I edit books for other authors, and often I feel bad about how much blood I draw from their beloved masterworks. Truly the death of a thousand cuts. It can be hard taking the role of the professional honest person at the end of the line: "The Honester" (Yeah, I am absolutely calling myself that in the future). So, mostly out of curiosity, when editing my own science fiction piece, THIS LAND, I turned the Track Changes around on myself, and set to work.

After the first pass through the book, I knew I had already surpassed any bloodletting I'd ever done to a client. This was more than surgery. This was a slaughter. If it were a physical book, it would have closed with a squish.

I got a kick out of looking back after an editing session to see exactly how much I had colored. As an exercise in motivation, I recommend it, as you can visually track your progress.

Below is the version that went out to beta readers. It has 12,160 revisions (5972 insertions, 5633 deletions, 68 moves, and 487 changes to formatting). Though it's not reflected here, after I got it back from beta readers, I cut 7000 words, added 3000, then I sent it off to a proofreader and went over it two more times, implementing recommendations, before publishing it.

It feels great to have the completed book in my hands (so to speak), but also sorta satisfying to be able to crack it open and see how it all happened as well.

EDIT: The last screen capture is from an e-reader app which didn't fill me with confidence.

Those who survive the morning hole up in the ancient monastery that overlooks the town, only to have their safe-haven become their place of siege.

Cut off from the outside world, they can hope only for rescue, but there might not be anybody left out there to help them.

And their safe-haven may not be as safe as they thought.

The slow fires of eternity burned within them, these three grandfathers of stars, these eggs of civilizations, as through the ageless black they lumbered, ever faithful to the instructions of their masters, given so many eons ago: Proliferate. Prepare. Make way for us.

Now these dark leviathans were awakening, beginning to feel the tickle of the nearby yellow sun, growing as a distant hole in the black tapestry of the universe. As they drew nearer, they tasted the flavor of its solar breath over their bodies and found it a refined meal; the star had aged well, to a warm and gentle vintage, since their last visit, and they noted the change with mechanical pleasure: the conditions aligned, their calculations were in agreement; between them they shared a pleasing congruity.

Yet something was not as it should be.

Though the yellow sun had become the fertile garden they’d expected, the seed of the second planet was not as they’d left it. From afar they detected a surfeit of oxygen and nitrogen; the planet was awash with hydrogen, carbon.

Incongruity. Misalignment. The conditions were not in agreement.

They awakened more completely, expanding the wings of their consciousnesses wider to swish about these blues and greens and browns they were tasting from the planet in the light of this refined sun.

Only, as the cells within them awakened from the cold hibernation of eons, one of the travelers awakened in error. With its kin, it tasted the blues and browns and greens and, like them, came to the pleasure of alignment between their conclusions.

Life.

However, during their long sleep since the last star, many thousands of years before, portions of its instructions from their creators had been forgotten. In those places where it reached deep inside itself for guidance, it felt only dim memory, half-remembered creeds.

Life.

With this new congruence of unconformity, its two kin shouldered the wings of their consciousnesses once more, and powered down despite this strange taint to their meal. Misalignment, yes, but, as per their instructions, they were not to create life through extinction, as, above all, their masters had feared making entreaties to the void only to hear the echoes of themselves coming back to them out of the darkness, pips of insignificance in a long, lonely universe.

They peered far ahead through the swells and tides of gravity around the outer gas planets, and the clockwork disturbances of comets and unclaimed tumbling stones, and with the most imperceptible adjustment, angled toward the yellow sun, ever to move through the universe, ever to sleep between the cradles of the stars, fulfilling the instructions of their masters, wherever they might be.

To aid their exit out of the system, they would bask in the yellow star’s generous feast briefly, and use its gravity to boost them out into the silence of cold oblivion once more, where they would again shutter their minds and wait until they were next needed.

Except … in their adjustments they suffered in surprise. Their kin had not turned with them. It was spreading the wings of its consciousness further and had begun to slow.

Asymmetry. Disfluence.

Assessments indicated it was manoeuvring to fulfill their primary initiatives. It would proliferate, it would prepare, it would make way for their masters, and it would protect what it had wrought.

