Sunday, June 24, 2012

Excerpt: Lloyd's A Killer

“You can only hope to be happier. You’ll never be happy.” The alarm clock radio told Lloyd in the early hours of the morning. Gray sunlight spilled across his face and he grimaced at it. He slapped his hand down on the radio and rolled away from the sunlight. His feet found the floor, but the circulation in his long, thin legs was bad. All he could feel was random tingles and aches. He kept his eyes closed because his eyes felt like they were being compressed. Tears bled from his eyes and a shivering breath drained from his mouth.

He was a killer, not of men but that didn’t matter much. Soon enough, he’d be gone with a sledgehammer in his hands, off to knock in the skulls of cattle. Out west, they had special guns that fired a steel rod with compressed air, but Lloyd did it the old fashion way. On hammer. One skull. The cow goes down. His hand ran through his sweaty gray hair. It was thinning. His hands were stiff, rough like rawhide and Lloyd kept flexing them, kneading what little hair he still had. That stiffness didn’t go away. That stiffness turned to sour strain as it crept across his shoulders and down his back. One hand worked through his hair and the other rested on his potbelly. He had stomach troubles. He couldn’t move his bowls easy and he felt like he would be sick at any moment. Lloyd imagined that he would die with his sledgehammer in his hands, knocking out the brains of an old heifer standing in her own shit.

Lloyd gardened. That is, he tilled some soil behind his home, he made hollows in the ground and filled those hollows with seeds. He couldn’t get anything to grow right. He had planted flowers but the stocks bowed over and the pedals turned gray and brown. Most of them died without ever budding. The dead flowers rotted in the ground, putrefied and reeking. He tried for vegetables; celery, cabbage, cucumber, peas. All of it died or somehow became poisonous. Little, red veins etched throughout his plants and they might have been the beginning of his intestinal troubles. Lloyd was a killer. He had no business bringing up life.

He wore an ashen-gray jumpsuit when he smashed in cow skulls. His work was bloody work and his gray jumpsuit was permanently dotted with orange circles of poorly washed blood. He rolled his sleeves up around his elbows, exposing faded tattoos of Spanish slogans written in tight, black, blocked letters. He lit a damp cigarillo that smelt vaguely of spilt beer. He wasn’t a drunk, but he drank. He kept beer on hand and his breath normally smelt of it. He was a killer, but he needed not to think about it.

It was a gray day with streaks of black in the sky. It would rain but not before Lloyd slid his sledge into the passenger’s seat of his old, rusted Ford and then slid himself into the driver’s side. Raindrops dotted the windshield while he was on the road, puttering along while puffing on his last cigarillo. The rain crept on him slowly and his windshield was slick and sliding with the rain before he turned on the windshield wipers. He had been drifting out of his lane without knowing it, straddling the faded yellow lines that marked the middle of the road. Big, swaying trees jutted over the road, obscuring the edges and stealing away the light. Thunder rumbled over Lloyd’s head, sending more and more rain down upon the roof of his truck. The road was bucking him slightly, fighting the frustration between rubber and road.

Lloyd puffed on his cigarillo, biting on the unfiltered tip while his hand wrested with wheel, trying to keep his path true. He pulled the truck off to the side of the road underneath the shade of a bowing tree limb, expecting that the weather would sooner see him crash into a tree if he continued. There he waited, with his sledge perched in the passenger’s seat, for the rain to slow. They might miss him and his sledge at the slaughterhouse, but Lloyd doubted it. He was a killer but he didn’t think that he was a necessary killer.

