husband and other lost children. If only she had good hands to leave the village in, she would be at peace with the thought of her death.
She looked down at the next two little graves that held the bodies of her two babes—twin girls. She didn’t want to think about how she’d failed to save their lives. The twins had come too early, as is common with twins. If they’d been anyone else’s children, she might have been able to sustain them, but childbirth had weakened her, and they’d passed before she recovered her strength. Her daughter Malva came next. Malva had died giving birth to the twins—Aine and Caronwyn. Cassandra grieved not being able to stop the bleeding that took her life. She’d helped so many other mothers give birth safely, but somehow she’d not been able to save her own child.
Cassandra felt eyes watching her and turned. On the other side of the fence, just off sacred ground, stood a demon. It smiled at her revealing nasty, yellow teeth and a forked tongue, its cat-like eyes glowing with satisfaction. “Good e’vn, powerful one.” The demon was short, but bloated, as if it had just consumed someone’s essence, but it was too small to have gotten past the wards she had guarding the village.
Cassandra’s lips tightened as she wondered who had been caught outside the wards. She hoped it wasn’t one of those who relied upon her for protection. She’d warned them not to be without the village boundaries after sunset. She readied her staff to perform the ritual of banishment, but the demon’s behavior was odd. “Why have you sought me out? You know I’ll simply send you back where you belong.”
The demon laughed. “Today, yes,” it hissed. “But soon there will be enough of us to overwhelm your wards and devour your village.”
Impossible. The veil might be thinner, but not thin enough for demons to cross in multitude. It would take far too much energy. “Your idle threats don’t scare me.” Cassandra took her staff and began to draw a pentangle in the snow, the first step of the banishment ritual.
The demon smiled wider as the pentangle took shape; it should have cowered in fear. “I will feast on you yet, powerful one, and the meal will be delectable.” It licked its thin lips with its forked tongue and made no effort to thwart the banishment. Any effort it made would have been futile, but still, she usually had to do the ritual while fighting them off, a lapse of concentration on her part would usually be fatal. This demon just watched as if rather amused by the spectacle.
Cassandra finished drawing the pentangle and stood in the center. She planted her staff and began to chant in the old tongue. Directing her will and her energy into the staff, she pointed it toward the demon. The demon began to fade as she pushed it back beyond the veil. Usually, at this point, the demon would scream and curse her name. This one just laughed again and spoke a single word, “Soon.”
When it was gone, Cassandra leaned against the staff; the banishment had not been difficult, but the behavior of the demon disconcerted her. Surely the demon’s threats were empty. Still, something was going wrong with the world, and she was getting too old to handle it.
She tottered to the graveyard gate. As she opened it, a young woman came racing around the corner. “Grandmother! Grandmother!”
Alarmed, Cassandra looked around for any sign of another demon. “Caronwyn, what are you doing here? The sun set half an hour ago. This is outside the wards, and demons are about. I just finished banishing one.”“Grandmother, it’s Aine!” Tears streamed down Caronwyn’s cheeks.
Thinking of the demon’s bloated belly, Cassandra grabbed Caronwyn’s shoulder. “No, it isn’t true. The demon didn’t get her.”
Caronwyn shook her head. “No, Grandmother, she’s fallen through!”
“Fallen through what?” Cassandra pictured a hole in the ice over the river and wondered why her granddaughter would come to her instead of someone who could help. Running water negated magic, and she’d be useless in such a situation. Aine and Caronwyn were all she had left, and she couldn’t bear to lose either of them.
“A gateway, a random gateway!” Caronwyn wrung her hands. “Grandmother, we have to go after her! We have to bring her back!”
Random gateways between Domhan and Earth did occur, but they weren’t common, and they were so obvious they could be easily avoided. “Surely you’re mistaken.”
“No, Grandmother, I saw it with my own eyes. I was out gathering holly for the Solstice celebration when Aine came running up the hill, followed by Henrik. They were arguing as usual. He was pleading with her to listen to reason, and she was cursing him and his ancestors.”
Cassandra hoped the cursing would take. Henrik was no where near good enough for her granddaughter.“Aine stopped at the edge of the cliff and told him if he came any closer she’d jump. You know how dramatic she always is. I came out and told her to step away from the edge. She said she’d do no such thing until he apologized. He said, ‘Alright, I’m sorry.’ But Aine didn’t think that was good enough. She told him that he really needed to mean it, and she stamped her foot. That’s when the edge of the cliff gave way.”
Caronwyn let out a wail. “She flailed with her arms, but she still went over. Both Henrik and I screamed her name and ran to the edge of the cliff. That’s when we saw the black light. She fell straight into it. The air crackled with lightening. Then the black light disappeared, and she was gone. We searched all around the base of the cliff, and we couldn’t find her body. She’s gone through. She’s on the other side. You have to bring her back.”
Cassandra sank down on a nearby stone. Random gateways were unstable. Aine could have arrived in mid-air and fallen to her death or materialized inside stone and suffocated, or worse yet, she might not have made it all the way through and be trapped somewhere between Domhan and Earth in that dark, formless void forever.
“We’re wasting time. We have to go after her now. Who knows what will happen to her in that frightful place?”
The same thing that would happen to any young girl without money on the streets of Earth. Earth with its racing technology was no easy place for the laid back inhabitants of the slower moving Domhan. “Take me to where she went through. I need to get a reading on the gateway, so I can build one in proximity to when she went through.” The where wasn’t difficult. Any gate built in the vicinity of their village would place them in the Earth city of New Orleans. But when was harder to pin down. Time moved weirdly between gates, and a cross could take a few minutes or a few years. If there was enough residual energy from the gate, she could likely pin Aine’s location in time down to within a few months, but that was as close as she was likely to get.
“This way.” Caronwyn grabbed Cassandra’s arm and start pulling her after her.Cassandra’s knees and hips protested sharply. “Slow down, child. This body doesn’t move like it used to.”
