S.A. Hunt's Blog, page 5

Malus Domestica 99¢ Halloween sale!

Hey folks! Just wanted to let you know that all October, Malus Domestica is only 99¢! That's right, to celebrate finally landing a literary agent and breaking the Amazon Top 100 Horror Authors list, I'm running a Halloween sale on my horror novel!

"With a brilliant and unpredictable plot, interesting characters and great control of literary adrenaline, Hunt proves why he is an award-winning author."
- Damnetha Jules, HorrorPalace.com

"Dark, it's meaty, it's satisfying in a way I haven't experienced since NOS4A2."
- Christopher Ruz, author of Century of Sand and the Rust series

"Reads like a movie. [...] This was a book I've been looking for for a long time."
- Late Night Tea Blog

"Forget the wicked hags of Oz, if you want your witches to be really scary, put 'em right there in your home town and have them serve cookies to your kids."
- Immerse Or Die

"If you can't remember the last time you were so caught up in a story that you read till 4AM without even noticing, this is The One."
- Stephanie Lehenbauer, Rock & Hill Studio

"Malus Domestica is a near-flawless foray into a frightening world of dark thaumaturgy, mystery, and evil..."
- Matthew Cox, author of Caller 107, Division Zero, Emma & the Banderwigh

Introducing The Written Ainean Language Font

Hello! This is the Ainean language, invented by Chaser Spaeth and turned into a TrueType font! What do you think?

"Hello! This is the Ainean language invented by Chaser Spaeth and turned into a TrueType font! What do you think?" Guess what? I figured out how to embed fonts into my website, and I've used the Blockquote function to introduce Chaser Spaeth's Written Ainean, the written language of the characters from my Outlaw King series! Isn't that fucking amazing? It's designed to look utterly alien, and yet still be readable to a certain extent, and retain a bit of the Arabic influence on the world in the books.

How Being Eaten By a Grue Can Help You Be a Better Writer

Beginning in the late 90s—1994, 1995, somewhere thereabouts—I discovered an internet phenomenon that had been around for roughly a decade: text-based roleplaying games, also known as “online tabletop”, or “interactive fiction”.

From Wikipedia’s “online text-based roleplaying game” artlcle:

“A role-playing game played online using a solely text-based interface. [They] date to 1978, with the creation of MUD1, which began the MUD heritage that culminates in today's MMORPGs.

“Some online-text based role playing games are video games, but some are organized and played entirely by humans through text-based communication. Over the years, games have used Telnet, internet forums, IRC, email and social networking websites as their media. There are varied genres of online text-based roleplaying, including fantasy, drama, horror, anime, science fiction, and media-based fan role-play. Role-playing games based on popular media (for example, the Harry Potter series) are common, and the players involved tend to overlap with the relevant fandoms.”

The games I played were on Telnet, a text-based communication protocol. I started with a non-roleplaying MUD called “Ambush” that was purely hack-and-slash gameplay, and I quickly graduated to roleplay-centric games, in particular one based on the Final Fantasy videogames, called Final Fantasy MUX.

From Wikipedia’s “MUSH” article:

“Traditionally, roleplay consists of a series of "poses". Each character makes a "pose" – that is, writes a description of speech, actions, etc. which the character performs. […] This medium borrows traits from both improvisational stage acting and writing.”

This is a really good explanation of how it works, especially that last sentence. “Improvisational” is the operative word here. They don’t really get into the nitty-gritty of how the “pose” part works, though.

Each roleplay session is a “scene”. You and a handful of other players might agree to get together Friday night and do a “scene” in the game. Imagine a stage play that, instead of the entire story happening in one night, it’s stretched out over multiple nights, each session representing a scene in the play. If you’ve ever played “tabletop,” you probably know what I’m talking about.

So, that Friday night you all assemble in one of the game’s many areas—perhaps a tavern, or a cave, depending on the story—and one person begins the action with the first “pose” of the night, a slightly longer-than-usual entry that sets the scene for everybody else by describing the general activities and environment. If the scene takes place in a tavern, the first player to pose might describe the tavern itself and what the tavern patrons are doing in the background. They may or may not include what their own character is doing as well.

Then the next person poses their own character, describing what they’re doing or saying:

Kethis walks in and bellies up to the bar, ordering a whiskey. “Oy, mate,” he says to the bartender. “You heard anything about that fella I asked you about last night? The red-headed man?”

and so on. Each player in the list of players contributes a pose, round-robin style. It keeps going until the last player in the list has posed and starts over with the first player, ad infinitum, until the scene is finished. Poses can be just a few lines like the example up there, or they can be tremendous 20-line paragraphs. (Be aware, though, that many players dislike wordy players, as their poses take forever to write.)

The characters will get into conversations with each other, sometimes fighting, sometimes an epic plot arc that requires weeks or months of adventure scenes. Some games even allow sexual scenes. It’s great fun. It’s basically you and some friends co-writing a novel together on the spot.

This system works well as a sort of “boot camp” for writers, and I credit it for beating discipline and talent into me. Participating in a roleplaying game teaches you how to improvise and it hones your skill at believable dialogue. It teaches you how to push out the words instead of letting writer’s block sandbag you—everybody else attending the scene is waiting for you to post, and if you don’t post within a certain period of time (usually dictated simply by how long people are willing to wait) you’ll be skipped.

It also forces you to develop characters with legitimate flaws, too. In the world of MU* games there’s a type of character called a “twink”. You might know them as a “Mary Sue”—a character that can’t be beaten, a character adored by the opposite sex, a character that does no wrong. And nobody likes playing with people that have twink characters. Satisfying drama and compelling characterization comes from characters that can be defeated, characters that can feel pain, that can be ashamed of their mistakes and can be redeemed.

The technical aspect of playing Telnet games might make you ill at ease, but if you have the time, they’re worth climbing the learning curve. Some of them even have interfaces built right into their websites now, so that you don’t even have to download a separate program to access them…just go to their website, click through to the game, and it’s right there in your browser! They control a lot like those old Infocom games you played when you were a kid—remember The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? You are likely to be eaten by a grue. It’s a lot like that, only simpler.