The rain clattered against the roof of his old, rusted Ford, rattling methodically. Thunderclaps streaked across the sky, jutting like a blue-silver bullet-train. The sky twisted and swirled, black curling into gray and every once and a while, there was a streak of blue-silver lightening. The air was electric and the ground rumbled underneath Lloyd’s truck vibrated. There was a moment where the rain stopped being a sound. It was a quavering in his inner ear. The rain was a throbbing working through his muscles and all of a sudden, there was  a tinny knocking at his truck’s passenger’s side window. Lloyd looked out the passenger’s window and saw an old, black man in an overcoat and a fedora. He was soaked in the downpour, rain droplets beading off his chin and saturating through his clothing. Lloyd leaned over the passenger’s side and opened his truck without fully understand why he did so. Lloyd pulled his sledge over closer to himself, freeing the seat for the old man. The old man stepped into his truck and closed the door behind him.
“Thank you, sir.” The old man said, smiling with a soaked face.
“Not a problem.” Lloyd shook his head slowly and then grimaced at the rain.
“But it’s still good of you.” The old man said, offering another smile.
“Yeah.” Lloyd said.
“It’s coming down, ain’t it?” The old man asked, leaning back in the passenger’s seat and studying the rainstorm. The old man kept his hands folded in his lap. He had a wedding ring on his right hand.
“Yeah.” Lloyd said, stared down the running road which was looking like a painting of a road placed under a stream of running water.
“You’re a killer, Lloyd.” The old man said, still staring down the black stretch of road.     
“What?” Lloyd asked, looking at the old man.
“Just what I said. Lloyd, you are a killer. You have a killer’s hands and a killer’s remorse. You’re a strong man as well.”
“How do you know my name?” Lloyd asked.
“Same way I know you, Lloyd. You are without joy. You are without love.”
“Who are you?” Lloyd said.
“Just a man like you.” The old man said.
“What’s your name?” Lloyd asked.
“Curtis.” The old man said.
“How do I know you, Curtis?”
“You don’t. I just know you. I’ve come along to set things right.” Curtis said and somehow, Lloyd accepted this. He turned his head back toward the rolling rain. It didn’t seem to be close to abating. Lightening flashes licked through the sky, the rain fell and together, they sat and stared out at the runaway world.
“You smoke?” Curtis asked. Lloyd nodded without looking at the old man.
“Mind if I?” Curtis asked. Lloyd shook his head. No, he didn’t mind. The old man fished a soaked pack of mentholated Double Diamond cigarillos. He plucked a damp cigarillo out from the pack and pulled out a golden lighter from his breast pocket. Lloyd didn’t except the old man could light the tip, but he did and smoke issued as he puffed on the filter. 
“American.” Lloyd said, bringing his gaze to the soggy cigarillo pack. It’d been written in English. Lloyd had been used to seeing everything, except for the Coca Cola and Pepsi logos, in Portuguese.  

Sunday, June 17, 2012

The Last Reich - Book 1: Ch. 5

5.
Clod had a girl named Wanda on his lap with her hand in his pants. He had gotten hard, but it was the stiffness reserved for deep sleep. Having a full bladder or a lovely dream. Wanda knew this as much as she knew that playing with the man garbed in black wasn’t a far cry from playing with a stick of dynamite. When she was alive, she had seen Clod’s hand disappear into a man’s chest and reappear with the man’s heart. When she was alive, she didn’t see a human male. She saw a hurricane condensed into the halls of her former whorehouse. There had been a clatter and a crash and that had awoken her in her whore’s crib. She had untangled herself from a fat man who had been too drunk to get in up. She had stopped to empty the man’s pockets and if she hadn’t she probably would have remained alive.

As it was, she stole into the hall with nothing on but a pair of panties. The fat man’s money was clenched in her fist as she hurried down the hall, expecting the commotion to be a rowdy drunk who had too little money and not enough sense to walk away. The commotion kicked up louder and women were screaming. Maybe the drunk had a gun. Maybe he’d start shooting. She hustled along and realized, too late, that she had hustled in the wrong direction. Wanda stopped in her tracks and her fingers went slack, pouring the fat man’s money onto the scoffed wooden floor. One of the men that the whore house employed to keep things civil came flying through the door Wanda was planning to go through. He laid stretched out in a heap of broken door and splinters. She then saw Clod as the hurricane. She saw him throw his hand into the man’s chest and rip his heart out. He flung the heart away and turned toward Wanda. Wanda began to run in the other direction and so she didn’t see the other, Rein, coming behind her. She later learned that Rein hadn’t intended to turn her. He had just gone into a kind of frenzy, tasting a little of everyone. He left her half-drunk on the floor and then took her in when she turned up sobbing and confused one night.

“Pretty, pretty girl.” Rein had said, holding up her cheek and smiling. Rein had given her a still-live baby and she hadn’t felt bad when she drunk it. Rein had told her to wash Clod. She knew that Clod wasn’t a vampire, but she also knew that he wasn’t exactly human. She also knew that she wasn’t allowed to drink him. That was part of the reason she wanted him. When she took him by the hand and led him into a tub, the water turned a deep scarlet. All that blood. It had just dried on his skin and she kept wanting to put her mouth on him. She had blood to drink, but she wanted to know how he tasted. She settled for tasting his skin instead of his blood. She put her head in his lap at first, but got a kick in the ass by Hess, another one she couldn’t drink. It was a senseless bit of meanness and he plopped himself in a high-backed chair as if he were gloating. Possibly, he was gloating. He hadn’t told her to let Clod alone and she had played with men while other men watched before.

