Below is a short snippet from the opening of the novel version of the comic I created with artist Niki Smith. Just thought people might be curious to see what’s changed in the different versions.

I’m biased, I know, but I think the comic IN MAPS & LEGENDS is way better. But there’s some cool stuff in the excerpt, below. Enjoy!

And don’t forget to vote — the final ranking for this month’s contest ends Monday, November 30th, at noon EST.

From Maps and Legends (the novel)

Kaitlin Grayson squinted in the dusty yellow light from the lamp on the floor next to her and pressed the knife exactly three-eighths of an inch into the wall of her spare room. Her shadow moved with her on the top half of the wall and stretched onto the ceiling — a silent, distorted companion for this night’s work. Whenever she felt that tiny popping sensation of blade breaking through thick drywall paper, then slicing into cool, smooth gypsum inside, she felt a fleeting instant of guilt. Security deposit, her mind reminded her, then she pushed the X-Acto a bit deeper and began to cut and pull something new into existence.

Some nights her labors were less strenuous than this — just a simple scarring of the unpainted gray wall here (desert), an oblong amoeba shape encasing a mostly bare area awaiting the insertion of grass there (plains) — but tonight Kait was busy carving out a valley.

No way in the world, she thought, shaping her meandering cut until a two-foot-long gouge of sheetrock fell to the floor in a cloud of white dust, am I going to avoid getting evicted with this little project. Forget ever getting the security deposit back.

Tonight she’d woken up at half past one needing to empty her bladder — she knew she should’ve skipped that second bottle of Belgian ale while she was working late — and then she had an even more pressing urge to pick up the razor-sharp art knife from her work table and trundle off to her spare room, an unheated room she always kept locked. The room where she’d been spending most of her nights — not sleepwalking, but awake in a weird, dreamy way — with strange music and names tumbling and turning through her head like dry leaves in a lazy breeze.

That had been half an hour ago. Now, her hands were covered in drywall dust and going numb from the cold in the unheated room, but Kait was too deep in her work to notice anything more than a odd tingling sensation in her white-flecked fingertips. More than anything else, she was thinking about pulling out her calligraphy brushes. All those locations she’d cut so carefully into this wall in the past week of nights needed labeling.

Blassinger Valley.

Hollouman’s Ridge.

The Gediphal River.

She didn’t know where the names came from. She’d asked Jeremy about it once, a few months back, without mentioning any specifics about her map. But he just claimed he “trusted the process” and let the ideas and plots and names come to him while he was working.

Easy for him, Kait thought. His work came with a Delete key and a Backspace button. Once I cut or glued or inked something, it was done, like it or not. Ripping stuff out was not an option. Not if I’m going to do this right.

Blinking her sore eyes made the walls blur into grays and blacks for a few seconds, and Kait took a step back from the wall. Humming a tune that had been stuck in her head since she’d awoken, she absently dropped her knife blade-first to the uncarpeted wood floor. It stuck there, quivering. She pulled her thick black hair back into the rubber band that had been trying to hold it in a ponytail and pushed up the sleeves of her faded sky blue sweatshirt, squinting at her work. She picked up the wobbly little lamp for a better look around.

Exactly eight feet by eight feet, broken only by a door smack in the middle of the south wall behind her and a closed heating vent jammed into the ceiling above her, this windowless space contained a vertical map stretching over all three walls and most of the north wall in front of Kait. Not just a simple one-dimensional map, either. This project had depth, texture, and color.

On her left, the swirling Soninglan Ocean juggled islands of dried mud that jutted out defiantly. Each concentric level of the ocean had taken Kait forever to delineate, as she tried to accurately describe the increasing depth of the ocean and the necklace of brightly named islands it contained: Songbird, Melodian, Baylit, Trebling, Bellewinger, and more.

On her right, a trio of cliff-shorn continents — Blacklingoe, Fellingar, Rohingal — jutted out like twisted vertebrae from the wall, separated by smaller seas and a pair of sharp gulfs. Ahead of her were the plains of the second-biggest continent, Forivin, nestled next to the forests and valleys protected by the Splitshell Mountains.

