One Million Beautiful Quotes (and Giveaway)

I love reading individual, isolated quotes from novels, especially when it's a good, strange, or thought-provoking quote that piques my interest. I like to try to imagine how it fits into the overall story. I guess that's why I keep doing these quote posts from my novels. Maybe nobody finds it as interesting at me.

Anyway, I've done enough of these that I thought it might be interesting to collate them all into one mega-post.  Also, click on the pictures for more info about the books.

GIVEAWAY: I've got a few paperback copies of my books to give away. Respond with your favorite quote from this list, and I'll put you in the drawing. You can respond on the blog, on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. If you'd prefer a Kindle copy instead of paperback, let me know. Books will be given away in a couple of weeks (4/15/17).

Mary of the Aether Series

"I don’t want a boring old world where all anyone ever does is grow up and work some awful job for no money and spend Friday evenings watching high school football games and recalling the so-called glory days until they die."

"Nobody really believes in anything. My parents don’t believe in anything. They just breathe and eat and work."

"I don’t want sympathy. Sympathy only makes me mad."

"Maybe if I practice a lot, if I order my thoughts, I can learn to imagine better things. Maybe in time I could imagine anything. What if nothing is impossible?"

"The world just got a whole lot more dangerous tonight. Maybe it always was dangerous, but I didn’t know it."

"I know who I want to be. I want to help and heal, and I won’t let you or anyone else try to change me. I saw what I can become, I saw it, right there by the side of the road."

"I don’t care if anyone likes me, as long as I’m not embarrassed ever again by my own feelings or my own behavior."

“I never want an explanation for any of this. Never. I don’t know what you did. I don’t care what you did. The whole world has gone crazy, and I don’t want to know anything."

"I’ve been selfish. I see that now. I wanted a happy little life, but I was entrusted with this power by people who loved me. I’ve wasted so much time whining when I should have been learning."

"The world will burn out like a torch, but the light will shine brightly, and I will rise like the brightest ember into the stars at the end."

"The world is sliding into oblivion, devoured by shadow, and you are its last light."

Shadows of Tockland

"Destiny, I want to lick your face for all your perfect ways.”

"Mark my words, the ever-night is coming, and when it does, you'll be glad you've got some wild nutters at your side."

"Destiny has a funny way of making things irrelevant. Superior numbers, for example.”

"Far away, far away, blessed one. The ever-night is coming. It is coming forever."

"Tonight is a night you’ll wish you had a gun.”

"Sometimes, rubes don’t think they got their money’s worth, and they try to take it out of us in blood."

"Look, we’re committed to destiny now. From this point on, whatever happens, happens. That’s how destiny works."

Children of the Mechanism

"Open doors are the best thing in the whole world. An open door means you can leave something bad and maybe find something good."

"If you hold on, we will live. If you let go, we will go down, down, down. Do you understand how important it is for you to hold on?"

"I was born climbing the Mechanism. Nobody ever told me why.”

"Where I come from, the higher you go on the Mechanism, the more dangerous it gets. The circles get smaller, and the fall is farther. The world is like that, isn’t it? The higher we go, the stranger, the smaller, the uglier, the more dangerous."

"I walked forever down a hundred different places and saw all kinds of different lights and Watchers with hands, and then I came to the end."

"The world got worse and worse the more she understood about it."

Garden of Dust and Thorns

"The very thing that you took for granted will be your salvation. Never forget it."

"You’ve lived in the shadow of this Garden all your life. And you had no idea what was here. None of you did, not even the caretakers. This will be to our everlasting shame. While we lived outside the wall in the dirt, we had everything we could ever need in here.”

"Persistence is not a virtue. It is a defect."

“Stand on your island, in the shadow of your sacred tree, and watch me defile this ground. And weep, if you will, knowing that your thief-lord’s reign is at an end.”

"It’s a very strange thing to be deceived. A very strange thing."

The Archaust Saga (The Vale of Ghosts)

"Why is it every decision I make seems right one second before I make it and then completely wrong and ridiculous one second after I’ve made it?"

"You crossed the relic wall. The ghosts can see you now, and they will—they will drag you down into the vale, sooner or later. They do not give up."

"As time passes, everything we ever knew or saw or heard, every person we ever touched or loved, they all drop away, leaving us with nothing but the vague and choking need to escape."

"Are we smarter than the generations that came before us? How can we expect to fix a problem that they could not?"

"Our worst mistakes can become the catalyst for our greatest accomplishments, if we are willing to make it so."

“There’s not a worse person in the world than someone who will abandon a friend or family member in their last days.”

 

Dreams in the Void

"Your comfortable life is paid for with the taxes of hard working villagers, so that one day, you might provide just leadership for them.”