* * *
Cassandra was winded and hurt in all her joints by the time Caronwyn had dragged her up the steep hill to the spot where Aine had gone over. Cassandra planted her staff and leaned heavily against it. She could still feel the gateway’s residual energy. After she’d rested a moment, she stepped as close to the edge of the cliff as she dared. She focused her energy through the staff and sent a beam down to where the gate had been. The residual energy from the gateway was faint, but still strong enough that Cassandra could read when Aine had gone through. It was a nearly instantaneous gateway. Aine had come out, if she’d come out, at nearly the same moment she’d left. Cassandra only wished she could be that precise in building her own gateway.
As Cassandra and Caronwyn came back down the hill, they were met by Henrik and nearly half the villagers, including Zinna and Yale—Aine’s other set of grandparents. “Is it true?” Zinna asked. “Has our Aine fallen through?”
Cassandra nodded and patted Zinna’s arm. “It certainly appears that way.”
“You will go after her, won’t you?” Yale asked. “You’re the only one within a hundred miles that could.”
“Of course I’ll bring her back.” Dear goddess. Please let me find her. Let me be in time.
“What can we do to help?” Zinna asked.
“Get me Aine’s hair brush—I’ll need some of her hair to perform a tracking spell. And bring me all the gold and silver you have. They have value on Earth.” On Domhan, they were so common that even the poorest of the poor had them in quantity. “I may need the money to track Aine down.”
Caronwyn stepped forward. “You mean, we may need the money. I’m going with you.”
“You?” Cassandra, Zinna, and Henrik said at once. Caronwyn was a timid girl. She’d hardly cross the village street without Aine holding her hand.
Caronwyn crossed her arms. “Aine would do it for me, and you may need help.”
“What help could youpossibly be?” Zinna asked, in what Cassandra thought was a tactless manner.
“You have no magic, granddaughter,” Cassandra said more gently. “It’s best if I do this alone.” Caronwyn would only be someone else she’d have to worry about.
Caronwyn tried to argue, but Cassandra stood firm. Caronwyn glared at her. “I’ll fetch Aine’s brush and gather the village’s gold and silver.”
“Bring it to my house at sunrise. I need light to create a gateway, and it’s too dark tonight.”
Caronwyn and the villagers scattered, and Cassandra hobbled home. She went to her old trunk, opened it, and took out the quilts to reveal the false bottom. She fumbled with the secret catch and opened it. Inside were souvenirs from her previous trip—most importantly, a thousand Earth dollars, money to keep her until she was able to sell whatever gold and silver the villagers donated to the cause. Cassandra had always intended to go back to Earth or go to the capital and do great things. She was really too powerful for such a small place. But after her adventure, she’d fallen in love with the village blacksmith. She’d married and had children. Then she’d used her talents for the good of the community, protecting it from demons and wild beasts, helping the crop to yield bounteous harvests, healing the sick. She didn’t regret her choices; she’d had a good life, if not the exciting one she’d once imagined.
She’d offered the money to Aiden, her youngest, when he went off adventuring, but he’d told her he didn’t intend to pass through. She smiled at the thought of her youngest, most mischievous child. He’d always been getting into one mess or another. But he’d had a good heart. All would have been well with him, but he envied the talent his older brother held. He’d always been after her to teach him more, and she’d tried. Aiden’s magic had hardly been adequate to light a candle. She sighed as she wondered what had become of him. She hadn’t heard a word from him since he went off thirty years ago, but in her heart, she couldn’t believe him dead. If he’d been dead, she surely would have felt it somehow. She’d always believed he would return. She still did. She just didn’t know if she would be still be here when he did. At seventy-five, she was already an old woman.
Cassandra dismissed useless thoughts of Aiden and began gathering the paraphernalia she’d need for the spells to rescue her granddaughter: candles, incense, chalk, and a compass. She was powerful enough that these trappings weren’t strictly necessary, but they helped conserve energy she might otherwise need. Lastly, she lay her wizard staff by the bundle. She hoped it wouldn’t be necessary, but if she had to fight, it could come in handy.
* * *
When Caronwyn arrived early the next morning carrying a sack of silverware, candlesticks, and jewelry that she’d been able to gather from the villagers, Cassandra was dressed in her warmest clothes and had the thousand dollars and the magical paraphernalia in a pack that had been among her souvenirs. The storm that had been threatening the night before was upon them.
Caronwyn collapsed with the sack at Cassandra’s table. She was trembling. Caronwyn and Aine were twins and had never been apart a day in their lives. The separation must be terrible. “I’ll find her,” Cassandra said with an assurance she didn’t feel.
“Let me come with you,” Caronwyn pleaded.
Cassandra shook her head. “We’ve been over this.”
Surprisingly, Caronwyn argued no further. When Cassandra was ready, Caronwyn—carrying the heavy gold and silver—accompanied her into the woods behind her house to the clearing where she’d built her first gate all those many years before. In the clearing were two trees the proper distance apart to anchor a gateway. The wind was blowing too fiercely for Cassandra to have any hope of lighting the candles that would help focus the spell. Fortunately, she had the energy to proceed without them. She drew a pentangle in the snow between the trees with her staff. The five points—one for each element (fire, earth, air, and water) and one for the spirit—anchored her so that she didn’t get caught between, as Aine may have done. Then she began the chant in the old tongue—the language of the goddess herself. She pleaded with the goddess to allow a rift between worlds that she might step over. At first, nothing seemed to happen. Perhaps the storm negated the magic necessary to open the gate; rain would. Snow didn’t usually bother magic. Then, a bolt of lightening ripped through the air, and the air between the trees filled with a blackness so absolute it denied the existence of light.
Caronwyn screamed and grabbed hold of Cassandra’s arm. Cassandra had forgotten just how dark and powerful the gateway was. “It’s alright, child.” She patted Caronwyn’s hand. “Remember I may be gone awhile, but that doesn’t mean I have failed. Give me the gold.”
“No!” Caronwyn said, and before Cassandra could stop her, she stepped into the darkness. Cassandra had no choice but to follow.
