Matt Maxwell's Blog: Highway 62 on Goodreads, page 8

FULL BLEED: THE HORIZON TURNS INWARD

I'm not even going to look and see when I last did one of these. I'm sure it would be an interesting exercise to try and figure out what has changed since then. I'll try to do it from memory.

I was probably saying that I was looking forward to a release of a book that I had written in October, some eight weeks from now. The title's even there if you scroll down some. So is the publisher's name. I wasn't shy about either. That information is now outdated. Hell, I'm not even sure the title is going to survive (as it was a compromise between me and the then-publisher.) I've thought of a more evocative one anyways. Titles are pretty easy unless they're impossible.

Other stuff has changed. Couple covid cases went through the family, including not geographically immediate but immediate by relation. Which has meant a number of trips across highway 50 (if you know, you know) and there will be many more in the future, I can tell. So I'm just buckling up for that right now. My youngest is leaving home for school, not even in the next state over or the one after that, but rather on the Atlantic coast.

I probably thought I could sell short stories back then as well. Folks, that's not happening. Though I did have one sit at [outlet name redacted] for triple the usual hold time only to get a cut/past rejection. Which is the gig. Just one that I don't feel up to playing any longer. Oh, not giving up writing, even writing short stories. Just the whole submitting thing is for the birds. I know, how am I going to get my name out there if I don't get short stories up in (any) outlets for editors to see and then offer me a coveted publishing slot? Yeah, you got me.

I've got a whole collection of short stories in the same setting (though you could choose to ignore that if you want -- I have a tough time telling what people actually want, so I write to please myself.) Hell, I've got a handful more now and should be developing others. So that's two collections of setting-sharing shorts. You've seen what those numbers look like, right? Whatever, it's whatever. I'm able to do what I can do. It's been educational, and maybe this time the education will stick. But probably not.

I'm debating whether I should include this next part as it's kinda career-suicidal. Maybe I'll think about it some, the education of late, while I talk about other stuff. Maybe I'll type it out and delete it. You'll never know unless you do.

So I was watching a roundtable of science fiction magazine (online and other) editors taking turns reading and discussing slush. You all are clear on what slush is, yeah? When a magazine doesn't ask for a story and they get it anyways. There's a lot of slush out there. Lots of folks think they can write (myself included), so it ends up like, oh, I don't know, an avalanche being funneled down into a very tight blind canyon, all those entries filling up. Seriously. There's more writers than ever, and given the internet, they know how to submit to these magazines and outlets, which probably leads to editors and slush readers being burned out on the regular. So maybe it's best to approach this with some kind of lightness. For the writer, it's their breathless prose. For the editor, it's Tuesday and there's a hundred other stories to look at and know in the first page whether you're going to bother finishing the rest of it or not.

I realize this process is not fair. Not remotely. More like asymmetrical warfare, really. Or a million zombies trying to climb over a hastily-constructed wall. Just a crushing onslaught that will never ever end, until the AIs are trained well enough to serve up the content that people think they want, tailored to any level of political or aesthetic or intellectual engagement. Think of it. Writing can be great again, just take all those writers egos out of it.

So I should be nicer to the editors involved when they read slush on the video airwaves and talk about what works and what doesn't. When the simple matter is a balance of "do I like this?" versus "does this say what I want it to say?" versus "is the voice engaging?" versus "how does this fit in the identity of the line slash outlet?" versus other considerations. We all know what they are. That's a mighty tough balancing act. Particularly when there's no time or energy to give any manner of feedback. Just a cut/paste statement from the library.

Unless of course there is time. Which I suppose happens. That authors get individualized feedback which helps to shape their development. Because the only thing one learns from a yes/no is whether or not this story at this instance in time works for them (but don't bother re-submitting it). Ah well. Better luck next time. What was off? Who knows? You sure don't as the writer or receiver of the note. But of course, to expect any manner of acknowledgement is utter madness. There's just too many of us, to steal from Jude the Obscure. Unless of course the editor goes and says on tape that you'll get feedback if the editor thinks your work is worthy of it.

Which was a hell of a thing to hear with my own two ears. Sure. The world isn't fair and it's lopsided and everything else. But just to come right out and say it? Yeah. It's weird. But probably my fault for even thinking it's weird.

I suppose I could spend a little time here talking about my own relationship with editing and being edited, but it's real brief. All the edits I've gotten have been copy level or clarity level or word choice (yes, I did mean to say "words" not "worlds" in my first unsolicited sale, but I let them make it "worlds" because it's not worth fighting about.) Now, does my work need structural editing? Well I guess that depends on who you ask. Generally I keep things running pretty well plot wise, with some allowed digressions and eddies and letting stuff sometimes develop and never explained or left off for later. (Digression - I'm watching the current Sandman series and really taking umbrage at the meta plot-level fixes that are trying to make it feel like a much more unified, Really Big Story, instead of a loose plot with a series of small stories running through it and parallel to it and sometimes sideways from it. You can do that really well and easily in comics, but people get bent out of shape at this in prose, at least plot-lovers do.)

But I also outline decently robustly so that I don't run into chapters being in the wrong place or introducing characters who don't fit and have to be cut or turn into something else and have to be cut. I hate cutting stuff that's been written. Sure, you can save it, but it feels like wasted time to me. Outlining is your friend. Or at least it's my friend. But I try to leave some room to breathe, so it doesn't feel like every single thing is a perfectly-aligned heat-seeking plot missile to deliver everything like a laser guided payload. Sure, there's stuff that you could cut if you wanted to, but I'll fight you over it. Feral writer. Says so on the sign outside. That tooth-gnawed and rusted sign.

So, sure, I'd love to get edited. Well, not love to, but probably could benefit from it. Just that even when I've written for big places, I only get the surface-level sort of polish edits. And, frankly, ain't nobody that's that good out there, right? Sure, I've been doing this to very little success or effect for a very long time. Built up a skillset. But not like that. But then what editor has time to do a tear-down and rebuild on something they aren't buying? And even then, do they have that time or do they have an issue to get out next week? I don't begrudge this. Nobody has the resources they need. Nobody can pay what they want. Nobody can build up a bench. All they can do is cull those who are Clearly Not Ready and then try to assemble a roster of folks who are. An unenviable position.

Which really isn't helped by reading slush (that honestly I hope was consented to) on a broadcast and then offering advice of really dubious merit ("Your first page must be great.") I suppose that's helpful to someone. Oh, and telling writers to front-load the genre trappings. That one ripped the top of my head off and stirred my brain with some rusty egg whisks, I'll tell you that. Frankly, the last thing [genre] needs is [genre] to be reinforced as its primary aim. It needs good stories. It needs intriguing voices. It needs things to be picked at and questioned as much as reinforced. But this is me acting like I care about [genre] as a construct when I'm pretty on the record about that. I'm not, which is probably why I have difficulty selling my little stories in [genre] outlets. Oh well.

I'm still working on some. Can't be helped.

I will say, though, that maybe the whole letting everyone look behind the curtain (on all sides of the process) is a thing with lots of downstream consequences that are in fact, not detrimental per se, but have all manner of ways to subtly and not-so-subtly change the processes themselves. I'd suggest that writers should be quiet, which is rich, as getting me to shut up is the tough part (but there are things that I can not and will not touch upon in the process, but might be convinced to share with you for the price of a drink at a show -- totally worth it, by the by, life-changing stuff.) But for as much as it harms writers, this spotlight showing up on all other stages of the process is likely worse.

Just watch any of the testimony from the Penguin/Random House and Simon & Schuster merger case. Because the stuff in that should be enough to burn the place down. But this is a whole 'nuther blog entry that I've not written and likely am not going to. Suffice to say that calling it a fiction does a disservice to fiction.

So what else is going on? I'm looking at some travel in the future, including a long-delayed trip abroad with my wife that has been on the books for years but, you know, everything got in the way. Coincidentally, that trip is keeping me from doing any other conventions between now and sometime in October, really. Thought about doing World Fantasy this year, since I was supposed to have a book coming out around the same time, but, well, things change.

I've been poking at some writing on and off, mostly struggling with getting in this mindset again, mostly because all the careful plans that I thought were set were as durable as a cloud of cotton candy tossed into a blast furnace. Took a beating over that. Which is as much my fault as anything. Rejection slash failure dysphoria seems to be a default stance, which is not constructive I realize, but it's my own.

Sitting here with a novel and a book's worth of collected shorts that need homes. And I thought this stuff was locked down. Something something plans and laughter.

FULL BLEED: NOT THE END BUT YOU CAN SEE IT FROM THERE.

Sure, it's been a little while. Maybe even more than that. And sure, I've got real good reasons for not posting here. Mostly because this goes largely unread compared to anything I do on social media. I can see the metrics.

But sometimes things are too long for a tweet.

Anyways, it's been a weird couple of months. I know, me and everyone else, right? Still, living through a lot of changes right now, most of which is personal and I'm not going to discuss them right here and probably won't even if you corner me in a bar at a convention. Speaking of which, it looks like I'll be at the upcoming Bay Con in about six weeks. Maybe even crashing some panels. Will probably have copies of some short story collections and BLACK TRACE to sell on the sly if you're interested.

In the meantime, the fate of MY DROWNING CHORUS is much more set now than it was just a little bit ago. Shooting for an October release from Broken Eye Books. As you likely know, it's the second in the HAZELAND book series. I'd say novels, but it looks like at least two of these are going to be short fiction collected. And to share with you a little secret, I've always approached this project (once I knew it was happening) like it was a comics series. Not a graphic novel series, but comics.

