#1: Milo Greene, “1957″. I can’t get enough of this song or this band. Haunting, dreamy, and nostalgic. Makes me want to write a story. And the whole album has me quite entranced. Check it out. One reviewer said, “like roots rock has been mixed together with dream pop.” Yes! A bit short for $9, but all the songs are good!

#2: Passenger, “Feather on the Clyde”. The most breathtaking dude with his guitar you’ll ever hear.

I also own his whole album, Little Lights. Beautiful, beautiful album! Much recommended! This lovely acoustic solo performance of “Feather on the Clyde” is not on the album, sadly. The album version is good too, but it loses some of that deeply affecting simplicity of the solo version. You might have also enjoyed “Let Her Go”, which you get with this album too.

#3: Delta Rae, “Bottom of the River.” Holy hell, this song, lol! Powerful voice and chilling video. I don’t watch True Blood either, but if it’s anything like this song (which it seems was used in its promo), then maybe I should check that out too.

I will bestow upon you the knowledge of the most genius thing the internet has ever taught me: how to keep slugs off your strawberries.

You see, the bastards like beer even more than they like strawberries. You fill a tuna can with beer, and dig a little hole so that it’s level with the soil. The little drunken idiots will toss themselves right into it! It’s like a pool of alcohol and death! Drown, bastard slugs! Drown!

The plastic forks are to keep the strawberries up off the ground, to make it harder for any stray slugs who weren’t tempted by the beer. But it looks like they all were, lol! Who knew slugs were such alkies?

I was really surprised at how well this works! You can see the fat one in there, but there are also about eight more smaller ones too. This is after two nights. I’m not sure how long it’ll take for the beer to lose potency. I guess I’ll find out!

For my final piece in the Senseless Challenge, week 5, I’m sharing the very first chapter of my upcoming Nine Nights with the Studly Buddha, in its entirety. Which is possible because it’s a very short chapter at just about 1000 words.

This is Corbin’s first girlfriend, Raine.

Mololla, Oregon. 1993.

They both lie on their backs on top of the sheets. She was naked. He was naked. It was July, the summer after high school graduation, in that mid-summer heat that made skin perpetually sticky and slick. Her room smelled musky, the scent of pot, sweat, and condoms. Raine had a joint in one hand and the other traced absently down Corbin’s long torso, lean and chiseled hard. She’d never been with a virgin before him, wondering if it would even make a difference in a man. It did, but only the first few times. She’d never dated a younger guy before him either, but he’d been worth the exception for five beautiful months.

He had her long, wheaty hair in his fingers, picking it up and watching it drop. It looked heavy. Her head felt heavy, rolling to the side, his eyes, chocolaty brown eyes, stoned and dream-like. If only his eyes would stay that way. If she had to leave him — and she did, she really did — she wanted it to feel ethereal. She didn’t want to hurt him, but in three weeks she would no longer be a girl, or even in between, that hazy existence between high school and adulthood. She’d be in college. She’d be on her own. She’d be a woman. She looked forward to it with every ounce of her existence.

She put the joint to his lips until he inhaled. Then she said, “I want you to know my love for you is undefined.”

“It’s what?”

She put the joint to her own lips and took a drag, puffed it out slowly. The room pulsed, warm and sunlit. Her fingers drifted through the space in front of her. She wanted to touch everything all at once, sheets, skin, air. She wanted to touch the light. “It’s like, this thing,” she said. She held her hands above his face, the joint tucked between her fingers still, her hands cupped around an imaginary ball of air filling with a thin trail of smoke. “Love is the air. You know? Love is like this thing you can’t see, can’t touch, can’t even hold. But it’s there. I don’t want you to say you love me.”

“You don’t?” He perched himself up on his elbows, biceps flexing. She lifted herself too and touched him there, traced the length of his arm, over his stomach, where she stopped. He wasn’t going to say it anyway, but she wanted to make sure he didn’t try, that he didn’t go there. It would be too sad.

She shook her head. “Next year, I’ll be in New York, and you’ll be here, and our love will be this thing–” She tapped his chest, then his temple, then held a hand over her heart. “You don’t love me. You just love. Today your love is here with me, and tomorrow your love will go somewhere else.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. His eyebrows made the most finite movements, a pinch, a tiny furrow. He never became very outraged, very extreme. He was always so controlled. So concentrated.