If you want to give one of these games a try, the Mud Connector is full of them—games with original settings and characters, as well as games based on licensed properties such as The Wheel of Time, Harry Potter, and A Game of Thrones. Just give the Search link a try!

Dark Tower vs. Outlaw King

THEY MET EACH OTHER in a dark tavern, only revealed by the light of a single candle. At first there was only one man present besides the barkeep, though if you asked around you'd hear he was five people at the very least: Walter O'Dim, the Walkin' Man, the Man in Black, Randall Flagg, the Covenant Man.

He sat at a table in the back, slowly shuffling through a deck of cards, his black velvet Holocaust cloak piled around his shoulders. The candle guttered at his left hand. His hood drooped over his eyes so that only his mouth and chin really shewed. As the cards milled around, sliding and recombining into new ranks, his lips moved endlessly but silently over...what? Incantations? Curses? A story?

On another level of the Tower, he would one day die telling the longest story of his life, but today he was in a different desert, listening to a different platitude.

"Where is he?" A dry growl came from outside, a voice like marbles in a millstone. "Where's the fucker that says he can tell my fortune? Mine? There ain't but one magician on this side of the Aemev, and by the Wolf, that's me." The front door slammed open and a gust of sunlight came in on rails of dust. A silhouette threw shafts of darkness on the board floor, a bald old man with a spotty pate and a heavy brow.

He paused under the lintel and teased his long beard with an addled right hand, a whorl of scar tissue marking the back like an old stigmata. Tattooed across his eyes like a domino mask was a spread-winged cardinal, marking him as a prisoner--and escapee--of the Thirsty Castle.

"Welcome," said the man in black.

The bald man stared, squinted. "Something dark," he said to the barkeep out of the corner of his mouth, and left a couple of coins on the bar. On this side of the ocean, they didn't have his nemesis Normand's face on them. Out here deep in the territories they used Delian nieras and the Bemos' beads, not council talents.

Then he went over to the table. "I heard you been goin' round doin' magic," said the bald, bearded man, settling his rickety old ass on the other side. He leaned forward on his elbows. "There ain't nobody out this way that does magic but me. I'm--"

"I know who you are." The Covenant Man's pale, nimble, long-fingered hands shuffled and shuffled the cards like a spider rolling up a dead fly in silk. "You're Templeton Lucas. The... 'All-Seeing Eye'. They say you can see in the dark and walk on water. You've been going around the territories hemming up the savages and marching them off to the old factories out west where their Glass God resides."

Tem Lucas eyed the darkness. It seemed the tavern was larger than it'd been the last time he was here. Was it a trick of the light, or had the barkeep taken out a wall somewhere? The curtains were thick linen and draped heavily like columns.

"That's right. And who, pray tell, are you?"

"I'm a man that's lived many miles and walked many years. Who I am is not important; not as important as what I do. And I do very well, you kennit?"

"Is that so?" The old gunslinger watched the cards dance slowly around each other. "What do you do, then, stranger?"

"I am a catalyst."

"What the shit is a cat list?"

"I am a trigger, a pivot, a fuse, the missing piece. I serve a function on every level, up every Beam--I make things happen. I boil time." The Covenant Man stopped shuffling and held the deck of cards in both hands as if it were a robin's delicate egg. "Would you like to see your fortune, Templeton?"

"Why not? I ain't got nowhere better to be. Not til tonight, anyway." Lucas tipped his chin. "What you got there, anyway? Is that a tookey deck?"

"It is, it is!" The man in black grinned. "I am very fond of your land's ...'tookey scuttens'. So much like my tarot cards back home in Gilead. Very clever, using them for games of poker. If I'd been a gambling
(ramblin'?)
man back then, I might have done the same. But alas; the dealer ain't the wheeler."

"He's the stealer."

The man in black laughed. "Too true, too true."

"Well, let's get on with it. Let's see this 'magic' of yours."

"A man of alacrity." The man in black grinned, his gums clicking wetly. "So it goes." He thumbed the top card from the deck and placed it face up on the table between them. "Now, I hasten to tell you, this ain't magic," he said, and covered it with one spidery hand. "I never said I did magic. I only claim to know a man's road."

"Is that why they called you the Walkin' Man?"

The man in black's grin twitched even wider. Lucas could see the molars tucked way back in his cheeks. "Could be, could be." He uncovered the card to reveal a scutten of a man in a red cloak and a golden headdress, holding up one hand in a gesture of benediction. "The Hierophant, reversed. This is--"

"Hierophant?" Lucas tugged at his horsetail beard. "Looks like the Ersecad to me. I met him when I was a young man, you know."

"Aye, back when you and your fell woman drowned, hanged, and burned the people of this world at the stake for opposing your puritan Law of the Wolf. But that's neither here nor there. Where I come from, it's called the Hierophant, and in this circumstance it means that you are on a course of action that no one but you understands. And you think they ought to understand it, because it's the Right Thing," and Lucas thought he could even hear the emphasis on the capitalized letters.

"Yeah," said Lucas. "It's the Right Thing. Damn Normand, drivin' all us underground when he went to the throne thirty year ago and shot a hole in my drawin' hand. I'm gonna raise us all back up and push his narrow ass right off that ebony chair. The Weatherhead will be mine."

The barkeep brought Lucas a spit-polished glass of porter that tasted like a horseshoe out of a bucket of piss. He gulped down half of it and the man in black slipped another card from the tookey deck, placing it on the table.

"The Fool, reversed," said the man in black. "You have a new beginning before you right now. This could mean you're going to be given a chance to continue on your current path, or redeem yourself and work against the creatures directing you."

"...Work against?" Lucas stared down at the card, but then something twitched in the corner of his eye. He looked up and saw a dark figure in the corner, half-hidden by one of the linen curtains. Black dead eyes stared out of a porcelain-white mask. Another one of these cloaked phantoms stood on the other side, and also another crouched by the piano.

Lucas shook his head subtly at them. The man in black didn't see this because he was still staring at the Fool card, lost in his own interpreting. He put down another card. "Justice, reversed. You're going to have to deal with the repercussions of someone's actions...someone close to you."

"The boy?"

"Boy?"

