by Nico Photos / copyright 2011

It’s a tongue-in-cheek short-short, a story George Orwell and E.B. White might have cranked out in collaboration, if they had met on an ocean crossing. It’s also one of my personal favorites. I’m pleased to see it’s found a home.

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And in other news, got a chance to look at the preliminary sketches for the Lifting Up Veronica cover by artist Nico Photos. It blew me away, can’t wait to see the finished product.

Just got this final cover art for my short-story collection — Snapshots from a Black Hole & Other Oddities. Tod (Tod McCoy) of Hydra House Books and Chris (Christopher Sumption) are still tinkering with the type face and all the blurbs aren’t in yet.

I know I’m biased, but I think it’s pretty freaking cool.

Great job, Chris!

The book features twenty four stories, eighteen previously published and six brand new tales.

The inimitable Cat Rambo is editor, and the book features a kick-ass cover by Seattle artist Christopher Sumption. Plans are for a launch at Orycon November 11, 2011, in Portland. Hope to see you there.

Every Day Novels, slated to begin publication in January 2012, will be an online magazine devoted to serialized novels. A new flash-fiction length chapter will be presented daily, in the tradition of the 19th century novels serialized in British and American newspapers.

In addition to the serial run, Lifting Up Veronica will be presented in e-book and print formal after the serialization is complete.

In Lifting Up Veronica, Michael Kovac, a sociologist from Ohio State University, travels to rural West Virginia in the summer of 1960 to shoot footage for a documentary during a week-long tent meeting at a Signs Followers church. The Signs Followers are a Christian sect best know for their practice of handling venomous snakes and participating in other potentially deadly practices.

Every Day Publishing also owns and operates Every Day Fiction, where a number of my flash fiction pieces have appeared.

I wrote 5,149 words I like to think I’ll keep and fixed a nagging plot point by changing the gender of one of the characters.  Here’s a taste of the new stuff:

Paulie’s steam whistle shrilled Rolling Dandyman, jerking Proffitt from a nasty  dream. He’d been running through a forest, pursued by wolves, and the vivid scent of the surrounding trees lingered. Hell, he could taste it, too.

Proffitt rubbed at his mouth, dislodged some sort of rough fragment from his lips. Pine bark. He lay curled on his side in the sawdust Micah and the Burley boys scattered about the tent before the night’s show.

Someone had deep-piled blankets over him to protect him from the wind, for he lay in the open. The tent, the clay ovens and all the tent’s furnishings had been removed around him as he slept and he had remained oblivious through it all.

Proffitt felt moisture touch his cheek. All about him, the ground lay covered by an inch or so of snow, excepted for the cleared space where the tent had been. It had snowed in the night and the sky promised more snowfall soon.

The whistle shrilled again.

“Hey, boss,” Paulie shouted. “You gonna sleep all day?”

“God-damn you, Paulie,” Proffitt whispered.

Proffitt shoved his hand from beneath the blankets, rubbed away the sawdust from his hand and knuckled at his eyes. Paulie had gone beyond annoying. If Amelia wasn’t such a draw, Proffitt would just leave the obnoxious little turd to his own business today, not wait to think about it more once they hit the warmer weather they’d find in the southern Union states.

 Proffitt threw off the blankets and pushed himself to his feet. Before he could do much else, the Burley brothers scooped up the first of the blankets and began to fold it. They worked together as if they shared one mind.

“Go get something to eat, boss,” Lee said. He rolled the folded blanket into a cylinder, as his brother picked up the second covering.

“Yeah, boss,” Jake said. “We’ll take care of it.”

One look, two looks if you like, at Marley and Jacob Burley was enough to convince anyone that the brothers could take care of most anything.

The Burleys could stand beneath Proffitt’s outstretched arm without ducking but their chests and shoulders were half as wide as they were tall. Hard, tight and muscled, Lee and Jake could  lift the front end of Proffitt’s motor truck when they worked together. And they did everything together.

Best thing to do right now would be get out of their way.

More coming. Please consider sponsoring my Write-A-Thon efforts.

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 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!”