Pick up the Kindle version of ¡Reconquista! at Amazon. A paperback version is in the works. There is also reconquista.pub that has all the books and more!… Read the rest
Tag: fiction
Happy 2019!
And to start off the New Year, I’m experimenting with Instagram. Here are a few Sedona images:
[wdi_feed id=”1″]Meanwhile, here are my current projects for 2019:
Quintessence of Rust (QOR): Post-apocalyptic and post-cyberpunk novel series set in a future world devastated by climate change. Begun in 2018, I expect to complete the first book by summer 2019. Here’s a sample:
… Read the restThe jungle is so overwhelmingly alive some days that the air is a vibrating green shroud. The vines strangle up through the canopy trees towards a wan shimmer. The heat becomes toxic where the gray skies break through and the violet and rust of the fungal mounds heap like domes. A low drone warns of bloodsucking swarms of gigantic flies, startling the naked rodents out along paths and down through root mazes into protective huddles in the cooling mud, while the women stoke smudge fires and call the painted children close. And then the sound passes, and the clucks and snorts begin again, at first with hesitancy against the silence of the moist envelop, then more, and then with greater intensity, until the music of the day is restored. The hunters return by lunch to await the afternoon rains that slide and drop in pachinko-ball rivulets through the thousand feet of piled and layered life.
Fifty feet up, where the tree splits its ancient trunk into three equal parts, atop the accumulated detritus of hundreds of years that became yet another pad of spongy jungle, the high apartments begin. Layer upon layer of wooden hovels, connected by ropes woven from vine fibers, wedged by pins and slotted bamboo, build like a rectilinear wasp nest, splitting off and then recoupling higher still, for two hundred feet more.
¡Reconquista! at 50K
¡Reconquista! has taken on that magical quality of momentum where it is almost writing itself. Or maybe it’s just that satire, bleak and horrifying, is the perfect mood for the times. These counts do not include early plot development and notes, which read out at another 4K or more, depending on how you factor it.
The analytics put me on an exit trajectory around mid-August.
¡Reconquista! Cover Art
Barely 10K into writing and already the cover art muse has struck:
Against Superheroes is live on Amazon!
Grab a copy immediately if you must, but there will be a five day promotional give-away of the Kindle edition starting tomorrow. If you prefer print, the paperback edition should be available in a day or two.
This is the first edition and it is trimmed down from a rather portly initial cut, though it still runs to 300+ pages. The metanarrative that was removed will be available in the second edition. And then, I imagine, there will be the extended cut with additional excised spelling mistakes or something…… Read the rest
New Covers for Against Superheroes
Some new cover options for Against Superheroes are below. The previous, darker option remains front and center based on initial focus groups:
Signals and Noise, Chapter 00011110 (Pregnant Logos)
The spirals again. Zach was back in a deprogramming room trying to recall the previous twenty four hours, the week, and the year. A thin rubber belt spun the red spiral in the glow of lights emanating from behind him. The walls were white and with the regulation textures of modern drywall, unlike the SCIDE installation in the reactor. There were other signs of middle-class Americana, too, like the shadow of a lamp Zach thought he had seen at Ikea. The spiral was the least interesting thing in the room and he tried to move, but was stopped by firm strapping on his arms, legs, and his forehead.
Not this again, he said loudly. The spirals don’t do anything.
Quiet, except for the faint hum of the motor powering the rotating infolded circles.
Is anyone here? he asked loudly, then yelled a haphazard help that emerged truncated because of his inability to stretch his neck as he raised his voice.
Aphrodite spoke from behind in the dark. Hey, hey, cool it, calm down, Zach. The spiral stopped and she walked into the light and pulled the Velcro holding his arms and head and legs loose with quick sawing noises. He rubbed his arms and asked her How long? How long have I been here?
Just a few hours, she responded. Let’s go meet everyone. Glad you’re back.
She led him into a common area that was more modern than the decrepit nuclear facility. The people were more polished, too, and older, ranging from the early teens to the twenties. Many were dressed in combat fatigues, but with distinctive SCIDE patches on their arms.