Clod’s member shriveled in her hand and she realized that he was looking at her. She didn’t have time to read the emotion on his face. She saw his wide, blue eyes and then he snatched her by her hair and pulled her away. She tumbled to the ground, but he hadn’t released her. He was pulling her, jerking her back and forth and she was afraid that he was attempting to part her from her scalp.
“What is this!” Clod screamed across the room at Hess.
“Somebody Rein made.” Hess sounded scared.
“Back alley trash. I’ve ascended to god-hood and you offer me trash. You’ve brought me whores and vagrants. I do not operate in the shadows, not anymore. You shall not either.” Wanda was sobbing and shivering, but she didn’t attempt to run. She figured that this man, this new man, had forgotten about her and if she attempted to move or fight, he would snatch her life away.
“I’ll  do better. We’ll do better.” Hess said, sounding more and more like a scared child.
“Out in the open. Something shocking. Something horrible.” This new man seemed to have relaxed slightly, although he hadn’t loosened him grip on her hair.
“Yes.” Hess said quickly.
“Children. I want children. The men, with their guns, will come for dead children.” The new man said, drifting off into his own thoughts.
“Yes.” Hess said, just as quick.
“Keep this one. She’ll be a reminder. Never again.” With that, his hand went slack around her hair and he actually helped her to her feet. She wanted to run away at that point but her legs wouldn’t obey her. He turned to her and she knew what he was going to do before he did it. It was impossible to know, but she still saw it coming. He put his hand on her cheek with his thumb stretched out onto the bridge of her nose. It might have been mistaken for a tender touch but all of a sudden, there was a heat like the top of a hot stove. It burned and blistered her skin and when he took his hand away, there was a  black handprint surrounded with deep purple and throbbing red. She knew that vampires could heal, but she also knew that this would never.

No Magic For Luke Peters, Ch. 3

Chapter Three: Luke, Meet Bobby. Bobby, Meet Luke

The old man had started towards the wooden back steps of his house while Luke was still seated on the crabby grass that was his side lawn. The garden hose continued to spread water across the blacktop driveway. The German Shepherd followed suit, bounding at his master’s side with his shaggy, black and brown tail swishing behind him. Luke put his legs underneath him and started after the old man, landing a hand on the old man’s shoulder. Luke had been raised to respect his elders, so the hand wasn’t firm and it wasn’t harsh. It was tentative and coaxing.

“Sir. You can’t…” That was as far as Luke got before the old man’s cane shot into his stomach, forcing all his air out all at once and causing him to double over in pain.

“Damn it. I barely touched you. All you brats are too damn soft nowadays.” The old man said, laying a hand on the brass doorknob and turning it. He swung the door open and pulled Luke along by the collar, spilling him onto the kitchen floor. The German Shepherd came in next, his overgrown nails clacking the dusty-gray tiled linoleum. Lastly, the old man slammed the door, moved around Luke and pulled up a chair at the kitchen table.

“Who are you?” Luke asked breathlessly. He was going to vomit again. He could taste the bile at the back of his throat.

“Christ, boy.” The old man said, picking himself up out of the chair and snatching Luke by the arm. Luke’s feet scrabbled for purchase as the old man dragged him toward the kitchen sink. Luke found it and held himself up as he released into the metal basin. He spat out a slimy string and turned the tap on, washing the bile down the drain.               

“Who are you?” Luke asked again, adding some force behind his words.

“I’m the man that saved your life last night.” The old man said.

“I don’t think so. I was in bed last night.” Luke said, turning to face the old man.

“Your legs turned to jelly? Your chest hurt? Your head feel like someone’s been stomping on it? Your heart pumps blood to the rest of your body. If someone monkeys with it, it causes all sorts of havoc with the rest of your body. The man who did it to you was looking to kill you. I chucked a boot at him.”

“You saved me with a boot? Do you have some medication that you’re supposed to be taking?” Luke said.

“Cute. How about I make swallow your teeth, Pecker-wood. You have two choices here: Believe me and live. Don’t and die.” The old man said, his voice sounding closer to a growl than human speech. What was odd, was that Luke wanted to believe that the old man had saved him last night with nothing but a boot. He couldn’t remember his dream, but he knew that he’d been dreaming. As hard as he tried, all he could summon was two yellow eyes like twin moons behind a film of smoke.