"Until a few weeks ago, I thought the world was normal. Then it all came crashing down, and I learned everyone is sick—depraved and sick."

"It’s a miserable thing to be helpful—to be needed, to be essential—and someone can’t see it."

"There is a heaviness in me now, like something coiled around my intestines. I hope to make it go away. I don’t want to feel like this anymore. I don’t want to be the person I have become."

"Sit and ponder, boy. Dream of killing kings."

"And so it comes down to a simple question, young Dekembri. Are we the righteous, or are we the wicked?"

“A storm is coming to sweep away everything. Find a secret place, bury yourselves inside and wait it out. Wait it out.”

Fading Man

"You cannot bury sickness under the ground and expect it to stay there. It will make itself known eventually. It will climb up out of its hole and demand to be seen."

"Nature or fate or destiny has selected us for suffering, and we are to endure it, accept it, take and gorge ourselves on misery like the dutiful sub-creatures that we are."

The Uninterruptible Avalanche of Short Stories

So I've been gradually uploading all of my old short stories from 2009-2010 onto OMNI's new writing platform. It gives me a chance to go back over the stories and make some minor changes. Anyway, they're all fairly weird. I encourage you to check them out. The ones that are currently available are:

Companion - One of my rare attempt at straight-up horror.

Heart Case - This fantasy story is clearly a comment about working a crappy job.

Planet Feast - I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote this one. A pulp sci-fi story.

Grandfather's House - This one has a sort of Twilight Zone vibe.

Profaning the Leistra - This fantasy story is a strange meditation on the meaning of ritual.

Seeing through Doors - Another unusual science fiction story.

Robo and the Little Door - This one could also be a Twilight Zone episode. Who or what does Robo represent?

Eating the Sickness - A short story that inspired some of my later novels, specifically Shadows of Tockland and Fading Man.

More to come. I've got a lot more of these buried in old hard drive folders.

Context Free Quotes

So I've been attempting to do a Quote of the Day on Twitter. Basically, I find one interesting or unusual quote from one of my many novels and post it each day. I thought it might be interesting to see what those quotes look like stripped of their context and source. Without knowing anything else, what do these quotes make you think of?

"One dumb act made in ignorance is all it takes to ruin your life forever."

"Look, we’re committed to destiny now. From this point on, whatever happens, happens. That’s how destiny works."

"The world got worse and worse the more she understood about it."

"It’s a very strange thing to be deceived. A very strange thing."

"I thought the world was normal. Then it all came crashing down, and I learned everyone is depraved and sick."

"The world is sliding into oblivion, devoured by shadow, and you are its last light."

"Our worst mistakes can become the catalyst for our greatest accomplishments, if we are willing to make it so."

"Are we smarter than the generations that came before us? How can we expect to fix a problem that they could not?"

"I walked forever down a hundred different places and saw all kinds of different lights and Watchers with hands, and then I came to the end."

"As she became a part of every single living thing, she realized that every single thing was, in some strange way, reaching out to her, crying to her for purpose, for life, for breath."

"Nature or fate or destiny has selected us for suffering, and we are to endure it, accept it, take and gorge ourselves on misery like the dutiful sub-creatures that we are."

"Nobody really believes in anything. My parents don’t believe in anything. They just breathe and eat and work."

"Tonight is a night you’ll wish you had a gun.”

"My father used to talk about water dreams when I was a little girl, but he said they were rare, and when you had one, it meant someone close to you was going to die."

“This is not death. What new thing is this moving through my body?”

“A storm is coming to sweep away everything. Find a secret place, bury yourselves inside and wait it out. Wait it out.”

"As time passes, everything we ever knew or saw or heard, every person we ever touched or loved, they all drop away, leaving us with nothing but the vague and choking need to escape."

Which of these quotes stands on its own?

To follow the Quote of the Day, head over to my Twitter account: https://twitter.com/jeffaaronmiller

Opening Paragraphs Just Want Your Love

The purpose of an opening paragraph is to quickly pique the interest of readers. There are many ways to do this, of course, but I prefer to open with some indication of the conflict that will drive the rest of the story. A little bit of weirdness, a touch of mystery, a hint of danger, some indication of the setting--if I can work all of these things into the opening paragraph, then I've done my job. Take a look at the opening paragraphs of some of my recent novels, and you'll see this process at work. Here we go:

The Vale of Ghosts (The Archaust Saga Book One)

Ann heard screams through the window, though the shutters had been pulled and latched and a pillow shoved into the space behind it. A tortured scream, the scratchy warbling howl of a monster. She was crouched in the dirt beneath the windowsill, jabbing a crooked stick into the ground between her feet and trying to appear like she wasn’t listening, like she hadn’t a care in the world. A ladybug landed on her knee, and she offered it the end of the stick. It climbed onto the stick, and she held it up into the air until it flew away.