Her closets were already packed, her CDs, her guitar. “You knew I had to go.”

“But…” He bit his bottom lip. “I thought we would keep in touch.”

“Oh, Corbin. Oh…” She tilted her head at him. “That’s so sweet.” She reached out to his cheek, and he picked off her hand and set it down on the bed. She frowned at him. “I’m sorry, love. No. But I’ll think of you.”

Her eyes started to tear a little, and why? It wasn’t quite sadness. Empathy, she wanted to say, the pain of having to cause so much pain. They wouldn’t keep in touch, and she knew it. She wanted it that way. Though she did love him, in her way. But she needed to be free. Right now, she needed to be free. She needed to feel the air and the light and the breeze on her skin, with people. Yes, with other people. She needed to experience, to run, to dance, to love, to fuck. She couldn’t explain it to him. How she cared about him, how full she felt for him, but how it wasn’t quite enough.

He looked confused, but it was so simple. She would be in New York, and he would be here finishing his senior year of high school. She had a full life of experiences to live and her heart was wide open.

She fell back to the sheets again, hazy eyes drifting into sleep. He was already dressing. “These damned earthly bodies,” she said to him. “You know we transcend this. You know we do.”

She wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince him, or herself.

Her eyes were partially closed, but she listened for him to say something. He didn’t. He didn’t yell or shout or call her a bitch. She honestly wondered if he even thought it. She couldn’t imagine him calling anyone a bitch, but he should. Sometimes he should. He should have said it now, because she felt like a bitch. There was just the rustle of his jeans slipping on. A single tear fell down her cheek and she swiped it away with the back of her hand. She took a long, deep drag, and a long, slow exhale until her chest was empty. Her head felt so heavy, and she let it fall toward the door where he was leaving, bare-chested still, holding his shirt in his hands. The door opened, it closed, and a breeze fluttered over her naked skin, a cool breath in the hot room.

She wanted to think he gave her that breeze like it was a final kiss goodbye.

A few words: this is one I copied from another drawing for class, so it seems kind of bad etiquette to post the whole drawing. I drew it, but it’s not really “mine” if that makes sense. Anyway, I finished it! There were SO many feathers on this owl! I gave up on my first few owls I tried because the feathers just kicked my ass, but this one was good practice.

For week 4 of the Senseless Challenge, I’m sharing a bit from what was the forever-ago first draft of Leila’s story, A Thousand Simple Truths. I’m not sure if this will show up in the final draft of the book. I was in a silly mood when I first wrote it, and an even sillier mood when I revised and enriched it. Maybe there’s a place for it somewhere though. Every book needs a bit of levity.

In second person because I’m a rebel!

You know you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You know this. But you’re not eating any cake. You’re just thinking about it, considering it, leaning in to test the aroma. And it smells, so, so good. It could be your new favorite kind of cake, a flavor you never knew existed and wouldn’t have known how to look for before it showed up here, burst into your world in an explosion of warmth and flavor and spice. You spent your whole adult life thinking your favorite flavor was strawberry cheesecake — a perfectly respectable cake to enjoy — but how could you have known that your actual favorite was cinnamon chili chocolate crumble if you’d never seen it before?

You didn’t ask to find it. It was just placed here in your hands. First, you take a good strong whiff. The chili burns your nose while the cinnamon makes your lips tingle. Your eyes water. The texture looks crunchy on the outside but you can see through the cracks how moist it is on the inside. The rich, dark chocolate promises a decadence you know you’ve never had before. You can almost feel the crumble on your tongue. You can almost feel it stuck to your soft palate, sticky and thick, your whole mouth full. You might be salivating, but you’re not eating any cake.

Because a woman in your position should not be trying a new flavor of cake. A woman in your position should stick with the strawberry cheesecake, a tested old favorite, steady and true. A woman in your position is lucky to be stuck with strawberry cheesecake at all. It could have been worse — yellow sponge, or angel food. You could be stuck with gluten-free.

Because the thing is this: you might really love that cinnamon chili chocolate crumble. It might be made just for you, sent from the universe to your tongue on a fork straight from the gods. But what good is one little bite of cake if it ruins everything? What good is a whole slice of cake if you can never, ever have it again?