Demons in the Big Easy
Chapter 1
Shivering in the cold, Cassandra leaned on her staff as she stood over the snow-covered graves of her husband and four of her five children. Her long, white hair was loose under her hood, and she stooped with age. A storm was just over the horizon, and her bones ached. Curse these old bones of mine! The staff was of heavy oak, so she didn’t know if it were more of a help or a hindrance, but she didn’t dare leave home without it. One never knew these days when one might run into a demon. Something had made the veil thinner, making it easier for them to cross into her realm, and it was Cassandra’s job to send them back where they belonged.
Cassandra sighed wearily. She was getting too old for this kind of thing. She should have trained an apprentice to take over years ago, but she’d never been able to find a young person with the necessary talent. Arwain, her oldest, had had it, but he’d died before she’d had him half trained. A demon had come upon the village when Cassandra had been busy playing the role of midwife. At sixteen, Arwain had been eager to prove his worth and had taken on the demon on his own. By the time Cassandra heard the news, it had been too late. Arwain had managed to banish the demon, but only at the cost of his life.
She patted Arwain’s gravestone. It had been nearly forty years, but she still felt the loss. “Why, son? Why didn’t you run to me instead of toward death? The village needs you now. I won’t be with them much longer.” Cassandra half-smiled at the thought. She’d soon see Arwain again as well as her husband and other lost children. If only she had good hands to leave the village in, she would be at peace with the thought of her death.
She looked down at the next two little graves that held the bodies of her two babes—twin girls. She didn’t want to think about how she’d failed to save their lives. The twins had come too early, as is common with twins. If they’d been anyone else’s children, she might have been able to sustain them, but childbirth had weakened her, and they’d passed before she recovered her strength. Her daughter Malva came next. Malva had died giving birth to the twins—Aine and Caronwyn. Cassandra grieved not being able to stop the bleeding that took her life. She’d helped so many other mothers give birth safely, but somehow she’d not been able to save her own child.
Cassandra felt eyes watching her and turned. On the other side of the fence, just off sacred ground, stood a demon. It smiled at her revealing nasty, yellow teeth and a forked tongue, its cat-like eyes glowing with satisfaction. “Good e’vn, powerful one.” The demon was short, but bloated, as if it had just consumed someone’s essence, but it was too small to have gotten past the wards she had guarding the village.
Cassandra’s lips tightened as she wondered who had been caught outside the wards. She hoped it wasn’t one of those who relied upon her for protection. She’d warned them not to be without the village boundaries after sunset. She readied her staff to perform the ritual of banishment, but the demon’s behavior was odd. “Why have you sought me out? You know I’ll simply send you back where you belong.”
The demon laughed. “Today, yes,” it hissed. “But soon there will be enough of us to overwhelm your wards and devour your village.”
Impossible. The veil might be thinner, but not thin enough for demons to cross in multitude. It would take far too much energy. “Your idle threats don’t scare me.” Cassandra took her staff and began to draw a pentangle in the snow, the first step of the banishment ritual.
The demon smiled wider as the pentangle took shape; it should have cowered in fear. “I will feast on you yet, powerful one, and the meal will be delectable.” It licked its thin lips with its forked tongue and made no effort to thwart the banishment. Any effort it made would have been futile, but still, she usually had to do the ritual while fighting them off, a lapse of concentration on her part would usually be fatal. This demon just watched as if rather amused by the spectacle.
Cassandra finished drawing the pentangle and stood in the center. She planted her staff and began to chant in the old tongue. Directing her will and her energy into the staff, she pointed it toward the demon. The demon began to fade as she pushed it back beyond the veil. Usually, at this point, the demon would scream and curse her name. This one just laughed again and spoke a single word, “Soon.”
When it was gone, Cassandra leaned against the staff; the banishment had not been difficult, but the behavior of the demon disconcerted her. Surely the demon’s threats were empty. Still, something was going wrong with the world, and she was getting too old to handle it.
She tottered to the graveyard gate. As she opened it, a young woman came racing around the corner. “Grandmother! Grandmother!”
Alarmed, Cassandra looked around for any sign of another demon. “Caronwyn, what are you doing here? The sun set half an hour ago. This is outside the wards, and demons are about. I just finished banishing one.”“Grandmother, it’s Aine!” Tears streamed down Caronwyn’s cheeks.
Thinking of the demon’s bloated belly, Cassandra grabbed Caronwyn’s shoulder. “No, it isn’t true. The demon didn’t get her.”
Caronwyn shook her head. “No, Grandmother, she’s fallen through!”
“Fallen through what?” Cassandra pictured a hole in the ice over the river and wondered why her granddaughter would come to her instead of someone who could help. Running water negated magic, and she’d be useless in such a situation. Aine and Caronwyn were all she had left, and she couldn’t bear to lose either of them.
“A gateway, a random gateway!” Caronwyn wrung her hands. “Grandmother, we have to go after her! We have to bring her back!”
Random gateways between Domhan and Earth did occur, but they weren’t common, and they were so obvious they could be easily avoided. “Surely you’re mistaken.”
“No, Grandmother, I saw it with my own eyes. I was out gathering holly for the Solstice celebration when Aine came running up the hill, followed by Henrik. They were arguing as usual. He was pleading with her to listen to reason, and she was cursing him and his ancestors.”
Cassandra hoped the cursing would take. Henrik was no where near good enough for her granddaughter.“Aine stopped at the edge of the cliff and told him if he came any closer she’d jump. You know how dramatic she always is. I came out and told her to step away from the edge. She said she’d do no such thing until he apologized. He said, ‘Alright, I’m sorry.’ But Aine didn’t think that was good enough. She told him that he really needed to mean it, and she stamped her foot. That’s when the edge of the cliff gave way.”
Caronwyn let out a wail. “She flailed with her arms, but she still went over. Both Henrik and I screamed her name and ran to the edge of the cliff. That’s when we saw the black light. She fell straight into it. The air crackled with lightening. Then the black light disappeared, and she was gone. We searched all around the base of the cliff, and we couldn’t find her body. She’s gone through. She’s on the other side. You have to bring her back.”
Cassandra sank down on a nearby stone. Random gateways were unstable. Aine could have arrived in mid-air and fallen to her death or materialized inside stone and suffocated, or worse yet, she might not have made it all the way through and be trapped somewhere between Domhan and Earth in that dark, formless void forever.