Army of the Inner Eye (The Archaust Saga Book Two)

Enari kicked the coarse wool blanket off the bed and sat up, his head swimming from the lingering residue of a bad dream. Heavy afternoon sunlight filtered through the shutters on the only window in the room, illuminating the dusty air in the clergy house. It took him a few seconds to realize that he was still hearing the voices from his dream, three or four voices speaking all at once, and they seemed scared or angry or both.

Teth of the City

Teth leaned as far over the balcony railing as he dared, feeling the press of the cold metal bar against his stomach, and thrust the hunting pole toward the clothesline. Made of hollow aluminum, the pole was dented in many places, scars from all the times he had banged it on the railing or on the wall. At the end of the pole, a little loop of nylon rope was threaded through a hole. With the pull of a crude trigger, he could contract the loop, but first he had to get it around the head of the line rat. The fat little animal had a long tapered nose, dusky fur, and loose folds of skin that drooped over the sides of the clothesline. But nimble forepaws and a prehensile tail kept it from falling into the hazy, red gloom below.

Fading Man

“There's nothing you can do for her,” Eleanor said, bent over, her hand resting on his shoulder. “It’s the water. The sickness is in the ground water, that’s what they told us. She must’ve gotten into a puddle along the way.”

This technique, if you want to call it that, is evident in everything I've written, going back to my first published novel, as you can see here:

Mary of the Aether

The lunatic in the long, gray cloak dashed out of the forest and ran right up onto the front yard, waving his arms in front of him like a child playing tag. He skirted the porch, paused, turned a complete circle and fell onto his hands and knees. A hood obscured most of his face, but Mary could see the tip of a pointy chin covered in whiskers. She sat at the living room window, leaning against the sill and resting her forehead against the cold glass, transfixed by the sight. The crazy man crawled through the high, unmowed grass, his face close to the ground, shifting back and forth like a bloodhound chasing a scent. He stopped at the driveway, lifted his head and appeared to sniff at the air. Then he scooped up a handful of gravel and sifted it through his fingers.

My goal is always the same. 1) introduce the conflict, 2) pique readers' interest, 3) give some sense of what is to come. Some of my novels are more effective at this than others, of course, but it's a fun little part of writing a novel. Any favorites?

Book Quote Time Is Here Again

The quotes game is one of my favorite things to do on the blog, and I think it might be time to do it again. I pick one significant quote from each of my novels, both released and unreleased, and then you, the dear reader, decide which quote is your favorite. Sound fun? Okay, let's get to it.

"Maybe if I practice a lot, if I order my thoughts, I can learn to imagine better things. Maybe in time I could imagine anything. What if nothing is impossible?" --Mary of the Aether 

 

"The world just got a whole lot more dangerous tonight. Maybe it always was dangerous, but I didn’t know it." --Mary of Shadows 

"I know who I want to be. I want to help and heal, and I won’t let you or anyone else try to change me. I saw what I can become, I saw it, right there by the side of the road." --Mary of Starlight

"I don’t care if anyone likes me, as long as I’m not embarrassed ever again by my own feelings or my own behavior." --Mary of Cosmos 

"Destiny, I want to lick your face for all your perfect ways.” --Shadows of Tockland

"Open doors are the best thing in the whole world. An open door means you can leave something bad and maybe find something good." --Children of the Mechanism 

"You cannot bury sickness under the ground and expect it to stay there. It will make itself known eventually. It will climb up out of its hole and demand to be seen." --Fading Man 

"Your comfortable life is paid for with the taxes of hard working villagers, so that one day, you might provide just leadership for them.” --Bloodstone, Deep Water: Book One

"Until a few weeks ago, I thought the world was normal. Then it all came crashing down, and I learned everyone is sick—depraved and sick." --A Whisper in the Void, Deep Water: Book Two

"The very thing that you took for granted will be your salvation. Never forget it." --Garden of Dust and Thorns

"Why is it every decision I make seems right one second before I make it and then completely wrong and ridiculous one second after I’ve made it." --The Vale of Ghosts

There you go. For the sake of avoiding spoilers, I have not attributed the quotes to their various characters, but they each give you a sense of some important thematic element of each novel. Pick your favorite.