"My... adopted son. He's a bit of a wild card. He does what he wants with that mystical sword of his. He hears voices, says they're the Muses. Says they're doin' all this for the betterment of the universe, or some weird shit like that. Says they're gonna give me the world when they're done. I don't know if I believe it, but I ain't never been one to turn down a good time, so I go along with it. Me and Jethro, we do what we can for him, old as we are. You say he's gonna screw up and leave me to deal with it?"

"Could be. Do you trust him?"

"Trust." Lucas took another drink of the piss-puddle beer. "I love him, but I can't tell you I trust him as far as I can throw him."

"Then why do you follow him? Why do you let him govern you?"

"Cause he's all I got. I'm an old man with dust for jizz. He's all I got."

"Fair enough."

The old villain sighed. "How much longer is this going to take, pecker-neck? I got shit to do."

"Am I making you anxious?"

"...No. Not at all."

"Hey, Jude," said the man in black, dimples forming around his shit-eating grin. "Don't be afraid."

"I ain't afraid of fuck-all. Just keep dealing." He put up that garbled hand at the barkeep and pointed at his empty pint glass. "I'll tell you both when to stop."

Finally, the Covenant Man thumbed one card out of the tookey deck and placed it on the table by the other two, making three. "Past, present, and future," he said, and tapped each card in succession with a bony, callused finger. There was a picture on it that looked to Lucas like a whirlwind, a sand-colored funnel coming down out of a dark sky, but then he realized he was looking at the scutten of the Citadel upside down. Many people said it looked like the Thirsty Castle, but what would they know? They'd never been in it like he had.

"The Tower, reversed," said the man in black.

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"It means something you were counting on isn't going to be reliable forever, Templeton. It's going to turn on you. The match in your hand is going to burn you."

Lucas chewed the inside of his cheek. "Somebody's going to betray me?"

The man said nothing, his unceasing grin mottled white like indian corn at the bottom of his hood. He passed one skinny hand over the first two cards and they were gone. He shuffled them back into the deck, leaving the Tower card on the table. "Now for your payment, Templeton Lucas."

"Payment?" Lucas blinked and leaned back. "Who said anything about payment?"

"What, you think you get magic for free, son?" said the man eloquently, carefully, diplomatically. "Perhaps you should have discussed that with me before I went to the trouble of drawing cards for you. Or are you accustomed to getting what you want without paying for it?"

"Why, yes." Lucas stared at him. "Yes, I am."

The white-faced shadows lurking at the back of the tavern came gliding in, their hands extended, the nails and razor-blades pushed into their fingertips glittering. They took hold of the man in black's upper arms, pinning him to his seat. A queasy brine of rotten meat followed them, clouding over the table. The lenses over their eyes, round black portholes set in white atavistic faces, afforded a glance only at darkness inside and tiny pinpricks of lambent orange.

The candle-flame licked and twitched. "Oh, come now," said the man in black. He made no move to resist, as if he expected this to happen. "Surely we can palaver over this in a civilized fashion. Your Wilders are unnecessary. No need to come to blows, yes?"

Lucas almost burst out with, I'll blow YOU! but caught himself in the nick of time. "How do I know you were telling the truth? How do I know you weren't just tryna to take the piss out of me? Are you one of Normand's men? Did he send you to undermine me?"

"Oh, not at all," said the man in black. "I don't work for the White, Mr. Lucas. I'm only here to be an agent of change. You see, I've already taken my fee. Well, a down payment on it, anyway; I'll get the rest here in a couple of months."

"What are you playin' at, you double-talking bastard?" asks Lucas, reaching for the Tower card.

"You'll see." The Covenant Man's tongue slipped over those too-many teeth and licked at his flaky chapped lip. "You will definitely know when it comes." Quick as a snake, he came up with a dagger and plunged it into the Tower card, thunk!, barely missing Lucas's hand. His head darted to the left and he blew the candle out, dropping the tavern into darkness.

"Shit!" growled the old man, snatching his hand away.

The Wilders' luminous eyes orbited nervously over the table. He could hear the shifting of the man's cloak, but it was a sinuous, easy movement, without struggle. Lucas reached into his threadbare jacket and took out a box of matches, fumbling one out and striking it on the ball of his thumb.

A tiny flame winked to life. The man in black was gone, leaving Lucas's monsters standing there in confusion, holding up an empty cloak. They draped it between them like bunting, clawing through the fabric as if they would find him hiding somewhere deep in its folds.

His eyes trickled down from the cloak, like a pebble tumbling down through a deep crevice, and he glimpsed the Tower card he'd reached for. The dagger-point still stood in it. But where it had been a gritty ecru color before, the color of sandalwood, the structure had changed color.

Now, he saw just before the match burned his fingers, the Tower was dark.

Wattpad Paranormal Community Interview

Recently, I was approached by the ambassador of the Paranormal community on Wattpad to do a short interview pertaining to Malus Domestica, which I posted on the site in the hopes of attracting agent attention.

In the few short weeks it's been up, the book has already garnered 17,000 reads. Can you briefly explain what your book is all about?

For the last three years, a young woman has been traveling America filming a YouTube series. It’s not a travelogue, at least not strictly—it’s about her quest to kill every witch in the country. When she was a teenager, a coven of witches turned her mother into Malus domestica—a common apple tree. They’re using the tree to suck the life force out of the town of Blackfield and turn it into apples. And today Robin came home to avenge Mom.


Who is your target audience - and why? 

When I started writing the Outlaw King series, I thought the majority of my fans would be geeky men, especially ones already hooked on The Dark Tower. But to my surprise, most of my initial fans turned out to be young women. So that’s my target audience now, and who I consider my “Constant Reader”, as Stephen King calls his imaginary, singular target audience.

Why? To be honest, I’m not sure. It may have to do with females being the larger portion of the overall book demographic. There are a lot of women reading books. This somewhat affected my choice of protagonist for Malus Domestica, but largely that decision grew organically out of the story itself—the star of the book (and by extension, the series) was always a woman.


What is 'paranormal' about your story? 