Which leaves open the possibility of doing stories in what amounts to single issues, though it's tougher to slide those into a novel as presented, so there's going to be books of stories that are simply too long to offer in any other outlet. Have you looked at short stories lately? Most outlets tap out at 5k words. Some go as high as 7.5k. A few will look at 10k+. I tend to go from around 8k to 13k. It's just the way things go. Always been like this. And, honestly, most outlets don't pay well enough for me to try and hack down something by half its length for thitry-five bucks and a reader copy. I guess this makes me an elitist or something. Whatever.

So, October will see MY DROWNING CHORUS from Broken Eye. Likely a year after that, QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS will have reverted to me, and I'll be offering it along with a new novella entitled THE STARS ARE MADE OF US and some other material as a self-published volume. Now, this precludes someone in the horror world thinking that they'd want to publish it. I've already asked around. I don't have the rep to make a re-printing worthwile. I'm realistic if not sanguine about it. It's fine. Nobody stopping me from doing it myself. Can't tell you exactly when this will happen, but probably not until at least 2023, perhaps 2024. Shooting for regular releases of HAZELAND books after that. And it might even be possible that there'll be two collections of short stories in a row. Something about setting a broader stage and not having a novel to do it in.

Yes, this is likely commercial suicide. But looking over my career, that's about the only thing I am reliably good for. As in I can't even decide on a genre to work in like a normal regular writer would. Where the hell do I even shelve my books, right? Well, wherever I tell Amazon to, really. So I say 'horror' even though that's... inaccurate. But it's about the least inaccurate label out there.

So there's going to be revisions to QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS. I'll keep them small. I have no intention of going all STAR WARS SPECIAL EDITION, but there are some things that need tweaking now that the book is no longer stand-alone. And honestly, if I hadn't told you that I'd be doing this, I seriously doubt anyone would notice them.

I am, of couse, going to be re-designing the covers. No, I don't get them automagically. The publisher paid for the art and the rights to reproduce it. If you follow me on Twitter, you might've seen some of these.

I'll also start work on a book called VOIDMAW, which is a weird/gothic space opera about mythology and control in a crumbling empire. So maybe it's a complete departure and maybe it's exactly on-brand for me. We'll see. I'm still a little intimidated by it, honestly. I haven't written a novel in almost two years at this point. Maybe I've forgotten how.

Then I'll try to get through the weird summer ahead. Won't be making it to NecronomiCon, unfortunately. Had hoped this would be my first year there, but that's looking increasingly unlikely. Probably still going to the Rose City Comic show in September. Not sure of what other shows. Maybe World Fantasy, but given my last experience there, I'm not positive that's such a great idea. What else? Just trying to play the only game in town, I suppose. Like usual.

FULL BLEED: FOR THE BLOOD ON WHICH WE DINE

Well, that was a week. For those of you tuning in after last week's rampaging parade of fun, I was at a crossroads with the work I've done for the last couple of years, basically the duration of the pandemic. And, honestly, it felt like a coin flip between it getting published and everything collapsing in on itself. I pretty much swore to get to the bottom of things on it, which I did yesterday.

Good news is the last two books I wrote will indeed come out from the publisher to which they're contracted. So they'll be out there. Maybe this year for the first one, though I can see it moving to next year and that wouldn't be the end of the world. The next would follow about a year after that one. So let's take a deep breath and enjoy a moment of relief. It's nice to have things settled.

Of course, now comes the fun times of selling a follow-up book. Or a sequel. Whatever you want to call it. Which you figure shouldn't be too hard, right? People are used to series fiction. Hell, everything is series fiction these days. Okay, an exaggeration, but there's a lot of series fiction out now. Look at most of the original stuff on Netflix. Miniseries. Collections of miniseries strung together to make even bigger narratives. And if you missed the first one, well, you can watch it any old time.

Or if you missed the first book you can pick it up real cheap as an ebook now (or even just mostly cheap - but that's a discussion for another time.) Scarcity is gone (unless you demand the paper book, in which case, you better be dialed in and pre-ordering because folks aren't overprinting; it's too expensive to do that and then to warehouse backstock.) But catching up on books is easy. Really easy.

So imagine my puzzlement when I'm being told by folks who market books and more or less control audience segments saying to me "Yeah, we're not going to promote that because it's a series." Never mind that when I write a book in a series, I deliver a whole book with a beginning, a middle and even an end. Are there going to be more stories after that? Sure. But you don't gotta read them. And, believe it or not, I give you enough information about what happened before to make sense of what happens. But I'm not going to dump it all on you like a chunk of worldbuilding.

So yeah, people don't like series books. Okay, sure. Go tell that to, uh, every single book that's in a series, which at a quick glance I'd guess is nearly half the books being offered in genre. Yes, less in horror as a rule (but then horror authors aren't afraid to have a book end with the end of everything or just the end of that character). But to say "no series books," I just have to step back and shake my head. And no, it's not just straight up marketing companies, but when I go looking around at blogs (yes they still exist) and websites that cover genre fiction. Which is baffling.

And I'm sure these folks will happily cover installment X of whatever big series is going around. So, maybe the problem isn't that they don't cover series, but something else. I will say that nothing succeeds like success. Which is to say that if the first book in a series takes off that getting coverage for the second one is going to be a cinch. So what I'm hearing is not exactly the same thing. And, honestly, I'd rather hear "we don't want to cover this book" instead of a ridiculous statement like "we don't do series coverage."

Anyways, that's my fault for writing books that share a setting and characters, I guess. Perhaps people will be interested in _Asphalt Tongues_ which is all standalone stories. But something tells me that even that won't flip the trick. It might just be that success is the thing that breeds success.

Look, I get it. Prestige TV writing has ruined the idea of series-based entertainment for a lot of folks. Eight episodes of content with four episodes of story and lots of rumination in-between. Nobody likes that. It's just become a form. And then you get to the end of the book with a TO BE CONTINUED and fuck that. That's bullshit. But it's profitable bullshit. For someone. I've refused to play that game and still will.

Hell, I'm planning out the second _Hazeland_ trilogy of books and the challenge is to make each one satisfying and one that you can walk away from but also have things feed into one another. I try to make it easy to catch up on what's going on, but not whack you over the head with it. But I repeat myself.

Just amazingly frustrating to start in on marketing a book you're really proud of and just have it NOPEd off the table. It's fine. It's whatever. It sucks. Maybe I'll offer some enamel pins or some other promo kipple that people will pick up and forget. Whatever. I didn't get into this to sell junk and t-shirts, but to sell books. To offer readers an experience. To make things that weren't dead.

Sigh.

And it's entirely likely that my next non-_Hazeland_ project will be a gothic/weird/SF in a far-future setting. So now I get to buckle up and put my worldbuilding philosophy into practice. Which of course means I have to write up the RPG background and then bury it, figuring out how to reveal it in turns and not paragraphs of cruft, how to make it all organically flow. But that means not only figuring out what things are, but how people use and abuse them, what systems of knowledge and mythology are built up around them. And cosmology. And a sense of history, but not swarming in details that really don't matter. Gotta make things sticky like fishhooks, not overwhelming.

But at least I know which direction things are headed in now. Which is better than drifting.