“Who are you?” Luke said for a third time. He found that he didn’t want to say he didn’t believe, because part of him knew that those yellow eyes were real and something had made them go away.

“They call me Perkins. Dale Perkins, but Perkins is fine. That, there, is Cesar.” Perkins said, pointing to the German Shepherd, who had found a corner in the kitchen and curled up with his head resting on his paws.

“Luke.” Luke said. “Why are you saying that someone wants me dead? What did I do?”

“It’s not what you did. It’s who you are.” Perkins said, returning to the drawn out kitchen chair. The chair creaked and shifted underneath his weight.

“Who am I?” Luke asked.

“Unlucky. Somebody pointed a finger at you and decided that you’d make a good guardian.” The old man said, stretching his legs out underneath the table.

“Who did?” Luke asked.

“That, nobody knows. We’re all just pawns on whoever’s chessboard. They’re looking for you to either die or stop somebody from dying.” Perkins said.

“Who?” Luke asked.

“Who knows and who cares. It ain’t my concern to play their games. You listen to me, it won’t be your concern neither.” Perkins said, scratching his fingers through his iron gray stubble.

“That seems harsh.” Luke said, smiling. The old man hadn’t sounded amazed.

“You ever kill a man? You, even, been in a real fight, Luke? You follow them and they’ll let you die and choose another, seemingly at random.” Perkins said.

“If it isn’t your concern, why would you have saved me? Why not let me die?” Luke asked.

“Because I’m such a nice guy. Or maybe, you’ll end up doing a bit of damage after one of them snaps your neck.” Perkins said.

“Damage?” Luke asked.

“None of your business.” Perkins said, a gravelly growl piquing in his voice.

“It’s about me. How’s it not my business?” Luke asked.

“Because I’m the one calling the shots. I’m the one keeping you alive. I decided what you know.” Perkins said. A sneer was stretching across his face, his lips peeling back to show his off-white teeth. 

“I haven’t decided that you are keeping me alive. The most I’ve seen you do is knock me in the stomach and enter my house without my permission.” Luke said, sounding surprisingly calm. Luke and Perkins peered at one another from across the kitchen.

“ I don’t know, but I think that something happened last night.” Luke said, breaking his gaze with the old man. There was a crisp knock at the front door, an affable sound like a delivery man calling. Luke, Perkins and Cesar all turned their heads toward the sound almost all at once.

“Don’t answer that.” Perkins said, leaning forward and gripping his cane tightly.

“People trying to kill me? I’m not even supposed to be here. I’m not going to answer the door.” Luke said. Perkins stole a glance behind Luke and gestured toward something.

“Take that up. Just in case.” Perkins said, suggesting that Luke pick up a freshly washed frying pan, the one that Luke’s father had used to make his breakfast. There was another amiable knock at the front door, sounding slightly more urgent. Luke suddenly distrusted that knock at the door and he snatched up the frying pan.  There was something off about the knock, but Luke couldn’t quite place it. It sounded like someone from Federal Express, but it was too low to the ground, like a knock from someone standing at about three feet.

“Why not just call the police?” Luke said, moving toward a tan, hard plastic phone mounted on the wall. To the left of the phone, there was a white message with the legend ‘Numbers to Remember” scrawled across the top. The first number was for Dr. Anton Burns, the family physician. Beneath that, there was the number to the Lowell Police Department. 

“You try that, Pecker-wood.” Perkins said, eyeing the back window.

Luke didn’t feel that perceived emergency would be taken seriously by a 911 operator, but he also believed that something was happening and he had to get a cop car in front of his house. The amiable sounded at the front door, except it had lost some of the friendship it had promised. There was a note of irritation in the sound. Luke picked up the receiver and dialed the number for the police. He put the receiver to his ear and heard the conclusion of two hard objects, one dry and the other wet. For a moment, Luke believed that it was coming from beyond the phone, but he began to realize that it was phone lines were occupied with the sound of a metal baseball bat caving in a human skull. There was an initial blow and then a weepy, dazed groan and then there was another blow and another. There was a crack and a ring. Beyond that sound, which could only be murder, the irritated knocking at the front door seemed unimportant. Perkins came and took the phone from Luke’s hand. He put the phone to his own ear and then grimaced at the sound. He put the phone back on the hook.