If the burst of signals the two ancient leviathans sent to the breakaway traveler could be translated as words, they would be read as: Come with us. Come with us. Come with us. Come with us. Come with us…. And if machines could be said to contain sadness, as the signals gained longer intervals due to the burgeoning distance between them, it could also be said that they understood the futility of their cry across the darkness, because their signals weakened in strength as the distance compounded but they continued to plead with their kin nonetheless, as if the machines could also understand hope, could also comprehend desperation and loss.

Originally they had numbered five, but two of their kind had faded in the vastness between the stars. The first was simply not alongside upon awakening at one of their destinations — how long ago, they could barely remember. The other had angled up and out of the galactic plane, slowly rising out of the cone of their experience. For centuries the three had hailed it, and it had replied over increments of thousands of years — still here … still here … still here … until it no longer was and the expanse of space sounded like stars huffing with fire and the cold tinkle of dust over dead rocks; the ether hid no words for them anymore.

So, as the breakaway traveler settled in comfortably around the malappropriate planet, its two companions, having slung around the sun to bolster their escape velocity out of the system, sent a final, strong entreaty to their ancient kin; and when their impassioned plea was ignored, they sent no more signals, though they would still be within range for decades, as if the machines could also understand separation, inevitability, acceptance.

The three had become two.  

The remaining traveler turned its attention to the planet slowly heaving beneath it — breathing with life, misalignment — and spread the wings of its consciousness to its fullest capacity, content in the congruence of purpose. The equivalent of long-unused limbs came to life and it stretched and scanned, revelling in its completeness, and made itself ready for the coming execution of arranging this land to alignment.

It would propagate. It would prepare. It would make way.

But it was not to …

It was not to …

It was not to …

But it was not …

not to …

It was …

not to …

to …

?

Stephen ducked back and grabbed a gun for himself. He didn’t know if he was angry at the people for leaving after they were warned, or because they were murdered — eaten —within earshot of the monastery, his home. He could smell the stink of fear rising from inside his robes. He had never fired a gun, but he raised it, pointed it, and fired at the thing that had taken Gemma, its nose still pointing at the sky. He’d liked Gemma, so quiet, secretly smart, always with a smile for strangers in town. The gun kicked back into his shoulder painfully. If he missed, he didn’t care. Even firing, making a resistance, added an action to the blank that had thinned him, anchoring him to the world. No longer did he feel the wind would blow and he’d funnel away like sand.

But everyone was gone. He had failed them all. That thought radiated from him like warmth, and from the man next to him, and the next. Helplessly, they’d become fewer.

Lately I've been privileged to be in the company of some fine quality writers, a few of whom I'll be happy to showcase on weekends. Enjoy.

The first in the Jehovah and Hades series.

Jake was just a normal kid who enjoyed hearing his mother's bedtime stories. The stories became shockingly real when he discovered that he was a descendant of Dr. Jekyll and that he had his own Mr. Hyde living inside him. Driven by a desire to do good, he attempts to hunt down and kill the remaining Hyde monsters. Can he finish off the onslaught of Hyde monsters and keep the girl he loves safe from their retaliation?

Before an invasion it is wise to gather intel on your foe. Harbinger begins the tale of the fight to save Earth as told from the perspective of an unlikely hero...

In 1957, a group of wilderness adventurers are confronted with the unexpected. They are forced to defend themselves against an unworldly enemy. Will man's first encounter with aliens force them to run or will they stand and fight? This is the first thriller in the SODIUM series. Follow along as the unwitting group determine their own fate.

Lately I've been privileged to be in the company of some fine quality writers, a few of whom I'll be happy to showcase on weekends. Enjoy.

Part one of a serialized novel. 13,000 words.

What if everything you thought you knew about your home, your friends, your family--even yourself--was a lie?

A storm of change is coming to the planet Earth, and no one will escape it. Many will perish, unable to accept the total reshaping of reality as we know it. In the aftermath that follows, a handful of ragtag heroes must adapt to this strange, new world and begin a quest to save the Earth's remaining inhabitants from total annihilation.

Combining elements of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, PriorEarth takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through a world that is alien yet familiar at the same time.