“We’re wasting time. We have to go after her now. Who knows what will happen to her in that frightful place?”
The same thing that would happen to any young girl without money on the streets of Earth. Earth with its racing technology was no easy place for the laid back inhabitants of the slower moving Domhan. “Take me to where she went through. I need to get a reading on the gateway, so I can build one in proximity to when she went through.” The where wasn’t difficult. Any gate built in the vicinity of their village would place them in the Earth city of New Orleans. But when was harder to pin down. Time moved weirdly between gates, and a cross could take a few minutes or a few years. If there was enough residual energy from the gate, she could likely pin Aine’s location in time down to within a few months, but that was as close as she was likely to get.
“This way.” Caronwyn grabbed Cassandra’s arm and start pulling her after her.Cassandra’s knees and hips protested sharply. “Slow down, child. This body doesn’t move like it used to.”
* * *
Cassandra was winded and hurt in all her joints by the time Caronwyn had dragged her up the steep hill to the spot where Aine had gone over. Cassandra planted her staff and leaned heavily against it. She could still feel the gateway’s residual energy. After she’d rested a moment, she stepped as close to the edge of the cliff as she dared. She focused her energy through the staff and sent a beam down to where the gate had been. The residual energy from the gateway was faint, but still strong enough that Cassandra could read when Aine had gone through. It was a nearly instantaneous gateway. Aine had come out, if she’d come out, at nearly the same moment she’d left. Cassandra only wished she could be that precise in building her own gateway.
As Cassandra and Caronwyn came back down the hill, they were met by Henrik and nearly half the villagers, including Zinna and Yale—Aine’s other set of grandparents. “Is it true?” Zinna asked. “Has our Aine fallen through?”
Cassandra nodded and patted Zinna’s arm. “It certainly appears that way.”
“You will go after her, won’t you?” Yale asked. “You’re the only one within a hundred miles that could.”
“Of course I’ll bring her back.” Dear goddess. Please let me find her. Let me be in time.
“What can we do to help?” Zinna asked.
“Get me Aine’s hair brush—I’ll need some of her hair to perform a tracking spell. And bring me all the gold and silver you have. They have value on Earth.” On Domhan, they were so common that even the poorest of the poor had them in quantity. “I may need the money to track Aine down.”
Caronwyn stepped forward. “You mean, we may need the money. I’m going with you.”
“You?” Cassandra, Zinna, and Henrik said at once. Caronwyn was a timid girl. She’d hardly cross the village street without Aine holding her hand.
Caronwyn crossed her arms. “Aine would do it for me, and you may need help.”
“What help could youpossibly be?” Zinna asked, in what Cassandra thought was a tactless manner.
“You have no magic, granddaughter,” Cassandra said more gently. “It’s best if I do this alone.” Caronwyn would only be someone else she’d have to worry about.
Caronwyn tried to argue, but Cassandra stood firm. Caronwyn glared at her. “I’ll fetch Aine’s brush and gather the village’s gold and silver.”
“Bring it to my house at sunrise. I need light to create a gateway, and it’s too dark tonight.”
Caronwyn and the villagers scattered, and Cassandra hobbled home. She went to her old trunk, opened it, and took out the quilts to reveal the false bottom. She fumbled with the secret catch and opened it. Inside were souvenirs from her previous trip—most importantly, a thousand Earth dollars, money to keep her until she was able to sell whatever gold and silver the villagers donated to the cause. Cassandra had always intended to go back to Earth or go to the capital and do great things. She was really too powerful for such a small place. But after her adventure, she’d fallen in love with the village blacksmith. She’d married and had children. Then she’d used her talents for the good of the community, protecting it from demons and wild beasts, helping the crop to yield bounteous harvests, healing the sick. She didn’t regret her choices; she’d had a good life, if not the exciting one she’d once imagined.
She’d offered the money to Aiden, her youngest, when he went off adventuring, but he’d told her he didn’t intend to pass through. She smiled at the thought of her youngest, most mischievous child. He’d always been getting into one mess or another. But he’d had a good heart. All would have been well with him, but he envied the talent his older brother held. He’d always been after her to teach him more, and she’d tried. Aiden’s magic had hardly been adequate to light a candle. She sighed as she wondered what had become of him. She hadn’t heard a word from him since he went off thirty years ago, but in her heart, she couldn’t believe him dead. If he’d been dead, she surely would have felt it somehow. She’d always believed he would return. She still did. She just didn’t know if she would be still be here when he did. At seventy-five, she was already an old woman.
Cassandra dismissed useless thoughts of Aiden and began gathering the paraphernalia she’d need for the spells to rescue her granddaughter: candles, incense, chalk, and a compass. She was powerful enough that these trappings weren’t strictly necessary, but they helped conserve energy she might otherwise need. Lastly, she lay her wizard staff by the bundle. She hoped it wouldn’t be necessary, but if she had to fight, it could come in handy.
* * *
When Caronwyn arrived early the next morning carrying a sack of silverware, candlesticks, and jewelry that she’d been able to gather from the villagers, Cassandra was dressed in her warmest clothes and had the thousand dollars and the magical paraphernalia in a pack that had been among her souvenirs. The storm that had been threatening the night before was upon them.
Caronwyn collapsed with the sack at Cassandra’s table. She was trembling. Caronwyn and Aine were twins and had never been apart a day in their lives. The separation must be terrible. “I’ll find her,” Cassandra said with an assurance she didn’t feel.
“Let me come with you,” Caronwyn pleaded.
Cassandra shook her head. “We’ve been over this.”
Surprisingly, Caronwyn argued no further. When Cassandra was ready, Caronwyn—carrying the heavy gold and silver—accompanied her into the woods behind her house to the clearing where she’d built her first gate all those many years before. In the clearing were two trees the proper distance apart to anchor a gateway. The wind was blowing too fiercely for Cassandra to have any hope of lighting the candles that would help focus the spell. Fortunately, she had the energy to proceed without them. She drew a pentangle in the snow between the trees with her staff. The five points—one for each element (fire, earth, air, and water) and one for the spirit—anchored her so that she didn’t get caught between, as Aine may have done. Then she began the chant in the old tongue—the language of the goddess herself. She pleaded with the goddess to allow a rift between worlds that she might step over. At first, nothing seemed to happen. Perhaps the storm negated the magic necessary to open the gate; rain would. Snow didn’t usually bother magic. Then, a bolt of lightening ripped through the air, and the air between the trees filled with a blackness so absolute it denied the existence of light.