Just to the east of Forivin was an island made up of equal parts forest and mountains. The largest peak was represented by a strangely bleached rock she’d found on the shoulder next to Jones Ferry Road one morning and subsequently glued and jammed into the drywall, a perfect likeness in scale and shape to the real mountain, Balasander’s Crest.

The looping song running through her head — mostly a four-beat bass riff mixed in with twitching drums, bom-biddy-boom — came to a thudding halt as she blinked the last of the sheetrock dust from her vision.

“Holy shit.” In the shaky lamplight, only an oblong five-foot-high by four-foot-wide section of the western wall remained undone. Unmapped.

The rest of it was finished, textures and mixed media and all, covered in layers of shellac to keep it intact.

She’d heard about people doing things like this, somnambulists or drunks or heavily medicated joes who got behind the wheel of their cars and made the commute to work and returned home without ever waking. Kait couldn’t really remember any specifics about the other nights she’d come in here to carve and build. She just woke up in the middle of the night and got to it, sleep and her other paying work be damned.

And she’d gotten good at this, the most creative work she’d ever done. The forested areas of her eight major continents and assorted smaller islands were adorned with a mix of pine needles, sticks, dried leaves and bark, all assembled so that no two forests looked even remotely similar. Those had taken forever, and Kait hadn’t been especially pleased with the final results, but something kept pushing her, compelling her to move on and finish this thing. She’d wanted to add water to all the rivers, lakes, and seas, but physics had stumped her there. She was most proud of her mountains, though, each peak hand-picked from gravel roads and riverbeds, then applied just so with glue onto the wall.

She set the lamp next to her favorite mountain range, in the huge eastern continent of Ezled next to the door to her spare room. The continent and its smaller neighbor stretched from the top of the wall onto the door itself, both of them thick with jutting rocks. Kait did remember that these monsters had taken her over a week to do, back in December, and she’d finished it the day after Christmas. She didn’t have anywhere else to go that holiday, surely not back home to Cherokee to listen to Mom bitch and moan about the neighbors and the small-town politics. Her usual freelance work had dried up, so she’d stayed up all day and night for three days straight, using her hot glue gun to attach the various gray and brown rocks she’d found in a dry riverbed a mile down the road from her apartment building.

The hilly trail leading up to the waterless barren had reminded her of home, and of course, her Grampa. He was the one who’d gotten her hooked, first on hiking, and then on maps.

“Find the hidden places first,” he always told her, smiling a cryptic, tooth-gapped grin at her. He always had mud on his face during a hike through one mountain trail or another, from itching his nose with a muddy finger or rubbing his chin. “The rest of the map comes easy.”

Thinking of Grampa in his old gray-black jeans and goofy feathered hat with the pointy brim, the clothes he wore the last day she saw him alive, Kait reached out to touch the first of the jagged brown rocks in the range leading north up the wall. The biggest mountain in the range was — of course — a good foot or so above the door, a rock nearly six inches in diameter at its base. She ran her finger down the side of this smaller rock, tracing the lighter paths of calcium stained into it like tiny trails or rivers. She’d drawn her only blank trying to name this mountain range, so she just called them the Something Something Mountains. She could label it later.

When her fingers touched the peak of biggest of the scaled-down mountains, Kait felt herself being pulled — first as if falling, then as if being dragged by rough hands — somewhere else. The odd beat of her wordless song filled her ears — bom-biddy-boom! — blasting her eardrums now instead of tickling them, and her vision doubled. The air smelled sharp and acrid, like hot rocks after a sudden rain, and she felt tiny mouths biting her where her fingers touched the river rocks embedded in her wall. The mountains split open in front of her like a dark gray mouth, reaching out for her as the music crescendoed like thunder: Bom-bom-biddy-biddy-boom-boom!

Kait’s world tilted, and she could feel a key, essential piece of herself begin to peel away from her physical body, as if her soul was being stolen from her without a fight. As if she wasn’t really there any more…

And then she opened her eyes. She was sitting on her rear end in the middle of the room, head spinning in slow circles as she looked up at the Something Something Mountains.