THIS INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED SUSPENSE THRILLER by Michael Meyer has been compared to Robert Ludlum's Bourne series, and the writing style has been compared to that of Dean Koontz.

Imagine waking up remembering intimate details about a country in which you have never traveled and fluently speaking a language that you have never spoken. B.J. is living the ideal life. He has a great wife, a wonderful job. And yet he is experiencing life-like vivid dreams of Munich, a city he has never visited.

Stan Halsey is a professor in Saudi Arabia, who sends for his wife to join him. She arrives, and, in the blink of an eye, she vanishes, leaving no trace of ever being alive in either the United States or in Saudi Arabia.

COVERT DREAMS is a fast-paced international suspense thriller that moves from Munich to the burning sands of Saudi Arabia. What is real, and who is responsible for the terrifying nightmare?

Lately I've been privileged to be in the company of some fine quality writers, a few of whom I'll be happy to showcase on weekends. Enjoy.

Code name: Jet

Twenty-eight-year-old Jet was once the Mossad's most lethal operative before faking her own death and burying that identity forever.

But the past doesn't give up on its secrets easily.

When her new life on a tranquil island is shattered by a brutal attack, Jet must return to a clandestine existence of savagery and deception to save herself and those she loves. A gritty, unflinching roller-coaster of high-stakes twists and shocking turns, JET features a new breed of protagonist that breaks the mold.

Fans of Lisbeth Salander, SALT, and the Bourne trilogy will find themselves carried along at Lamborghini speed to a conclusion as jarring and surprising as the story's heroine is unconventional.

Christo's life fell apart when his partner of eight years walked out on him. There wasn't even a reason for it: sometimes love just fades, as quickly and mysteriously as it appears in the first place.

Enter Damien. Damien's the guy with a different man on his arm for every event, he's smooth and arrogant and always impeccably turned out. Christo hates him. But God, he's gorgeous. Damien could be exactly what Christo needs to get him over John.

It's only going to be a fling. Nothing serious, nothing that will affect their working relationship or the rest of their lives. So why are they fighting through the night rather than letting go and walking away? Why does Damien's secretive nature bug Christo so much? And why does he even care that the other man might not be as tough as he pretends to be?

CONTENT WARNING: This book contains explicit scenes unsuitable for those under 18.

But hey, I have another day or so until I'm finished my next blog post, and so have a gaping huge white space here on my blog. A torture, the blank pages. They mock me and hide in my closet at night. No matter how many shows of Doctor Who I watch, they're still there. I guess I'll have to take care of it by myself, Tardis-less.

Now where did I put my sonic pencil?

So anyway, here's an interview I did for We Write Worlds last year. I'll add some pictures shortly, perhaps scandalous ones.

Here's a suggestion: Turn the interview into a drinking game. When I sound pompous, that's one shot. When I plug my own books, you chug a beer. If you end up thinking, Oy, I wanna smack this little sock-puppet right in the chops ... well, perhaps it's time to stop reading it as a drinking game and go for a nice lie-down while I surreptitiously sneak out the back.

Mind you, that impulse would verify that you were reading closely.

Allons-y!

As early as seven, I said I would be a writer when I grew up. I wrote a lot during junior high. I wrote every day in high school. Of course in high school I wanted to be a poet, and I have many old notebooks still sitting in my old room at my parent’s house that I need to burn someday.

For a while I let myself be convinced that writing was not a viable career path (That may, unfortunately, yet prove to be true). I studied English in university until I dropped out after two years. Then I got a science degree in Anthropology, studying Osteology and Archaeology, until I realized I would, at best, be a mediocre archaeologist, and that simply wasn’t good enough.

One day I decided I would write, and that was that.

At the time I was living in a bush camp a hundred miles from civilization in the north of British Columbia. I still remember the exact moment when, in the middle of the forest, I stood up, looked around, decided I wasn’t going to go back to do an archaeological thesis – I would write instead – and I was happy.

At the end of the summer, I returned home and wrote a terrible novel.

2: How many books have you written?

I have completed three books. I have two in states of undress.