Caronwyn screamed and grabbed hold of Cassandra’s arm. Cassandra had forgotten just how dark and powerful the gateway was. “It’s alright, child.” She patted Caronwyn’s hand. “Remember I may be gone awhile, but that doesn’t mean I have failed. Give me the gold.”
“No!” Caronwyn said, and before Cassandra could stop her, she stepped into the darkness. Cassandra had no choice but to follow.
August 22, 2013
Interview with Richard Porter
Today my guest is Richard Porter, author of London Lunatic. Meet him and read an excerpt from his work. If you like what you read, I'd love your comments.
Tell us a little about yourself?
In 2009, the doctors told me I had Prostate Cancer. At that time, I had just received a lead role in a play that I was acting in. The doctor told me to come into his office and sit down, that he wanted to explain some things to me. Mr. Porter the doctor said. You have three choices. You can do nothing, and you will survive three years. Then we will only be able to make you comfortable with some medication. The second thing is to have an operation and clear all the Cancer out of your body. And lastly, you may take radiation treatments for that will also clear the Cancer from your body as well. The medical procedures will leave you with some problems for the rest of your life. These procedures if done early enough will leave you with a better quality of life. We have seen a 90% success rate from having these procedures done. I walked out of that office afraid and angry. Once I arrived at home,called my children, and we discussed what would be the best decision for the family. We all agreed that radiation would be the best way for us to go. That was in November of 2009 as I went through those horrible weeks of radiation. Five days a week without fail.
I studied 300 lines that I had to bring to memory. I was the lead actor in the play called "The Devil Is Loose." Most of those eight weeks were very uncomfortable. I still was able to perform and did a good job. I told none of the production staff about my medical condition.
Now, I write e-books for Amazon Kindle, and happy to say, the year is 2013, and I will continue as long as I can. I hope that when you purchase one of my books. My belief is you will enjoy the stories that I produce. I write like there is no tomorrow, so you will get my very best every time out.
What made you want to become a writer?
I have a love of reading horror books. So I began to try my hand at writing horror.
What genre do your works fall into?
Most of my work is Horror/Mystery/Fantasy
What about this genre appeals to you?
You can dream up the most horrible stories, and you don't have to hold back anything.
Could you tell us a bit about your most recent book and why it is a must-read?
My London Lunatic is only for hard core Horror fans of all ages. The average person would be highly upset if forced to read this tale. But those who love horror will enjoy this story like no other.
What gives you inspiration for your book?
Some of my dreams, people I see in the street. In fact I killed my landlord in a story. She had raised my rent in real life. That is how I got even with her. Just kidding.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
Most of the people in my stories are make believe. I do use some relatives' first names.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
Cynthia Clayton FBI Special Agent.
What is the biggest surprise that you experienced after becoming a writer?
People actually read my books, and some even like my style.
Is there any particular author or book that influenced you either growing up or as an adult?
Alfred Hitchcock no one can craft a story like he did. I love his work.
Do you have a day job in addition to being a writer? If so, what do you do during the day?
Sometimes I work as a Chicago Actor.
What is your favorite writing tip or quote?
"Don't stop to correct just write"
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other books in the works?
I have my London Lunatic II to be released in Dec 2013; also Cynthia Clayton FBI Special Agent stars in two more short stories.
Where can we find you online?
Blog: http://richardporterbooks.blogspot.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/richardp3 Twitter: https://twitter.com/Playerrich33 Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0055ATA10
Excerpt:
Chapter 1Molly:The Second Victim
She was weak. Although she struggled and screamed she couldn't break the grip he had on her arm. For the first time in his life, Jonathan Walker felt like he had power over another human being. It was a heady, exciting experience that he wanted to draw out forever if he could. The thrill of this moment was nearly overwhelming. He had planned this so well, but he didn't really know what it would be like until now.
He pushed her against the wall of the dilapidated, deserted building that was destined to be razed for another renewal zone in London at the beginning of the 20th century. The new electric street lights softly lit up her face. She was young and frightened. Her body was so small that from a distance, she looked like shemight be eight, but upon closer inspection, the curves of her tiny frame convinced him that she might be 16 or 17.
She wore a skirt that ended above her knees – it almost looked like a swimming suit except that she didn't wear tights beneath it. She had on a lot of short petticoats, but they were designed to hold her indecent skirt out rather than help her gain modesty. Her blouse dipped down to show off plenty of cleavage that was partly covered by a mass of dark, tangled hair pulled forward to cascade down her shoulders. However, she was clean and seemed sober. That surprised him.
“Please, Mister,” she whimpered. “I'm doing' no harm to nobody. I'm just out to give a good time to anybody that wants it. Please, Mister, don't kill me?”
Her voice was soft. Not loud and brassy like he expected.
“Shut up.” He ordered
“Yes, Gov'ner. And I've got family. People who'll be looking for me” She added this piece of information hopefully, searching his face to see any sign that it made any difference.
It did. If he had felt any softness toward her at all, it disappeared in a rush of violent rage. He knew how she felt. He remembered all too well being tiny and helpless against a bigger human being. He, too, had sought to find words that might prevent the brutal blows that were about to rain down on him. Just like this whore, his words always seemed to have the opposite effect on the drunken adult who was assailing him. No matter how pathetically, or politely, or pleadingly he delivered his petition for forgiveness, he always managed to earn himself a harder beating than if he had just kept silent.
He tightened his grip on her thin forearm and shoved it above her head against the wall. Her breath was coming hard now, in apparent fear. “Please, Sir. I'm a good girl. As good as I can be. I live with me Mum Please sir, don't kill me for 'er sake.