One Million Words

I published my first novel, Mary of the Aether, back in July of 2012. Since then, I have written and published nine more, and I'm currently working on my eleventh. For the record, those novels, in the order they were written, are:

Mary of the Aether
Shadows of Tockland
Mary of Shadows
Bloodstone
A Whisper in the Void
Mary of Starlight
Garden of Dust and Thorns
Mary of Cosmos
Children of the Mechanism
Fading Man
Vale of Ghosts (unfinished)

That's a whole lot of writing, and it's mostly just the result of setting a daily goal for myself. Basically, I force myself to write at least 1,000 words a day, whether I feel like it or not. Most of the time, even if I'm not in the mood to start, once I get into the writing, I enter the zone. What is the zone, you ask? It's the creative head-space where catharsis happens, and it's a good place to be.

Now, my novels vary in length. The shortest is Garden of Dust and Thorns, at 87,000 word, and the longest is Shadows of Tockland, at 120,000 words. But the average length for all of my books is about 93,000. Why are we playing this math game? Because I wanted some idea of the total number of words I've written since I began this novel-writing frenzy.

As it turns out, the combined total is somewhere around 1,023,000 words. Yes, I've written over a million words in the last few years, and I show no signs of slowing down. In fact, the act of writing has become easier and more habitual than ever. I am certainly nowhere near running out of ideas, though I do find myself repeating certain themes and ideas throughout my stories.

For example, here are some themes that I see recurring over and over:

The dangers of bad leadership: Shadows of Tockland, Bloodstone, A Whisper in the Void, Garden of Dust and Thorns, Children of the Mechanism

Desperately trying to fix damage done through poor decision-making: Mary of Shadows, Mary of Starlight, Fading Man, Vale of Ghosts

Being destroyed by one's own obsessions: Shadows of Tockland, Fading Man

Being compelled by grief and loss to accomplish some great task: Mary of the Aether, Bloodstone, A Whisper in the Void, Garden of Dust and Thorns, Children of the Mechanism, Vale of Ghosts

Faith in a power greater than yourself: Mary of the Aether (whole series), Bloodstone, A Whisper in the Void, Garden of Dust and Thorns, Children of the Mechanism, Vale of Ghosts

There might be other major themes that recur throughout my novels, but those were the ones that came to mind. Anyway, I have no lack of ideas for novels yet to come. The one I'm working on now, Vale of Ghosts, is the first volume of a series, so I will be in that world for a while. And it is a very interesting and dangerous world, let me tell you.

But Why Did He Fade?

The first piece of fiction I ever got published in any professional capacity was a short story called Fading Man. I had originally written it as a creative writing assignment for a college class in the Fall of 1994, but it got a good enough response from fellow students that I thought it might pique the interest of an editor somewhere.

Eventually, it appeared in a now-defunct magazine called Starblade sometime in 1995. I was paid in contributor's copies (2, to be exact). Although it was exciting to get published, when I went back and read the story, I was embarrassed at the poor quality of my prose. My writing just didn't live up to my imagination, so I didn't show the story to very many people.

Fading Man the short story was set in a vague post-apocalyptic version of Tulsa, and it told the story of a man named Joe who has disjointed memories of a place he once lived. He can't connect the memory with the rest of his life, so he is trying to get back to this place, driven by a need to understand himself. Along the way, of course, terrible things happen.

Anyway, despite being not particularly well written, the concept of the story stuck with me over the years. There was something about it that really resonated with me, so occasionally I considered how I might turn the thing into a novel.

Fast forward to February 2014. I started working on a new novel, a young adult novel called The Figment Tree. At the time, for various reasons, including a short-lived job that was a horrible ordeal, I found that the tone of The Figment Tree wasn't a good fit. It was too lighthearted, too much of a coming-of-age tale, and writing it wasn't cathartic.

When my mood and the tone of a novel I'm writing are in opposition to each other, it becomes like nails on a chalkboard. I needed something a little darker and more emotionally exhausting, something that mirrored my true state.

Now, by this point, I had already written Shadows of Tockland, which is set in a bleak and dangerous post-apocalyptic version of Northwest Arkansas. I began to see a connection. Maybe the world of Cakey and the Klown Kroo was the same world as Fading Man.

That gave me my inroad, and the novel of Fading Man began to take shape in my mind. It became a story with a bit more complexity, not the story of a lone man but the story of a relationship, not the story of a man trying to figure out who he is but the story of a man looking for a destination where everything will finally make sense.

What I ended up writing, thanks in large part to my mood during the first half of 2014, became rather bleak but hopefully compelling. It's not, by any means, the lighthearted story that The Figment Tree would have been. But I hope it will resonate with people.

It was a profoundly cathartic experience for me. I used to long to sit down and work on it, and there were specific scenes that I yearned to get to during the process. Whether or not readers take to it, this novel will always mean a lot to me.