There are a great deal of paranormal elements in this book: witches, demons, out-of-body experiences, clairvoyance, magic, voodoo zombies, even ghosts. The main thread, though, or perhaps the two main threads, are witches and magic.

Now, these aren’t the Harry Potter kind of witches, or the bubble-bubble-toil-and-trouble witches, but more like the “liche” - undead sorcerers that have been around for hundreds of years, looking for ways to prolong their lives through supernatural means. They use something called a “nag shi”, also referred to as a “dryad”, to siphon the life-force out of a town or city and convert it into youth-restoring fruit. This only affects their outward appearance, though—inside their unwrinkled skin they are still a walking corpse.

The kind of magic they do is different as well. The witches of Malus Domestica derive raw paranormal energy from a central point, the Mesopotamian goddess of death Ereshkigal. This energy is filtered into many discrete disciplines: clairvoyance, telekinesis, flight, pyromancy, transfiguration, and others.

Some witches are better at certain disciplines than others. For instance, the witch Theresa LaQuices can change herself with the gift of Transfiguration, as she does at the end of the second act when she transforms into a giant hog-monster to attack Robin and her friend Wayne.

It’s handled a little more realistically than your average magic, function-wise. Theresa’s transformation is very visual and painful, and even after she changes, the tattoos on her body remain—even though they’re stretched out. To channel and focus the energy as it emerges from them, the witches often have to perform specific alchemic rituals—for instance, a witch with the gift of Clairvoyance can see via the eyes of cats. In order to use this “gift”, they must take a hallucinogen and experience something catlike during their trance (such as eating cat food) to trigger the mental transferrence.

“Voodoo zombies” is perhaps a simplistic way to describe how the witches make their “familiars”, their crazed minions. Cats are servants of the death-goddess Ereshkigal, her agents here on Earth, and they are completely obedient to witches. And when a witch sacrifices a cat, the witch can infect a nearby human with the cat’s soul, basically turning that person into a cat-brained human, a clawing-hissing-climbing zombie totally under their control.

I’ll let you find out about the ghosts and demons yourself. The demons in particular are too awesome to spoil for you here.


Does it contain other genre elements, if so which ones - and why?

There’s a heavy thread of urban fantasy, and the book is written a lot like a fantasy novel with the same lyricism and the alternating points-of-view, according to some of the reviews. Like I said, magic plays a huge part in the story, especially in the third act when a secret organization of magicians show up in town to help Robin handle the witches. They can use the same gifts the witches have, and they even derive their power from the same origin—one of the magicians can project hallucinations into your mind, and uses it to create horrific monsters based on your worst fears.

But I won’t spoil it for you as to how they obtained this ability.


Tell us about your writing process - how do you get from story idea to a Wattpad published story?

Well, they usually start as a realization out of the blue while I’m doing something else, and evolve into a “what if” question—what if I got sucked into a fantasy world? What if I could turn people into chickens with an old conductor’s baton I bought at a thrift shop? I could be checking the mail, and I’d get a mental picture of tiny little eggs clinging to the outside of boxes and envelopes in the mailman’s truck. What if the mailman is unwittingly infecting the entire neighborhood with spiders that attack you while you’re sleeping and wrap you in silk?

From there, I take the seed idea and apply it to the first range of characters that pop into my head. In the case of the spider eggs, I think of a small suburban family, a man and wife with a couple of boys, maybe a neighbor girl in the mix. You know what? This would make a good Goonies-style kids’ adventure story. Then I sit down with a word processor and start rewinding from the spiders to the best starting point. No, not the day they receive the spiders in the mail—go back a day, or start that morning. Let’s establish the characters first, let the reader get to know them before we get them in trouble. That’s where I start writing.

From there it’s just the usual—write write write, edit edit edit, send off to the beta readers, edit edit edit, publish or query.


Did you encounter any challenges when writing, if so - how did you overcome them? 

Not really. I mean, I’ve been battling depression for a long time, and sometimes I get into a really dark funk and I feel like crap, and I can’t manage to produce good work. It’ll last for a couple of days or a week, and then I crawl out of it and get my head on straight again. But for the most part, it’s been a really cathartic, productive experience.

While I only got better by producing more and more work. I credit a lot of the talent I already had to playing text-based roleplaying games a lot when I was a teenager. These were multiplayer interactive-fiction games where you created a character and then inhabited a world full of characters being played by other people, and acted in scenes with them by collaboratively writing stories. It was a bit like writing in a novel. I probably wrote hundreds of thousands of words alone in those games.


You often hear that 'writing well' is the baseline for success. What does that mean for you? 

I take pride in the quality of my work just out of general craftsmanship and because I feel like I’d be cheating my few readers with bad writing, but writing well means nothing if you’re aiming for “success”. Longevity, yes. Consistency over a long period of time, yes. Initial success, no. I am living proof of that. Many of us are living proof of that.

I guess it depends on your definition of “success”. Writing well and prolificacy are necessary to sustain a long-term literary career—no one is going to keep reading your books if they are ALL bad, or if you only write a couple of books—but quality and innovation are not necessary for initial success. In fact, they’re a bit of a hindrance if you’re querying literary agents in traditional-publishing, and they make you hard to access for readers in the self-publishing industry.

Success demands visibility. Look at the Amazon rank of the first book in my original series, The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree—compare that with its Amazon reviews, Wattpad comments and readcount, and check out how many cheesybad books are ranked higher just because more people know about them. Look at Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian—do you have any idea who Linda B. Buck or Sally Ride are? Linda won a Nobel Prize, and Sally Ride was the first woman in space. But stop any random person on the street and ask them who Kim Kardashian and Sally Ride are, and I bet I can guess what they’ll say.

Getting that big break is all about two things: who you know, and how visible you can get. You have to get in front of people’s eyes, and you need help to get there. That’s how you get success. Keeping success is where the effort and quality comes in.


One final question, this being the Paranormal genre: Have you ever had a paranormal experience?

I think I might have, actually. I saw the silhouette of a horned human head in my bedroom window when I was in middle-school. But my town and the surrounding county are a hotbed of paranormal legends and phenomena. When you get a free moment, Google “Corpsewood” and check out the stuff about the castle that was built up in the mountains and the two men that were murdered up there. It’s fascinating stuff. Someone should write a book about it.