FULL BLEED: TRANSMIT TRANSPORT TRANSFORM

Pretty sure I've used that title before. That's okay. There's folks who go their entire careers just recycling their own work or the work of others. They do okay. But sometimes they end up trapped by it. Look at JK Rowling. A monumental, titanic success and all she's ever going to do is Harry Potterverse stuff for the rest of her life. Sure, she may write other books but relatively speaking, ain't nobody gonna care. Same with Stephanie Meyer and for that matter E.L. James. Rewriting books they've already written (that were certainly not technically good -- but that just goes to show that technique is vastly overpraised as a thing to reach for -- entertainment is where it's at.) But still, they're going to be rewriting those books forever. It's all that any but the most discerning fan is going to want from any of these writers. Don't worry, I've seen hit happen to much less popular writers than the ones mentioned above. And, honestly, the ones above could never write another word and still have more money than they or their families could spend in a lifetime. They'll be fine. And they'd be fine even if they just wanted to write something different. Nothing in the world to stop them from just writing a thing and tossing it up on Smashwords or the Kindle store. I mean, damn, there you can be free of expectation. You can defy genre. You can do whatever it is the hell you want. You, of course, will likely not get paid for your troubles, though I imagine that any of the three above would and probably generate some very decent numbers, at least on an absolute scale. They'd be *terrible* in comparison to their previous careers, sure. The point stands. They're free (unless contracts prevent them from doing so, and then even at that point, they could turn in 400 pages of just about anything and it could be turned into a novel and made to work.) Just that it wouldn't be another runaway success.I won't go into my whole tirade about writing advice vs success advice, though I was given a golden opportunity to do so this morning.But here, if you've come for advice, I've got some. Buckle up for the stratosphere. The sky is the limit and the stars themselves will quail in the shadow of your coming, if only you follow this simple advice.You don't need to ask permission to write. This is not a new thing. I've seen variations on it for a very long time, and it bubbles up from time to time, seemingly afresh. Though with social media being what it is, the half-life of *anything* not being trammelled to death in the discourse is pretty short. I know. That's three-quarters of the fun.Seriously. You don't need permission. Go ahead. Start it up. You don't need to outline (though it might help if you do.) You don't need a title (but a working title is a good thing.) You don't even need to research (particularly if you're making it up.) You don't need to have traveled or to have a day job. You don't need to be a good person or have a special writing room or use a particular pen or computer or any material object. If you think you do, then just go outside and pick up the first rock or bottle cap or any other object that could possibly serve as a fetish and pick that thing up and decree that this is your WRITING THING and keep it with you. There. You have everything you need. And if you lose it, well, it wasn't anything more than something you picked up from the ground in the first place. That's the magic of magic. You can make a thing and discard it as easily.You don't need to know a particular method (though, again, some of them may be valuable.) You don't to know anyone in the business. You don't have to do anything other than sit down and write. If you don't know what to write, then I suggest going back to the planning stages for a little while and sketch things out. It's a lot easier to change a single sentence or paragraph of synopsis than it is to throw out chapters that didn't need to be there (or you don't even want to be there, or don't serve the story or aren't pretty enough to get away with without serving the story or moment or atmosphere.) And yeah, sure, you don't even need to tell a story. Poetry's good for that. I never got the hang of it though.The things you think you need are standing in your way. Not to write. Or to pre-write.Now if you're concerned about fitting into genre or riding the wave of popularity or how do you replicate the success of JK Rowling or get a million reads on Wattpad or get that Netflix deal, you're not thinking about the writing, are you? You're thinking about success.Think about the writing instead. Of course, you may be in a position that you need the writing to be a success so that you can pay the bills with it and then be able to do nothing but write so that you can make a living. I hate to be that guy, but sometimes it simply doesn't work out like that. Believe me.Believe me.I'm fortunate in that I've found a publisher who wants to work with me. That's some success. I can't tell you how to do that. I didn't do it by bending what I was writing to what I thought someone else wanted. Of course me doing that probably got me fired from some writing jobs in the past (not to mention really has cramped my style in getting work accepted at other outlets -- but I'm not good at living up to an expectation. Any kind, at least when it comes to words on paper.)So don't ask for advice on writing. Maybe ask for feedback (but all you're going to get if you're lucky is honest feedback from one reader who may or may not be in touch at all with what's going to sell.) Remember that publishers don't know what's going to sell. They don't. They do not. Anyone who says they do is lying. They know what they believe is publishable and may have a chance with a lot of luck to catch on. But they absolutely do not know what sells exceedingly well or they would just publish that. There would be no such thing as remainder books. Used bookstores wouldn't exist because books would beloved forever instead of churned. Editors and publishers all rolling dice on things. Oftentimes they're making what they think are safe bets, and the audince just sees as a safe bet and not anything exciting at all so they stay away in droves. Or they buy enough for it to continue along for a little while then drop off.This is not to say that publishers and editors are dumb and bad. They are neither. They are human (and publishers typically are organizations, where you have to deal with groups of humans coming together and enacting what they want in addition to what the organization requires -- the bigger, the more likely that these human desires come into direct conflict with one another and end up working against the organization over time, but that's a tale for another day.) Publishers and editors are imperfect humans. Understand that if you're trying to base the worth of your work (and *gulp*, more dangerously, yourself) on their feedback and opinions. That's a path to madness. But it's a common madness in this endeavor. Note I'm not going to call it a business. There is a business of writing. I'm no goddamn good at it. I'm, however, a pretty good writer in my own slice of things.Ask for feedback where you believe it to be valuable (don't ask me because, well, I'm not going to give you good commercial advice. Seriously, the last story that moved the needle for me was "The Junky's Christmas" by William S. Burroughs, which I read for the first time not so long ago.) And it's not even a *genre* story, but it's scarier than any horror and more uplifting than any Christian fiction (is that not the very purposes of those genres, to scare in the first case and confirm belief therefore uplifting the believer in the second.) See, there's the problem there, in relying on genre as promise. The only promise you should make is that of experience, hopefully a relatively unique one. Granted, that may take some time to develop the skills required to do so. That's okay. It's a process.Don't ask permission to grow. Don't ask permission to make the attempt. Don't allow your own conception of your work to be shaped by others. If you're going to write, go ahead and write. Allow yourself to make mistakes. Allow yourself to explore the freedom afforded you. Don't envy those who have built empires with their words, because they're stuck in them. Stay in a frontier, restless and quick to move, nomadic and living within a territory rather than exerting your will upon it (and having it crumble to dust often within your own lifetime.) Don't ask permission and don't seek it. Trespass. Steal. Break things and patch them with gold. Make invisible fractures and leave corrosives within so that when the last word lands, defenses crumble and are laid bare before you.

FULL BLEED: EVENT RELATED ECHO

No, there's no hyphen. Sure, that's not grammatically correct. That's fair.It's also the title of a collection of short stories of mine that will be coming out, hopefully around the middle of October. I'm waiting to hear back on the foreword and rights reversions of one of the stories (which shouldn't be an issue, but I'm just crossing the i's and dotting the t's.) As usual, it covers the science fiction and horror territory (and horror's nothing but fantasy tilted towards darkness, soooo...) Here's the cover.(Yes, that is not a joke. That's the actual cover.) Here's a list of stories that'll be found within.The Black Mass VariationsThrough the LimbsBallgameRingerThe Stars So BrokenChunkedPresidential FeedHomeNight SongTwo are available from me as single stories, one has been printed by someone else (Broken Eye Books) and a few of the others I've posted on my own site, but subsequently taken down. "The Stars So Broken" and "Night Song" haven't been seen anywhere before, so technically I'm not lying with the "New Stories" thing.There's an outside chance that a couple other smaller pieces will make their way into the book, but a lot depends on stuff that hasn't been settled yet and whether or not I can use them to lead readers elsewhere. Even so, with all those above, it's totally worth five bucks, which is something you'll tear through before you can finish either of the first two stories in the book. I promise.And like I said above, this will come out well before BLACK TRACE does. I hope it's an adequate substitution.Funny, but I did think that I was going to be ending summer with BLACK TRACE, but it didn't turn out that way. I'm trying to arrange some pre-press publicity and such, so it needs a little more lead time. Don't worry. It'll happen before MY DROWNING CHORUS comes out (no, it hasn't been officially announced beyond the Kickstarter statement, but I'm optimistic.)So, yeah, summer didn't turn out the way I'd expected. Should have expected something radically different, but I guess I was hoping for better. No trip to the state fair with my daughter, which is something I've not-so-secretly come to really looking forward to and enjoying. She's not going to be in the house forever, dig. Time passes. Once it's past, you don't get to visit it again. Sure, you can remember whatever memory constructs or photographs you've taken but those aren't really real. Yeah, no Musk head probe thing is going to work like that because humans don't construct memories and experiences like that. That's pure materialism at work, pure commerce, pure bullshit.No conventions or film festivals to visit and talk folks into buying books or just saying hello, no excuse to get up to Portland and eat biscuits or go to Powell's and buy too many research books and hang with friends. And that really sucks. These are mighty small potatoes, I know. I'm speaking only for myself and focusing on these because looking at the bigger picture is enough to drive you absolutely freaking mad. You already know what I'm talking about so I don't need to say any more. Summer's almost over.The blackberry bush is about done making fruit, still producing some smaller ones, still tasty. Another hot weekend coming, so the season is not going to go down without a fight. But still the season will go down. So will these times. Yeah, sorry, this got heavy. Sorry, sorry.More next week.