Is this place new? Zach asked after Aphrodite.… Read the rest
Signals and Noise, Chapter 00010100 (Deprogramming)
A spiral is an ancient symbol—a snake, an eye, a womb—and a hypnotic focus for mesmerizing the compliant into a hypnagogic state. A spiral is a flow into a singularity. A spiral is a whirlwind. The spiral before Zach’s eyes was generated by a light projector, he knew, and by a filter that was spinning before the projector. He focused and heard only a faint dripping. The fuzziness was falling away from him like he was shedding a cocoon, though, and he soon felt bindings of his arms behind him, metallic and cold, mirroring the cold of the room around him. The spiral was spinning gently, like a pinwheel in a breeze, and Zach found it comforting. It was a flow into a black hole, the negation of everything material, yet the lines of flow never altered or diminished, but extended into forever. A cold universe, empty of the luminous, yet beautiful in its existence, is still cold, he reasoned as he felt the chill rise out of the chair, into his damp back, and his arms. The spiral kept spinning with clockwork regularity.
He finally heard steel slide against steel and a light bloomed to his left, incandescently warm and yellow. A human shadow marched in and stood quietly before him. He didn’t speak at first, waiting to try to see who it was, though suspecting a female form from the subtle hints of hip and slender arm as the shadow moved around him. She slid into the light of the spiral and he recognized Aphrodite from the beach, her hair tamed slightly by a band compressing the afro into three cottontail puffs, above, left and right. She finally spoke, low and even, declaring him cleansed and purified.… Read the rest
Teleology, Chapter 1
A sense of purpose is a hard-fought and hard-learned achievement for anyone, but for a twin it is always overshadowed by a sense of duality. Shared reference points—languid and lazy summers, tiny tragedies—dodge and weave together and remembrances are broken into equal parts of self and mirror self. Was it his observation or mine? Who made the comment and why? Since the twin is an ever-present reflection, the narratives of shared discovery from the earliest days mask differences.
Mom calls to us as we look for satellites between Jupiter and Mars, “Harold! Mike! Time to come in now!” The damp summer grass is at our back. Just audible, beneath the chant of crickets, is the murmur of cottonwoods at the edge of our yard as a breeze crawls up the canyon.
“I got one. North to South,” my brother says and swipes at the stars with his hand.
“Where?”
He points again and I ease my head over to his shoulder to try to line up with his fingertip.
Finally it resolves for me as I defocus and refocus my eyes: a pinprick of light in the indigo sliding between the silvery weave of stars.
“Spy satellite. Polar orbit,” I say. I try to imagine the view from the satellite, as if I was a hitchhiker holding on to the solar panels and looking down at the dark Earth below. Dish antennas rotate and twitch, seeking out radio signals far below the faint splashes of city lights. Space is cold and quiet, even the wind tamped out, until…
Mom is calling again.
It is the summer of 2002 and Harry and I are both 10 years old. We live in Santa Fe, New Mexico and our lives and our purposes are unremarkably simple.… Read the rest
Signals and Noise: Chapter 00010101 (Ennui)
What does one do when one is only living? What does one do when there is nothing to be done. Waking back to the abandoned reactor was already boring after only one night. It was late in the morning judging from the portals of light in the hall outside his cell. He was famished and athirst as he walked down to the central room. Only a few children milled between smoldering fires. He could smell food, though, and followed the scent. It was bacon, he thought, and his mouth began salivating. He hardly ever ate bacon, but he often craved it. He found older kids cooking in a functioning kitchen, though they had converted the sinks into fire pits and were toasting bread and frying bacon in iron skillets thrust into the hot coals. He waited in line for a helping and gobbled it down with his hands off the tin plate that they handed him. He looked behind the cooks and saw several large, blue coolers filled with milk cartons, eggs, and slabs of meat on top of mounds of ice. Zach thought that they must have brought that in this morning since there was no electricity at the facility.
A boy approached him as he leaned against a wall and drank deeply from the cup of milk that he had been given. You a hacker? the boy asked, stammering and averting his gaze just a bit as he spoke, then raising his eyes directly towards Zach until Zach returned the look. Yeah, I spose. Why? Oh, dunno. I’ve never touched a puter, he said, seeming proud of his accomplishment. Really? Zach asked. How long you been here? The boy grinned at him.… Read the rest