“Holy shit,” she said again, ears ringing, both hands pressed hard to her chest. She looked down at her hands and arms, half-expecting to see the angry red imprints of many small hands there, but her skin was unblemished. The bass music thudded inside her head one more time, but then she realized that — at what had to be two or three in the morning — the sound was actually someone banging on her apartment door.

from Lady Lazarus

By Andrew Foster Altschul

He was living in Morocco, sharing a mansion with William S. Burroughs, who’d once made a guest appearance at a Terrible Children concert (ostensibly to play the harmonica solo during “Shave Me, Shrieve Me,” though in the event he only stood in his three-piece suit and bowler, facing the microphone zombielike, before climbing down to the crowd and walking back to the stadium exit).

He was selling guns in Rwanda, as Rimbaud had done a hundred years earlier. Or heroin, my father buying vast quantities from smugglers in Eritrea, transporting them by camel caravan to Tangiers, from whence he and Burroughs supplied much of Spain and Italy.

He was a Bedouin, leading a slow parade of believers across the Sahara, founding a religion based on rock music and intravenous ecstasy.

He was in Bolivia, fomenting a civil war, leading general strikes against the government.

He was in a VA hospital in Brownsville, Texas, where the FBI kept watch over his vegetable form.

Or Paris, a mime in the Jardin des Tuileries, or Punta del Este, remarried to Colombian pop star Shakira, whom he’d met at the South by Southwest music conference years earlier, when she was only fifteen.

I knew these stories couldn’t be true (But what if they are…?, a voice said) – but somehow that wasn’t enough. With each outlandish sighting, it seemed there was more to my father than I’d known before; his story was larger than anyone had told me. Like the house on Azalea, there were unknown hallways, strange garrets, locked rooms – I was still a tiny, wandering child, lost within the walls of my own home.

The death certificate was always a point of contention – Exhibit A for the hungry prosecution. No agency ever identified it as having issued from their office; the San Diego coroner, the AMA, the IRC: all mystified, the document under none of their auspices.

*

*

This excerpt from the novel Lady Lazarus is part of the Stamps project at The Owls site. Click here to learn more >>

Believe it or not, on a non-work day, I’m in town. I’m at STL BreadCo -a chain that started with that name and when they went national, they’re known by the family name that started the company here, Panera; if you’re American, you’ve heard of it!

I parked a block away because that was the closest available spot, after running by the post office and the recycling center. I’m less than 5k from the word count goal set by National Novel Writing Month, although no where near finished with the story.

“Mr. Guerlaine, we are going to remove the tape but I want you to know that is only because you are completely out of earshot of anyone else but us. Save your breath and save us the headache, okay?”

The thing about writing without an outline and with literally no prep, you end up rambling around and basically doing character sketches and since this is sci-fi and occurring on another planet, I’m basically exploring flora, fauna and geology.

Things are happening but they’re all smaller, microcosms of the grander story, which is any New World type of plot. People come in to colonize, think the people there are less than human or at least lesser humans and feel free to trod upon everything.

The indigenous people rise up.

Chances are, since this is my story and I’m a fan of history, they’ll lose. I love an underdog but we all know bullets cut deeper than knives.

girls gaggling

Speaking of bullets and knives, it was all I could take to not attack the table of teenage girls shrieking about Sean and Erik and everything FABULOUS that happened at a party last night. There were tales of texting whilst the girls texted. I’m not sure how they managed to text, talk, eat and scream all at the same time. I almost shot video but I knew their gaggling, gurgling giggles would only sound like loud white noise to a poor microphone.

Unfortunately, I could make out each of the five voices. None of the stories amounted to much, which is about what I can say for my own, so I guess the only way I’m any better is that I’m not forcing it on three hundred other people in a large cafe!

In an effort to write today’s goal and make up for last night’s shortage, I’m sitting at my work desk. Everyone has now gone home and I’m manning the mac pro. We’re still on board the spaceship in this scene.

The Doctor was still wheezing and trying to get a breath after the hard blow to his chest. He rubbed it.

“Vic wants to see you.” He grimaced and looked away.

“What does he want from me?” Guillaume asked.

“How should I know? I was told to come get you.” The Doctor was starting to recollect himself and he was standing up practically to his normal stoop.

“You grab everybody like a bitch? That could get you killed.” Guillaume bent over to pick up the papers which had fallen to the ground, naturally, all out of the order the IPT weasel had so primly informed him must not happen.

He stood up and started to punch The Doctor in the face but he flinched. “Pfft. You are Vic’s bitch, that is for sure.”

