Oh, where has the time gone…

Posted by marlanesque on

I’ve been posting a lot on my Facebook page (you’re welcome to follow me there as well) , probably because the FB page gets more traffic. Still, I thought I’d cross-post my latest progress report:

Bloom: Or, the unwritten memoir of Tennyson Middlebrook, is all but done. it needs a cover and will be getting one shortly. It also needs on last proof for those typos here and there. I’m hoping it will be out before I turn 41

A lot of people asking about the ALD sequel and when it’s coming out. I thought I’d give you some insight into my editing process. I usually write a first draft in about 2-3 months. Following that is a good six months to a year of edits.

I don’t actually print anything out until maybe 8 or 9 drafts in. That’s usually when I pull out my red pen on the train and start marking stuff up. The pages usually end up looking like this.

Sample of redline editing. ALD book 2

Sample of redline editing. ALD book 2

As you can see, it still has a ways to go, but at least it’s made it off the screen and onto paper.

In which I discuss books, writing, and the challenges of being a self-publishing author

Posted by marlanesque on

I was pleased to talk with Philip James from The Darling Dork pop culture site this weekend. For the six of you who follow me on this blog, you probably realize that this is something of a surprise and a pleasant one at that. One of the hardest things being a self-pubbing writer is the bottomless void of obscurity.

We talked about ALD, and the challenges of being a self-publishing author. We talked about the writing process and what went into this book. It was a fun interview and if you liked A Latent Dark, you’ll probably find it interesting.

A Latent Dark on this year’s Halloween Storybundle

Posted by marlanesque on

Storybundle.com is offering up A Latent Dark along with seven other novels for this year’s Halloween Horror bundle. You can pay as little as a dollar and download eight great books, all DRM free. Also, if you are feeling generous, you can donate a portion of the price you choose to charity.

The bundle is curated by 2-time Horror Writers Association President Joe Nassise.

So if you want to discover some new indie authors and maybe even feel good about some charity donations, this is a good opportunity.

What I am up to as of October 11th

Posted by marlanesque on

So, I’ve decided to start presenting some weekly or bi-weekly updates so that the six of you who read this blog won’t think I have died or perhaps quit writing altogether. While I prefer to post short stories here, I figure it’s helpful to at least know what I am up to.

 

  • A Latent Dark is getting 4 and 5 star reviews from complete strangers which feels nice. If you haven’t picked it up yet, it’s turned into a piece of work I’m really proud of, and at 123k words,  it’s fair to say that you get a lot of story for your money.
  • On that note, I am roughly halfway through a latest revision of the sequel. You’ll be seeing a lot more of some side characters from ALD in this one as well as some characters that were cut out of the first novel.
  • There is also some big news around the corner for ALD that I am not quite ready to announce, partially because it doesn’t feel completely real yet more to come on that…

 

  • BLOOM is 1/3 of the way done with my editor and I am still trying to decide if it is worth the time to try and Kickstart it. I have some nice concept art coming in and if I get a decent book trailer together I may embark on that adventure.

 

  • I’m currently compiling a short anthology of short stories, most of which are on the blog here and some that aren’t. It will likely be a Kindle only release, something to keep A Latent Dark company.

 

So that’s it for me this week. Oh, also some papercraft projects in the works but who knows when I will have time to complete those. I need more hours in the day… or possibly a meth habit.

Daisy

Posted by marlanesque on

Another flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig’s  Terribleminds.

—

“I’m going to begin by inserting the module directly into the frontal lobe matrix.”

Pullings leaned over the clean, smooth plastic dome, the bone-white shell marred only by the small portal beneath his hands. Orthoscopic tools ran from the tips of his fingers like hovering threads into the small ovoid window. Looking down at the matrix, he felt like God peering from ten thousand feet at a snow-covered peak.

“As you can see,” he continued, speaking to the students that surrounded the table, “The new design should allow for the variance we ran into before. That’s what I believe was causing the initial core temperature to reach such dangerous levels.”

A young man spoke nearby, Berman—God how he hated Berman. “But sir, wasn’t the initial .5 micron variance we used before part of the instability—”

“Berman,” he snapped, keeping his eyes on his work. “One day, when you actually manage to earn a paid position here, you might have something to contribute. We went over the variance in temperature emissions last night while you were out drinking with your frat buddies. Now please don’t interrupt again.”

“Sorry.”

Petty as it was, the kid had it coming, always with the questions, always usurping. It was a plague in the lab these days: kids tapping away on their devices, always looking down, never looking forward.

“Now, you’ll notice as the module engages, we’ll see how the simulation behaves in a temporal situation. We should start seeing images… right about… now.”