Anyway, we shall soon see. Fading Man is now available in paperback and soon to be available as an e-book. In fact, you can read a free sample here.

Fading into Tockland

So here is how it all went down...

Sometime in the near future, there was a meteor shower one crisp autumn night, but these were no run-of-the-mill meteors. These weren't the kind that streak across the sky for a couple of seconds like a shimmering green fire before burning out. No, these rained down upon the earth for days on end, and many of them reached the ground, causing widespread devastation. The areas hit worst were Siberia and the Pacific Northwest.

Massive loss of life and the destruction of cities and infrastructure had profound consequences, but, truth be told, if it had only been the meteor shower, the world might have recovered. Oh, it would have taken many years, and scars would have remained. But the world might have rebuilt.

But, in a truly strange twist of fate, there were living organisms on some of the meteorites. They were burrowed in deeply, but they must have been incredibly resilient to have survived the vacuum of space and the intense heat upon entering the atmosphere, not to mention the impact of hitting the ground. But survive they did. We can theorize that the meteorites might have been the pieces of a destroyed planet on which these little organisms lived. But how can we ever really know?

They resembled nematodes, parasitic roundworms. In the larval stage, they are microscopic, but as they grow, they become visible, tiny little wriggling shapes, purple and shiny. They were not designed for life on our planet, but they adapted quickly.

The parasites found their way into the waterways and formed colonies. From these colonies developed queens, large and bloated creatures with long tentacles, and the queens began to eject larvae by the thousands. Rivers carried the larvae far and wide, and people drank the contaminated water without realizing they were ingesting their own madness and death.

The larvae first latch onto the inner lining of the small intestine. As they grow, they work their way into the bloodstream and slowly travel to the brain. We will never know what their original food source was on their home world, but on earth, they loved human brains the most.

Common symptoms of infected people include severe anxiety, fits of rage, uncontrollable outbursts, flu-like body aches, sensitive skin, paranoia, and confusion. Eventually, inevitably, the worms kill the host, and unless they are close to their queen, the worms also die. This is not, after all, their home. They are struggling to survive just as much as we are.

The brainworm plague hit at the worst possible time, as humanity was struggling to rebuild. It sent the world into chaos. Governments fell, cities were emptied, crime and desperation tore nations apart. And it was during the years of chaos that the great emperor arose. As the story goes, he was the self-appointed general of a ragtag militia formed to protect villages from bandits. But from humble beginning, he rose to become a great conqueror.

He was called General Mattock, and his empire was called Tockland. At its peak, it stretched from the Llano Estacado to the Ozark Mountains and north deep into the Great Plains. Somehow, the plague was almost nonexistent in Tockland, while it raged in the surrounding nations. How could anyone stand against him?

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the backdrop of both Shadows of Tockland and my next novel, the upcoming Fading Man. More to come soon. Stay tuned!

What's in a Chapter Title?

It's always interested to me when a novel contains a table of contents. Seeing all of the chapter titles before I've read the book always makes me speculate and try to predict what I'm in for. Of course, some chapter titles contain obvious spoilers, which isn't a good thing. But sometimes you can get a vague but intriguing sense of what's in store from reading the chapter titles.

To that end, here are the chapter titles for my forthcoming post-apocalyptic novel, Fading Man. What sort of sense do they give you about the story contained inside?

Chapter One - Admiral Vinegaroon
Chapter Two - Pradeep
Chapter Three - All Places Are Bad Places
Chapter Four - Hasty Retreat
Chapter Five - Desperate Measures
Chapter Six - A Warm Welcome to Tulsey Town
Chapter Seven - Secrets and Souvenirs
Chapter Eight - Shadows and Substance
Chapter Nine - Kingdom of Sickness
Chapter Ten - Cities of Ruined Flesh
Chapter Eleven - A Brutal Philosophy
Chapter Twelve - Hell to Pay
Chapter Thirteen - Break It All Down
Chapter Fourteen - A Fearful Gathering
Chapter Fifteen - Standing in the Way
Chapter Sixteen - Dead Inside
Chapter Seventeen - The Heart Gives Up
Chapter Eighteen - From Water to Dust
Chapter Nineteen - The Desperate and the Dying
Chapter Twenty - Pieces
Chapter Twenty One - Darkness and Light
Epilogue - A Place beyond the Horizon

There you go. There's your table of context for a novel you've never read. But based on those chapter titles, what sort of story would you expect to encounter?

In other news, here is a recent article about Children of the Mechanism. You might as well check it out, unless you've got other business to attend to. In which case, go right ahead and attend to your business.