Guillaume started ahead of The Doctor, although he did not like the idea of allowing the man to come up from behind him again.

76% to goal

I’m 624 words shy of my daily word count goal because I took off two days. Six hundred or so words is very easy to come up with (unedited) but I’m stopping because I have already written 4912 words tonight. My wee brain doesn’t need that kind of bother. I hope to manage tomorrow’s word count plus the part I’m rolling over from today. As of right now, I’m 72% toward the final goal and that’s nowhere near the end of the story. Here’s the last crappola I wrote. Better quit while I’m ahead…erm, behind.

In addition to the military, there were IPT personnel and government contractors. It was hard to tell the difference between the contractors and military sometimes but the IPT folks, they always stood out, like assistant managers of shoe stores. They always looked desperate and trapped yet still held the power of getting a refund or a ration over your head.

“Speaking in the language of left and right brain function, the concept of celestial influence is a legitimate right-brain or design-mind concept that operates without the observed facts and logical framework of the left brain. Only with an equal contribution from both halves can we hope to eliminate the chauvinism of scientism, which hardly even deems astrology a worthy subject to investigate, and the symbolic double-talk of some of its practitioners, and have a true and objective science of celestial influence.
Astrology can only be of real value when it satisfies the two domains of brain function. It must:
A) appeal to our higher emotions of harmony and order
B) make sense logically, and as a result
C) be able to be explained using known laws of physics, celestial mechanics and biology.

Few would argue that, as it stands, it scores high on point A, less so on point B and virtually zero on point C: scientifically and logically it’s a skeleton waiting for flesh. Whether or not traditional astrologers are ready for a paradigm shift in their approach is another story. But if there is ever to be a rational or objective astrology, many tools now in use may need to be abandoned.”

Planetary Types: the Science of Celestial Influence P.25

The heart is where the nature, feeling and intimacy of a life dwell, and without heart the world grows suddenly cold. In its desire for beauty, it reaches toward the beyond. This poignant desire for beauty suggests that beauty is the homeland of the heart…. When God created [the heart], it was fashioned for an eternal kinship with beauty; God knew that the human heart would always be wedded to him in desire; for the other name of God is beauty. The heart is the tabernacle of divine beauty. St John of the Cross puts this poetically:

I did not have to ask my heart what it wanted
Because of all the desires I have ever known,
Just one did I cling to
For it was the essence of all desire:
To know beauty.

- John O’Donohue

This has been a really hard day for me.  Mostly because i am not going to be able to use the internet for research anymore.  I just found out that this white thing that allows me to connect charges in the hundreds if you go over alloted time.  Apparently I did, and I’m not even sure how I did?  I guess whatever you do on the internet costs — text is the least of that — pictures and movies like the ones on youtube are way more.  How sad.

Anyway, what I learned was if you leave a lot of windows open at once — if they are running graphics and you aren’t even looking at the page — you are being charged.  So, dunno.

I managed to have a really beautiful connection in a scene between Teenie my character and her mom when she tries to wake her up — here is a piece of that:

“Mom, wake up,” Teenie whispered in her mother’s ear.
“Mom.”
“Mom, please wake up, please.”
Teenie began by holding her mother’s hand.  She held it in both of hers, and she was rubbing it between them, as if she could warm it — that’s how cold it felt.   The more Teenie looked at her mother’s hand, the more she realized how much she loved her.  Mostly it was a tiny little freckle right in the center of her mother’s

hand that Teenie focused on.  She couldn’t remember ever having seen it before.
“Mom, wake up.  Please.”
“Please mom.”
But it wasn’t doing any good.  Teenie’s mom was barely breathing at all it was so shallow.  Teenie began to cry, just little tears at first but, soon she was really crying and the tears fell on her mother’s hand.
“Mommy, please.”
“Please, mommy, please,” Teenie cried, her tears were falling faster and faster now, so many it was almost like rain.
Something was wrong and Teenie began to realize that, because her mother had always woken up before when Teenie had asked her to, but today it just wasn’t working at all.  She began to shake her mother’s shoulder back and forth, starting off just softly at first.
“Please, mommy, don’t leave me alone,” she cried.
“Mommy, please.”
Suddenly Teenie remembered something that her father had told her once — well he had shown her how to do something actually — that had to do with having something called a heart-to-heart.  They’d always called it that whenever they had gone out on a walk together, when she’d been littler, and he had still been home.  Except, they had both been awake.  How could she have a heart to heart talk with her mother if she was asleep like this?
Teenie came up with an idea and it was one of the best ideas she had ever had.  She put one of her hands on her chest and she could feel her heartbeat.
“Heart, I need you to speak to Mommy,” she said.
And then she took her other hand and put it on her mother’s heart.  She could feel it just barely beating under her mom’s thin bathrobe.
“I need your heart to talk to my heart, mom,” she said.
“Please talk to my heart, Mom.”