You know this isn’t about cake, of course. This is about a man.

I hope this doesn’t blow anyone’s mind, lol!

I’m tweeting all the time about my 23-or-something books in progress. This is to let you know that I’m totally not joking.

For a while I was talking about Leslie’s story, which I thought was going to be the next book out the door, but Leslie is being difficult, so now I think Corbin’s book will be next. If any of you remember, both Leslie and Corbin were secondary characters in Exactly Where They’d Fall — Leslie had a much smaller part as one of Drew’s cousins, and Corbin played a larger role in the story as Amelia’s friend. You even got to meet Leila in EWTF, though you’ll probably remember her as Corbin’s friend, “the earthy brunette”. Leila’s book will likely be finished soon after Corbin’s book is done.

I’ve been meaning to append a note to the back of EWTF (there was a vague note about “though this is not a traditional series, you will see these characters again…), which will attempt to explain what I’m doing here. What I want to say is: these books are part of a complicated and sprawling web of interlinked stories, novellas, and novels, spanning forward and backwards in time, and flowing through several friendships, families, and romances. While each story is whole and can be read independently, they can also be read together as part of a larger web of human connections.

And if that doesn’t do the trick, everything makes better sense with a diagram!

See? So think spin-offs rather than sequels. (more…)

Here’s week 3 of the Senseless Challenge: smell.

This piece is excerpted and reworked from a few episodes of my blog story, StorySkippers Anonymous, but with the story skipping stuff edited out, because that’s just too complicated for flash fiction and I’m not trying to blow anybody’s minds here, lol!

Bars didn’t smell like cigarettes anymore. Inside, the air smelled of manufactured fog and climate control, perfume and desperation. Outside, the air was saturated with lingering rain and the chill of autumn. The two worlds crashed at the opened door where she was leaving work, where he had come to find her wearing a strange-smelling lab coat, his neat close-cropped curls gone fluffy in the wind. “Oh, shit,” April said. She sucked in a breath of cold air, feeling torn between jumping forward to hug him, to hit him, to shout at to go screw himself, or maybe even crying. But she didn’t do any of those things — she didn’t move at all. She had a jacket on, but her legs were bare. She was cold, always cold when she came home from work in those little outfits, drenched in fruity liquors and spilled vodka. She saw him wanting to reach out his arms and wrap her up. She always loved the way he could wrap her up.

“I didn’t mean shit. I meant, what are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t want to fight anymore.”

A fight? In twelve years they hadn’t gone more than a few hours without speaking, so two months was more than a fight. She still couldn’t even believe he would suggest it, after everything she’d been through — April never wanted to screw up a kid like her own mother did. So if a kid was still what Beau wanted, then she didn’t know what to say to him.

It didn’t seem like it had been twelve years since they first met, at the park, scratching tic-tac-toe in the dirt, but it appeared to be true. April was never the type to mark time like that. But Beau was. Never grow up, she made him promise. And he had promised. But they did grow. They were grown-ups doing grown-up things, having grown-up feelings and needs, and one day they came to this road block — he wanted a family, and she didn’t. Where would they go from there?

“Did you want to say something, or just stalk me like a creeper?”

He laughed lightly. “I guess I just wondered what you’ve been doing. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“What I do?” She gave him a weird look. “I go to work. Here. This is what I do.” Was she okay? That was a different question. “You don’t look okay. Don’t you like your new job?”

“My supervisor is a total dick. An idiot too. So I’m in charge of the relay switchboard and all they have me do — for real — is push this button at the end of each treatment round. Mind you, I have two degrees, and all those student loans, just to push a button? The other day, when he wasn’t looking, I switched his bottle of Aluminum Sulphate with dishwasher detergent… It was his fault he didn’t look at the labels again before he filled the incoming tub.”

April pictured all the bubbles — there must have been so many, all iridescent and sparkling and going, pop, plink, pop. She couldn’t contain the grin spreading across her face.

“And it made me remember,” he went on. “The time we were both working together at my dad’s arcade — do you remember the arcade?”

“I remember,” she said.