“Please....” her appeal was abruptly interrupted by a high-pitched scream close at hand. He shoved his body against hers, still pinning her by her upraised arm with his left hand. He pressed his right hand hard against her mouth.
“Don't make a sound or I'll break yer neck,” he whispered urgently. Both of them had been so intent on each other that they had not noticed the carriage that had driven up out of the drizzle and fog and stopped within 100 feet of them. A well-dressed gentleman had alighted and helped out an obviously drunken older woman. As her feet hit the sidewalk, he had slapped her on the bottom, eliciting the scream that Jonathan and his captive had just heard.
“There, Flossy, see if you can stagger home from here. I've got to be going now, or I'm in big trouble.”
“Ya think yer new missus would be jealous to find out about old Flossy.” The woman demanded with her hands on her hips. She'd be thankin' me if she knew that it was I who taught ya ever thing ya knew about love.”
“You taught me nothing worth knowing, you old whore. And I won't have you in my carriage again unless you find your girl and bring her along. I can find better than you, Flossy.”
“Right, Mister Baxter. She thought she'd strike out on 'er own for a while, but I'll bring 'er back.”
“You may not Flossy. You may never find her.”
Flossy, turned on him weaving slightly. “And just what do ya mean by that, Mister Baxter? She'll come back. She always does. What do ya mean, she won't come back.”
“Now don't get excited, Flossy. I just meant you can't keep promising me your daughter when you haven't got her. You might do well to look for a different... uh.... assistant. And not that other old dried up drunk you're always palling with. I don't want her either.”
Flossy looked at him for a while. From the constantly changing look on her face, it was obvious that several emotions were fighting for the upper hand. She finally decided that it was best to use caution on an old customer.
“Well, ta ta till next time.” Flossy turned to stagger down the street. She was singing, “A twopence or a pound. It's all the same to me. I'll do me best for you sir. I'm the best, you'll see.”
She passed within feet of Jonathan and his victim. She was bent forward, singing her ditty and watching her dirty shoes slap on the pavement. Jonathan thought that with her long skirt and high-buttoned blouse, she was dressed more decently than his intended victim, but something about her aroused more disgust and loathing. Her loud voice and drunken amble excited a hatred in him, but he was not about to let go of the girl he had after she had had such a good, up close view of his face.
Molly watched the woman walk by with intense interest as well. It was almost as if she had forgotten the man who was threatening her life. She quivered a little as her eyes tracked the path of the singing drunk. Her lips moved as though she wanted to say something but she didn't try to make a sound.
“That's a good girl.” Jonathan spoke to her quietly as he took his hand from her mouth. “If ya are good, ya should last a long time.”
“Ya won't kill me then, yer Lordship?” the girl raised Jonathan's status to show respect.
“No. I'll take care of ya.” Jonathan sounded almost tender as he reached in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief wrapped in oiled leather. He opened the cover and held the hankie against her nose and mouth. Within seconds her eyes rolled up in her head and the world turned black.
Jonathan held her beside him, trying to make it look like they were walking side by side as he slowly waddled back to his house a two blocks away. When he finally got to his row house he turned and pulled the girl up the two steps to the ground floor entrance. Further down the street sitting on the corner curb, a man with two deep scars on his face watched him. Although it was late May, the weather was still uncomfortably cool and the moisture in the air was too heavy to be described as a mist and now too light to be a drizzle. The man turned up his collar against the night chill but seemed to not notice that he had no hat. Jonathan saw the man looking at him and hoped that he looked like a customer bringing a drunken prostitute home. It was a ordinary scene in this neighborhood, but Jonathan was no ordinary-looking man.
The next morning, Jonathan went down to the basement to see his new guest. A moderate rain had started to fall. A heavy rain might have emptied the clouds and spent itself in a couple of hours; a light rain may have fizzled out from its own disinterest. But this moderate rain settled in and kept up the same pace for a two day. Although it fell steadily, it didn't take enough away from its parent cloud to keep it from blocking the sun.
Jonathan had been a virtual prisoner in the same basement room most of his life up until two days ago when he had killed his mother and taken her place as the sovereign of the apartment. He had had no contact with people that wasn't of the “victim/perpetrator” kind. So it seemed normal to him that his new family member take his place just as he had taken his mother's.
The headache that had pounded since he had beaten his mother to death had cleared and what his last step-father had described as “episodes” had passed. He would definitely keep this new girl as a companion as long as she was nice to him.
“Hello, Honeeee, I'm hoooome,” he called like his last daddy used to do when he came home. He opened the door to his old room and found his girl sitting on the floor staring in horror at his mother's body.
“This is me mum,” he said in a friendly way like anyone would when introducing a family member. “I killed 'er by accident a couple of days ago, and then didn't know what to do with 'er. I'll leave 'er down here as company for you until I can bring ya someone else.
“Please Mister. Please let me go. I'll do anything.”
“Oh no. You'll get to like it here. You'll get to like me. I'll take care of ya. What's yer name.”
“Molly... Me name is Molly. Maybe I can have something to eat?”
“I'll find you something later. I don't eat much meself.”
Indeed Jonathan had the stunted appearance of someone who had grown up without regular meals, but in this section of London, a lot of people looked like that.”
“Well, when you find something, will you share it with me?”
“Oh sure Molly. I'll go upstairs now and leave Mum and you alone.” Jonathan had been eager to make Molly's acquaintance, but when he was face to face with her, he felt just as eager to get away. He hadn't had many conversations with people. Maybe a couple with his last daddy, who had left about a year ago after only three or four months with the family. His last daddy had seemed so nice at first before he started acting crazy. He had told Jonathan's mother that a boy ought to have decent parents one time after he took away the strap she was beating Jonathan with. Jonathan liked that line but he thought it was a weird thing to say. His last daddy said and did a lot of strange things.
The rain lasted all day and then fell into a miserable sprinkle the following night. It picked back up the next day and then stopped at night. It was chilly and drippy though so Jonathan sat in his apartment, walking back and forth from the living room to the kitchen and occasionally going downstairs to fill the furnace with coal.
