Lance Weller's Blog, page 4

July 13, 2012

The Breathable Air: Part 3

They were the same four that Leonardo had seen earlier that morning, only now instead of carrying on their shoulders a door, they had appropriated a little wooden trundle cart which they wheeled before them, stacked with grisly cargo. When he opened the door to their knocking, the becchini pushed past him without speaking and crossed the garden to the enter the house proper. From where he stood, Leonardo could see Vincente’s maid within the darkness of the house motioning the men toward the...

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Published on July 13, 2012 17:57

July 10, 2012

The Breathable Air: Part 2

Lawrence Kelman’s reading voice slowly trailed away to silence and he gently closed the book of poems he had been reading to his wife. He looked at Elsabeth where she lay sleeping—perhaps dreaming, but of what he had no way to know. Setting the thick book down on her night table, he folded his hands across his stomach and watched her. The blankets rose and fell and, with her eyes closed in sleep, he could see the faint traces of the girl’s face, the woman’s that he had once known. He felt his...

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Published on July 10, 2012 20:07

July 8, 2012

Before Wilderness: Some of my earlier work for your review; Part 1

I’ve been very fortunate in that nearly every short story I’ve written has seen publication somewhere or other. Most are available online and linked elsewhere on this blog and, for the sake of completeness, I thought I’d post two early stories that are not. Rather than throw enormous blocks of text at you, I’ve broken each story down into discrete chunks that will be serialized over the next week or two.


“The Breathable Air,” was the first story I ever tried to write and, cosmically enough, it...

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Published on July 08, 2012 13:48

June 27, 2012

Migraines and Astronauts: A Review of The Infinite Tides by Christian Kiefer


Astronauts are larger than life. They represent the best of us and escape the mundane bounds of gravity and atmosphere to explore the vast, dark beyond. They are adventurers traveling out to the very edge of everything that is, everything known and everything mysterious and returning as lauded heroes. But, as is all too easily forgotten, astronauts are also ordinary men and women and, as such, not in any way immune to earthly tragedy. Christian Kiefer knows this and in his remarkable debut no...

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Published on June 27, 2012 17:31

June 16, 2012

A Note on Research

I went into writing Wilderness—which is, at its heart, a novel of the American Civil War—with very little background knowledge on the subject. But there was something there that called to me. Perhaps the inherited and taken-for-granted freedoms and privileges that were granted us by that struggle. Perhaps the common mythologies of the period that all Americans share in. Lincoln and Grant and McClellan and Lee. Stonewall Jackson and the Iron Brigade. Gettysburg. Whatever it was, as soon as I s...

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Published on June 16, 2012 17:38

May 28, 2012

A note on dogs:

Dogs have always been and always will be important to me. They’re the very best things I know and I can’t imagine not having (at least) one around. In way, Wilderness is as much about one man’s relationship with his dog as it is about anything else. I have always had, and always will, have a dog. Preferably several, as is the case now.


So, a roll call:


Molly (the marauder): Part shepherd, part something else and the smartest, truest-hearted beast I’ll probably ever know.


Mongo: Our foundling and...

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Published on May 28, 2012 14:54

Memorial Day

Memorial Day seems a fitting occasion for an inaugural blog post in support of a book about a soldier. My upcoming novel, Wilderness, tells the story of Abel Truman, an aged, ailing confederate veteran of the American Civil War, who undertakes one last journey that, in his heart-of-hearts, he knows he has no hope of completing. The book comes out this fall from BloomsburyUSA and elsewhere on this site you can find out all about it.


I was never a soldier. My health closed that door early and,...

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Published on May 28, 2012 12:40

Advance Praise For Wilderness

Wilderness


Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain meets David Guterson’s East of the Mountains in this sweeping historical novel of a Civil War veteran’s last journey on the Pacific Coast.


Thirty years after the Civil War’s Battle of the Wilderness left him maimed, Abel Truman has found his way to the edge of the continent, the rugged, majestic coast of Washington State, where he lives alone in a driftwood shack with his beloved dog. Wilderness is the story of Abel, now an old and ailing man, and his...

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Published on May 28, 2012 12:29