and then, I had a great scene about Devlin and Brownie his puppy, as well…

When they all sat down to breakfast together with little Brownie asleep on Devlin’s foot, Devlin decided to tell his grandparents about Teenie Alexander.
“I met a girl on the beach the other day,” he said.
“A really special girl.”
“I can’t wait to show Brownie to her because I think she will love him too.”
“Why, Devlin, that’s wonderful,” his grandmother said.
“What’s she like, son?”
“I think she might be a writer,” he said.
“Or an artist.”
“She was crying the first day I saw her.”
“Do you know why?”
“Sort of.”
“She sort of told me how sad she was since her dad had gone.”
“Where did he go?”
“She said he had to leave the village to search for a job.”
“He used to be a reporter for the paper,” Grandpa.
Devlin’s grandfather just shook his head and let out a sigh.  He looked over at the paper on the table next to him.
“I’m surprised that place is still in business,” he said.
“After what they’ve done to all those poor people.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, son.”
“Making a little girl cry because her father had to leave town to go and find another job.”
He just shook his head back and forth really slowly.
“I’m glad you met a new friend, Devlin,” said his grandmother.  “What else have you found out about her?”
“Not too many things, so far.”
“She has beautiful hair though.”
“You should see the way it looks when the sun shines on it.”
Jess just looked over at Devlin’s grandmother and he was smiling the biggest smile.  It seemed like he was grinning from ear to ear.  He didn’t say anything else except, “It sounds like the day I first saw your grandmother Devlin.”
“I had my harmonica with me that day though.”
“I thought she had the prettiest smile I’d ever seen.”

I really want to be able to put the logo for NaNoWrMo in this post and that little sig I made for Heart of Clouds but I have no idea how much it will cost to do that and I can’t afford another bill like that one that just came.

I think I’m writing a really great book.

I need an agent for this book, too.

Really fast.

xxoo!

It’s a book for children that will change a lot of people’s lives in good ways because of the themes in it.  And, I’d like enough money to not care about worrying about how many things I wanted to see in the internet too.

So far so good, but, what I learned was that I have to limit my usage?

No extra windows open, don’t watch any films, barely do anything with art.  How fun is that?

Bye, till tomorrow!  Geez.

“Oh my God, Ava! He’s here! It’s him! He’s in the driveway!”

“Paul. Come on.”

“No! I’m serious! He’s here!”

                “tell him to go away. Turn out your lights. Just pretend you’re not home.”

“my car is here! He’ll know!”

                Sudden crashing noise. Cartoon fat woman scream makes the receiver of the phone shake.

“oh my God, it was the suitcase! The suitcase fell! Oh my God. I’m a mess.”

Ava laughs hysterically.

“Tell the story again!” Paul rocks back and forth with laughter. Kirby, grinning that Cheshire cat smile, “it never gets old!”

                No, just do the scream. Rocks Paul.

“I can’t! Someone is going to think there’s someone here in trouble.” Retorts Ava, always the overly reasonable, careful one.

Please leave comments, suggestions, criticisms, ideas. All will only help me grow as a writer.

Bella’s Tree, written by Janet Russell and illustrated by Jirina Marton, has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Children’s Literature: Illustration!

Jirina Marton

Congratulations to both Jirina and Janet for this well-deserved award.

From the jury: “Jirina Marton’s illustrations invite the reader to a winter landscape full of textures and subtle, earthy colour palettes. The Van Gogh-like interior and its warm tones create a holiday season mood that evokes an emotional response. The illustrations are well crafted and capture the imagination and humanity of the everyday lives they portray.”

