The Write-A-Thon: week two begins

5,100+ words last week on my quest to raise money for this year’s Clarion West Write-A-Thon.  My goal was 5,000 words.

Here’s a taste of the work in progress:

The sun looked to be a white marble that rolled through hard blue skies, an arm’s length above the southeast horizon. It provided wan light and no heat. As the morning progressed, temperatures held steady, as if the earth refused to warm.

Ice crystals covered everything. Tree branches, pushed about by a fitful wind, clattered against each other, sounding like so many giant wind chimes. Even the moisture in the air seemed frozen, as if tiny slivers of quartz floated all about them, glittering in the thin sunlight.

Their own smell, the people and the animals, drifted with them. An airborne blanket given substance by the cold, heavy and sodden, just at the edge of being unpleasant.

“Bailey’s Mill’s just up the way,”Thea said.

Her voice sounded muffled, as if in another room. They rode single file, Thea in the lead, following the trail broken in the thin layer of frozen snow by the wolf pack. Her big yellow dog, running with the pack, stopped to sniff at tracks almost covered by wind-blown snow.

Thea climbed from her horse and knelt beside the dog. “A two-wheeled cart,” she called, over her shoulder.

She and the dog hunched there in the cold, in communion for a time, before she returned to the saddle.

“They’re headed straight for the Mill,” she said. “And Yellow Dog says Dark John’s hungry.”

765 words this morning. Please consider making a donation in my name to the write-a-thon.

The Write-A-Thon is underway

I’m participating (for the first time) in the Clarion West Write-A-Thon.  It’s a fund-raising program to help defray the cost of the eighteen writers attending the 2011 Clarion West writers workshop.

The workshop began in earnest this morning and so has the Write-A-Thon.

Those of us participating have pledged to meet writing goals over the next six weeks and encourage folks to make a donation to the program, if we meet our goals.  I’m committed to write 5,000 a week, for six weeks, toward completion of my steam-punk-weird western novel Boogeyman and hope to raise $100.

If you donate at least $20 toward the cause, I’ll write you into the book as a supporting character.  Check back here, or at Facebook, to see how I’m doing. And drop by the Clarion West website to see how the campaign is progressing.

I plan to post my progress twice a week here.  I did 934 words this morning. Here’s a teaser:

They hadn’t gone another mile before the storm swept in from the northwest, dragging dark, swollen clouds that spit a cold and drumming rain.

What trees there were in this barren place creaked with the weight of accumulated ice. Patches of undergrowth threw back the last bits of daylight, looked like spun-glass sculpture. Now and again, there came the sudden snapped-bone crack of a limb giving way.

Mackie stopped near a patch of trees, waited for Nick and Young to ride up to him.

“We can stop, try to set up the tents.” the old priest had to shout to be heard over the fury of the storm.

“Go ahead, crawl inside a tent,” Young shouted back. “I ain’t going to sit nowhere and wait for that bastard and his monster-man to creep up on me.”

A hooded, snow-white poncho almost hid Young from view. It draped over most of Pinky, too, giving horse and rider the look of a misshapen, two-headed centaur. The ice-skimmed canvas cover snapped and crackled with the wind, loud enough to be heard above the storm.

“Black John has to be handicapped by this, too,” Nick said.

He had wrapped himself in a tarp found in a barn at Bailey’s Mill. It hadn’t done a lot of good. The stiff weight of the accumulated ice across the chest and back of his service coat pressed against him. His gloved hands felt stiff and clumsy. The wind-driven rain had long since battered all sensation from his face.

Young shook his head, sent flecks of ice in all directions. “Ain’t going to count on that. Don’t think you want to, neither.”

An echoing crack sounded, almost on top of them. Pinky appeared to start at the noise, sidestepped to the right. Then the horse staggered back and dropped to his rump. Only then did Nick realize the sound hadn’t been a breaking limb.

It had been a gunshot.

Pinky finished his collapse, rolled to his side, carrying the sheriff with him.

“Damn him!” Young flailed at the frozen ground, struggling to free himself from the folds of the rain tarp. “That bastard Herron shot my horse!”

 

Clarion West Write-a-thon

I’m participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon this year.

I’ll be working on Boogerman, my steampunk/ weird western novel.

All donations support the writers attending the 2011 Clarion West writers workshop.

If you’d like to help, check out my Clarion West page.

At Lightspeed

I wrote first draft of Snapshots I Brought Back from the Black Hole at Clarion West last summer.

The finished story is up at Lightspeed today. It’s an A.I.’s view of the complexities of love, space travel and quantum physics.

There’s a podcast of the story, too, and an author interview that discusses construction of the story.

I’m awfully pleased with this one.  Not only is it a good story, but it led to my invitation to the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers in July at the University of Wyoming.  Mike Brotherton, Launch Pad founder and director, has a cool non-fiction piece — Dividing Space by Zero — in this issue of  Lightspeed, too, on the peculiarities of black holes.

Check it out, if you get a chance.

At Dark Valentine

Good news and bad news from the same source.

The good news — my story, Gossamer Yellow, is live today in issue 5 of Dark Valentine with a fantastic illustration by Jane Burson.

She captured what I had in mind perfectly.  Thank you, Jane.

The bad news — the first anniversary issue for this lovely publication marks its demise.

Publishing these days, print or electronic, is a dicey business.

Thank you Katherine, Joy and Joanne for what you’ve given us.

I’m sorry for the loss.