Marsha > Recent Status Updates

Pay attention to how "swear words" pack a wallop, or how they can fix your character in the reader's mind. It's a good lesson in seeing how all the words you use are bullets, each with its own particular impact. Writing them down affects us, as the originators, and saying them aloud unleashes them to a reality that they won't achieve silently in our own mind.

No matter how low or high a genre may be classified on the literary marketplace, it has something vital about it, and it can teach you something as a writer. Before you toss a "plain brown wrapper" in the trash, ask yourself: Why does anyone get off to this? What do these authors know about pushing buttons that take readers out of their workaday orbit?

When he was done, Sebastian screwed down the cap shook the bottle vigorously and said, "Now I must prepare my sauvegarde."
"Sauvegarde?" Tim repeated.
"I think you would call it your safety net," Sebastian replied, shaking the bottle again and setting off towards the edge of the copse.

The principal was a tall white-haired woman with the lightest skin and eyes I'd ever seen. I hadn't realized it was possible to be that pale. I wondered if she had some rare skin disease and that's why she so rarely appeared before the students. Or maybe she was a vampire.
She held out her hand and we shook. Her grip was firm and her hand warm. Too warm for a vampire.

"Excellent."
I giggled again. No one says "excellent." It's even more injured than "grim." And here was Steffi telling me "spoffs" was crazy. Hah!
"What?" Steffi asked. "What's so funny?"
"Nothing."
"You people are always laughing at me," Steffi said.
"Sorry."
"I'm not mad. It's just so different here. It's hard to fit in when we don't even seem to talk the same, you know?"

Lyra brushed her hand against the child's cheek.
"Miss," the boy said, breaking into a smile.
Immediately bringing her hand away again, she turned to Rust and told him, "Once dawn comes, exile him to a neighboring village." Her experssion was that of a stern and callous warrior.

"Welcome home, dear," Elena said.
Quickly putting the item he carried into a leather bag, the man inquired, "Agnus gone to bed already?"
"Hours ago."
"I guess that'd be about right. What time is it now?"
Elena replied, "Well, it must be around nine o'clock."
"I'm starved. I ate the dinner you packed me, but it wasn't enough."
"Don't you smell that, Billy?"
"A pie?"
"Right you are!"

He looked at me through half-closed eyes. "Why did you tell me that you are a vampire?"
"To amuse you. To intrigue you. To entice you, I suppose. And because I am."
"But you are not," he protested. "You are exceptional, but you are not a vampire. You are something quite else." As he said it, his eyelids closed and his breathing deepened. I let him sleep. As I write this, it is nearly dawn and he is sleeping still.

There are, essentially, two issues to deal with: consent and money. For most people, knowing if and how their tissues are being used in research is a far bigger issue than profiting from them. Yet when this book went to press, storing blood and tissues for research did not legally require informed consent, because the law governing such things doesn't generally apply to tissue research.

One day, around three o'clock in the morning, my phone rang as I slept. Deborah yelled on the other end, "I told you London cloned my mother!" She'd Googled HeLa, clone, London, and DNA, and gotten an online chat-room discussion about HeLa cells: "Each contains a genetic blueprint for constructing Henrietta Lacks...Can we clone her?" She thought those were proof that scientists had cloned thousands of Henriettas.

Carrel was a mystic who believed in telepathy and clairvoyance, and thought it was possible for humans to live several centuries through the use of suspended animation. Eventually he turned his apartment into a chapel, began giving lectures on medical miracles, and told reporters he dreamed of moving to South America and becoming a dictator. Much of white America embraced his ideas and saw him as a spiritual adviser.

Reggie wasn't searching for a replacement. All sorts of people gave him hard ons, some reminded him of Dad, some didn't. The best way to escape society's sexual conditioning, he thought, is to branch out and turn sex into a whole range of things. Dad was a phase, Dad was over, he was worried about what was coming next, just around the corner, arson sex, cyborg sex, plant sex, not some mysterious reappearance of Dad.

"Touch me," Roy says, and Nathan embraces him. He leans against Nathan, who caresses the thick hair at the nape of his neck. He opens his shirt slowly and Nathan feels the strong upsurge of breath and desire, same as the night before; only in the daylight the rich color of his flesh glows, blinding, and when Nathan touches the curves and planes, the sudden rush of heat engulfs them both.

"But aren't you afraid that Hong Kong will be destroyed by the Chinese?" she asked.
"No, no!" Tremble shouted, though twenty minutes later he lapses, as Anglophones always do, into anecdotes, which were so complicated he lost his point, if he'd ever had one other than the desire to show his expertise.