When asked by the CBC what it took to create Bella’s Tree, Jirina Marton said: “When you are looking at one illustration, it must invite you to turn the page.”

See a sample of Jirina’s page-turning illustrations below!

(The three sample page spreads can be enlarged by clicking. The spreads are not in order of the story.)

Want to give this beautiful book as a holiday gift? Buy it now!

Across the street, the North Park’s marquee lit up the falling snow like colored confetti.  A small crowd had started to gather in front of the glassed-in ticket booth and I tried to remember the last time I’d brought a girl to the movies.  I couldn’t.  My view from the window reminded me of  a picture Edward Hopper never painted but might’ve –  a scene gone grim when I noticed my own faded reflection in the glass, how my white oxford clung tightly to my slightly bulging gut.  I did a quick turn to see if the seat of my pants still grabbed the cleft of my ass just so.  It did.  And so what if my other side had fallen into such disrepair: greasy hair, lined face, I thought I was invincible, but fifteen years in the restaurant business will wreck the same havoc on any able body. Here’s to fifteen more I mouthed to the ghoul in the window. 

Next to the North Park, Costantini’s was all but invisible – windows boarded, brick the same shade of shit brown as every other building on the block.  In my memory it was a much brighter red, but then everything seemed brighter back then when Larry first got me the busboy job at Garangelos.  We’d go down to Costantini’s after work and grab a couple cheap drinks with Nello, Jimmy, and Manny before heading over to the Colonie for the late show.  I couldn’t see the Colonie from Manny’s window but it was impossible to gaze on this strip of Hertel without calling it to mind – flashes of the glory days when Loretta was my best birthday present instead of just another wrinkled reminder of time’s relentless march.    

The first time I went to the Colonie, I remember being disappointed that the girls didn’t go bottomless, but on that night when I was alone with Loretta in the back office, Buffalo’s blue laws couldn’t keep that sparkly red thong on her hips.  Don‘t got all night, she had told me slipping it off and collapsing onto the couch.   During her show the guys had palmed her an extra hundred to show me a good time on my twenty-first.  All the taunting I’d suffered at their hands after admitting my virgin-hood had been worth it.  I sat on the ground and struggled to get my pants around my ankles.  Loretta looked at an imaginary watch, but once I was fully unclothed there was no more fumbling.    It being my first time, I knew just what to do.  I’d learned quite a bit from certain movies, not to Larry’s nightly anecdotes which rivaled Penthouse Forum in explicitness and exaggeration.  That there was no resistance on her part also eased the process along.  You’ve heard of a hot knife through butter.  Hot as mine was it didn’t even need to be, that butter was already melted.

Once I was in there, Loretta stopped rushing me, said I was the most enjoyable deflowering she’d ever been a party to, including her own, and invited me back for a few lessons at a discounted price.  For the rest of my twenty-first year, she served as my sole instructor in the erotic arts, but even more importantly, all that time with Loretta eased the tension that had kept me from normal social intercourse ever since my awkward teenage years.  If I could talk to this intimidating Amazon of a woman, I could talk to any girl and eventually get to something more interesting than social intercourse.  It was also during the year of Loretta that I finally made the leap from busboy to waiter at Garangelo’s.  So many of the lines I found useful on the sales floor, I learned screwing Loretta on that filthy couch.  You like that?  Let me fill you up.  Is there anything else I can do for you? I’m coming.   

Once I got the hang of it all, I didn’t really have much use for Loretta anymore.  If only she’d thrown in a freebie once and a while; maybe then I wouldn’t have decided to take advantage of the currency exchange and head on over the border for the Canadian Ballet where at ritzy clubs like Mints, the Sundowner, and Pure Platinum, there was more exotic faire to be sampled.   Here were mostly Asian and Eastern Europeans, and despite the enthusiasm with which they went about removing their clothes on stages, dry humping customers in “champagne” rooms and (for the right price), doing pretty much anything else a perverted mind could imagine in various basements and backrooms, I couldn’t shake the feeling that many of these girls were victims of some sort of flesh trade.  It was all in the eyes.  Foreign accents, obscene come-ons, and cheap perfume did nothing in adding life to their distant eyes.  Eventually, the whole scene made me miss Loretta and how she was all business in her own way.  Her eyes watched my eyes watching her, telling me what a bad boy I was, and that judgment, whether real or imagined, sent my cock a-thrumming, even if she did look like her years in Buffalo hadn’t treated her like a lady.  She was still eye-candy, just a tough piece, like those big sticks of taffy the Fowler’s people sold at the Erie County Fair every summer, fireball flavor naturally.  She was all frizzy brown hair and tan leathery skin.  She had huge asymmetrical nipples and a big gap between her front teeth, but the honesty by which she plied her trade excited me more than any of those living dolls just on the other side of the Peace Bridge, even if over there it was legal to go bottomless