Awesome Outlaw King Fiction

RECENTLY MY GIRLFRIEND AND super-talented artist and writer Jessica Wagar wrote some fiction in the world of Outlaw King, detailing the childhoods of the Ketek characters that rule the islands of Finback Fathoms.

If you haven't read Outlaw King 3: Ten Thousand Devils or you just don't remember the Ketek family, they're the descendants of the former King, Zereld. When Normand Kaliburn (the hero of Ed Brigham's books The Fiddle and the Fire) was a little boy, the kingdom of Ain was ruled by a tyrannical despot named Zereld Ketek, a Tekyrian.

The petite, slender Tekyr are a long-lived race, each one capable--like the tortoises of Earth--of living hundreds of years. They're referred to in scientific circles as "amphibifelids", and laymen call them the racial epithet "catfish", because they exhibit both amphibian and feline qualities--smoothly micro-scaled skin and velvet fur; the capacity to breathe underwater; a lithe, athletic, catlike frame; webbed toes. They have no nose, respirating through a row of seven pores along their collarbone that also serve as oxygenation gills when submerged. They also possess the ability to quickly heal from injuries, and their blood is often stolen illegally to sell on the black market as a miracle cure.

Unlike humans, the Tekyr grow stronger, taller, and more agile with age; when a Tekyrian reaches about three hundred years of age, their capacity for healing becomes almost instantaneous.

Unfortunately, reaching this advanced age has the potential to drive the individual mad.

It was at this point that Captain Jude of the Kingsguard decided to dethrone Zereld. The immortal King had grown too powerful and lived in luxury with his son Prince Naro as the kingdom withered underneath him, both from taxes and attacks from the Wilders in the colonies. Crime was rampant and poverty had evolved into an epidemic.

In a stunning battle in the throne room of the Weatherhead, Jude and his men managed to kill Zereld. But at the moment of the deathblow, Naro escaped with his own infant son Ky through a door in time and space opened with a mysterious magic fiddle. This door led him into the jail cell of Joseph Kaliburn, the father of the boy Normand who would one day succeed Jude as the Outlaw King of Ain.

Joseph paid for his freedom with a map to the treasure of his former employer, the pirate Captain Conrad Zant. Prince Naro fled into the islands to find this treasure and rebuild his life, eventually becoming the lord of the pirate territory of Finback Fathoms, where he would father two other Tekyr children: the sweet, introspective Kojot and the clever rogue Kel.
Ky stood tall and eyed the pink-red, fluffy baby in the bassinet. An ear twitched faintly, and his stoma opened as he exhaled in a rude noise. The child glanced to his father. “It looks,” he commented, “like it needs to go back inside for a while more.”

Prince Naro’s brows arched up. Kids. The things they said. “She is your sister. Her name is Kojot. She will stay in the nursery and you shall move to your own room. You’re a young man now.”

Ky seemed to relax a bit. A young man. His Own Room. He wondered how long it would be until he was ruler of all. He suspected not long. He wasn’t sure how old old was, but figured Father and Mother had to be old (the nursemaid said not to talk about such things).


“I want to be king,” whined Kojot.

“You can’t,” Ky replied, lifting his chin. 

“Why?”

“Because you’re a girl,” Ky sneered, “And I’m going to be King. Besides, you’re weak and sickly and you’ll probably die any day now.”

Kojot snorted. “I’m not gonna die.” 

“Going to. Not gonna,” Ky corrected absently. “We’re Ketek. Not slaves. At least get that right!”

Kojot stuck her tongue out at Ky, stood on tip-toe and bared fangs before quipping that Ky should go engage in adult activities with a dead fish. She had the joy of seeing Ky look stunned at the vulgarity (she’d overheard it the last time they’d watched a match at the fighting pits), before the older Tekyr flew at her.

The nurse found them fighting, biting and kicking and snarling in a most impolite fashion. Kojot did not find it fair at all that she was sent to her room and scolded much more so than Ky was.


Kojot was crying, the child’s neck-stoma whistling, her face deeply purple with her sorrow and anger. The tree lizard she’d ‘saved’ the night before was a bloody pulp of reptile parts, its six legs splayed this way and that.

Ky glanced to the nurse and shrugged. “It had an accident. I told her you can’t keep them inside…”

It was the first of many suspicious deaths of Kojot’s pets.


“We have a brother!” Kojot gushed, pointing to the baby.

Ky maintained an expression of polite indifference. “So it would seem.” 

“He’s adorable,” Kojot said, grinning. 

Ky hoped and prayed to the Wolf that the new baby would die. Kojot could be an annoyance. But she was a female. And sometimes entertaining when upset. The boy? …that was different. He pursed his lips as he eyed the infant, made some polite talk with their Lady Mother, and excused himself with a bow, silently wondering what he had done to be cursed with such a fecund mother. He wondered if this new baby was a punishment, and a replacement for his Glorious Self.


Ky glanced at his sister. “No one will believe you,” he said with a smile. “Now. Go wash up and make yourself presentable. No one wants to see you sobbing like a baby over something stupid.” For good measure he gave the clockwork toy another kick, sending it spinning and crashing into a wall. Gears and springs sproinged and clattered, and the wind-up Pohtir’s legs splayed awkwardly.

A horn broke off. The rider was askew. “You weren’t supposed to play with it anyway," said Ky. "It was too fragile for someone as young as you anyway; so of course you broke it.”

Kojot’s ears fell back. Her mouth fell open. “…But… but… you….”

Ky’s eyes gleamed. “No, dear sister. You. You broke the gift because you couldn’t resist playing with it. Of course it was an accident and you didn’t mean it, but such things cannot go unpunished. You’re a Lady. Act like it.”

The Tekyr girl whistled in a breath. Closed her mouth. Looked away from her brother. 

“Besides. You don’t want to wake the baby. Mother needs her sleep.”

She left the den, silent and pale.


Sometimes she pretended Ky was not, in fact, her brother. This never made it true; their relation could be seen at a glance in their features, how they ate and folded their hands together when deep in contemplation; and in their tempers, and how they both had their mother’s skill of knowing just what to say to make someone they’d deemed an enemy flinch. 