"The Station Inspector's costume was really important. In the script it said he was wearing bottle green, but it just didn't feel right to me. I ended up with a strange color, sort of a turquoise. It's really not an obvious uniform color."

Rumor at school was that he was going to be canned for that one. Mayor Haenkle was pretty annoyed, seeing as how his son's nose was one of the ones bloodied. Mom and Jenny--my younger sister--and I sat up late, waiting for Dad to come home from the city council meeting. It was after midnight when Dad came in the door, toosed his hat on the table and said, "The vote was seven to six, in favor. Dimas keeps his job."

The automaton my father discovered did save me.
But now I have built a new automaton.
The complicated machinery inside my automaton can produce one hundred and fifty-eight different pictures, and it can write, letter by letter, an entire book, twenty-six thousand one hundred and fifty-nine words.
These words.

Hugo headed straight for the shuttered toy booth. He made sure no one was around, and then he tried all the keys on the key ring until he found the one that opened the booth. He stepped inside and egan going through the boes, opening drawers, and flipping through papers the old man kept back there. But there were no clues. Hugo did find one curious item, wrapped in a piece of fabric at the very back of a drawer.

Early the next morning, I found Molly sitting with her back against my locker, looking like she'd camped out in Hemingway the night before. Her hair was pulled back into a messy low ponytail, and her black glitter eyeliner looked smudged, like she'd accidentally fallen asleep with it on.

Molly was not sure how long she had been standing on the downs of Rivermarsh when she realized the melting snow was soaking her feet. Despite the fall of night it was warmer now than it had been earlier, the seasons of Jackals returning to normal. Her body felt strange, as if she was not sure where she began and the Hexmachina ended. The land seemed part of her still.

Oliver looked to where the knight's sacred weapon, Lord Wireburn, lay on a bale of hay. Something about the weapon's voicebox made him uneasy; the sound of all the souls it had dispatched from the world caught within its piercing artificial timbre. Luckily for the Jackelian the weapon spoke rarely.

'He is a joining--a creature formed from steamman cadavers. His pattern has been violated, the architecture laid down by King Steam tampered with. Three souls of our fallen lay trapped within the corpses that make up his body by Onestack's selfish refusal to deactivate. It is a great dishonour for him.'

Once we reached the Path station, I started acting very coy and flirty. I commented on his dark, bedroom eyes and told him how I hated for the evening to end. He said he did also. I took a deep breath, crossed my fingers, closed my eyes and blurted out: "Would you like to come to Jersey with me?"

With each thrust, my balls wanted to crawl up my dick. But after a whole day sitting on that huge dildo, my hole was stretched so wide i wasn't squeezing Sir out. He f**ked me until I was so raw and so desperate my whole body felt like it was on fire.

Experienced Tango dancers tend to favour music that was created by the musicians who played with dancers in mind. The easiest way to get this kind of music is to look for music recorded during the Golden Age by orchestras that specialised in dance music. That is not to say that there is no modern music designed for dancing. The beginner will stand a better chance of finding them by sticking to the Golden Age.

If a young man went to a milonga with a step or two and a lot of hope, none of the women would dance with him, because the room was full of men who were already skilled dancers. To get a woman into his arms at all, he had to be able to dance, and to dance with the most attractive women and the best dancers, he had to be very good indeed.

"Did the turtle itself tell you to give it to me?"
"Must have. I gave it to you, didn't I?"
"And you're sure you gave it to the right person."
"I'm a qualified shaman. I wouldn't make a mistake about a thing like that."
"What exactly would I be supposed to do, assuming I am the guy who is supposed to have the turtle?"
"Don't worry, Neddie. You always worry. A hero knows what to do. That's why he's a hero."

Colonel Ken Krenwinkle was sitting at the next table at breakfast. Kadota Figs with Cream ($0.40), Oatmeal ($0.45), and an Individual Pot of Postum ($0.25). Eloise was with us this time, nibbling toast and sipping tea.

Grimus says: —Thank you all for your efforts. I have derived a great deal of pleasure from watching you. To Virgil, I owe my apologies. I have been playing a game of hide and seek with him. Slightly cruel, possibly, but necessary.

Sit down, Grigor, she said, patting the bed. Is Masha very beautiful tonight? Can Masha ever look beautiful, I wonder, said Patashin, eyes twinkling. Old grizzly, said Irina, you are a master of tact. And you, Irina, he said, you are too wise and composed for your own good. I look into your eyes and see knowledge. I look at your body and see anticipation. You must learn to dissimulate, to show less worldly wisdom.