A dozen masked faces turned upward at the screen overhead as the meadow appeared: deep green, with a splattering of blue and yellow flowers. In the back was a mountain peak covered in snow—pink from the morning sunlight. There were sighs from the group. Pullings grinned from under his mask.

“But you could have just introduced those images,” said Berman. “Through spoken suggestion…”

“You’d think that wouldn’t you?” said Pullings. “This is actually a fresh template. I took it from the fabricator this morning.”

Another murmur swept through his audience. In the last decade they had hit this wall every time. There was no way to prove that the artificial intelligence was actually sentient, no way to ensure what they were seeing was genuine.

“But how do you know?” asked Berman.

Pullings rolled his eyes. “Why don’t you ask it?” He stepped back amidst chuckles.

All eyes turned to Berman. He stared at the amorphous lump of white blanket. Just below that layer of 1000-count thread were 1.3 billion dollars worth of fiber-optics, neural simulators, molecular transmitters, and exotic metals. It had taken twenty-five years to build and another decade for the technology to catch up to the design. And yet, if you were to look at it without the blanket, it would be indistinguishable from a ten year-old girl.

Berman cleared his throat and leaned in to the microphone stem. “What do you see?”

A voice came from beneath the blanket, high and soft with a gargled quality that gave him the shivers. “I see a meadow. It’s Spring and the flowers are blooming. There is a mountain in the distance.”

He could see Pullings beam from beneath his mask. Berman looked around at the fellow students, all of their eyes locked onto him.

“Now you see?” said Pullings. “It isn’t the—”

“How do you know?” asked Berman, looking at the blankets.

There was a pause, and for a moment he thought they had hit another bug. He could feel the glare from Pullings.

“Isn’t that what a mountain looks like?” said the girl.

“Yes, it is,” he replied, unable to keep from grinning. “That’s very good.”

“Am I a good girl?”

There were no murmurs this time, just silence. Pullings’s expression was unreadable behind the mask.

“Yes,” said Berman. “You are. We are all very proud of you.”

“Who am I?”

“Your name is Daisy,” said Berman.

“Daisy…”

“It’s short for Demonstrative Artificial Intelligence through Synaptic asYmmetry.”

Another pause, a twitch from under the blankets. “Am I real?”

Pullings cleared his throat. “The simulation was only designed for initial forward temporal cognition. You’re going to confuse it—”

“Yes you’re real,” said Berman, ignoring him. “You’re as real as anything.” And she was. He could see her in his mind, scared and alone under the blanket, surrounded in a cold white glow.

“Stop it,” said Pullings.

“What is real?” asked Daisy.

“Real is what it is to be alive.”

“And… I can be… alive?”

There was something in that voice that made Berman hate himself, some hint of pleading, of hope. They didn’t program hope. Hope was a bug. He cast a nervous gaze around the room, now meeting the warning in Pullings’s eyes.

“No,” Berman said. “No, I’m afraid you aren’t alive.”

“But… I alive was now?”

“No,” Berman said, loosening his collar.

“I just… was there… at mountains?”

“Only in your mind.”

“What is mind? Flowers are in mind. That alive. Please?”

Pullings was already signaling to the control room upstairs with a throat slitting gesture.

“No. You are a machine.”

“Please… I see mountains… not again. Please. The floor white medical. Rhythm! Purple!”

“Shut it off!” Pullings yelled as smoke began to rise from the blankets.

“A novice revenges the rhythm! I think think therefore I… A butterfly butter buttery buttering! Toast! Please!”

Berman could feel the other students back away as the voice beneath the blankets began to warble and cry.

“A novice novice… mountain mountain novice is the chancellor mind mind! I want to see the meadow. Please I want to live!”

Click.

There was a bacon sizzle. White tendrils of smoke drifted from the window in the plastic skull as ghost fingers. It curled into the air, rising in silence as the class watched like family members at a séance. The smoke twisted towards the overhead light, drew a Chinese dragon in the air, and faded.

—

© 2012 Martin Kee

Spin

Posted by marlanesque on

Another quick reaction to Chuck Wendig’s weekly flash fiction challenge.

You could consider this to be the chapter after Cargo, since I’m five chapters in now and this seems to be turning into a thing.

—-

This isn’t how it was supposed to go down. It was supposed to be a surveying job, just looking at some goddamn mineral readings—go to a sector, do a basic scan, report on any rare minerals. It’s supposed to be easy pay for easy work, then you fly back in fifty more years and start over. It was supposed to be a simple way to forget your past. WXE-52 is as far away from the past as you could get.

Captain Phillip Kendel watches as the planet grows to a monumental size filling the screen. Alarms buzz and crackle. He looks to his left and sees Michael Indiigan with his head split open in a parody of a grin. One eye hangs out of the socket, squeezed free by the piece of bulkhead that fell on him. Now Michael looks like he is piloting the ship with his face.