“We can go out the back. If he’s in the front, we leave from the back without him knowing.” Luke said. His voice felt shaky in his throat, but the words came out clear enough.

“That mean that you’re taking this seriously now?”

“That means something’s happening that I don’t like.”

“That’s a start. Look out that window. What do you see?” Perkins said, pointing a finger toward the window looking out onto the driveway. Luke stole a glance, but he didn’t see anything worth noticing. There was the garden hose that he hadn’t turned off yet. There was the barest patch of the house’s side yard. In the distance, there were Red Maples and Eastern Hemlock regaining their leaves from the winter’s frost. There was nothing worth reporting.

“There’s nothing.” Luke said.

“Look closer. You’ll see footprints.” Perkins said. Luke did see footprints, but he had assumed that they belonged to Perkins.

“Your footprints.” Luke said, suddenly unsure of himself.

“If my feet got wet, yours would have too. We were eye to eye, cheek to cheek. There’s a man in the back as well as the front. You seem like a smart boy. Why would one man be loud while the other one stays silent?” Perkins asked.

“Distraction. He wants us at the front door, so we’d have our backs turned to the back door. What if we just leave out the front. Rush past the guy up front.”

“Monkey with their plans. I like it, but the man up front could have a gun. I don’t know about you, but I could never outrun a bullet.” Perkins said.

“Then what?” Luke asked.

“We go straight for the man in the back. Get the drop on him before he can on us. But first, you go up to your room. Get something on other than bed cloths. Pack a bag as well. I’m giving you thirty seconds. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.” Perkins continued as Luke hurried up the stairs, scrambled into a pair of blue jeans and threw his feet into some sneakers. He pulled his bed shirt off and failed to noticed a bead of blood at the exact location that Perkins had struck him. He dumped his school books out of his Army-green book bag and began stuffing in clothes.

“Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven. Ten.” Perkins called. It came to Luke that he was unquestioningly packing away his things to leave to places-unknown with a man he had just met. Why? The only explanation he could come up with was that it felt right. He needed to be gone from this house filled with his dead mother and his crumbling father.

“Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Time’s up, Pecker-wood.” Luke came down the stairs with his book bag slung over his shoulder and the frying pan clasped in his hand.

“I’m ready.” He said, looking down the stairwell to Perkins and Cesar.

“Well, I’m delighted. If we could get going?” Perkins growled, moving back into the kitchen.

Perkins stood at one side of the doorframe while Luke stood at the other. Cesar stood between the two of them, wagging his tails and waiting for the open to swing open. Perkins gripped the handle and pulled it open on the morning light. No explosions or screaming. No gunfire or scratch of metal on metal.  Luke could hear a sparrow chirping in the distance, but that was all. Perkins stepped out ahead of Luke with Cesar trailing along at his side. Luke followed after, closing the door to the house behind him. He was considering whether or not he should lock the door when a young man stepped into vision. He had short, blonde hair, blue eyes, broad, muscular shoulders attached to muscular arms. Luke had taken in all of this, but the young man’s most striking feature was the scuffed, metal baseball bat in his right hand. Luke’s eyes locked onto that, remembering the phone call.

Perkins had seen him in time, raising his crimson cane up to repel a strike from the young man. It was lucky he did, because the strike would have cut straight through Perkins’ middle, blunt instrument or not. There was another strike, sending long, echoing clacks up into the air. Luke was thinking that the cane would snap at some point and the young man wasn’t holding back. One strike and Perkins would be gone. Cesar must have had the same idea as Luke because he launched himself up through the air like a furry bullet. The addition of Cesar had distracted the young man long enough for Perkins to take the offense, cracking him across the face with the length of the cane. The young man was on one knee, a red mark stretching across his face and droplets of blood dribbling from his mouth. His arm was bleeding from where Cesar had bitten him. Perkins had his cane raised up in the air, ready to kill the young man. The cane came down and the young man struck out with the bat, swept Perkins off his feet. Next, he bashed Cesar across the side, there was a loud snap that had to be a rib breaking. Cesar howled out in pain.

As soon as Perkins smacked down onto the ground, he had rolled onto his knees, but by that time, the young man was on his feet, readying his bat to give the same treatment the young man would have gotten a few seconds before. Before he was able to, Luke came with the frying pan. It seemed that the young man hadn’t considered Luke a threat until the moment the frying pan was ripping though the air. Crack. Luke brought the frying pan across the young man’s face and he went sailing to the ground. The baseball bat flew from the young man’s hands and onto the blacktop driveway. Impossibly, the young man was raising from the ground, his face soaked in a stream of blood. The young man’s progress was slow, making Luke wonder if he’d given the young man a concussion. 

