Thought-Drive

Part III             Another night, another run. The sameness was broken by a splash of white on an otherwise black clad man, on either side of a dark tie, between two breasts of a matching suit jacket. The sight made David remember the guards in his mother’s kitchen in a way that made him realize that slowly, slowly he had been forgetting those memories all along. He changed direction after another two strides and pushed himself against an alley wall. He glanced in both directions, then peeked around the corner but the man was gone. Everything clung to the baseline of his beating heart, and David found himself stalking to hide away in the parking structure of a nearby office park, cowering. He waited, and then he waited some more. He waited until long after it should’ve been safe, then he climbed stairs to look down on the area around him, crouched down in the shadows, peering into the open darkness.                Part of him expected to laugh about it later, to be elated that

Part II               The next morning he checked out of the expensive hotel. He walked to the nearest bank, and investigated the fullest qualities of the plastic cards his father had given him. The teller looked perplexed. He had questions, but didn’t ask any of them. David didn’t help the man’s curiosity, only accepted the liquidated assets and absconded.                With a new number in mind, he walked and contemplated. What if he couldn’t find work? He needed to find a more efficient way to live for the time being. What if he couldn’t find work? With a new daily allowance, he could extend his situation for a substantial amount of time. What if he couldn’t find work.                David walked into an alley and put his hands to a brick wall. He pushed, dissipating some of the stress in his shoulders and back. He grit his teeth and breathed. It didn’t matter if he couldn’t find work. He wasn’t going back.                “Hey, you hear me?” someone asked.           

Part I              David’s flight from the island of his birth was unceremonious. He woke up one morning, walked into his mother’s kitchen, sat at the end of the table and silently ate his share of the breakfast. It was room temperature, coordinating with the hour. His father had gone and left the guards. Something about listening to his mother sing as she washed the dishes, as if she couldn’t see the posted sentries, the men in suits designed to shrink their world. Something about that made everything fall into place David.                When his father came home for lunch David told him.                “I’m leaving.”                It wasn’t just the patriarch he was speaking to, David realized, but his mother, as well, and the uncle or cousin his father had brought home with him. The words came out of his mouth and it was almost like sneezing, something his body needed to expel, a violent, involuntary gesture. After he spoke, there was nothing left to do but to have an

I don't know if naming things gives other authors trouble. It's possible that I build it up too much in my mind. I feel like words, sounds and syllables create two distinct problems. The first is reference: if a sound creates a troublesome association in a reader's mind. Twilight, for instance, has been ruined for a lot of people, even though in a vacuum it's fairly evocative and pleasant to say. If a name points to a very specific memory for a very small number of people, it can't really be helped, but there is a worry with "you don't want to sound like something else." The second problem is what I can only describe as mouth feel. If a name hard to pronounce, difficult t say, or just a strange kind of word salad. It sticks in the mouth, and rather than the reader moving on the next sentence they're at home again in an armchair saying the word to themselves in slight disgust. My original idea for Where Shadows Lie was a kind of double entendre,

I sat down this morning with my aim on an accurate accounting, but reaching back in my memory became a lot like reaching into the backseat while driving: I knew what should be back there, in general, and I could definitely put my hands on various items, but I struggled with knowing what I was turning over and pushing aside in anything but a fuzzy, vague sense. Somewhere around 2007, I wrote a story. It was meant to be humorous. I called it Couch Monsters. In retrospect, it was kind of a Mystery Science Theater, but for urban fantasy. The commentators were a trio of classic movie monsters, and through their commentary, they set to right all the rumor and hearsay about their weaknesses, vulnerabilities, perspectives and stigmas. My very, very small and exclusive circle of readers liked it, and thought there should be more. But, as a satire, it could be brief, and it could be flippant. As a larger conception, it had to be researched and considered more sincerely. Through that process,

Starting on a sequel. Here's the first few from the first book.  Scribing the Circle Introduction                June 23. Landing Day. Even in the frontier town of Fisher’s Reach, there was celebration. Hewn from a sparse, jungle woodlot, all the empty space used for housing and streets, all the wood going to construction, Reach was a homey place. People only had 37 days before Big Rain, not much time, but they still told their stories in festival. Which of the Sons this family were descendants of, or how it was that this group had hiked across the first continent. Didn’t matter if the stories were true. What mattered is that they were all there then to celebrate the lie. It was Landing Day.                At a particular street stall, where a family sold teas, a man appeared. There was no way he could have walked up, stood waiting for a short time, cleared his throat to alert the distracted people. As the story would be told later, he appeared. When t