I looked out the window toward the direction of the Colonie.  Maybe I’ll drop in on Loretta tonight I thought.  Could have been that the snow was just making me nostalgic for the white night of my twenty-first when I walked out the back door of the Colonie and down Parkside to Manny’s apartment by the zoo where the guys would be waiting with back-pats and a case of Genny to crush.  It was snowing and I swaggered, catching flakes on my tongue, thinking what a childish thing it was to do in light of my recent passage into manhood, not understanding that a wet dick doesn’t a grown man make and even ten years later, watching different snow fall from the same sky, I was no more a man, having traded one playground for another, a hundred notches on my belt and the only thing to show for it was a scarred and broken belt.  Maybe I wasn’t a child any more, because a child still has his innocence, but I was on the verge of becoming something less than a man and just maybe it was that desire to still catch snowflakes on my tongue that kept me from slipping over.

The Youth shifted his weight back and looked out past the creek to the bank on the other side. Well, he said, anyhow. He fidgeted with the backpack and finally put one arm through the strap. The Old Man did not budge nor shift his eyes. The Youth started to back away. Through the second strap he slipped his other arm.

I needs to put up a happier entry? XD; I’m really kinda depressed today. I haven’t really done anything… I’m trying to write, but I dunno how to even start. 8D; I’ll post up an excerpt, I guess? Maybe that’ll get me to get a-movin’. 

This excerpt, however, is NOT bright and cheerful. This is where the dark stuff is. I got so creeped out when I wrote this part! It’s like writing my pre-NaNo prologue for Keen (yay for writing something I’m not going to include in the draft! *coughhack*): describing a NEEDLE with YARN going through a MOUTH was CREEPY. And describing in gory disgusting detail about how a Heartless rips out Ven’s heart made me want to vomit. 

This is one of those kinds of bits. One of those where you get this weird feeling in your stomach (I guess?) and you just kinda feel sick and really pretty creeped out. I love those bits Anywho, here we go! 

SLAM! 

Her hands started turning numb. The green light engulfed her! She stared down… until it seemed as if her gaze was cemented into place; staring straight ahead, never allowed to look away from that one spot. 

Hands numb… it trailed up from her fingers down to her wrists, her arms, then started crawling all over her body. She couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t move anything! 

Everything started to get bigger, while she got smaller… So small, so tiny. 

The only thing she felt was the strange sensation of something crawling over her skin… Actually, it was more like replacing her skin. 

Something covered her eyes, as if sharp stabs had come in. They took over, the things over her eyes. They became her eyes… those little plastic things, round and black. 

Then it felt as if something had been placed over her mouth! Something replaced the line of her lips, a sharp stab coming back and forth. Up, down, up, down. 

And then the green light went away. She stared at the ground, nothing more. Staring down at the pristine ground that appeared out of nothing, replacing the concrete she had stood over moments ago. 

I… 

A bony hand coiled around her torso, sharp nails feeling as if they were trying to stab through the girl’s shirt and her skin. At that moment, they probably could have. 

Violet eyes watched and looked as the two were placed, together, on a shelf. 

Both of same size. Both of same height. 

The woman surveyed the black button eyes that replaced those hazel orbs. The peach tinted fabric that replaced the girl’s real skin. The loose, black thread formed in a fine line that had replaced the girl’s thin lips.

Together, they were nothing more than toys. Dolls, even. 

click… click… 

The echo of footsteps reverberated in their cloth ears. 

 Neither could move. Neither could act. They just sat on a shelf… collecting dust.

…wake… up… 

Yuuuuup. Okies, time to go run off and be awesome! *coughhacknotreallycoughhack*