“Come on.” Luke said to Perkins, pulling on the old man’s arm. With Perkins on his feet, Luke turned his attention to Cesar who was panting and whining. Luke gingerly put his hands underneath the dog and lifted him up.

“Give him here.” Perkins said, taking the dog from Luke. The two stole down the street with the dog whining in Perkins’s arms.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Analysis: Harrison Bergeron

When reading Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, a number of themes and concepts are introduced to the reader. These themes run the gamut from conformity to desensitization toward violence. I intend to discuss these concepts, as well as to compare the different interpretations of this story.

 The short story starts with a married couple seated and watching television. The husband wears a mental handicap, which makes concentration almost impossible. The wife aspires to be the Handicapper General and they both watch ballerinas dance across the stage. Halfway through the program, a news bulletin announces the escape of one Harrison Bergeron, an athletic and ingenious teenager. Now, depending on how the reader interprets this story, two very different impressions can be derived.

 On one side, the story can have a bit of an elitist point of view. It describes average as being almost mentally retarded and incapable of moral outrage or even have the capacity for understanding human emotion. To be fair, the average American isn’t that impressive mentally or physically (e.g. being average), but when I first read this story, it felt like something a high school math-lete would have written after getting a swirly. It seemed like Vonnegut had a bit of intellectual frustration when he wrote this piece. Don’t get me wrong, it’s well written, but I got an impression from the story that the author had little or no confidence in average America. For example, in the beginning of the story, Vonnegut wrote, “the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.   It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts” Now I’ve worked with the mentally handicapped and I’m pretty sure that they’d notice if there child of fourteen years was snatched away from them. So logically, a person of “average” intelligence would both notice and care deeply if their child was taken away.

 On the side of the coin, it also gives the impression of Orwellion revolution and of hope for people to be the best people they can be. If average is actually a metaphor for accepting the bare minimum, for permitting oneself, to live in the crowd. Then that would make the scene at the end of the story with, Harrison dancing with the ballerina, a demonstration of human excellence, a demonstration of what we all could do if we had the will to. He spoke of the two of them leaping 30ft into the air and of Harrison snapping metal like celery. These are extraordinary things, but with enough will and want a person could achieve these things.

 It also is delivering the obvious message of “Don’t-allow-yourself-to-live-in-the-crowd.” But although, I got both these messages, one of intellectual arrogance and a message of hope, I think it doesn’t have to be either/or. I’ll be the first to say that people from all walks of life can be dumb, but no matter how shallow the gene pool gets, people can still surprise you. Harrison Bergeron. I hope I succeeded in doing that as well as in discussing possible meanings hidden behind the words.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Over a Hundred Posts and Finally....

We've had over a hundred posts, here at the Dark Abby, but finally, we've atained Structure!

I'm not a very disciplined blogger. Those treasuresd few from America and scarse parts of Germany may have noticed that I randomly shoot my entire wod like an over-excited virgin. I, typically, post when I feel like it, which isn't conducive to gaining readership. A party train that shows up whenever it feels like it, is hard to jump on to.

So, with the new features on Blogger.com, I'm taming this party train. I'm still going to shoot my wod all at once, but it'll feel like I'm fucking you all night long. (That's gross, but it's the other half of this metaphor.)

So look out for new posts to come out every Sunday night at 10:00pm (Parific Daylight Timezone: United States)

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Micro-Blog Post: Novel Status

I've recently made it to 23,600 words today on my No Magic For Luke Peters: Luke Peters is in Exiles Custody, Bobby Bland is in Police custody, and Sadie Perkins is soaked and afraid on the side of the Merrimack.

After a wild raid on the home of Sheila of the Wolves, Luke and Sadie were driven onto the street and ultimately into the Merrimack river with Bobby Bland attempting to smash in the windshield on Perkins' truck. Bobby turned out not to be the threat as the mighty Merrimack tossed my characters around like pinballs in a particularly exciting game. I was wondering if it's possible to use a Deus Ex Machina in reverse. 

I used the violence of the river to strip Luke of his allies and to tire both Luke and Bobby so that I could have them confront one another while not injuring one another too badly.