one more draft…

no real excuse for the lack of content recently. we’ve all got jobs and families and all those things. i’ll just say i’m gearing up to get back into the swing of things soon.

this weekend i received a review over at Dark Wolf Fantasy Reviews. a number of items didn’t work for Dark Wolf, but again, this is all about seeing the positive and negative, and I’m thankful for the honest commentary and the clarity around what didn’t work and why.

and they very well would have been the death of me if not for my wife, who finally told me to stop tweaking and start sending. even so, i had the selfish gall to give her a bit of an attitude about this being the only chance i really had with each of these agents, so the letter has to be perfect, researched, fine-tuned, etc., and various agents have various preferences for queries and how hard it is to get everything summarized and effective and clear and…

i know, i know, talk about childish. i don’t deserve her.

thank you, mary, more than i can say.

so, it’s been more a week and a half since i wrote anything vaguely creative, but last night i jumped back on the wagon, solely due to a friend who asked after the work i’d been doing. i’d previously been telling him how important it’s been for me to write for even a mere five minutes, and how it’s kept me going for the past several years.

well, when he asked yesterday, i was forced to admit i’d failed in that practice recently. he understood the pressures of office work and house re-siding work, etc., but it galled me to say that i couldn’t scrape together even five bleeding minutes to put pencil to paper. later that day, i made a pinkie-promise (which was new to me but is, i think, the result of his having children and me not) to do my five minutes that night.

but it almost happened again. mary was asleep, i had turned off the downstairs lights and computer, locked the doors, brushed my teeth, and was headed for bed when i realized i still had not written. yes, i was tired; yes, it was late (for me); yes, i had a thousand un-creative things spinning in my feeble brain; no, i didn’t have any clear ideas. fortunately, i remembered the promise and so what? wasn’t that the point? to do it anyway?

so i trumped back downstairs and did it anyway. and the ‘it’ in this case, went from five minutes to a half hour, and looks like the first several paragraphs of Book 2. i think i’m back on track.

to my friend, i give thanks.

yes, it’s been quiet here. don’t get me started. anyway, hit a bright spot in my email last night, when i received the Kirkus Discoveries Newsletter for May, and there, at the top of the list, was Witness!

the review is the same as I listed elsewhere, but now it’s out on their site, all official-like!

Check it out!

obviously, i’m still behind on the daily story. did get the weekly up, though.

the house work (roofing and siding) has taken more of a toll than expected, both in time and body. did something seriously un-cool to my neck and upper back this weekend. however, looking to get back on target with the writing this week, one way or another.

“Exquisitely thrilling as this riveting banter isn’t,” Manadan prissed, “might we please hurry it along?”

“Nevermind, Jimsa,” Gupti apologized, shrugging through the grate. “It was a bad joke. Can we get our weapons?”

Jimsa eyed him suspiciously for a moment, then seemed to give up and slid back behind the crate.

“Jimsa?”

“Eh.”

Manadan took a breath, but Gupti held his hand out to wait.

“Come on, Jimsa. We need our weapons. We’re late for duty.”

“So.”

“So, we’ve got to get moving. The captain is already angry at us for being late.”

“And whose fault was that, again?” Manadan’s stage whisper, full of snidely false curiosity, covered Jimsa’s response.

“What did you say, Jimsa?”

Jimsa mad a rough barking noise “Jes’ like I sprek. Body don’t care.” His pale arm flopped above the crate and waved dismissively. “Gan whicha.”

Gupti glared at Manadan, but kept his voice quiet.

“Jimsa, please. I’m sorry. I’m listening.”

“Nuh-ah.”

Manadan opened his mouth again, his eyebrows tight with frustration, but Gupti covered it with his hand. Leaning in close, he whispered very quickly and very firmly. “Go wait upstairs!” Then he turned the little man around like a doll and pushed him slightly less than gently back down the corridor.

Manadan did not reply, and he only paused slightly, before moving off the way they’d come, Gupti returned his attention to the grate and the reticent armorer.

“Yes I am listening, Jimsa. Please, just give us our weapons and we’ll leave you alone, okay?”

“Alone?” Dry breath rattled in a dry throat. “Alone?” His face appeared once more beside the crate and his round eyes fixed Gupti squarely. “We’re never alone.”

Gupti leaned back in mild surprise. Jimsa was not entirely squarely tied on, as it was said, but solitude was his one known pleasure. That was partly why he’d been assigned here. He hated being bothered only slightly less than he hated doing what others told him to do. The only thing he hated worse than those two things, however, was not being able to complain to someone about them.

The other reason he was bound within these stony confines was an awe-inspiring knowledge of weaponry. Or a disturbing knowledge, depending upon one’s point of view. As the King’s Guards had seen it when they had installed him some twenty years past, Jimsa was the perfect armorer. His background, whatever it had been, ensured that their weapons were always cared for, always prepared, and always lethal. As the local populace saw it, Jimsa was a bogeyman, an unseen hand whose works wreathed the barracks as a bristling reminder of an angrier past.

“Oh.”

Officer Gerent’s soft, ridiculously insufficient remark hangs awkwardly in the room for a long moment, but I hardly notice; my stomach is sinking into my toes and my mind feels like it’s going numb from the inside out.

Two fee in front of me, a few hard glints of white within the general grey and black shadows are the only discernible evidence of the lunar resorts on the heatmap; empty light reflecting off the rigid glass and steel biospheres. The rest is a dead, charcoal grey, the cold remains of a forgotten fire.

This is impossible.

“This is what I was trying to say. I didn’t do this. I’ve been hacked.” I settle into my chair in front of the screen, keeping Patrick close. I have to get my logs up and make my case as quickly as possible.

Gerent speaks up as my hands lift over the keyboard, his smartly-dressed form stepping quickly up beside me. “Mr. Nemmons, please don’t touch anything.” Despite his movement, his voice is still uncertain, as if the request is actually one which I could refuse.

I know full well that’s not true, but my mouth is already on autopilot. “I’ve been working overtime on a bunch of reports for the office tonight, when all of a sudden the system went out of control and started accessing stuff all over the place.”

“Sir, we need to assess-”

“Dad!” Patrick’s gasp doesn’t cut Gerent off, but actually punctuates the fact that Gerent had stopped speaking mid-sentence.

My mouth shuts as I face the screen again and Patrick reaches forward, tapping the lunar heatmap to the front: cold grey, hard white, and absolute black.

Not a hint of red or orange.

Following him into my office, though, it’s clearly not fine.

“Dad,” he says softly.

The screen is still scattered with the video feeds from the resorts, but they all look empty now; hollow images of shadowed, photo-negative buildings and craters. My heart dips at the apparent evidence sitting on the screen for the police and Interpol officers to see.

Behind us, his uniformed bulk filling the room, Reynolds’ grunt of satisfaction is clearly audible.

A quick glance shows the officer’s summarizing eyes on Patrick, confirming his obvious snap judgement from earlier. I give Patrick’s shoulder a firm squeeze and offer his worried face a half-hearted smile, but it’s as much to fend off my own fears. Officer Gerent squeezes into the small room around Reynolds. It’s already clear he’ll bend whichever way looks best to the other two.