Their Lady Mother did not mince words when riled.


Kojot was dressed fashionably, but with a decided bent towards both comfort and utility: an apron over the imported skirts that were said to be the rage in Ain, so as not to get paint upon them.

One hand was swathed with a bandage. An "accident". She was so clumsy. The words came easy now…though Kel had glanced at her as she told Mother the story, not old enough to understand why she lied, why she didn’t bother to tell the truth. One must carefully pick their battles, and Ky was Father’s Favorite….

But there were nice, new and expensive paints in the jars near her easel.

Ky watched her paint. “You do have a talent,” he admitted quietly, before walking away.
 
Diplomacy, Kojot thought, was the art of keeping Ky from killing Kel. Using words to turn her elder brother’s anger from the youngest. Taking the brunt of it for herself. The lessons and reading came in handy more often than she would like to admit. Learning the names and shipping lanes? That was less practical, and didn’t have the excitement of hearing travelers tell tales of adventure. Gunslingers and Grievers and Wilders, oh MY!

She chewed on the end of a paintbrush, leaving tiny marks along the length of wood. Wondered if there would be a fight in the pits worth watching, or a trader coming in with new books. She glanced skyward. 

And then screamed like a little girl when Kel surprised her with a hug from behind. 

It was dreadfully unfair that he was already taller than her and now old enough it felt awkward calling him ‘little’ brother. No longer a baby. Growing up.

They were all growing up. Sometimes it seemed to take forever, and other times it seemed too fast. “I was painting,” she told Kel, trying to sound irritated for the surprise. 

He smirked. “Sorry, Ko,” he said as he released her. His ears flicked back then fore as he asked, worried, “I didn’t ruin it, did I?”

“No, you didn’t.” She was thankful. The hug had only resulted in her squeal and a dropped brush. 

“Can you paint something more cheerful sometime?” he asked.

“For you?”

Kel nodded.

“Any time.”

Scott Wieczorek's "Witness Through Time"

WHEN GLORY PARKER MOVES to the bucolic locale of Cragg’s Head Cove, Maine, she uncovers a mystery that has remained unsolved for more than fifteen years—the disappearances of four college students with the perpetrator still on the loose.

As the mystery unfolds around her, she becomes aware of her strange new ability to pierce the veil of time. Can Glory solve the mystery before more people disappear?

Scott approached me to do the cover of his paranormal-thriller novel Witness Through Time, and I thought I would show it off here on the blog, along with an excerpt of the book itself. I haven't been able to get to it yet, so I can't give you an objective viewpoint. But it seems to be doing pretty well so far: four ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reviews and a four-star. Scott's a good dude--if you're into murder mysteries and time travel plots, you might give it a look!

About 10 pages in it sucked me in and I had to keep reading until I was done. It was an amazing story, the plot and characters call to you and everything flowed wonderfully."

"Kaila", Amazon.com

I really enjoyed this book. It's a quick read since the author manages to suck you into the very suspenseful plot. Although you may think you've figured out the mystery, the ending provides an unexpected twist.

"Planz", Amazon.com
The glow of her headlights caught a gleam of metal ahead in the distance. A car was pulled over to the roadside. Could it be Jim? Did he decide not to head in to the station, but to wait for her? As she approached, the car came more clearly into view—definitely not Jim’s.

Parked askew, it appeared the driver had pulled over in haste. The car’s headlights remained on, but its taillights sat dark. She couldn’t understand why someone would drive and abandon a car in such a dangerous way at night.

Against all her instincts and better judgment, she pulled off the road, grabbed her cell phone, and shut off her car. As it sputtered to a stop, it became apparent the other driver hadn’t turned his engine off. Had something terrible happened? Its occupants couldn’t be too far away. She reached into her center console and removed a flashlight before stepping out into the chilly night air.

She dialed Jim’s number, hoping he still had his cell phone handy, but groaned at the dead air against her ear. A glance at the screen told her all she needed to know—no bars. How could that even be? She’d just received a text from Jim mere moments ago. She sighed, debating whether to drive a little further up the road to find better reception, or a phone booth. But something tugged at her; people probably needed help, and she couldn’t just leave them here. With a shiver flitting up her spine, she stuffed the phone in her pocket and closed her car door.

As she stepped toward the embankment, the hackles stood on her neck. Something about the whole scene seemed wrong. Except for the low idle of the car, an eerie solitude settled about the place; not even the tree frogs croaked their mating songs in the night.

A scream pierced the stillness. She knew the sound—it didn’t belong to any kind of animal; it belonged to a woman. She pulled her phone from her pocket. She dialed Jim’s number again—still no reception.

Whipping her flashlight around, she pointed it to where the sound came from. Of course, it needed to be down the embankment. She slipped her phone into her pocket again; she would check for reception again later.

With a deep breath, she made her way down the steep roadside to the leaf-littered forest floor below. A quick examination of the slope as she went revealed another fresh path cut through the leaves, and snapped branches. Someone had crashed through here at high speed. Another scream caught her attention—a female voice, and definitely in trouble. Glory broke into a sprint, following the voice. She ran through the woods, branches whipping her face and brush grabbing her ankles.

“Somebody! Help me!”

The girl’s scream sounded loud and clear. Something crashed in the leaves ahead, followed by a groan and sounds of struggle.

“Let me go, you bastard.” The girl’s voice echoed through the woods.

“Shut up!” The angry voice belonged to a male.
As her feet crashed through the leaves, she heard something like a meaty thud.

Glory stopped dead in her tracks, reached for her phone, and dialed 9-1-1. She pressed send—nothing again. Crap! She must still be in a dead spot. The irony struck her. If she didn’t do something soon, then this would certainly be a dead spot for the girl. She needed to help—one way or another. Glory crept up, extinguishing her flashlight. She followed the sounds of struggle pierced by the girl’s sobs and squeals.

“Yeah,” said the male voice, “you go ahead and cry. Ain’t nobody gonna help you.” Glory could hear from the sound of his voice that he was enjoying himself.