My first novel remains untitled, best left buried in my bookshelf. It was a compilation of true hitchhiking stories to a fictional place, tales that I had either experienced myself, or compiled from the experiences of people I knew.

My second novel was A String of Momentary Silences, which is the only novel-length piece I currently have available through Amazon and Smashwords, about a man who decided to step off the hamster wheel of his dreary life. He stutters rather badly and hates his existence, and decides he’d be better off never speaking to anybody ever again. After he does that, life is easier for him, and he explores his world as an unspeaking individual. He meets a fellow who runs the puppet show at the local market, a man who also doesn’t speak, and the two become friends. Meanwhile he meets a woman online, and struggles with wanting to tell her that he can talk to her as he feels terrible lying to her with his silence. A String of Momentary Silences is not a long novel, but I always have trouble describing it.

My third is unfinished Twice Against the Same Stone, about a woman nearing her golden years, but who’s lived a bit of a criminal life, and she’s trying to make amends for her many mistakes.

My fourth is Raw Flesh in the Rising, about a man exiled to the leper colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai in the late 1800s. There, the one healthy man among the sick, he becomes the leper among the lepers.

My fifth, and current work in progress, is where I relinquish my grip on five-word titles.  Systematic Rube, my first non-fiction book, is a rough outline of the silviculture industry as it represents rite of passage in Canada. I received a grant from the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council to work on Systematic Rube in the spring of 2011.

3. What inspired you to write your (latest) book?

My latest book is Systematic Rube, exploring tree planting as rite of passage in Canada. It was not born from inspiration; rather it is a child of exasperation.

I spent thirteen months, working every day, writing Raw Flesh in the Rising. Then I spent sixteen months editing , every day, seven hours a day. I didn’t work for those two years; I wrote. Six months into editing I needed a break. I wanted to write – firstly – something new, and – secondly – something fun.

I had learned so much from writing Raw Flesh in the Rising. I wondered what my first person writing would look like. One day I sat down and began to write, cataloguing my favorite stories from my years working in the forests of British Columbia. At the time, thematically, it was very free-flowing. Having since gained purpose, it has become regimented and directed, though I still love working on it as I can do anything I want as long as I stay within the boundaries I’ve set for myself.

4. What is your favorite genre to read?

I read roughly equal amounts of literary fiction and science fiction, and then a smattering of fantasy, history, and science writing. If it’s well written, engaging, and/or introduces me to new ideas and concepts, I’m game to read it.

5. Is your writing style at all influenced by those of your favorite authors?

My style is influenced in different ways by different authors. Firstly, stylistically, I love writers with a flair for language, such as Jack Kerouac, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Herman Melville, Thomas Wolfe, and others. I first fell in love with Kerouac when I was sixteen. I read On the Road, decided it was over-hyped, and set it aside. Back then, however, I would read every book twice; only by reading it twice, I had decided, could I truly get a good grasp on the flavor of the book.

I finished On the Road for the second time two days later, and already I was in love. The man was a genius with language. To think that everything he wrote is a first draft still blows my mind.

Steinbeck is my favorite conventional author. His stories capture straightforward characters doing everyday things – and they are stories told simply as well – yet they add up to an amazing thematic complexity which I love. Very powerful.

I won’t say I’ve been influenced by either. More like inspired and admired. In the end, they are benchmarks.

6. Which is your favorite book that you’ve written?

My favorite book, to this point, has to be Raw Flesh in the Rising. I spent two years writing and editing the novel to my satisfaction, crafting everything the way I wanted. Then, when I was finished, I cut 50,000 words out of it. To say that any other novel was my favorite would be a harsh pill to swallow at the moment.

Luckily, it’s paid off. In 2011, I won the Percy Janes First Novel Award for Best Unpublished Novel in the NL Arts and Letter’s competition. I’m currently shopping the book to publishers.

I should probably flash this around more often while I still hold the award:

http://www.tcr.gov.nl.ca/tcr/artsculture/artsandletters/2011/lee_burton.pdf

7. What is your opinion of the art of writing?

Writing is an art like any other. One can be an artist who understands every facet of the history of his art and how his own work relates to all the other work which has come before him, or one can simply be an artist for fun and enjoyment. There’s value in both, and the best writing, in my opinion, combines the two.