Don't Get Too Excited or You Might Burst into Chunks

So I just finished the first pass through my latest novel, Fading Man. That means revisions and rewriting, which means fixing typos, filling in plot holes, deleting unnecessary or repetitious text, adding things here and there. I also added an epilogue to tidy up the story a bit. The ending was too dark for my taste, so the epilogue gives a little burst of light right at the end to send the reader skipping merrily on his way.


As it turns out, 2014 is shaping up to be a rather prolific year for me, in terms of writing and publishing novels (if not so much in terms of sales or publicity). I have already published two novels this year. First came Mary of Starlight in February, the third volume of my young sdult series. Then came Children of the Mechanism in March, a science fiction story. In September, the fourth and final volume of my Young Adult series, Mary of Cosmos, will come out. And then hopefully by the end of the year, Fading Man will also come out (assuming I get the revisions done in a reasonable amount of time).

That's a whole lot of writing and publishing in between bouts of playing MMOs. I'm not sure what I'll work on next. I've got a couple of novels sitting in a folder that I've started. One of them is a young adult novel about a kid living in a trailer park who one day befriends a strange super-dimensional being that lives under the trash in a corner of his bedroom. Yep, you read the right. It's called The Figment Tree, and I've already written the first 20,000 words or so. The second novel is perhaps even weirder. It's about a boy who lives alone in a giant gray house with a sentient robot toy. Outside of his bedroom window, he sees only endless fog stretching out forever. That one is called Voices in the Gray House. I've only written the first chapter of that, but it's based on a short story I published a few years back. We'll see if I feel like finishing either of them. I always have to work on something that lines up with my current mood. I'm weird that way.

Anyway, let me give you a tiny sample of each of the novels I've either written or published this year, just so's you'll get a taste of 2014. Here we go.

Mary of Starlight

Chapter 6: A Sea of Blue and Red

         Pain stabbed into Mary’s shoulders and down her back, that old familiar pain, and with it, a great wave of exhaustion washed over her. A million twinkling lights filled the black canopy around her. Stars like she’d never seen before, the great hazy trail of the Milky Way, constellations she had no name for, and the sliver moon resting in the midst of them. She would have sailed up there forever, two hundred feet above the earth, with the wind in her face, and her hair whipping out behind her, but she could only fly for so long. She needed rest, so she cast her gaze to the dark landscape below and looked for a safe place to land.
          She was in the middle of nowhere on the eastern edge of Texas. She had passed a tiny one-stoplight town some miles back, but there was nothing now but a hint of trees and hills. On the horizon, she saw lights, a kind of shifting haze of red and blue, very far away but beautiful and strange. She knew what it was, of course. How many times had she seen such lights? Police cars, possibly other kinds of emergency vehicles, stopped somewhere up the road. Mary came down gently in the middle of the empty highway, touching down on the asphalt so softly that she did not make a sound.

Children of the Mechanism 
Part Four: Feeding the Grong

          Kuo sank his hands into the meat trough and scooped up a large mound of the damp, gray paste. He brought it up to the lid of the trough and dumped it into the plastic bucket on the floor between his feet. Some of it slopped onto the floor, but Kuo was careful to pick up every little bit and flick it into the bucket. The grease ran between his fingers and dripped onto his feet, tickling his toes. When the bucket was full, he grabbed the rope handle in both hands, set his feet farther apart, and rose. The bucket was heavy, but Kuo was strong. The only risk was losing his balance.
          Kuo turned, saw the line of feeders moving across the room, saw the Watchers beyond them with their mouthless faces and bent arms. Oh, the Watchers were always nearby, weren’t they? Always staring, staring, staring, and sometimes Kuo thought he knew what they were thinking. They looked past the other feeders and fixed their black eyes on Kuo alone.
          “I know what you’re doing,” Kuo muttered. “I can read your minds. I know you’re playing the game with me.”

Mary of Cosmos 
Chapter 1: The Long Awakening

          It took five days of healing to get her right eye open, another three for the left. Five more days passed before her hearing returned, and the first sound she became aware of was the creaking of her shattered bones coming back together. She had the unfortunate pleasure of listening to the bones mend over the next two days, and only then did she manage to raise her right arm. She held the hand over her head, trying but failing to flex her fingers. The ring finger and thumb were still broken, pointing in wrong directions. It took another couple of days to fix that. And finally, a week after her fingers mended, her spine came back together and she managed to sit up.
          She had fallen a hundred feet and slammed into the side of an oak tree. That single blow had shattered most of her ribs, snapped her spine and broken her right arm in three places. It had also sent her spinning wildly another thirty yards into the forest, until she finally hit the ground and rolled, fracturing her skull, eyes sockets, breaking her legs and feet and her other arm. After that excruciating ordeal, she had finally come to rest under the low branches of a pine tree, buried under a mound of debris that her tumbling had kicked up.