He didn't go into Molly's room. He had everything under control. He was glad she was there, but he didn't have to go see about her all the time to enjoy her company.
Twice during those rainy days, he made himself a bread-and-butter sandwich from a moldy loaf that he found in a kitchen cabinet. That's what his mother would have done for him. The rest of the time, he ate nothing. He went to see Molly for a short time the second day after he got her, but she greeted him with a list of complaints, so he just shook his head and backed out the door.
He forgot that Molly said she was hungry. He did remember, though, that he had promised her a companion and as soon as the weather cleared he went out to find one.
Tell us a little about yourself? In 2009, the doctors told me I had Prostate Cancer. At that time, I had just received a lead role in a play that I was acting in. The doctor told me to come into his office and sit down, that he wanted to explain some things to me. Mr. Porter the doctor said. You have three choices. You can do nothing, and you will survive three years. Then we will only be able to make you comfortable with some medication. The second thing is to have an operation and clear all the Cancer out of your body. And lastly, you may take radiation treatments for that will also clear the Cancer from your body as well. The medical procedures will leave you with some problems for the rest of your life. These procedures if done early enough will leave you with a better quality of life. We have seen a 90% success rate from having these procedures done. I walked out of that office afraid and angry. Once I arrived at home,called my children, and we discussed what would be the best decision for the family. We all agreed that radiation would be the best way for us to go. That was in November of 2009 as I went through those horrible weeks of radiation. Five days a week without fail.
I studied 300 lines that I had to bring to memory. I was the lead actor in the play called "The Devil Is Loose." Most of those eight weeks were very uncomfortable. I still was able to perform and did a good job. I told none of the production staff about my medical condition.
Now, I write e-books for Amazon Kindle, and happy to say, the year is 2013, and I will continue as long as I can. I hope that when you purchase one of my books. My belief is you will enjoy the stories that I produce. I write like there is no tomorrow, so you will get my very best every time out.
What made you want to become a writer?
I have a love of reading horror books. So I began to try my hand at writing horror.
What genre do your works fall into?
Most of my work is Horror/Mystery/Fantasy
What about this genre appeals to you?
You can dream up the most horrible stories, and you don't have to hold back anything.
Could you tell us a bit about your most recent book and why it is a must-read?
My London Lunatic is only for hard core Horror fans of all ages. The average person would be highly upset if forced to read this tale. But those who love horror will enjoy this story like no other.
What gives you inspiration for your book?
Some of my dreams, people I see in the street. In fact I killed my landlord in a story. She had raised my rent in real life. That is how I got even with her. Just kidding.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
Most of the people in my stories are make believe. I do use some relatives' first names.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
Cynthia Clayton FBI Special Agent.
What is the biggest surprise that you experienced after becoming a writer?
People actually read my books, and some even like my style.
Is there any particular author or book that influenced you either growing up or as an adult?
Alfred Hitchcock no one can craft a story like he did. I love his work.
Do you have a day job in addition to being a writer? If so, what do you do during the day?
Sometimes I work as a Chicago Actor.
What is your favorite writing tip or quote?
"Don't stop to correct just write"
Tell us a little about your plans for the future. Do you have any other books in the works?
I have my London Lunatic II to be released in Dec 2013; also Cynthia Clayton FBI Special Agent stars in two more short stories.
Where can we find you online?
Blog: http://richardporterbooks.blogspot.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/richardp3 Twitter: https://twitter.com/Playerrich33 Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0055ATA10
Excerpt:
Chapter 1Molly:The Second VictimShe was weak. Although she struggled and screamed she couldn't break the grip he had on her arm. For the first time in his life, Jonathan Walker felt like he had power over another human being. It was a heady, exciting experience that he wanted to draw out forever if he could. The thrill of this moment was nearly overwhelming. He had planned this so well, but he didn't really know what it would be like until now.
He pushed her against the wall of the dilapidated, deserted building that was destined to be razed for another renewal zone in London at the beginning of the 20th century. The new electric street lights softly lit up her face. She was young and frightened. Her body was so small that from a distance, she looked like shemight be eight, but upon closer inspection, the curves of her tiny frame convinced him that she might be 16 or 17.
She wore a skirt that ended above her knees – it almost looked like a swimming suit except that she didn't wear tights beneath it. She had on a lot of short petticoats, but they were designed to hold her indecent skirt out rather than help her gain modesty. Her blouse dipped down to show off plenty of cleavage that was partly covered by a mass of dark, tangled hair pulled forward to cascade down her shoulders. However, she was clean and seemed sober. That surprised him.
“Please, Mister,” she whimpered. “I'm doing' no harm to nobody. I'm just out to give a good time to anybody that wants it. Please, Mister, don't kill me?”
Her voice was soft. Not loud and brassy like he expected.
“Shut up.” He ordered
“Yes, Gov'ner. And I've got family. People who'll be looking for me” She added this piece of information hopefully, searching his face to see any sign that it made any difference.
It did. If he had felt any softness toward her at all, it disappeared in a rush of violent rage. He knew how she felt. He remembered all too well being tiny and helpless against a bigger human being. He, too, had sought to find words that might prevent the brutal blows that were about to rain down on him. Just like this whore, his words always seemed to have the opposite effect on the drunken adult who was assailing him. No matter how pathetically, or politely, or pleadingly he delivered his petition for forgiveness, he always managed to earn himself a harder beating than if he had just kept silent.
He tightened his grip on her thin forearm and shoved it above her head against the wall. Her breath was coming hard now, in apparent fear. “Please, Sir. I'm a good girl. As good as I can be. I live with me Mum Please sir, don't kill me for 'er sake.
“Please....” her appeal was abruptly interrupted by a high-pitched scream close at hand. He shoved his body against hers, still pinning her by her upraised arm with his left hand. He pressed his right hand hard against her mouth.
“Don't make a sound or I'll break yer neck,” he whispered urgently. Both of them had been so intent on each other that they had not noticed the carriage that had driven up out of the drizzle and fog and stopped within 100 feet of them. A well-dressed gentleman had alighted and helped out an obviously drunken older woman. As her feet hit the sidewalk, he had slapped her on the bottom, eliciting the scream that Jonathan and his captive had just heard.