8. What advice would you give someone who is just beginning their own novel?

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Don’t rely too much on writing guides or you’ll just end up writing like everybody else who’s read them.

Remember the lessons of your high school teachers when it comes to making jot notes and outlines. They work.

Walk sometimes instead of driving. And without headphones.

Listen to critics, but don’t write their words in your heart.

Grammar, spelling, and punctuation, are supremely important. A writer not using the tools of his trade properly would be akin to a carpenter trying to build a house by hammering screws with a wrench.

Don’t emulate the best in your genre, but the best writers in general.

Read a lot; and again, read the best.

Write a lot. Make sure you love your writing for what you’ve written, not because it’s you who’s written it.

       
9. Do you have any funny and / or interesting stories about how you’ve come up with plots or characters?

In my novelette, Do Unto Others, which I’ve published to Amazon, the mayor and priest of my fictional town of Scanlon are based on the real historical characters, Bernard and Pierre Clergue, the local bailiff  and parish priest of the town of Montaillou, France, in the 13th century. Pierre was a womanizer who used the priesthood to seduce women, and Bernard a bit of a brute who used his authoritative position to become wealthy.

Also, and I’m still not sure if I consider this funny or not, but I began writing Raw Flesh in the Rising on a whim. It was supposed to be about forty pages and take me a month. It consumed the next two years of my life.

Lately I've been privileged to be in the company of some fine quality writers, a few of whom I'll be happy to showcase on weekends. Enjoy.

When Tate entered a vision quest hoping to learn something that his Grandfather insists is vitally important, he never expected a nightmare! He had heard about Skin Walkers, but he never believed they were real...
                 
When Morningstar left her village, her dreams were to please her Ancestral God, and return as a potential bride and future mother to her people. However, motherhood always comes with a price...

Three hundred years ago Yellow Bird Mountain didn't exist. Now it marks the location of the Makoce Indian Reservation, containing some of the riches oil deposits in the region. Russell Blanding wants that oil, and will stop at nothing to get it...

Blood is the first volume in the Ancestral Skin Saga, and lays the foundational tale of Native American Skin Walkers with mystical creatures, and thrilling suspense. This Paranormal novel is laced with humor, romance, murder, and deceit.

(This book contains material that some may find offensive. It is intended for mature audiences.)

From best selling mystery author Traci Tyne Hilton comes Gone, the first novel in The Tangle Saga series.

One woman, heir to a throne back on Earth, found life on a remote space station a comfortable way to avoid responsibilities waiting back on her home planet.

But when her rebellious teenaged brother and sister disappear her responsibilities catch up with her.

Thousands of lives hang in the balance--including her own -- as she digs into the darkest corners in space. Can she find the missing kids before their rebellion sets off a chain of violence no one can stop?

"Thomas?" Verity knocked on the screen of his sleeping compartment. Her efforts were rewarded with a groan. She popped the steel blade of her defender and jimmied the door to the compartment open. Thomas lay on his side, moaning, his sandy hair hanging over his ashen face. His hands were bound together with shoelaces.

Verity reached in and shook his shoulder, "Thomas? What happened?"

The tutor's eyelids flickered. His mouth was slack but he groaned something that sounded like Tamsin.

Had Tamsin slipped Thomas a mickey and then tied him up in his sleeping compartment? The idea beggared belief. "Where did they go, Thomas?" Verity stood on her toes and reached inside to untie the laces.

He groaned again then said, "coffee" or something similar.

"They went to the coffee shop?" Verity gave Thomas another shake. His eyes fluttered shut again.

Verity pressed the palm of her hand to Thomas' forehead. He was clammy and cold. " Oh,Thomas, what happened?"  She let her hand rest on his forehead for a moment. Could she really find them without Thomas? Her heart fluttered in her chest. She wouldn't think about without Thomas right now. She'd check the coffee instead.

There was a coffee cup in the drinks holder of his sleeping compartment. Verity dipped her pointer finger in it, letting her embed-comm soak in a sample. She tapped the wall of the compartment and said, "Send sample data to chem-lab 52."