FULL BLEED: AFTER KILLING JASON OFF AND COUNTLESS SCREAMING ARGONAUTS

Let's see, business first.1) Hope you enjoyed "Ballgame," that short SF piece I had up here. It's gone though I'm sure it exists on some wayback type machine. It'll exist in an anthology that I'm planning on doing sometime next year, but I gotta figure all that out. With HAZELAND on what I hope to be a regular schedule, I want to plan around that. And I still have BLACK TRACE to run out there.2) BLACK TRACE is likely going to be early next year. I know what I said about it being this year, but I want to do some kind of promotional push and that needs lead time. I know you're all disappointed in me, but no more so than I am in myself.3) There is an old project now stirring, likely on a greatly reduced scale, but shambling towards the sunlight on my part. I need to rewrite a bunch of stuff though.4) I'm sheparding my mother's science fiction reissues into some kind of being, starting with the November 10th release of FIRE DANCER in ebook (the first time it's been available legitimately in this form.) That's taking some time.5) ASPHALT TONGUES rolls along. Still can't say as to where that fits into the HAZELAND release schedule (see 1 above.) I at least know what all the stories are going to look like, but not sure of the texture each one will take. That only happens when I start writing and stuff starts deviating from whatever plan I thought I had. Believe me, that's a good thing. Me planning out every single thing meticulously is a recipe for something pretty dull.6) I keep thinking about kicking AUTODRIVE back into play, but a number of factors make me rethink that one pretty hard. The Current Situation is not good at all for comics makers just bringing out their own material and not doing the FRANCHISE IS thing. If you can do that and you're getting paid well, congratulations. I hear that's what's selling and anything that isn't that is not. Besides indie projects like that live and die on word of mouth at shows and, well, no shows until next spring at the stone-cold-earliest.7) MY DROWNING CHORUS is slated for spring. I haven't started on revisions of it yet. I'm kinda afraid as to what those are going to look like, honestly.Business concluded.Let's talk a little about being an older human online now. I meant to get this a little earlier, but last week was pretty draining for a variety of reasons (namely the goddamn heat and smoke, now it's just smoke).So I read a piece written by S. Qiouyi Lu, who I'd met and been on a panel with last year at World Fantasy (and who pointed out that the Cantonese phrase for television or film was "electric shadows" and I really need to read more translated works, but I need time to read more anything, honestly.)You can read the piece here, and I recommend you do.https://s.qiouyi.lu/article/twitter-is-not-your-friend/I'm not going to do a refutation or point by point commentary. Just going to use it as a kicking off point. Though I'll note that S is younger than myself and operates in spheres that I overlap in but am not within. (And S, if I get absolutely anything wrong in here, please get in touch with me so that I may address any issues.)As noted, I'm older than S (probably older than most folks reading this, honestly.) I was using email and USEnet and desktop publishing setups while I was in college, which is anywhere from thirty to thirty-five years ago. I had a post-adolescence online, which was certainly aided by having a backbone connection on my desktop computer when I went to work after college. There was a time that you could conceivably know a lot of what was going on on the internet at any given time. It was a strange world with ad-hoc social conventions and rules that you could even wander into and not be ridiculed for missing (if you like the analogy of early punk and people pulling one another up out of the slam pit should someone fall down -- a lovely thought, but I can't say whether or not this was true.)This is not possible any longer. It's barely possible even within whatever cohorts spring up around, say, the writing of any particular genre of fiction. Or lovers of a particular genre of music or video game or any way that we choose to bifurcate and isolate or identity-generate via cohort. And, truth be told, it was even difficult to keep this going in the Olden Days up until AOL started carrying USEnet in what, 1994 or 1996, whenever the Long September was. And then there were public message boards (themselves just a more user-friendly version of BBS services, but able to form around a tiny nucleus of interest and go over that territory over and over, or to argue that XXX isn't really something we should talk about here, you should go somewhere else.)So this series of social fora, USEnet and discussion forums, and email lists (which I didn't get to, but I ran several of them through the mid to second half of the nineties, mostly music-focused) made for a long series of stumbling grounds in identity formation or just accumulation of folks to talk with or get mad at or *plonk* as necessary. This is something I got to experience mostly by dint of my age and boredom at work, so I was Extremely Online early, and I didn't think too much about the social construction of these parades of shared realities aside from sort of big macro-level "Yeah, that person has really wrapped themselves up in whatever and there's no getting them out" observations of identity-creation or cohort adoption. So yeah, I've seen love-bombing, and I understand the impulse (though, luckily, I've never been on the receiving end because that would probably just make me look for the exit and never to return.)About that, yeah, I've joked about being feral in nearly any cohort (internally or externally-generated) unless it's down to good friends, and those I can count on two or three sets of hands. The rest of the time, I'm probably more hyperaware than I should be which generally leads to the defense mechanism of finding the door. Particularly in a setting where there's layered expectations at play (yes, I'm an older white cis male-identifying human.) But that's just the start. Given the power of the mighty verb "am" in English, I'm (see?) introduced as a writer or comics person or expected to be a voracious reader because I'm among voracious readers (I can bore you with my reading habits another time) or that I spend my time following every wrinkle of genre (again, since this is a huge self-selector in the spheres/layers I find myself in.)There are things that I have some interest in and spend some time doing. But I don't identify myself by these (exclusively or as even a fragment of the whole.) So friendship by Twitter, for instance, as this was a subject of S's essay, though really it runs to much more than that in terms of digital social construction, (hey we're back to the clause) is kind of a dodgy thing. And honestly, I'm probably allowed to slide on that since I am an older, white, male-cis-identified human. Theoretically I don't have to be as on and as sparkling and have to tone down any deviating-from-perceived-norm (as opposed to 'deviant': not the same thing at all) behavior. Though there are folks who've said, for instance, that my absolutel and utter inability to do bar-con have put obstacles in front of my "career" that didn't need to be there. Likely true. Bar-con is far too powerful a thing, or at least perceptively was. That may be changing. But I'm not plugged-in enough to know whether it is or not. I could tell you that (barring a few dear exceptions) bar-con is a harrowing ordeal for me precisely because of what S was describing in terms of what appear to be permeable categories/relationships, but are absolutely not. Not easily, anyways. Not in the space of a bar conversation or hurried introduction in the hallways or even sharing a panel space. Granted, sometimes it's easy to tell where these relationships settle to, whether you can say "Oh, hey, hi there" or Just Keep Walking in the halls.And even if you're at the greeting phase, where else are you? Now what if that hallway is Twitter? Where you may not even look like you but a rubber-suited monster with a cosmically dubious expression? Particularly when Twitter strips (as does nearly any other text-based communication *even between intimates*) so much emotional/tonal nuance out of things, not to mention context? Yeah. It's tough. Then add in layers of expectation. "Oh, you must know and or love [beloved genre thing]." I'll be honest, I probably don't love what you love. That's okay. "Oh you must know or want to write for [beloved outlet]" or "You must hold this [opinion]" and again, you'd be surprised how much I am deviant from any perceived norm. This is where I am asked if I love horror, for instance, and sure, I do. But only what I figure has fit inside my conception of it and really that puts me more as liking dark fantasy than savoring that final note of helplessness and bleakness that marks the True Horror Fan, or so it seems. But even the mantle of "Oh you're a writer" is one that is laden with expectation and judgment. Again, I try not to *be* a thing, but to *do* things, and be mindful of what I do and how it can affect other folks, other humans I happen to be sharing the room or situation or social construct with. (For instance, aside from anything that I do, I happen to on the tall side and while not impressively built, my physicality is something that carries with it all manner of judgment and psychic baggage -- so that's something I have to try and control. I doubt I'm successful at all times.)Hmm. I've wandered far afield of the thing that originally kicked this off. I doubt I've even touched on it significantly. But I'll pull back to say that S's essay was strong enough that I'm still considering it even after a week of churn in 2020 (and since we're all here in 2020, we know how mighty those forces are.) It's something that demands thought even more so now as we're forced into virtual/digital spaces to address the vacuums left by isolation via pandemic or economics or self-selection. I've half-joked that the Internet's primary product is isolation, which it then serves itself as a solution to. I try not to be cynical about it (though the behavior of the big tech companies makes that sort of thing increasingly difficult, given their drive to boost engagement and become a replacement for reaching out to actual people.) But reaching out to people who may be in a position to grant approval for your work? To even get you further work or publication? Yeah, talk about fraught. (And this isn't to address even base physicalities, such as touched on above. Fraught, fraught, fraught.)I don't know, honestly. I try to be genuine out in that weird endless scroll of public space called Twitter (about all I post to other than graphics to tumblr and this blog here, which is its own different thing.) But how much of that is construct? Hell, how much of the real life fiction-suit in construct? I know. I'm not trying to get all PKD or reality mechanic on you. That's just where my mind immediately goes. Is Twitter your friend? No. Do I have friends who I've only met on Twitter? Sure, you bet. Do I have friends who Twitter is my primary contact point for? Sure, but most of them were my friends before I followed them or mutualized them. Go ahead, use 'mutualized,' it's fun. Are there people I've followed by way of my line of work? Absolutely. Are they my friends? Nope, but I could probably say "hello, I'm Matt Maxwell, but I go by Critical Nostalgia on Twitter and look like a Godzilla" and they'd know who I was, or at least who I presented myself as being on that public space. But probably still not friends, though maybe some kind words could be exchanged.I should wrap this up, having managed to say a lot of not much. Just make sure you read over S's essay and consider the construction of these relationships and be honest about how they play out for the time when we get back to having in-person shows and I'll work on rehabilitating my feral behaviors.Until next time.