“There, Flossy, see if you can stagger home from here. I've got to be going now, or I'm in big trouble.”
“Ya think yer new missus would be jealous to find out about old Flossy.” The woman demanded with her hands on her hips. She'd be thankin' me if she knew that it was I who taught ya ever thing ya knew about love.”
“You taught me nothing worth knowing, you old whore. And I won't have you in my carriage again unless you find your girl and bring her along. I can find better than you, Flossy.”
“Right, Mister Baxter. She thought she'd strike out on 'er own for a while, but I'll bring 'er back.”
“You may not Flossy. You may never find her.”
Flossy, turned on him weaving slightly. “And just what do ya mean by that, Mister Baxter? She'll come back. She always does. What do ya mean, she won't come back.”
“Now don't get excited, Flossy. I just meant you can't keep promising me your daughter when you haven't got her. You might do well to look for a different... uh.... assistant. And not that other old dried up drunk you're always palling with. I don't want her either.”
Flossy looked at him for a while. From the constantly changing look on her face, it was obvious that several emotions were fighting for the upper hand. She finally decided that it was best to use caution on an old customer.
“Well, ta ta till next time.” Flossy turned to stagger down the street. She was singing, “A twopence or a pound. It's all the same to me. I'll do me best for you sir. I'm the best, you'll see.”
She passed within feet of Jonathan and his victim. She was bent forward, singing her ditty and watching her dirty shoes slap on the pavement. Jonathan thought that with her long skirt and high-buttoned blouse, she was dressed more decently than his intended victim, but something about her aroused more disgust and loathing. Her loud voice and drunken amble excited a hatred in him, but he was not about to let go of the girl he had after she had had such a good, up close view of his face.
Molly watched the woman walk by with intense interest as well. It was almost as if she had forgotten the man who was threatening her life. She quivered a little as her eyes tracked the path of the singing drunk. Her lips moved as though she wanted to say something but she didn't try to make a sound.
“That's a good girl.” Jonathan spoke to her quietly as he took his hand from her mouth. “If ya are good, ya should last a long time.”
“Ya won't kill me then, yer Lordship?” the girl raised Jonathan's status to show respect.
“No. I'll take care of ya.” Jonathan sounded almost tender as he reached in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief wrapped in oiled leather. He opened the cover and held the hankie against her nose and mouth. Within seconds her eyes rolled up in her head and the world turned black.
Jonathan held her beside him, trying to make it look like they were walking side by side as he slowly waddled back to his house a two blocks away. When he finally got to his row house he turned and pulled the girl up the two steps to the ground floor entrance. Further down the street sitting on the corner curb, a man with two deep scars on his face watched him. Although it was late May, the weather was still uncomfortably cool and the moisture in the air was too heavy to be described as a mist and now too light to be a drizzle. The man turned up his collar against the night chill but seemed to not notice that he had no hat. Jonathan saw the man looking at him and hoped that he looked like a customer bringing a drunken prostitute home. It was a ordinary scene in this neighborhood, but Jonathan was no ordinary-looking man.
The next morning, Jonathan went down to the basement to see his new guest. A moderate rain had started to fall. A heavy rain might have emptied the clouds and spent itself in a couple of hours; a light rain may have fizzled out from its own disinterest. But this moderate rain settled in and kept up the same pace for a two day. Although it fell steadily, it didn't take enough away from its parent cloud to keep it from blocking the sun.
Jonathan had been a virtual prisoner in the same basement room most of his life up until two days ago when he had killed his mother and taken her place as the sovereign of the apartment. He had had no contact with people that wasn't of the “victim/perpetrator” kind. So it seemed normal to him that his new family member take his place just as he had taken his mother's.
The headache that had pounded since he had beaten his mother to death had cleared and what his last step-father had described as “episodes” had passed. He would definitely keep this new girl as a companion as long as she was nice to him.
“Hello, Honeeee, I'm hoooome,” he called like his last daddy used to do when he came home. He opened the door to his old room and found his girl sitting on the floor staring in horror at his mother's body.
“This is me mum,” he said in a friendly way like anyone would when introducing a family member. “I killed 'er by accident a couple of days ago, and then didn't know what to do with 'er. I'll leave 'er down here as company for you until I can bring ya someone else.
“Please Mister. Please let me go. I'll do anything.”
“Oh no. You'll get to like it here. You'll get to like me. I'll take care of ya. What's yer name.”
“Molly... Me name is Molly. Maybe I can have something to eat?”
“I'll find you something later. I don't eat much meself.”
Indeed Jonathan had the stunted appearance of someone who had grown up without regular meals, but in this section of London, a lot of people looked like that.”
“Well, when you find something, will you share it with me?”
“Oh sure Molly. I'll go upstairs now and leave Mum and you alone.” Jonathan had been eager to make Molly's acquaintance, but when he was face to face with her, he felt just as eager to get away. He hadn't had many conversations with people. Maybe a couple with his last daddy, who had left about a year ago after only three or four months with the family. His last daddy had seemed so nice at first before he started acting crazy. He had told Jonathan's mother that a boy ought to have decent parents one time after he took away the strap she was beating Jonathan with. Jonathan liked that line but he thought it was a weird thing to say. His last daddy said and did a lot of strange things.
The rain lasted all day and then fell into a miserable sprinkle the following night. It picked back up the next day and then stopped at night. It was chilly and drippy though so Jonathan sat in his apartment, walking back and forth from the living room to the kitchen and occasionally going downstairs to fill the furnace with coal.
He didn't go into Molly's room. He had everything under control. He was glad she was there, but he didn't have to go see about her all the time to enjoy her company.
Twice during those rainy days, he made himself a bread-and-butter sandwich from a moldy loaf that he found in a kitchen cabinet. That's what his mother would have done for him. The rest of the time, he ate nothing. He went to see Molly for a short time the second day after he got her, but she greeted him with a list of complaints, so he just shook his head and backed out the door.
He forgot that Molly said she was hungry. He did remember, though, that he had promised her a companion and as soon as the weather cleared he went out to find one.