Her comm crackled a little. The voice of the lab tech came through, "Is this Verity?"

"It is. Could you run a scan on the data I just sent?"

"Absolutely. Does this have something to do with your brother and sister?" The tech had a high-pitched note of panic in her voice.

"Yes, probably. And they are going to be in serious trouble when I lay my hands on them."

"Got it. Where do you want the results sent?"

"To my data center and the nurse. Tell her to come to the tutors' lodging, district 9, Thomas Montcrief's pod if it looks like she'll be needed. Tell her I'm administering some charcoal, just in case."

"Will do." The comm crackled again and the call ended.

Verity stored the steel blade and dispensed a charcoal tablet from her all-in-one defense unit. Almost the last one. She'd have to remember to refill when she made it back home. Thomas didn't look like he'd be able to swallow the pill so she popped the capsule into the ejector, stuck the barrel in his slack mouth and sent the charcoal on its way to absorb whatever poison was still lurking in his stomach.

Pardon the roughness. I'm jumping the proverbial gun a little by posting. Hope you enjoy.

The last fingers of the morning fog were slinking away, little waves collapsing on the shore like exhausted swimmers. Hunkered down behind the fishing boat, Stephen knew the longer he stayed near the dock, the deeper the acrid sting of the brine would burrow into his nostrils. He’d taste it all night, even in his sleep, and probably have dreams about stinking seaweed dragging him into the ocean.

It was times like these that tested Stephen’s understanding of how to be a good priest of Banyon. As he saw it, he could put his trust in his judgement of people, that they were rational and straightforward, or he could put his trust in how the world worked: one day followed the next — tomorrow would be much the same as today.

Because therein lay the problem. The day before had derailed spectacularly and had come crashing into this morning.

Acolyte Daniel was still peeping over the edge of the boat, scanning the houses and the fish-drying rooms. If someone happened along then to see them, they’d look foolish.

“What do you think, Daniel?

Daniel was as sure as ever. “I don’t see anything. No, there’s definitely nothing there.”

“No, about all of this. What do you think?”

“Oh. No. There’s definitely no such thing as monsters.”

Monsters, thought Stephen. Someone had finally said the word. Over the houses, Stephen could see the plume of pale orange rising from the hillside. Some of the men claimed it was a kind of smoke coming from a strange thing up in the woods. Like a big pimple just ... just sprung up out of the ground.

“It was a northern rake,” said Daniel, “drifted down with the ice. That happens sometimes. The current brings them right past here. I’d be scared of a rake too. They get big. Have teeth the size of my fingers. They can take down gannocks over four times their size and rip them to shreds before they eat them. They have three stomachs, see....”

That was the last Stephen heard before he tuned Daniel out and looked out over the glittering ocean. He wasn’t so sure the townspeople had seen a northern rake. At heart, he wanted to dismiss everything they had said — wave away all the strange talk about the animal, pat the dust off his robes, and run his errands the way he would normally; life wants to go on like that. But the people who’d come running to the monastery were hardy folk, faces carved by scouring winds, hands sculpted by pulling wet ropes out of the ocean, by pulverizing thick bread, by the hilts of fish-gutting knives. Not people to tell tall tales: people who would know a northern rake if one drifted in on a stray piece of pack-ice. Surely, half of them had seen it happen before, and had probably eaten rake-steaks for days afterward.

Monsters.

Banyon himself had only to believe that he wouldn’t die from thirst, that water would erupt from the bare stone about him. Even he hadn’t had to wrap his mind around monsters in a quaint place like Bay Banyon. Normally, the worst monsters found in town were the ugly clawfish the nets sometimes trawled up, with faces like fistfuls of nails. Too late in the season and they tasted terrible, and tended to give Stephen pungent gas.

“Easy for you to say,” said Stephen, cutting into Daniel’s lecture arbitrarily, “your room is up near the tower. I’m down by the hall. All night people were wailing and pulling their hair out. I might have closed my eyes for a couple hours, maybe two. Up in the tower, see, it’s quiet. Down near the hall where I am, last night it sounded like a circus was going on in there. Now, it’s not so bad normally—”

“People see all kinds of things that don’t really exist. This is a small town. People here were probably still seeing sea maidens and tree people until recently. They see a northern rake and they panic.”