Fading Man 
Chapter Thirteen: Break It All Down

          Joe hurried to catch up to the others, though his back and ribcage still hurt from the fall. But the terrible sounds blasting out of the open vent suddenly quieted, as if someone had covered the hole. Joe glanced back and saw a misshapen lump squeezing itself out of the opening like some formless flesh struggling to be born. The shape shifted and revealed a crooked head, shiny gray skin swelling out of what might once have been a human face. A single eye, pale as a chip of ice, rolled about until it found Joe. Then the gray skin parted to reveal a toothless mouth, as red and angry as a wound, and the scadgling began to wail. The mournful sound carried out across the river and filled the empty lands beyond.

Joe drew the .38 out of his pocket and pointed it at the scadgling. It ceased thrashing, and the wailing sound faded out like a siren running out of batteries. The wound-mouth closed, but that single eye kept staring.

“Don’t follow us,” Joe shouted. “We don’t want to hurt anyone. We just want to leave.


So there you go. A delicate sampling of everything I have thus far either written or published in 2014. And which one, O Reader, piques thy interest most? In other news, here is a recent interview I did with Ten Minute Interviews. Go check that out for no particular reason, if you don't mind. I mean, you read all the way to the bottom of this blog entry, so you're clearly someone who is willing to read long, rambling things. And I applaud you for that. I truly do.

The Fading Man Has Faded

Well, I recently finished the first draft of my latest novel. I am currently in the middle of The Great Slog, aka revisions. Here's the thing, sometimes when I finish a first draft and I go back to do revisions, I am greatly disturbed at the low quality of the prose. I mean, it's never as good when you go back and read it for the first time as you thought it was when you were writing it. However, Fading Man turns out to be better than I expected. At least in terms of the prose.

We'll see how the story plays out. I'm a little concerned at the bleakness of it. Yes, the man who wrote Children of the Mechanism, where kids are being dragged down refuse holes by dead-eyed robots, is concerned about the bleakness of his latest novel. But here's the thing, I always want to give some amount of hope in anything I write. We'll see if I managed it this time around.

What is Fading Man about, you ask? It is the story of a guy named Joe Mund and his troubled wife, Eleanor. Joe has memories of a place he's never been, a city called Verum. He has spent years trying to find this place, and his journey has finally taken him into a plague-ridden wasteland called Tockland, where the water is poisonous and scadglings roam the ruins.

That's not the official blurb of the book. It's more like the set-up. Now, as I mentioned in a previous blog entry, this novel is based on a short story I wrote when I was 20 years old. It is interesting to see how the 40 year old version of me approaches the same story. In the short story, the theme was all about trying to find yourself and figure out who you are. In the novel, it's more about the long-term damage caused by an obsession with self discovery. Perspectives change as we get more decrepit, I guess.

Anyway, I should have a free sample in a few weeks.

The Ongoing Prancery of Pradeep

Well, I'm still working on my next novel, Fading Man. I'm about 45,000 words in, which means I am slightly less than halfway. I just got done with a passage that was dark and troublesome with a lot of skulking through underground tunnels and cities. There's a kind of steampunk vibe in parts of this novel, which is a genre I am modestly fond of. Mostly, however, it's just post-apocalyptic decay and ruin.

Since my last blog entry, I have written the following chapters:

Chapter Nine: Kingdom of Sickness

Chapter Ten: Cities of Ruined Flesh

Chapter Eleven: A Brutal Philosophy
Chapter Twelve: Hell to Pay

There are so many flat-out weird characters in this novel that I can't wait for reader to meet. I've already mentioned Pradeep, who is my favorite, but the beautiful duo of Hilda and Billiam are the latest. They are just delightfully hideous.

But this novel is not all about ruined cities and hideous people. Thematically, it is more about the emotional wreckage that comes from a relentless pursuit of self (or perhaps instead of "self" you could say "identity," "meaning," "contentment"). If I pull it off, a certain point in the story should be obliterative.

I really like the word "obliterative."

In other news, Mary of the Aether, my first published novel, was the Indie Book of the Day for April 2, 2014. Here is the actual award:

Click it to go to the award article. Anyway, it's nice. I guess I can now technically call Mary of the Aether an Award-Winning YA novel and not be lying. So I shall. In fact, henceforth, I shall include the term "Award-Winning" in every single reference I make to the book, so brace yourselves, people.


 

The Wonderful World of Pradeep

So my latest novel, Fading Man, is a few months from completion, at best. I'm almost 30,000 words in, which is about a fourth of the total story, depending on how much I digress and detour along the way. Despite this, I just have to say I'm really feeling the vibe of this one. Though the characters are very different, it has a lot of similarities to Shadows of Tockland. There is definitely a rising and relentless sense of peril, punctuated now and again by acts of desperation and violence.