The girl wailed, her voice carrying through the barren trees. The sharp clap of an open-handed slap echoed through the dark. Another wail flew into the night.

Glory could see the pair on the ground. The mousy young brunette girl lay on her back with a young man of average build atop her. He wore a backward baseball cap and Glory couldn’t see his face. They wrestled around as he tried to pin her hands at her sides. She wriggled her hand free and tried to punch him, but he grabbed her wrist, trapping it again.

She scanned the ground for anything she could use as a weapon. Ten feet to her right, lay a long, thick branch, about four-feet in length. Her heartbeat thrummed in her ears. Sidling like a crab, she slid her phone in her pocket and picked it up, creeping toward them.

Before she could reach them, though, the male straightened up, bellowing in pain.


Scott Wieczorek is a professional archaeologist working in the American Middle-Atlantic region. He has written numerous short stories and several full-length novels ranging from science fiction to paranormal mystery to horror. In addition, he writes reviews of books by independent authors. Samples of his work are available on his blog at Wieczorek Fiction.

Taking the Plunge: Jacket Copy Doctoring

So I was hanging out in my monthly writers' Skype group the other day and got into another session of shortening and untwisting someone's jacket copy for a query they were about to send out to some agents.

What's "jacket copy", you may ask? The BookBaby blog calls it "that briefest of descriptions which must, at quick glance, convey to a potential reader all the brilliance and complexity of your book". Sometimes called a "blurb" (which seems to have evolved into a catch-all word for half a dozen book-related things), jacket copy is the teaser text either on the back of a paperback's cover, or printed on the inside leaf of the removable book jacket. It summarizes the central characters and the main conflict of the story in a couple of brief paragraphs.

Anyway, apparently I'm pretty good at it! Chris Ruz suggested that I should do it officially, for a small fee (most authors that do this, do it for upwards of sixty, seventy bucks), so I decided to take him up on that and offer it as a service.
Getting ready to self-publish your novel and need some help writing the teaser copy for the back cover or the Amazon listing?

Maybe you're pursuing traditional publication and need help writing the jacket copy for the query. Perhaps your jacket copy is too long, or awkwardly worded.

Well, I'm here to help you untangle it for just twenty bucks. We'll sit down and go over what you've got and see if we can't shrink it down, or clarify those wonky sentences.

Work-in-Progress: The Somnambulists

Chapter 0


EVEN FOR A FIFTEEN-year-old, Wesley Foxhill made a bad king.

To the etiquette-master’s annoyance, he ate with the wrong fork and put his elbows on the table during dinner.

To his chamberlain’s embarrassment, he treated his servants as if they were schoolboy friends. 

To his statesmens’ disappointment, he laughed at the gaily-dressed lords that came to pay him tribute and taunted their anger.

To the disdain of the master-of-arms, he stumbled over the ornate Gnessian carpet in the hall on the way to court and jammed his finger. 

To the grand vizier’s chagrin, he picked his nose when he thought no one was looking. And to the kennel boys’ dismay, he played with the hunting dogs in the royal kennel.

If he’d been fully aware that he’d been the ruler of the land of Essam for the last two hundred and fifty years—that he’d stumbled over the carpet in the main hall ninety thousand, seven hundred and twenty-six times during his reign as monarch—he might have had some practice at the day-to-day affairs of running a kingdom.

But like the other children, the Longhaul Sleep System managing his induced hibernation cycled him through the same day over and over again, like that old movie Groundhog Day, wiping the day’s memory each night. This happened nightly for Wesley, but in real life, thanks to the accelerated properties of REM sleep, this memory-flush occurred eight times a night.

As he dreamed and dreamed, the space vessel Mithrandir carried him and the other several hundred men, women, and children deep into the cosmos toward the distant star system Gliese 581, and humanity's next home.

Wesley woke up the next day with a powerful hunger, and as he slipped out of his royal bed and into his warm slippers, he salivated over the syrupy pancakes and juicy blueberries he’d been served for breakfast the day before. It was also the first time he’d ever had coffee, real bittersweet Berben coffee with cane sugar and cream, made with fresh beans from the Scarbury Isles, and he was looking forward to another helping.

“Good morning,” Wesley told the assistant chamberlain Roane as he came in carrying a tray with a covered dish, a ceramic teapot, a little sugar dish, a tiny carafe of cream, and a small mug.

“Good morning, your Highness,” Roane said with a smile, setting the tray on a table by the balcony.

“Things always look different after a good night’s rest,” said Wesley, as the older man selected a handsome outfit from the assortment of garments in his armoires. Four of them lined the west wall, scrollworked cedar cupboards filled with clothes in all manner of color and fabric.

“That they do, that they do.”

“Yesterday was a bit of a cock-up,” admitted Wesley, “but today I think I’m going to get things started off on the right foot.”

Roane gave him an odd look.

“Yes, well,” said the assistant, “if you don’t mind me saying so, your Highness, I think you handled your ascension as well as anyone could under the circumstances. Your father would be quite proud of you.”

Wesley hesitated. His ascension was two days ago. What was this man talking about? Oh well. It’s been a turbulent week. One can forgive a slip of the mind. “You flatter me, good chamberlain. I only hope that I can live up to his legacy.”

His outfit was to be a tailored slip and leggings of the whitest pearl-silk; a tunic of such a rich blue velvet that unless he turned toward the window a certain way, it was almost black; a belt and boots made of the finest black kid-leather; a light cape that was the same blue on the outside and black on the inside, studded with tiny diamonds so that when he held it wide it seemed he had the night sky at his back.

“A remarkable transformation indeed, sire,” said the assistant. “You make quite the handsome king.”

Wesley blushed. Roane tucked a lock of the King’s lank black hair behind his ear and placed the royal diadem on Wesley’s head, a simple circlet of gold with a pair of branching prongs that resembled the antlers of deer. Three rubies had been set into the brow, the largest in the center.

He had an odd feeling that he’d been here before, seen himself in this outfit before.

“Déjà vu,” he murmured.

“Ah, yes, what?” asked Roane, visibly troubled.

“Oh, nothing.” Wesley rubbed his hands together, unable to contain a stirring of delight. “What’s for breakfast, man? More of the same as yesterday, I hope.”