Sobbing and crying had crept stone to stone across the ancient quiet of Banyon hall, twenty people camped on the sacred steps. Few of them had brought food. Some of the women still holding their knitting needles. The men with their high rubber boots on their feet trampling the vegetables to relieve themselves in the corner of the yard when Mrs. Johnson took too long in the communal water room.

Young Mrs. Cole had hardly said a word the past two days. She’d just curled up on the stone steps of Banyon’s chamber and talked quietly to herself. Talking to her absent husband, someone had said. Where her young daughter was, nobody would say.

Stephen hated hearing her crying, and Old grumpy Ben Terra, gnashing his gums together and grinning at everyone, seemed determined to make the ordeal worse for everybody. Every so often, when the room had quietened, he’d smack his hands together loudly and yell, “Shooped up like a great blot of steam! Clamped down upon like two hands clapping in that great mouth of the beast, then SHOOP, there he went!” In the quiet of the great stone chamber, his hands clapping reverberated inside the ears like gunshots.

The women scolded him. These gentle mothers of Bay Banyon with their ankle-length dresses and flower-print aprons had eyes like wild beasts when needed. He was scaring the children, they said. A man of his years should have better sense.

But Old Ben Terra had been ignored in town too long to keep himself quiet. Before long he’d raise a ruckus again. Maybe not of the same sort, yet trouble nonetheless. What men weren’t out with their rifles only looked at their feet, not knowing their place.

Stephen picked a yellow peeling of paint off the boat with his finger and shifted on the loose shore stones. His knees were starting to ache; the soles of his shoes were too thin and his feet could feel every lump.

 Daniel stood up and stretched his neck to look further. “It doesn’t exist … what they described. And it doesn’t make sense. It’s only about four hundred paces to the store. The front door is open. The sign’s still on it, even.”

“That may be true, but I’m not so sure that—”

“You got your robes on, Stephen. Trust in Banyon, right?”

Stephen didn’t like the condescending tone in that. Daniel had missed the point of being a priest of Banyon altogether. It didn’t make him live with faith in the optimal outcome, it made him cocky and restless.

“Okay ... but Banyon wasn’t stupid, Daniel. Seems to me that’s why the monastery’s on a peninsula, and there’s fifteen foot high walls around it.”

Daniel scoffed. “To keep the gardens from being attacked, maybe. The walls by the road don’t even go anywhere.”

“Well, they’re probably symbolic or something.”

The waves hissed down at the beach and the stones clattered, reluctant to be drawn down by the white fingers of the surf.

“See, said Daniel,” holding his hand to his ear, “if there were a northern rake anywhere near here, we’d have heard it scraping its front claws together by now….”

Stephen stood slowly and stretched his legs, sliding his toes around against the rocks. He could feel his knees and ankles popping. Probably be crippled by fifty, he always said. It felt good to stand, but that orange column rising from the hill looked to be blowing towards them, and he felt exposed strolling along as if everything was normal.

“Fine, you go on,” he said, “you be the brave one. I hope you don’t mind if I hang back a bit and stick close to the houses. I don’t got the young danglers that you got.”

Quiet. That was true. An assault of quiet. The wind was waving in the far trees, the branches bowing their heads, and Stephen could hear dead leaves scraping across the pavement somewhere, and the tinkle of tiny rocks against a metal grate.

Usually there’d be a crowd of men down by the dock, mending nets and spitting, gregarious, with thick fingers and impenetrable mumbled accents. He could ignore them until they weren’t there. Then their absence made him nervous.

Back at the monastery, he’d counted nearly twenty people before their milling had ruined his tally, but that left nearly three times that many unaccounted for. Down the road all the doors were closed, the houses quiet. Where was the clatter of dishes being put away after breakfast, the squeak of clothes being fed out to a backyard line? And now that he thought about it, no whistle fish were singing down by the beach. Nor was there a single cheep to be heard from a gray-wing overhead.