BALLGAME

"At least Dodger Stadium gets a breeze once in a while," the warder told me. He had rusty red hair and a dried-out kind of face. "You could be in Phoenix, kid. Hundred and ten with shade. You're lucky."He was the only human here. The rest of us were detainees. Couldn't call us prisoners because the law would've made them treat us differently."Yeah, I'm made of luck," I said as I picked up one of the plastic work kits from the bench. It had been red once, but sunshine and scratches had muted it over time to an anemic bleached coral color. Coral bleached everywhere, why not here, too?Just that my luck was bad.As the box left its station, there was a downdraft of rotorwash and a hum as the ghost's motors started up from idle. It followed two steps behind, well out of arm's reach fixing an eye on me as I shuffled down to my assignment. I honestly forgot it was there most of the time. Better that way. Who cares if someone in a cubicle in Nevada is watching you pick your nose or scratch yourself?The readout on the box gave me a section and row assignment. 012 ROW CDE SEATS 3,5;7,9;1-9. Someone must have taken a real shine to row E. Kids sometimes get in when they power the ghosts and walkers down and the detainees have been taken to that old big-box off San Fernando Road. That was home. Was an Ikea once. Anyways who messes with a ball park? American pastime, and we're running short on those. Everyone staying in these days.I marched off to the seats and my ghost followed me. Passed one of his big brothers as I hit the midfield seats. It didn’t look human and wasn't supposed to. Why do you think Fed Police all dress up in that armor and helmets? They don't want to be human. Humans have hearts. These things just have engines. I waved my bracelet in front of it and the screen where its head was went from red to blue."Have a nice day, buddy," I said.I thought I heard someone behind me, thought there was another human in here, but it was just another detainee way over on the other side, along the third base line. Would have been nice to have someone else to talk to, but that's not the job. Which is what this was. A strictly voluntary job to nick hours off my service time.Now, while there weren't other humans here, every seat was filled. Vacuum-formed plastic people, vacuum-formed clothes, vacuum-formed features. Easy clean, non-porous surfaces, liquid-shedding up to and including vomit and feces. Yeah, a bunch of squatters rolled the hurricane fencing last year, during what was supposed to be the World Series. They'd been living in a hotel or something south of Towne and decided they wanted to make a statement that the cameras were going to have to record. Smeared the faces of every occupant behind home plate with home-grown shit. Crews had to work double time and distancing be damned. Shoulder to shoulder and those things better shine. Every single speaker grill cleaned with a toothbrush.Oh yeah, the speakers. It's Tuesday, they're gonna test them. Dammit. Oh, the wardens aren't monsters. They give you a set of foam earplugs. They're supposed to last you your whole tour. Nevermind that they get crinkled and crumble after a couple weeks. Or stolen.I had to hurry if I was going to get out of here in time. I set in on the first row. I'd been here before. Yeah, bad actuators on these arms for the wave and trying to catch the odd fly ball. And they kept sending me garbage parts. Of course they kept breaking.The ghost settled into a slow orbit around me as I worked. Pop the shell and get to it. Touch up the paint on the face, too. Sun's hell on this plastic, even if it cleans up fast. I looked over the face and realized this was a Timmy-23, one of the first dimensional stadium-fill models put out. All-American kid. Any color you like so long as it's white.Yeah, nobody believed those flat and stupid cut-outs. I wouldn't either. But you get the sun all hitting them at the right angle, some decent matte-finish paint so everything didn't look plastic? After a couple of beers who's to say that they'd be any worse company than the real thing? Certainly cut down on the fighting in the stands. And when they got the arms? That was huge. You go far enough back and when they were given those stochastic stagger/wave routines? Just as good as fans in the stands. Sure, they didn't buy that much at concessions, but the bathrooms didn't need to be cleaned hourly, either.I started working on the last row. Was gonna have to hurry. Warm cuts sandwich and branded partner water bottle were not going to get any better with time. Bracelet said I had about half an hour to get this last row done before the sound test started. Even worse, the thousand different voices singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" just off-key in enough ways to make you think that they were real as you tuned in from home. Even worse, but not the worst.It wasn't the players people missed so much as the community, the being part of something that everyone else was part of. Sure, there were all those chat messages and posted pictures, but those were somehow not real enough. You had to watch and love something that lots of other people were out there watching and loving right then. That made the moment. The wave going around the stadium during a long time-out, the flurry of arms all reaching out for an incoming fly ball. That was what made it real.And no plastic-backed cutout could do that.I snapped the last bracket in place and dashed paint across the brow of the Crystal-17 mother/girlfriend variant. Sure, the skin tone was off-model but I had to work with what I had.I addressed the ghost. "Job done. Request completion code."I waited while the ghost swooped in and ran a pass over the models I'd worked on. Times like this, I really regretted the stupid mistakes that put me here. Couple shitposts, couple video uploads and suddenly you were a threat. Even if you never meant a damn thing by it."Satisfactory. Detainee is ordered to—"Come on, come on. Put me back in my sanitized cubicle on the bus and then back to my sanitized cubicle in the old IKEA.A massive electrical pop filled the air, pushed through a network of speakers. I was too late. I clumsy clambered over the plastic chair backs to get out of the aisle before I got crushed. The ghost rose and went back to covering me with the Armalite DBW. It didn't shoot a big bullet, but then it didn't need to be big."Remain where you are," the ghost said."Please stand for the National Anthem." The voice echoed and rang loud enough to hurt. But that was nothing compared to what was coming. That voice was just off the masts. The others would be right next to me, right there, loud enough for studio audience at home. Could hear them all the way to Chinatown.Fifty thousand pairs of actuators went to work, moving the three sections of each man, woman and child in the stands, each of them off by fractions of a second to make them a little imperfect. It was less uncanny that way. But you didn't want to be standing in front of them when they went off. Then twenty five thousand digital voices piped up and out of speaker grilles. Really it was only about a hundred different voices all modulated and tweaked and time-stepped to make it feel more like a crowd.They sang the National Anthem as one and I was only thankful that their arms all didn’t go up at once. But then, they didn't have to. Everyone knew it was all under control, that everyone was working as one. Even if we couldn't stand in crowds because of lung and nerve damage being passed along in the singing, we could hear the anthem being sung with a single voice.END©2020 Matt MaxwellIf you're going to steal it, at least link back.

FULL BLEED: DOWN IN THE DESERT

Stopgap entry this week, I suppose.Lots going on outside of stuff I'm obliged to self-promote. Two-day-drive through the plaguelands coming up because school is starting, don't you know. So it'll be like this week kinda doesn't exist.I do however, have some oblique news about a project that I thought was dead for almost ten years. Well, it was dead. But it is very much alive now, not through my own actions, but on the part of one of the artists involved. Which means I've moved to hire a second artist to fill out the bridge story. It's possible that the work could be done this year, haven't firmed that up yet. Not sure what the final thing will look like, but I'm working to get it to as many people as possible.But who knows what that looks like the day after WB brought the axe down on DC Comics. Or what DC will look like afterwards. There's always the promises of cuts for efficiency to generate growth. That's stuff you tell shareholders or to convnice the board that this really is the way forward. All I know is that a bunch of people who loved and spent their lives working in comics are now out of work without much of any warning during a rolling economic and health and national calamity. No good to see in any of that. Not to mention what happens when one of the two largest publishers driving traffic and filling shelves at direct market comics shops takes a hit like this. Not when there's really not much indication of a plan other than hedging for future growth.But this project is a comic book one-shot, and there's precious few other places to sell that sort of thing. Suffice it to say that there'll be more news on that later on.Additionally, I'm running point on promoting my mother's science fiction backlist coming back into print as ebooks, for the first time since the seventies and eighties. Those are coming up soon and I'll post official announcements and such when they happen. Trying to line up reviewers and coverage outlets right now, which is a long process of sifting through the sargasso of first through fourth generation book blogs and genre-focused sites.In terms of my own work, I finished off the first draft of "The Stars are Made of Us," which is a HAZELAND-set novella that may be appended to QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS or may end up in ASPHALT TONGUES. That last one is a short story collection that I'm now, uhm, behind on. Originally hoped for drafing to be done by October, and at this point it'll be November maybe December, depending on edits for MY DROWNING CHORUS which are due soon. Just in time really.Speaking of HAZELAND, the books and myself will be one of the sponsors of the upcoming Outer Dark Symposium on weird and horror fiction. Yes, I'm a little surprised, too. But the opportunity presented itself and they seem like pretty good people doing good work so I'm happy to help out a little. So I guess this counts as a convention appearance for this year? Yeah, I didn't think so, either.Remember conventions?Oh, and BLACK TRACE, which I should be doing pre-release contacts and reviews for. Though I wonder about that and if I shouldn't just release it and get it done. It won't be the one to move the needle but it is the one I should just let go of.Otherwise, I'm just trying to hold things together, which I guess is as much as everyone else is doing in this insane and shifting landscape. And, frequently, acting against my own best interests. Luckily there's people around willing to give me a shove and point that out from time to time.

FULL BLEED: JANTHINA JANTHINA

Hey, if you're into atmospheric drone that sounds like folk music from the Plateau of Leng, check this out: https://worstward.bandcamp.com/album/ulaan-janthina-part-iIt's pretty good.In other news, no BLACK TRACE chapter this week. There may be one next week. But really I need to solidify release plans, and, frankly, you've got enough to know if you want to keep reading or not. Though as I can actually see how many people have clicked on these previews, I do wonder if this whole move was simply a giant self-own on my part. Ah well.In cosmic horror news, I'm an official sponsor of the Outer Dark Symposium next week. Hopefully I might even attend next year or open my fool mouth on mic and say something that will make people want to take away my cosmic horror fan club card. I'm old enough that I don't care about club membership, so go ahead. But I'm happy to hang with folks who seem interesting and sharp. Unfortunately, I'll be moving my son back to college and won't be able to attend, but maybe I'll drop in by Zoom if I get a chance.That said, there is a bit more about MY DROWNING CHORUS that I can share. Something almost resembling a blurb. I was asked to come up with an elevator pitch, but frankly, I ain't gonna. Here's where I get on my high horse as a writer.So, you ever watch a movie you like, one that's pretty good, and all of a sudden they drop in a historical figure or counterculture hero or even just a movie or TV show or hell, a song you like. And then they lean on that instead of doing the work? "See! We like the things you like! We're just like them!" Take for instance, STRANGER THINGS, the first series, which was the only one I made it through. Remember when the kid goes missing and in order to get him to come out of hiding, his mom buys him tickets for POLTERGEIST? Heart-rending moment, yeah.Not so much. It's borrowed power. It's not even stolen. When you steal something, you make it your own. This is showing the registration tags as belonging to someone else, another thing entirely. "You liked POLTERGEIST? Us, too! Let's squee together!"Now, this has been an issue since the postmodern mode popped up on the scene: borrowing, copying, marginalia-driven plotting, revisionism, referentiality. It's an easy way to familiarity, to understand that there's a common language between the artist and viewer. (I'd say "consumer" but I'm not feeling *that* mean this morning.) "We're both part of the same club! Now smash that like and subscribe!" Again, it's easy, almost effortless. And yeah, it's hard to break in a new thing, new approach, new characters. I've been trying to do it since 1990 and seriously since 2005 or so. It's really hard. People want to be impervious to it because, well, there's a lot of work out there (much of it just content). Go to a comic show and through the small press area and you'll be bombarded with new works, some great, some not. But the thing is, they all gotta get through that armor, the armor we put up just to stay goddamn sane in this looney-bin world.We can't take it all in. It's not even a firehose any more, but a torrential rain, constant, unrelenting. So many things shouting for eyeballs and brain-time. You have to be selective. Even if you stick to pretty much one genre/mode, much less try to branch out across multiples. There is too much. And, again, Sturgeon's law applies in even the most niche microgenre or mode. Most of it's crap (sometimes even enjoyable.)So of course, appearing as another thing that people already love is a great way to sneak past that armor. "See, you're already halfway to liking this thing. It's STAR WARS meets GREAT EXPECTATIONS." Only the sad fact is that just STAR WARS is STAR WARS. Just because you have robots and spaceships and laser swords doesn't mean there's any quality there. It's just checklisting. It's trope-counting. It's pretending. Now, that's convenient for the algorithm, but doesn't take into account that it's genreally bullshit. But then marketing was always bullshit. Only now, creators have internalized that bullshit and think they have to present as something they're not in order to get people to read it.Hence the elevator pitch. It's THE FRENCH CONNECTION meets KRULL. NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET meets THE JETSONS. James Bond meets NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. It's borrowed power. Worse. It's begged power. "Look at my work through this prism and not as it is."Marketing. Mis-representation.I know. You've only got ten seconds to get the hook in on the show floor or when someone is browsing Amazon. It's really easy to overthink and get yourself lost in the seeming of being another thing because you think you have to. You really don't. It's not a game that you need to play.Yeah, you need to think of something catchy. But don't borrow.So, with all that in mind, I won't two-things pitch you on HAZELAND, or MY DROWNING CHORUS. There's not a lot of point in it. I'll tell you that there's Cosmic Mysteries, Weird Crimes and Gothic Rock and that it's set in 80s Los Angeles. I figure that's enough for you. I know. There's a word missing there. I wonder what it is.Here's the teaser copy for MY DROWNING CHORUS, which is a book I really enjoyed writing and think it's the best thing I've written. But then there's always room for improvement.Cait MacReady is haunted by creating then un-creating the Sightless Eye, preventing the end of everything six months ago, an end that came at the hands of the queen of No Tomorrows. Now Los Angeles itself is haunted by something out in the waters, older than anything, older than names or people to give them. It is both calling and being called, dragging pieces of lost time into Cait's present. When it's finished arranging these pieces, the city will be crushed under the pressures of both water and time.Unless Cait can turn it back. But how can she do that when she can barely hold her own life together?Hopefully you're intrigued enough to check it out when it comes out from Broken Eye Books next spring.