“And what were we, seventeen then? When you put dish liquid in the fountain because my dad told you to clean it and you thought that was how. And then when it started to bubble, we snuck out the back so the new kid would get the blame. I remember we were smoking a joint while he fired that poor kid. And you still had the back of your head shaved, ’cause you were going through that punk phase, and I was teasing you about it, and do you remember you said if I ever stopped being your friend, you would shave my head?” He grinned. “Well, don’t you owe me a head-shaving?”

He meant it lightly, he meant it as a joke, but instead it only made a deep ball of hollowness form in her throat. “Only if that means you stopped being my friend. Did you?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t.”

“Then I actually like you with all that hair.”

“Come here,” he said, holding out his hands. “I know you want to.”

It was true. She was starting to bounce a little.

It had been too long, but between them, too long to start again was impossible. She touched his jacket first and let him pull her close. “Do you smell chlorine?”

“No,” Beau said. “I don’t smell anything.”

“Yeah,” April said. “I think you spilled some on your jacket or something.”

She opened up his jacket and let him wrap her up inside, tucking her face in the warm space where his collar met his skin, the safest place she ever knew, the smell of him, of clean laundry and Irish Spring soap and apparently, chlorine now too.

“I won’t say it again,” he whispered. His voice was soft beneath the rush of cars passing on the street, but with his lips so close to her ear, she heard him clearly. “I know why you don’t want to, and I respect that. If it means we can’t be friends, then it’s not worth it.”

All that struck her then was that this meant someday he would find someone else to have a family with. He deserved a family, and she did want that for him. One day, he would meet someone who could give him everything he wanted, who could be everything he needed and deserved, and she would lose him for good.

But for now, she still had him. She held him tighter, the warmth of his hands on her back, his breath on her shoulder. She held him tighter, even if he did promise her they would hang out again soon, and a lot, and every day, and forever. She felt herself losing him, little by little, with each disagreement, each difference, so many marks stacked against them, so many reasons why it couldn’t last.

He started to part them, but she stopped him. “No, not yet,” she said. “Don’t let go.”

She breathed in the smell of him, remembering all the smells of him, the boyishness of trees and dirt and wind, the spilled soda of their teen years, the pot smoke of college, and finally the smell of him all grown up. Chlorine and dish liquid. “Don’t let go,” she said again.

Week 2 of the Senseless Challenge: sound.

Stephanie’s entry is excerpted from another of my WIPs that some of you may have read pieces of before, an immensely huge sci-fi/drama called Lakeside Heights that is going to take me forever to finish. This piece actually comes from about book 3 or 4, but I don’t think it should be very spoilery. Or at least shouldn’t spoil anything you didn’t figure would happen eventually anyway, lol!

There were other voices in the background, calls home, canned laughter. Her husband’s voice was wrapped in echoes over the satellite relay connection, like he was standing in a small tin room. Then she realized, he may in fact be standing in a small tin room. From what he’d told her, that was what most of the rooms were like on base. “Have you heard them? You can’t hear them there, can you?”

“No. No, we can see them, but we can’t hear anything here. Not from outside, I mean.”

“Did anyone ever tell you about them? Did they send video? It’s probably not the same over video.”

“What do they do?”

“They don’t do anything, really. They just fly.” She could hear them now outside, streaking across the sky with their song, almost melodious. “They make this sound,” she told him. “It’s like voices, thousands of voices. But sad, like they’re weeping. And the noise goes on and on since they’ve been here. I think it’s the sound of them cutting through the air, or maybe it’s how they power the things – I don’t know. Do you know how they power the things?”

“No, we don’t know that yet.”

“I don’t like you being down there,” he said. “They’re going to send more guys back down. They’re worried we took too many, left you guys vulnerable. They said it was the Mars unit that they finally breached. Nobody ever thought they’d get that close. Nobody ever knew– Are you scared? Is Willow scared?”

“That’s the thing,” she said. “It’s not scary, exactly. Not unpleasant. Loud, yes, but almost pretty.” She didn’t know how to explain it, the longing drone of them, like a long cry after so many years of quiet tension, waiting. It sounded like release. It spoke to her somehow. “It’s just… constant. It’s been weeks now, I think, since they started, doing whatever it is they do up there.” She moved to the window to look out at them. “Can you hear this?” She held up the phone to the sky, one, two, three zoomed past, high, where the airplanes used to fly, but faster and louder. The airplanes didn’t dare fly anymore. “Did you hear that?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Just wind, it sounded like. Is it windy there? I miss the wind.”