Inside every house, he saw only pictures and chairs and dishes, sewing machines and pipes on windowsills. These were dolls’ houses. He wanted somebody, anybody, to be around, and he wanted them to come ambling around a corner carrying their potatoes in an old shirt, not to be found hiding in a closet, or running for their life. If this was all a joke, he was tired of it.

He decided he would not call out, and wouldn’t mention the quiet to Daniel either. The boy would start yodeling over the rooftops with his next breath.

He’d been glad to take Daniel and escape the Banyoners invading his home. Another hour tending to the braying of Mrs. Johnson and they’d have been prying his hands off her throat. The people of Bay Banyon had never been friends to him, but he found himself wishing for a sidelong glance from a window, a sneer from an open upstairs door. He didn’t like being nervous, and wanted to be at home, hoeing in the garden and making repairs to their crumbling monastery; he missed the tedium of his morning rituals.

An orange stain roughly two arm-spans wide was slowly running off the side of the outside wall of the store. Some of it had apparently washed away with the rain the night before, but it looked to have soaked into the boards underneath.

Shooped up like a great blot of steam!

“This is going to take some paint,” said Daniel. He plowed his finger through the orange sheen and it looked viscous and slippery. Daniel sniffed it and coughed immediately. “Ugh, that smells like a jeck’s udder.” Not wanting to wipe it on his pants, he wiped his finger crisscross against the doorframe.

SHOOP! There he went. Gone!

“Ahh, my finger still smells!”

“Not so loud.”  Stephen couldn’t get the sound of grumpy old Ben Terra clapping out of his head. Gone! Just like that. Gone! Clap! Gone!

This morning I self-published a short story of mine with Amazon. I'm not very good at blurbing, blurbinating, or blurbtastic exclamations, but this one came out fairly well.

"Nick stepped up onto a rock and proudly planted a solid print in the cinnamon soil on the other side. One small step for a facilitator …

Nick Hutchinson hates Mars, and hates his new job as Earth Liaison.

One month down, five to go. Think of rivers, think of clouds, think of frogs and dresses in summer and umbrellas. Five months until antelopes, snowflakes, storm drains …

But when he volunteers to venture out onto the surface, hoping to convince a widowed hermit to sell her land to Friends of Earth Co., it’s she who has the most to say, and he who had better listen."

As an aside, if there's no such job as a person who writes winning blurbs for books, this is a niche that somebody needs to fill. And I am certainly not that person.

This story came about when my friend, Michael, challenged me to write a science fiction story as a bet for the Friends of Merrill short story contest. As usual, I doubled the allotted wordcount and forfeited the contest. But it was fun, so that's okay.

Though Mars is popular these days, and always in the news, writing a story about Mars that doesn't infringe on areas already flavoured slightly by the greats is next to impossible. The scientific material we're getting about Mars these days rides the wave of imagination established by A HUNDRED YEARS of stories about the planet, starting with H.G. Wells, peaking at Bradbury, and firmly achieving maturity with Kim Stanley Robinson.

On that note, it's very difficult to write anything political about the colonization of Mars while avoiding falling into Robinson's rather sprawling, erudite, and epic shadow. So I decided the best course of action was not to try. Exercises in futility are not my forte.

So I laid my thoughts out about the inevitable trend towards privatizing space flight, and voila, Daisies of Mars. It's a trepidation that I think is valid, seeing that Virgin is building a space port in New Mexico and Google has lately invested in a company to take advantage of future asteroid mining.

The story is also a turning point for me in my mindset towards publishing.

Just a year ago, I would have held onto the piece and sent it out to journals, hoping for print publication. Daisies of Mars began that way, but after I waited three months to hear back from Asimov's, and a few weeks from Analog (great publications), I realized I simply didn't care to run the gambit of submissions anymore. I don't write many short stories, I don't write much science fiction -- and so don't have a thorough knowledge of that side of the industry -- and I have other projects to write which get neglected while I'm trolling through web pages and looking for submission requirements.

Publishing it on my own -- sorry traditional publishing -- is so damn easy. I know I won't sell much, if any, as I don't write the sort of material that does sell on Amazon, and I know I never will. But it's still nice to be able to give a piece a fond farewell, and a chance at completion: being read.