BLACK TRACE - CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 8Slats looked about as comfortable as an Eskimo Pie on July sidewalk as he climbed into the car. He sat down like the chair could have lined with punji sticks, even though he’d ridden in Blue near fifty times.“Roy’s?” asked Jake, not looking Slat’s way.“Sure. You pick it.”The air rung with a low standing wave. Nothing could be said to break it up. In the just-rising light, the clouds were great finger-strokes of purple across the warming sky. Jake looked ahead at the lights of the towers near town, knowing that someone had to talk before he or Slats exploded.Jake looked straight ahead as Blue swallowed the black strip, back to the rising sun. Going west. Why he’d come west in the first place.“You got anything to say back to me?” Slats asked. And suddenly it was like he’d waited for someone to say this, waited for years. The base of his spine tightened up and a thousand threads pulled at his insides, ligatures buried until now. He said nothing.“Not just yet.” Cold welled up in his blood. That wall he thought was holding up was beginning to crack out from under him.The sun rose over the jagged rows of precious junk in the Yard. Mullins would be up shortly, tending it like his garden. He might be out there already, resting the tea he swore he hated on his belly and watering his beautiful junk. Jake looked away, seeing the tangle as rubble. He’d be walking through it on patrol. No even footing anywhere and twice as bad in the flat moonlight. Stumble and catch yourself on a brittle plastic spar or drive a masonry spike through your boot to catch tetanus or some damn other bug floating around. The Federal States seemed to be mostly built out of the crap, at least the parts of it he’d grown up in, back when it was just the USA. The sun flashed on the row of motorcycles and it looked like a broken spine, wrecked from carrying too much weight for too long. It was too close. It was right there.Even though California was no longer part of the Federal States, there were reminders. The great gleaming machine of American progress had come to a shuddering stop after a series of fruitless wars overseas coupled with decades of economic chaos and unrest. Rust had crept through the pistons and cranking gears of the United States like cancer until finally everything was brought to a grinding halt. The Great Big Zero hadn’t helped anything, turning information into noise and hashing computer files into glitched Dada before the switch got shut off. The U.S. economy spun into a depression worse than the ones that hit before. The industrial east and Midwest took the worst of it, and were already standing on ground that had long crumbled beneath them. Unemployment and bankruptcy skyrocketed past anyone’s darkest dreams. Crowds ran wild in the streets of every major city, demanding food and shelter from a government that was in no position or had any desire to provide it. The Feds were tied up with trying to stabilize the economy and to somehow create new jobs for sizeable population that was now unemployed and looking for someone to blame.The western U.S. was able to weather the worst of it fairly well. Sales of high technology to overseas markets and independent energy sources helped ensure their success. Things were bad, but nowhere near the scale of the collapse in the east. The states became untied, many refusing to go down with the ship. Empire-building was proved to be the pastime of wealthier nations and the legacy of America was thrown overboard without hesitation. Texas and the Dakotas went their own way. Then California and the other western states, buoyed by agriculture and technology. Going west once again became something young men did, if they could get over the wall.By the time the bleeding stopped, fifteen states had broken free, forming some six or seven loose allegiances. None of them wanted to have the dead weight of the rubble belt hanging on their necks. Jake hadn’t been back to the Federal States since he had quit the force. You just didn’t do that. Though he wondered if there had been any opportunity to rebuild what had been left to shatter and rust. He had picked up transmissions from the Federal States before, but they didn’t tell him what was going on. They were recruitment messages mostly, young men with blankly handsome faces, chiseled jaws and steely eyes. They stood tall under the Stars and Stripes. Sunset shone warmly on their faces as they watched an eagle in flight soaring over a gleaming expanse of a mythical skyline. A commanding voice said, “Duty Now. For The Future.” Jake never went looking for it, though he knew there were entire channels devoted to Federalana, the nostalgia for a time that never was, not even in his memory. The aesthetic seeped up out of the cracks like mud.That wasn’t real. It was just a commercial. Jake had seen the real another time. He caught a clip that someone must have bounced off a pirated satellite or locust network. It was video of soldiers running through a ruined street taking cover from a sudden hail of gunfire that sounded like it had come from right next to the camera. The flags withdrew after the chatter of automatic fire. They were too clean, their victims too dirty and downtrodden. It was propaganda, but who for?The voice of a young man shouted ecstatically: “John Paul Jones of the New American Front declaring a first victory against the illegal occupation of America by Federal Forces!” The voice kept babbling while the black silhouette of the tank rolled into view, down at the end of the shattered boulevard. There was a white plume of smoke from the tank’s gun barrel and the screen went to static.Everything that Jake saw in those few minutes of raw footage told him that nothing had changed. There weren’t cities, just vast seas of concrete and twisted girders. But the physical conflict had been extinguished. The only clashing now was for wall space, since precious little remained. Both the flags and the Rebs needed places and media to expose their slogans and they fought bitterly over what was left. But after all that, nothing was rebuilt. There was no future. Only duty.Slats coughed, reminding Jake that he was still right there.Dust blew through the main drag, swirls crawling across the street, ghostly sidewinders. Jake flashed Blue’s lights at the sentry in the tower. A single spotlight winked back as they passed. The sky went pink and dusted in the rear view.Blue slowly pulled into the sand-strewn parking lot. It was covered with black patches, Rorschach blots of oil spilled on the reddish dirt. There were crazies who claimed that they could read those spots, tell where you’ve been and where you’re headed. Jake didn’t believe in those things. The desert seemed to spawn that kind of faith, living in a world rife with signs just for the looking. Meaning was optional. The neon threw a weak orange cast over Roy’s, the sign making an angry waspish noise as it flashed erratically. The cracked windows were tinted Coke-bottle green. The sign’s message was reflected upside-down in them: “Roy’s Cheap Real Food.”Jake snapped the engine and lights off, then looked at the blinds in the window like prison bars set the wrong way. They got out of the car and walked inside. Slats had his head low. He was looking intently at cigarette wrappers and bottle caps on the ground as they glittered in the early morning sun.The interior of the café was morning dim, illuminated by the purplish light of a bug zapper and a flickering television. Roy sat near the metal cash register watching one of his movies as he smoked a Camel. The smell of the cigarette hit Jake and he wanted one bad. Roy turned to look and smiled, blue light playing off his drawn face. “Morning, Jake, Slats. How you two doin’?” His voice was little more than a ragged rasp. Behind him, a sign said “Mind your manners. Because we do.”“Been better.” Jake said flatly as he found a seat. Slats only answered with a head-shake. Roy took another drag off his stick and stood up. He shut off the Sony and the picture faded to a bright point on the flat black screen.Jake sat in a booth away from the door, back to the wood-grained plastic wall. The vinyl was cracked and worn smooth with the weight of years of visitors. It felt electrified and he couldn’t hold still now.Slats sat across from him. His eyes fixed on the hypnotic purple light of the zapper, anywhere but the other side of the table. Roy stood and set down two dirty white mugs of steaming coffee. He handed them two menus of laminated cardboard. The plastic was nicked and cut at the edges like it had been used to stop knife fights over the years. “What can I get you this morning, citizens? Just got a fresh shipment of real eggs last night, outta Blythe. I hear they’re from actual chickens.”Slats pored uselessly over the menu. It never changed. Everyone knew that. “Shrimp and eggs, scrambled. And another cup of black,” Slats said after draining the first cup.“The usual. Right,” Roy growled. “Jake?”Jake didn’t even look at the menu. “You got some sausage? Real meat? I’ll pay the extra. Toast, too.” Being too specific at Roy’s was a short path to disappointment.“Someone just finished a job, I see.” The smile showed nicotine creases in his everything. He nodded and left, breathing smoke behind him.“I need a cigarette. I mean really need one,” muttered Jake. “Excuse me.” He got up and walked over to the machine in the corner. Slats reached to say something, but couldn’t find it and let him go.Jake crossed the cafe to the cigarette machine in the corner. “Five bucks per – Don’t even think about stiffing me” said the magic-marker scribble on cardboard. His eyes flashed over the brands, nothing coming to him. They were all the wrong names. He opened the front of the machine and dropped a couple of roughed-up bills into the sheet-metal box and fished for a pack of plain Ridgways.Jake unwrapped the package noisily as he walked back to the table. He tore open the foil and placed a cigarette in his mouth. His hand automatically went for his pocket, feeling for the lighter he hadn’t carried in years.Jake found a book of matches up by the cash register in an overturned hubcap stolen from a Tucker. The matches advertised Vanishing Point, the only bar in town. Its logo was spelled out with inviting curves of pink neon on a dusk desert backdrop. Jake struck a match and lit the cigarette without having to think about it. Pure memory.He sat down. Smoke rose from the cigarette. He breathed in once and coughed explosively. Stifling it, he breathed in again, then exhaled a thin stream of blue. He brought his boots onto the bench and pressed his back against the window, feeling the cool plastic begin to warm to the morning sun. The tension receded, but didn’t leave completely.Much better. Just needed that stick, that’s all.Slats looked out the window into the pale turquoise stripes between the blinds. “What was I supposed to do?” he asked. “Just let someone from Joshua Tree roll out and arrest you? ‘Cause Daniels isn’t going to let this slip by. Prell might have, but not Daniels.”Jake blew another line of smoke. “I don’t know. Just that I never figured you’d be the one to tell me.” He leaned forward and looked at Slats. “See, I always thought that someone with a bronze badge would step out of a crowd, cuff me, then drag me away. Either that, or I’d be done long distance by a Wesson sniper job if they thought I was worth the trouble.