She inhaled for him, a sort of game. When he missed the sunshine, she stuck her hand out the window to feel the rays on her skin; when he missed the rain, she went outside to drench herself in it. There was a little wind–smelling of fresh cut grass and some car exhaust–but she couldn’t hear it over all that sound, the endless voices, the sad, white noise. It had become the background of their whole world.

“The other day, somebody in Detroit took a rocket launcher and shot at one. You know they told us not to. They told us to leave them alone. And he didn’t hit them or anything, but he shot at one, and for maybe five minutes, they stopped. Even here, everywhere maybe. For real, they just stopped dead in the sky where they were, floating, and the sound was all gone. You should have seen everyone watching them, listening. We didn’t know what they were going to do, but when we realized they weren’t going to do anything, everyone noticed all at once that the sound was gone. We all grabbed our ears to make sure they were still working. And they were. Everything was just as it should be again. When they stopped, it was just rain and wind and the waves and the leaves crunching on the ground. It was all so quiet by comparison, and we never knew it would be like that. Even the birds stopped chirping. I’m telling you, I could hear my own heartbeat it was so quiet.”

She could barely hear her husband breathing over the sound. She pressed her ear harder to the phone and plugged the other ear with her finger, and there was his soft, rhythmic breath. “Wow,” was all he whispered, almost inaudibly. His breathing, hers, her heartbeat pulsing in her ears. It was just like this, she thought, when they stopped for five minutes. Like the quiet pause after a symphony of so much sound.

Week 1 of the Senseless Challenge: sight.

Rita’s entry is excerpted from a WIP that I should finish sometime this fall, Nine Nights with the Studly Buddha.

She was starting to forget what his clothes smelled like. She could hardly remember the scratchy feel of his stubble against her cheek. But his eyes, she remembered. She remembered because she forced herself to remember. They were a muddy shade of blue, always trying to look hard but barely holding back a smile. He never took any of it seriously. She knew he didn’t. She remembered the sandy blond of his hair, the shape of his shoulders, the angle of his jaw, the length of his arms and legs. He had freckles on his nose, hair he wore shaved at fourteen, hidden under a ball cap or hoodie at sixteen, and finally as a young man, let to see the light of day again. She had few pictures of him — how was it possible a person could exist in this world for nineteen years and leave behind so few imprints? Besides the baby photos his mum kept, but those were not the ones Rita wanted. But what she had was many years of memories, so she drew them feverishly. She drew them so she would never have to forget.

There was a knock at her bedroom door. “Are you going to start on those rooms then? We have three guests checking in today.”

“Just a minute, Mum,” Rita said. She had this memory in mind, crisp as the day she saw it: him at his bedroom window with a cigarette between two fingers, gray-cast light falling on his bare chest. It filtered their world into tones of light and dark, the white of his skin, the darkness of the room behind him, as if all the color had leaked out.

Her mum let herself into the room and crept closer, trying to peek over her shoulder at the paper. Rita snapped the sketchbook closed, her eyes dead forward on the blank white wall, holding his image in focus, conjuring him in front of her, a ghostly hallucination. Drumming her charcoal pencil on the desk, a nervous tap, tap, tap, a staccato plea. “Please, just a minute. I’m almost done. I just need a minute. I’ll be right out.”

“Won’t you let me see what you’re drawing? You never let me see what you’re drawing. Don’t it count we’re still paying for your flat out there?”

“It counts, Mum. But no, this one’s not done yet.” She felt him fading, her attention split. She sighed, broke focus and looked up at her mum’s face, her smile, partly disappointed, but mostly concerned. Two figures in her mind — all the lips, the eyes, the hair, the skin — became blurry.

“They’re never done with you,” her mum said. She placed a soft hand on Rita’s shoulder before turning to go.

When the door clicked closed, Rita opened the sketchbook. The shape of shoulders, the recessed hollow of a collarbone, the beginnings of a darkened backdrop, charcoal and paper, light and dark, here and gone. She closed her eyes and tried to bring him back to her.