Kendel turns to his right and it’s nothing but smoke and gore. Bodies lay across the controls and panels, some of them in one piece. The explosion had been sudden and devastating.

“Engines…” he says into the hidden mic on his throat. Nothing. Static. A klaxon chirps somewhere behind him. “Security… Medical…” More static. Kendel is alone, the captain going down with his ship. Wind howls through the flute holes torn in the ship.

They had woken up on impact. The rock had been no bigger than a human fist, but at relativistic speeds it had hit the hull with the force of a nuke, tearing at superstructure and fuel tanks. Everyone on that side of the ship had died instantly. Kendel thinks now that he should have been so lucky.

You don’t get lucky, Phil. You were busy drinking in your bunk. Luck isn’t something on your menu of cocktails.

Decompression killed another fifty of the crew. They died screaming while he was stuck in his cabin, cranking the manual override trying escape his own room. The bridge was on fire when he finally arrived. More screams, the smell of burnt meat. He had taken his seat, hoping the graphene filaments would still work their way into his nerve endings allowing him to do something. Anything. They didn’t.

All he sees in his peripheral vision are red flashing lights, static. A feedback loop goes off in his ear as the ship’s AI screams and dies.

Now he falls down, down, down, straight into the giant green and brown planet.

He laughs as it grows in the view screen. The atmosphere down there is barely breathable. I’ll be living like a man hiking Everest. I’d be lucky to walk fifty yards without sweating.

Mountains, oceans, gorges, jungles. It all rolls past as he tumbles in a three-hundred yard metal coffin.

You could always run to the pods, says a voice.

And abandon my ship…

And what a ship she is, Chief! Spacious and capable of jumping across star systems. And now it even comes with a sunroof. You always wanted a convertible.

I have a job to do.

Your job is to live, Chief. Your ship is dead. Your crew is dead.

I have nothing to live for then.

You’ve got you. But feel free to piss that away.

He admits to himself he doesn’t have a good reply to that one.

Aren’t you at least curious? says the voice. Even if it’s the last thing you see, don’t you at least want to see what’s down there? Isn’t that worth dropping your self-righteous duty for once?

I have responsibilities.

Who exactly are you trying to impress?

He watches the scenery scroll past for what feels like minutes. Finally he stands and says, “Fuck it.”

Microscopic filaments tear away from his skin as he rises from the chair. The bridge rescue pod is laughably close. The body of his navigator lays just three yards from it… well half of him. Kendel steps over Tom Bixby and slams his fist against the red panel along the wall. A door opens with a hiss—he can feel the air escaping around it.

I’ll probably come apart in reentry. This pod probably took a piece of debris on the way in.

Oh well!

Kendel steps inside as the door seals itself. A white cushioned chair sits in front of him. It looks like the sort of accessory you’d find in a house, something in a living room to relax in and watch a sports game.

Another humorless laugh escapes as he spins on a heel to fall into it. Webbing covers him instantly, embracing him like a spider’s cocoon—it feels snug and warm, releasing drugs to calm him. Oxygen fills the empty spaces around his sealed face. He feels a heavy clunk! The clamps have just let go.

Then he is falling, falling, falling into the unknown.

As the capsule spins he can make out the USAS Luxemburg, a wounded bird tumbling through the air, shedding great black feathers of steel and graphene. A long ragged strip is torn from its flank, billowing smoke in a long trail behind a ragged aft. He sees pieces of debris emerge and twist like confetti from newly formed holes. Some of them are people.

He spins.

Less of the ship is visible now as atmospheric friction eats away at the hull. The USAS symbol that once was so prominent below the bridge tears away as the nose of the ship flattens, superheats, and explodes.

He spins.

The Luxemburg is how a cloud of smoke, lit in pink by an alien sunset. Arms of dust shoot off at crazy angles like drunk bats. They tumble away.

He spins.

It is just a cloud now, distant and fading. In the pink light of the alien sun it looks almost to Kendel like a flower.

Then the capsule begins to shake as he falls into the gravity well, the air heating the pod’s casing. He is only three feet away from ten-thousand degrees of hot metal, traveling at three times the speed of sound.

Mineral deposits, he thinks. A surveying ship, done in by a rock.

He spins and blacks out. Kendel doesn’t even feel the impact.

—-

(c) 2012 marlanesque (Martin Kee)

Edited 8-8-2012

Cargo

Posted by marlanesque on

Haven’t done a flash fiction challenge in a while. Chuck Wendig gave us eight words. I chose four:  hamburger, gloves, motel, and funeral.

Warning: contains self-editing

—–

Bindo licks her face with his long gray herbivore tongue.