“I never even told Madelyne. I never told her…” Remember how she was curious about the waffled scar and you wouldn’t tell her what it really was. If she figured it out, she never let on. “Shit. It’s not like…”“Not like what? Not like I eat babies?” He thought of the stories about flags that circulated during the Secession. “Those guys were all the bad shit that ever was. You heard the joke that went around? ‘What’s the difference between Nazis and flags?’”Slats shook his head, pretending not to know the answer. “‘Nazis at least knew when to quit.’” Jake finished his first cigarette and flicked it into the ashtray. He looked right at Slats, into those slate-colored eyes. “Tell me that things are different now.”The other man stared at the dregs of the coffee cup and nodded. “No lie, but…”His answer was cut off by Roy’s rasping voice. “Better quit those things. You’ll end up sounding like me.” He smiled, teeth long and yellow.“It’s okay. I’m real good at quitting.” Jake smiled a crooked one back.Looking over at Slats’ plate, Jake wondered how anyone could eat bugs. He had seen the pens that grew those things and was damned if he’d eat anything that came out of those still, murky green ponds. Jake ate in spite of the hanging smell from the plate. Those were things you fed to other food. --The sun was out full by the time they had finished breakfast. Green and black zebra stripes from the tinted window were painted over the table. Jake smoked another and watched Slats finish his third cup.“Now what, since there’s a they that knows?” Jake asked. The smoke curled lazily towards the still blades of the overhead fan. He’d already thought up a handful of different scenarios, figuring that none of them were even close.Slats placed the cup on the table, scarred and pitted. “Daniels wants to see you. Order went out with this morning’s shift. I might’ve jumped the gun a little bit.”“You know what for? It’s not like I’m a lawbreaker.”He narrowed his eyes in faintly mocking disbelief. “Say again?”“A bad lawbreaker,” Jake corrected. “Just ask Lois. She’ll give you an armful of glowing recommendations.”Slats shrugged and tried to pull a last drag of black out of the cup then gave up. “No charge, but ‘compelling witness’ was thrown. Figure that I’ve got a little time to bring you in before Booth does. You know how he works.”Jake had met Booth before but he could only remember his own reflection in the shades. He was the kind of cop that made citizens clench when they were pulled over, all confidence and power and impatience. Better that Slats had gotten to him first. Jake stubbed out the stick in a glass ashtray with a scorpion embedded in the bottom. “Let’s go. Just get it done.” Jake breathed, resigned. He tried not to think about exit routes, and how many there might be on the way out the door.Slats gave him a knowing look and nodded. “I’m glad you agreed. ’Cause I’d hate having to drag you in.” He wasn’t smiling.Jake stopped in place. “We’re friends and all.” He smiled faintly. “But without me wanting it, you wouldn’t be able to.”The wrinkles around his eyes slouched a bit as he frowned. “If it wasn’t me, it’d be someone else. Sooner or later. There’s a lot of Cal-I and only one of you.”“A lot of anywhere else to be out here.” He was pulling his jacket on when he heard the bell over the door ring. He saw the suits who walked in and stiffened. Slats picked up on it and turned around. “What…” His voice trailed off. “Oh, hell.”Three men slow-swaggered into the café. All of them wore identical deep blue uniforms and mirrored wraparound shades, silver bug eyes that seemed to eat half their faces. They had the determined and resolute stride of men with a mission. Business to attend to, minus anything like sentimentality. The hard light of the sunrise ground out any features in their faces.“That blue burner shows up as a big problem in my book,” the lead cop said to the room, not looking at anyone. “Who wants to step up now?” Jake didn’t need to read the name on the badge to know who’d come around.“Don’t do anything stupid.”Jake stood there still, watching as they walked between the counter and booths. The light of the zapper became twin points of violet in their silicon eyes. Booth’s hand rested on his holstered pistol, more as a statement of fact than any interest on his part. But there was a taunting hint at the edges of his lips.Jake was smarter than that. Nobody started anything with a Cal-I trooper and walked away from it with a good side.Booth was a goddamn flag, but he didn’t wear the bronze. Same walk, same air, same everything else, though. A different flavor of power.“LT,” Booth said as he came to a stop near the table. His voice was like a broad file dragged across a wrist, hard. “We’ll be taking the prisoner now.” He didn’t ask, so it just came out blank and mean.Slats swole up, angry. “First word out of your mouth is sir, or you’ve stepped in it.” He waited for the correct response.“Sir. Yes, sir,” Booth said, hardly moving his lips.Slats breathed in and continued. “Nor is he a prisoner, so you try a different phrase.” He breathed out hard through his nostrils, close enough to fog Booth’s glasses.“Sir. The captain told us to bring him in, cuffs and the whole guest package.” Jake saw the anger writhing beneath the surface of Slats’ face and wondered how much it would take to get him to punch Booth in the kidneys.Slats turned to Jake, dismissing the others with a flashed scowl. “The captain has trust issues, apparently.” He looked back at the cop, making sure that he had been suitably humbled. They hadn’t gotten the message. “We’ll follow in his car, Corporal. You and your men are dismissed.”Booth stood there, stock still. “Which words didn’t you understand? I said dismissed.” The plate with the kidney punch on it was waiting under the hot lights, ready to be served.“Sir. Captain’s orders. Culver comes with us.” Booth hid his smile expertly. “And he said that was from him. He’s the only one who can call us off.”“Sorry…” Slats began to say.Jake waved it off. “No problem, I’ll go with them. Aces.” He said it, but his eye was on the door and figuring how to put space between him and them. Foolish thought, but it came anyways.Slats’ grey-blue eyes watched him warily. “You sure?”“Not going to start a thing over it.” He put his eyes right on Booth’s shades. “Let’s go.”There was no need to get Slats in any more trouble with Daniels. He and Slats had been butting heads ever since Daniels took command over from Captain Prell, who had been jumped on the road a couple of months back. Prell was hooked up to some rig in the hospital at Joshua Tree, still sucking lemon meringue pies through a tube.Jake threw Blue’s keys over to Roy, who caught them without looking away from the TV. “Thanks, Roy. Great cup of black.”“You in trouble?” asked Roy, momentarily looking away from the CRT.Jake shook his head. “I’ll be back soon for the keys.”“Maybe not so soon, flag,” Booth hissed under his breath. Rising to that would only ensure a steady torrent of shit. No need for that so early in the day. Slats paid for breakfast with black plastic that Roy waved through the reader with shaky, nicotine-stained fingers.The sunlight was blinding as they stepped outside the dim café, with wind that was hot and dry coming in off the Mojave. Everyone called it “Devil breath,” like standing in front of an open blast furnace. Booth was right behind Jake. He could feel eyes on the back of his neck, every bit as hot as the sunlight. Parked on either side of Blue was a Cal-Intercept cruiser. It was a reminder that they could call up as much muscle as they thought necessary to bring him in. Or hit him if he chose to run.Since when did I become such a high roller? One of the shadow officers stepped ahead and opened the back door of the nearest cruiser. The tinted windows cast a sick gray pallor over the grimed plastic seat cover in the back.“Watch it,” warned Booth. “Those doors are smaller than they look.” Booth violently pushed into the back of the car. Jake caught the side of his head on the top of the door frame and started to curse, but bit it off. That would be just like putting sugar on top for them. He rolled to his side, then started to sit.Jake touched his temple gently, checking for blood. The door slammed shut, blotting out the too-bright sun and making the back seat feel like solitary. It smelled like sweat and dirt inside, only just kept clean enough. Outside, Slats yelled something and the engine revved up. “Goddammit! I’ll have your head for this!” He was talking to dust by now.Jake removed his jacket. The back of the car was warming quickly in the September sun. It would be oven-hot in a short time. Booth and the other guy didn’t seem to mind. They probably even had air conditioning up there. Asking them to route it to the backseat would only have brought a black laugh. Just sit and sweat.The mountains and plain flashed by. Joshua trees stood out on the sand like packs of untidy and flightless birds. He saw the charred spot where he had to smoke a gang a while back. Gila Monsters, they were called. They all wore black-and-yellow-banded jackets, and fought pretty well for ghouls. In the end though, all that was left was the black spot where their ’18 Rustler exploded. Incendiaries kissing the fuel system. Even the burnt-out chassis was gone, sold for scrap by some opportunists. Nothing lasted out in the desert. If scavengers didn’t pick apart the wreck, the land itself just swallowed it.Jake leaned back and closed his eyes, trying to drive away the throbbing that split his skull. The sunlight was relentless, smashing through the fingerprint-smeared windows. It was the first time Jake had ridden in the back of a cruiser as a prisoner. The ride to Joshua Tree was