I've written eight chapters so far. They are:

1) Admiral Vinegaroon
2) Pradeep
3) All Places are Bad Places
4) Hasty Retreat
5) Desperate Measures
6) A Warm Welcome to Tulsey Town
7) Secrets and Souvenirs
8) Shadows and Substance

Just like Shadows of Tockland, there is a certain point in the book where everything just goes absolutely violently insane, and the story takes a descent into madness. Not literally, because none of the major characters are actually insane. Though a few minor characters certainly are.

However, with all of the crazy stuff that happens, I think and hope that it is the emotional core of the story that will ultimately resonate with readers. The relationship between the main characters is on a clear trajectory, and if it works, it should be the thing that really sticks with people. We shall see.

Anyway, I've got a long way to go, but I'm getting there, day by day, a thousand words at a time. This one's got post-apocalypse, environmental devastation, hideous underground people and weirdos aplenty. Just you wait and see, people. Just you wait and see.

In the meantime, here is an article I wrote about my previous novel, Children of the Mechanism, in which I expound in a little more detail what I wrote about in a previous blog entry.

Isn't It about Time You Got to Know Pradeep?

Well, I'm working on Fading Man, my latest post-apocalyptic adventure novel. I'm only about three chapters in, but it's shaping up to be a possible magnus opus. I know I said that about Shadows of Tockland, but there is something so profoundly significant and personal about Fading Man.

When I set out to write a novel, any novel, there is always some emotional subtext driving the story--or, more accurately, driving the author. Whether or not that emotion comes through in the story itself is never a guarantee. But I can say that if Fading Man ends up reflecting the driving emotions and mood of the author, it will cut pretty deep.

At the same time, the story has a certain beautiful strangeness. Just look at the chapter titles. The first three chapters are titled: 1) Admiral Vinegaroon, 2) Pradeep, and 3) All Places Are Bad Places. That should give you some sense of the strangeness.

In other news, Children of the Mechanism comes out very soon. Both the e-book and the paperback will be available on March 5. I am interested to see how people react to the story. It's quite a bit different than Mary of the Aether. I don't want to scare people away from it, but my wife's response after reading the first draft was, "this is really bleak."

Of course, it also has memorable characters, some really intense scenes, and I think it's ultimately a hopeful story (as I believe all of my stories are ultimately hopeful stories). But we shall see how other people feel about it.

As a final bit of news, I updated the Mary of the Aether page with a bit of temporary graphics for the fourth and final book, which comes out in September. If you've read the first three books in the series, then you can go click on the picture for Mary of Cosmos and read a sample chapter.

And that's all for now. It is super later (or super early, depending on your point of view). Good night/morning.

Fading Man

So for a while there I was working on a new young adult novel called The Figment Tree. It's actually based on some characters I created when I was a child, though the storyline was significantly altered from my more simplistic childhood notions. It's a fun story about a sad young man living in a trailer park who befriends a nine-dimensional being. Yep, you read that right. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. It gets weirder.

Anyway, I think The Figment Tree has the potential to be a pretty good story, and there is certainly a compelling emotional subtext. However, after a stressful month, I was struggling to get back into writing it. Honestly, I was not feeling the tone. I needed to work on something that was more in line with my current mood.

So I decided to abandon The Figment Tree at around 24,000 words and start another novel that I've been thinking about writing for some time. It's called Fading Man, and it's actually based on a short story that I wrote back in the day.

You might remember that my novel Children of the Mechanism (which comes out very soon) is based on a short story I wrote in college called Stick Boys. Well, before I wrote Stick Boys, I wrote a short story called Fading Man. It was the very first short story I ever published, appearing in a long-defunct magazine called Starblade circa 1995.

Well, Fading Man the short story is now the inspiration for Fading Man the novel. I can't tell you much about it at this point, but I'm certainly digging the vibe a lot more. You've got to write what you're feeling, I guess. Anyway, here are some things I can tell you about the novel that you might find interesting.

It is set in the same post-apocalyptic world as Shadows of Tockland, though it is about completely different characters. No, Cakey will not be making an appearance, though if you've read Shadows of Tockland, you'll recognize some places and names. It is the story of a man with mysterious memories looking for a lost city. He is accompanied by a troubled woman named Eleanor, and lots of crazy things happen along the way.

So there you go. That's what I'm working on now. Even with all the SEO writing I'm doing these days, I should be able to hammer this one out because I'm really feeling it.

There you go.

I sleep now!