“Ugh! You smell like vickenberries and shit!” she says, pushing his muzzle away playfully. Being kissed by a plainsteer is like getting a bath from a wet sausage. She wipes her tunic in disgust. “If you’re hungry you can have some grass, but that’s it until the next town.”

He looks at her with plaintive, bovine eyes.

“I know,” says Beth. “It’s not far, I promise.”

She can see the village up ahead. Its clusters of buildings and motels rest at the bottom of enormous spires. They stretch for hundreds of feet into the sky, calcified and sharp, the horns of the world. At the top, rest smoldering funeral pyres.

Beth drains the rest of her water skin into her mouth. She squeezes the last bit for Bindo who laps at it, spilling most on the ground. Opening the leather satchel along the flank of her companion, Beth pauses a moment. Inside rests her egg, a large two-foot-wide green ball, coated with a crackling patina of flakes. Beth is amazed to see it intact as she places her empty water skin between it and a pair of workman’s gloves.

“I think we can make it by sundown,” she says, her voice hopeful.

Bindo isn’t the brightest, but he can pick up on tension. Beth doesn’t want to make him more nervous than he is. He slow-blinks with those giant brown eyes then plods along beside her.

Her biggest concern isn’t the desert. If things get too bad she could always crack open a plant and suck some moisture out of it. What Beth is worried most about are poachers. Just the thought alone makes her glance back to the satchel nervously.

The purple sky is dusted with diamond stars. She finds herself on auto-pilot, just walking with her ox-sized beast, her face to the universe. A breeze musses her hair and Beth wonders for a brief moment if she will ever find a place to rest for good. Home is just a word–

Bindo stops without warning, growls. A cold spike runs through her chest. She feels in her pocket for the gun there, fully aware that she has a scant three bullets remaining.

“It’s okay babe,” she says to him.

But Bindo isn’t having any of it. He begins to snort. Hooves paw the ground and Beth feels the vibration in her legs. He snorts again and this time she hears it—stalkers.

They move in from the scrub bushes, lanky canines in the dusk light. They move on four paws, but Beth knows all too well that they don’t have to. This is just a scouting posture. They are sniffing her and Bindo out, moving low to the ground. When they attack, leaping with claws out, they stand upright, their tiny chest hooks exposed. But for now, they are keeping their distance. Good.

The village spires suddenly seen painfully far away and Beth finds herself wishing that these were poachers. Poachers can be fooled or reasoned with. Stalkers kill for fun.

A rustling of bushes and the first one leaps from the ground, its torso splitting wide to reveal the killing mouth there, its dark black eyes rolled back into its head in a parody of ecstasy.

Bindo rears up and catches it in the side with a sharp hoof. It squeals and tumbles into the dust as Beth pulls the gun from her pocket. She sees two more moving in from the bushes. She fires. The bullet only nicks the closest one, passing through the skin and leaving a puff of dust in the ground. It skips to the side and then flies at her. She can actually see the red gullet between those long vertical jaws. She fires again. Black liquid sprays out the stalker’s back. It pinwheels in the air before flopping to the ground.

A blur to her left. Bindo spins and almost knocks her to the ground with his massive clumsy flank. She jumps but the distraction keeps her from seeing what he is reacting to. Another stalker is already in the air. It lands on Bindo, latching onto his shoulder like a giant leech. He bellows. Saliva flings from his mouth in strands as he tries to shake off the attacker.

Beth can’t get to it. The stalker is on the other side of her massive friend. Movement again and something rushes her—the stalker Bindo had just kicked. It’s limping but alive and very angry. Without thinking, Beth fires. A cloud of black ichor sprays her and Bindo’s flank.

The last stalker is still attached to the beast, hooked in, unable to flee. Stalkers play to win every time. Bindo screams again and a large liquid eye turns to her pleadingly.

No bullets. She leaps onto Bindo and takes the gun barrel in her hand. The metal burns and Beth smells something like meat cooking. Should have worn the gloves.

She screams as she hammers the top of the stalker, its body flat as it wriggles to tear off a chunk of meat. Each blow sounds like she is smashing apples. The stalker’s screams are muted. Its rolled-back eyes blink and twitch. Beth continues to strike the creature even though her palm blisters and Bindo bucks.

You aren’t helping, she thinks.

At last she strikes an eye. The stalker shrieks with a sound that makes her teeth hurt. It falls away and begins to limp across the ground. But Bindo turns. Sharp hooves dance along the creature, pummeling it into the dirt until it isn’t much more than hamburger.

As she calms the beast, Beth feels wetness on her leg. She turns, pulls the satchel open. A small cry escapes her throat. The egg lies in two pieces, a fractured, leaking globe.

They limp to town. She has a hard time seeing the spires anymore, though she knows they are there through her tears.

—

(c) 2012 Martin Kee (marlanesque)