too long. --Joshua Tree Station was huge and imposing. Its walls towered on the south side of the sixty-two and dared a look, much less a challenge. Back before the Secession, it had been a large, if not misplaced, industrial park of slab concrete and right angles. The network of buildings had all been filled in, making something not unlike a hive, cobbled together out of what had been available and then painted over in the same desert tan to try and enforce a sense of cohesion. The older chain link had been replaced by reinforced concrete and razor wire. Every corner had an observation station with cameras and men hidden behind five centimeters of ballistic plastic. Below them hung a 30 millimeter chaingun which was more than enough to deter your average troublemaker. Cal-Intercept had little opportunity to use their toys. Nobody in memory had ever been stupid or suicidal enough to attack the station directly. Even when the Feds rolled past, they never rolled downrange.Sunlight shone through the tangled razors atop the wall, reflecting off a thousand edges. The massive front gate rolled back and admitted the cruiser. A figure waved from behind the bulletproof glass of a tower as the slid behind the walls. The California flag and that of the League hung listless in the still air of the compound, trapped between gusts of wind. They kicked up in time with the whine of a helicopter warming up. Dust flew across the landing pad as the bug lifted off, tandem rotors slicing through the air.The cruiser stopped and the two cops up front climbed out. Booth stood there smiling behind the door that opened, a pair of cuffs in his hand. They jingled enticingly.“Guess I forgot the jewelry.” He frowned sheepishly.“I never knew you felt that way about me,” Jake said. “First date and all.”“Out, pucker-puss. Hands behind your back, nice and slow.”Jake tried to place the accent. It was vaguely eastern, flattened in the wrong places. Not uncommon, but not all that common out here, either. Lotta people in California who weren’t born out here.“Hope you like it rough,” he said as the cuffs bit into Jake’s wrists.A few of the technicians milling about the yard stopped and watched as Booth hauled in his catch. Jake tried to relax as he was tossed around, knowing that clenching up was just going to make it hurt more. The two stoic figures posted by the door dropped their duties long enough to turn their heads and watch the full show as it passed by.He kicked himself for not having Slats just take him right in, but doing things the easy way had never come naturally. Through the dim hallway, Jake saw a pool of light surrounding a desk. The attendant was hunched over, occupied in some task, face lit from beneath by a green-white slatescreen which made him look like a comic book villain.Jake smelled the coffee spilled all over the desk as it soaked into the workpad. The attendant cursed bitterly and threw a soaked paperback book into the precycle can where it made a soggy noise. The desk-slave didn’t look up until Booth shoved Jake into his workspace.“What is it?” asked the attendant, watching with bloodshot eyes rimmed in green. The irritation of the lost coffee and book had pushed him from impassive and detached to seething rage at anyone within reach.“This here’s the flag that Daniels wanted. Culver’s his name.” Booth took off his glasses. Jake saw colorless eyes, like bleach.The guy mouthed the word scowled haughtily as if Jake was a turd that refused to flush. “Take him right back. No waiting.”“Aw,” Booth whined. “I was hoping to visit interrogation for a little while.” He tugged on the cuffs, hard enough to catch wrist bone. Booth started dragging Jake back through the halls. The attendant watched them both as they left. He’d never seen a real flag this close before. They didn’t look so tough.The tiles were bureaucratic off-white, dingy and in bad need of scouring. Scuff marks and dust coated the floor, obscuring the original color with a muddy haze. Cameras set at junctions scanned the halls silently, save for the faint whine of servos in need of oil.They stopped in front of a door with a frosted glass pane that read, “Neil Daniels, Captain. Sixth Desert Precinct” in freshly painted letters.Jake remembered Payson’s office. It had been little more than a closet, but he had a view of most of the surrounding area through the windows. That made him feel like he was on top of it all. He had filled the office with all sorts of loot from the wars that he had fought: Colombian rifles, the cornerstone of a Baghdad mosque, half of a shattered swastika, bronze stars and tassels of colored silk like Christmas ornaments without a tree. The Eagle flag hung beside the door, huge as the night sky, though the field of stars was yellowed and old then.Tucked almost invisibly among all that junk was a portrait of Captain Payson’s family. It was a tiny monochrome that seemed puny and insignificant among all the grandeur of the Federal States of America and the ghosts of its wars. Jake somehow resented that. That the man’s family was such a tiny chunk of his life that they only took up a corner on his desk.Booth knocked on the door. The frosted glass made a sound of breaking ice.“Open,” came a big voice from the other side.Booth opened the door and stood beside it. He gestured to Jake with his standard-issue cleft chin and then pointed into the office. Jake walked in, watching the camera watching him with a fish-eye.The room was deceptively small, furniture augured into place. There was a huge screen at the back of the room that was so big that the room must have been constructed around it, or maybe it was just fabbed and then assembled past the door. It felt like a phone booth with a desk and a viewer jammed into it.Looking at the figure behind the desk, Jake realized that it wasn’t that the room was small. Rather, the man who occupied it was huge. A mountain of flesh, a hundred forty kilos, maybe a little less. He was sitting, which made it difficult to gauge his height. He was fat, but there was enough muscle left on him to make someone think three times about a casual cross.Captain Daniels wore his thinning hair short and kept the rest of his dome shiny. His face was big and heavy, features that could have been used to scour rock to powder. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead and glistened in the light of the overhead lamp. Daniels was an unattractive man, but nobody was going to tell him that. He looked at Jake with hunter’s eyes. “Shut the door,” Daniels snapped. Jowls shook visibly when he talked. His voice seemed to come from under the ground rather than out of his mouth.Jake looked over the desk. There was only one thing on the billiard-green felt: a folder with a yellow note tagged to it. The note said EXT-RENDITION in block letters. That word ran through Jake like a bullet. “Take his cuffs off, Booth,” Daniels growled. “You weren’t ordered to restrain him.”Booth looked away quickly. “Given his record, I thought it…”Daniels interrupted angrily. “You aren’t paid to think. Take. The cuffs. Off.” The asshole was unspoken but rang in the big man’s voice. Jake rattled the cuffs behind his back and didn’t smile.Booth acted his part pretty well. His eyes never left the ground, scolded schoolboy style. The show was nice, but it was nothing new. Jake had run it himself back when the job was more arresting and less shooting. Booth shoved the key into the lock as hard as he could, trying to get a final twist in. “That’s home all right,” Booth breathed.There was a click and the bracelets fell to the floor. Jake took his wrist and started rubbing the pain out of it. He ignored the freshly abraded skin tags the metal had left.“Not used to being on the receiving end. Huh?” Daniels smiled at his own observation. He leaned forward and flopped the file open, watching Jake as he did so. There was a huge band of sweat down Daniels’ back, though the room was cool enough.He cleared his throat, then spoke. “Culver, Charles Jacob. Born Aurora, Colorado. Enlisted Federal States Security Police at age seventeen.” His dark eyes narrowed. “You lied about your age?”“Yes.” Jake’s answer was flat.“All eager and willing to serve, huh?” Daniels smiled a mocking grin. “Showed exemplary behavior in the Denver chapter of FSSP. Twice decorated: Bronze Star and Eagle Wing. Very nice.” Daniels read it off without looking, as if he’d spent the hour previous memorizing the thing. Jake was staring straight ahead, conscious of Booth’s eyes on his neck.“Trained in combat driving, blah blah blah. Oh, this is good. Ran remote surveillance and recon on the White Lightning out in the Rockies.” Daniels pursed his lips with malice. “We were short that week and I used to hunt up there with my stepdad.”“I heard they were real mean.” He scowled, fit to spit.Jake struggled to remember something distinctive about White Lightning. They were one of a large number of neo-fascist revolutionaries who had made a bid for power while the government was out to lunch. “Right America is White America” got shouted and painted up a lot back then. And while they might not have had a brain to share amongst themselves, they were smart enough to ride resentment and to pick easy targets. When you’ve got nothing and people come along offering you a way to get something, even that seems like a square deal if you don’t think on it too closely. The best thing about them was that they were rubbed out now.“Nobody’s mean when they’re being cluster fucked by a couple of s-wings,” Jake said drily. He’d been up there in the scrub pines, painting their compounds with infrared lasers. All humans on the triggers, no mistakes, no hijacked remotes. “Ain’t that the truth,” said Daniels. He made a hawking noise, but didn’t spit, just rolled it around under his tongue. “Exemplary service until you made looey. Friction in your platoon. Bucking orders. Redirecting lethality. Here’s the part that I like. July seventh, twelve years back. Failure to report to post. You disappeared with a cruiser full of equipment. Like the wind.” Daniels scratched his thinning hair as his brow wrinkled. His hand came away moist and he wiped it absently on his seat. Jake’s guts churned a little, old ghosts filling him with acid. “What’s your point, Captain?” The curiosity was a sharp edge in his voice.Daniels closed the folder like it was radioactive now. “The point is that you’re wanted by the Federal States for theft of military property, desertion, and failure to appear on said counts. “They want you back.” Daniels looked across the desk. His dark eyes were set too deep in his fleshy, slick face.