Just realized I hadn’t posted in over a month before that last E&A update post I just put out. Things have not been happening much around here. Making a blog plan has been on my to do list for awhile now, but it keeps getting pushed down the list and never actually done. I’m going to up it’s priority and get to it. Expect May to be a much more lively month than the last couple have been.
Just wanted to let everyone know that the 10th installment of Empire and Animal is now live. You can find it over at JukePop Serials by clicking here. This is the second part of the fourth E&A story. This current story is called “Empire’s Son” and is all about Kassis, a young man who drinks and gambles too much, and the tensions and secrets in his family.
As always, feedback, comments, criticism, and requests for things you’d like to see in future E&A stories are appreciated. Happy reading.
So more Empire and Animal chapters have gone up over at JukePop Serials. Chapter 7 was released yesterday and I’ll be putting up chapter 8 later this week.
Why am I releasing 2 chapters?
Well, because I promised to finish up the current story, “Hybrid” this week but the final installment came out too long for one chapter. So I’ve taken a page out of Tarantino’s book and gone Kill Bill on it. The first half was released yesterday and the second will come on Friday or Saturday.
Wait – Empire and Animal? Hybrid? I’m confused.
Here’s how I’m doing this. I am releasing a serialized book called “Empire and Animal”. That means that chapters come out one at a time, somewhere between monthly and weekly. I had some hiccups when I got started but I’m now aiming for as close to weekly releases as I can get.
Now the other format I’m trying for this book is episodic. It’s not one single narrative beginning to end like a standard novel. Instead it’s a collection of stories in a single world taking place within the same rough time frame. If you’ve ever read the old Thieves’ World books or any of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser collections you’ll have an idea what I mean. So far E&A has included the stories “Salatis and The Dog” (Chapter 1), “The Turn of a Coin” (Chapters 2&3) and now “Hybrid” (Chapters 4-8).
Note: I’m noting planning to double the length of each subsequent story. It just happened that way with these first three. So I hope that clears things up about how E&A works. Please stop by and give it a read, and don’t forget to +vote for every chapter! If you’re confused about how JukePop itself works stop by tomorrow – I’m going to write up an explanation of that too.
For now I say:
The Worlds Without End “Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge” asks readers to choose books written by authors they’ve never previously read. That being the case, I think the most important question to address in a review of one of these books is – are you now interested in reading more books from this author?
In the case of Lauren Beukes my answer is an unqualified, absolute, as-soon-as-possible-please, YES! Continue reading
I’ve got a new flash fiction story here for you. This is another response to a Chuck Wendig Friday Flash Fiction Challenge. He provided a list of 10 words and we had to choose 5. They weren’t just to appear as words in the story but to become five elements of the story. I chose the words library, undertaker, cube, envelope and storm.
The result makes me want to run out and watch a David Lynch movie. If that’s the sort of vibe you like then perhaps you’ll enjoy a story of
The Day The Undertaker Came
The Undertaker came to The Library at the beginning of the end. He came to prepare us, though we didn’t know it at the time. He wore sable robes that swallowed light and dimmed the corridors as he walked through them. If he had a face we never saw it; he kept his hood pulled high and forward like an opaque veil.