Roane squinted in confusion. Shaking it off, he went to the table and lifted the cover from the dish.

“Pancakes,” said Wesley.

“And fresh blueberries, and maple syrup, and of course sweetcream. They were your father’s favorite, as you well know.”

“Yes.” There was a queer deadening in Wesley’s hands.

Call us superstitious, perhaps—

“Call us superstitious, perhaps,” said Roane, pinching a couple of sugar-lumps into the mug and pouring coffee into it, “but we thought that it might be most auspicious to begin your reign with the same odd lot of things that he preferred for his morning meal.” The chamberlain’s assistant looked up with a gracious grin.

Wesley licked his teeth in thought. “Yes… yes, I agree.”

He sat down to breakfast.


The rest of the day progressed as usual. By ‘as usual’, it is meant that everything carried with it an unsettling feeling of clairvoyance. Every moment seemed pregnant with meaning and memory. Used was the word that sprang to mind, as if he were living a secondhand life.

Coming back to court from a mid-day meal in his chambers, Wesley tripped over the carpet in the north antechamber hallway again. He was accompanied by William Linau, a dandy baron from one of the coastal territories and manager of one of the kingdom’s chief ports. He’d come too late for the morning supplication, and Wesley had elected to take lunch with him to avoid making the man wait.

The Baron will laugh, he thought, as he stumbled over the lump in the carpet.

Linau giggled.

Wesley gave him a sharp look and the lord’s pale face fell, mouth hidden behind the perfumed handkerchief he always carried around.

“Baron Linau,” said Wesley.

“Y-Yes?”

“Do you know anything of magic?”

“Magic, sire?”

“Yeah.” The King rolled one shoulder, uncomfortable. “Seeing the future, ahh, raising the dead, making somebody fall in love with you. That kind of stuff.”

“Oh good heavens, no,” said Linau. “Why? Do you have your royal eye on some lucky lady?”

Wesley grunted. They pressed on.

Flash Fiction: Lord of the Files

JOHN WAS GIVING HIMSELF a whore’s bath with screen-cleaner and a wad of toilet paper when Stephen Turco from Acquisitions got the drop on him. “Eeeeyah!” the man screamed, swinging a blackjack.

Where the hell did he get a blackjack? John flinched, but the thing ratcheted when it hit him in the arm and left a stinging snakebite pain.

A staple glinted in the torchlight of his makeshift sanctuary.

Thinking fast, he sprayed Steve in the mouth with the screen-cleaner. The man recoiled, gagging and coughing. John picked up his spear—made from one of the legs of an aluminum shelf in the supplies room—and followed him, plunging the point into his back. Crack! The spear-point broke off, leaving the tip of a plastic picnic knife embedded in the flesh.

Steve growled in agony, trying to reach behind his back and pull it out, but the angle was too steep. “Ahh,” he breathed, blood gurgling in his lungs, “you fucker, you stabbed me, I can’t believe you stabbed me.”

Turning the pointless spear around, John clobbered him in the head.

All around him was a labyrinth of shadows, a pressboard fort made of office desks stacked on top of each other, and steel bookshelves zip-tied to them as ramparts. “Unfuckingbelievable,” said John, and he beat the writhing Steve until he quit moving. The tooled metal shaft swung like a metronome. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. “I gave you my last Dorito, and this is how you repay me? Are you kidding me?”

“Gnnngrrrddd,” Steve mumbled through a mouthful of broken teeth and blood.

John found a spork in his supply bag and sat down to dig the staple out of his arm. It was a hellacious trial and he bled all over the place, but he finally got it out and flicked the piece of metal away. “Where did you even find more staples, man?”

“Stacy.”

“Stacy gave you staples? Where did you find Stacy?”

“Four…fourfloor,” Steve said.

“What else did she have? Is there anybody else with her?”

“Mi—Michael.” Steve rolled over onto his back, began to choke, and rolled over again. Blood pooled in his cheek, and a nasty divot down the side of his face told John that his suborbital bone was shattered.

“Michael? Michael Slattery? She’s got that bastard down there with him?”

“Yeff.”

“You know the twelfth floor is mine,” continued John. “What made you think coming up here was a good idea?”

“Needed.”

“Needed what? What did you need?”

“Firff-aid kith.”

“Well, now you need a hell of a lot more than that, don’t you, Steve ol buddy ol pal? Did it ever occur to you that you could have just asked for it?” John turned and stood at the window, gazing out at the desolate vista. The glass had been busted out long ago, and cool wind skirled through the gap, smelling of smoke and nuclear ash.

Wilderness that had been Seattle three months ago was now a shadowy concrete jungle. Campfires twinkled in the distance like red stars. Brady looked sightlessly up at him from a starburst of black far below. The birds had been at him, revealing a gruesome Joker-face of bone and teeth. “You know,” Steve tried to say. “Youff.” He spat out blood. “You know we don’t ask for things anymore, man.”

“I see.” John clasped his hands behind his back and listened to the drums pound below. “So you just take what you want now, is that it? Is that how your new gang of friends works?”

Steve shrugged, his face a bashed ruin. He tried to smile, but it just looked like a thumbprint in a raw hamburger.

“Do you want to be like those guys out there?” asked John.

Steve shook his head and wept.

“I’m sorry,” he gurgled.

“Like I told you this weekend, dumbass, I’m the King of this building,” John said, and he opened a desk drawer.

Inside was a shard of metal he’d scraped to a fine edge, a thin piece of titanium two feet long. It had once been a trophy sitting on a shelf in Brady’s office, but Brady didn’t need it anymore. Their asshole department manager was outside in the plaza, as flat as a pancake. “I want you to take this back to your new friends and tell them not to come back up here unless they want the same thing.”

Steve’s face twisted in surprised confusion—is he about to give me this sword-thing of his?—but then John took Steve’s arm and rested his knee on it, putting all of his weight on the bones in his forearm.

“Aaarrrgh!” bellowed the acquisitions agent.

“You think that hurts?” said John, and he started sawing through Steve’s wrist. “Man, I bet you’re gonna be super gristly, you racquetball-playing fuck.”