The other day, I was poking around my old web site in The Internet Archive looking for some information, and I happened to notice my “Response Times” link. This was a report that could be spit out by my old Manuscript Tracking database and which I used to upload from time to time just as a point of interest to show how long it was taking to get responses to submissions. Obviously this information is now completely out of date and utterly useless, but I thought it would be interesting to post its state as of the last time I updated it, over ten years ago. And so, here it is, in all its retro Web 1.0 glory:

Publisher/Agent Response Times

Note:  The information
below comes straight out of my MS Tracking database.  Obviously, one or
two submissions do not add up to a reliable average, but I included them
anyway.  These are my experiences only.  Your mileage may vary.
Markets listed as “CLOSED” are not necessarily out of publication,
but to the best of my knowledge are not accepting fiction submissions anymore.
They may still accept nonfiction or other types of submissions.  In any
case, this list should not be accepted as definitive for the status of any
particular market.

Last Updated: 9/5/99 (I know, I’m a slacker …)

A few useless statistics from the table above:

Wow … I sure was a busy fellow back in the day. I would also say I was very patient, but I’m not sure that would be accurate.

Don’t forget to vote for the November scene of the month!

The votes are in and once again the winner for “Scene of the Month” is The Wolf. We’re up to about page 24 of about 100, so there’s plenty of werewolf fun still available, but it’s starting to become clear that this will be the first book to be removed from the “Scene of the Month” list due to running out of material. And now, here it is, the next scene!

The kids thought it was pretty cool to ride in a police car; Michelle hoped they didn’t have a repeat of the experience, say, when they were teenagers.

The deputy, Miller, had offered to drive them up to the lodge. He had become superfluous at the accident scene; between the sheriff, the game warden, the fire department, the paramedics, and the road crew working to clean up the trailer, the stretch of road where they had won their argument with the pickup truck probably had the highest concentration of government employees in the state.

“Heck of a way to start a vacation, huh?” Miller said.

“Yeah,” she said. The kids had started singing the theme song from that reality cop show, getting the words mostly right, although they couldn’t seem to quite hit the reggae beat. “Do you get a lot of poachers up here?”

“Nah. Well, some. We’re really not sure. Most of them never get caught. There’s a lot of forest to cover, and Darwin is the only game warden in the county.”

“He is?”

Miller shrugged. “Budget cuts.”

“When I grow up, I’m gonna be a game warden too,” Robbie announced.

“Hey, that’s great,” Miller said. “We could use the help.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Michelle said. “Last week he wanted to be a garbageman.”

They passed a sign that said Knotty Pines Campground. The sign had a picture of a pine tree with arms, legs, and big round eyes; it looked like the tree was playing baseball or something. The deputy pointed at the dirt driveway. “That’s the park where the trailer was spotted.”

Michelle eyed the campground as they passed. She couldn’t really see anything; the road curved into the trees and vanished. But she could imagine the truck and its trailer trundling out of it, making a left onto the the gravelly road, bouncing down the mountain toward its rendezvous with their car.

A few miles past the campground, they reached the lodge. The smooth blacktop driveway was gated, probably to keep out people like the poacher. The gatekeeper came out of his little cabin when the police car pulled up, looking concerned; Miller waved him over to the passenger side, where Michelle explained about the accident and gave their reservation number, reading it off the crumpled printout in her purse. The attendant went back to his shack and buzzed them in; the gate rattled open, giving them access to the long, upward sloping driveway that led to the lodge itself.

Michael said: “Whoa.”

The kids were both on Robbie’s side, noses pressed up against the glass like puppies at the pet store. They had seen pictures of the lodge online, of course, but it was more impressive in person. The vast expanse of log walls looked like they had cut down an entire forest to make it. The grand entrance was three or four stories tall, with a carved overhang supported by massive milled columns. Beneath it was a flagstone patio dotted with potted ferns and Adirondack chairs. A few other guests were on the porch, and they eyed the patrol car as it pulled up to the massive steps. “We’re probably the first guests to arrive with a police escort,” Shells said.

“Maybe so,” Miller said, “but if I have to come back and get you, it won’t be the first time somebody left here with one. You need a hand with the bags?”

They had transferred all their luggage to the police car’s enormous trunk, moving aside a shotgun and leaving various other mysterious cop-trunk type items at the accident scene. After a moment, Michelle said: “Are you serious?”

“Of course.”

“You don’t have to go investigate a crime or something?”

Miller seemed to think that was pretty funny. When he was done laughing, he said, “Your accident is the most excitement we’ve had in months. Nothing much ever happens up here, ma’am. It’s not like down below.”

“I guess not,” she said. “Well, if you’re sure, then yeah. I could use some help.”

“Sure I’m sure. You saw what it says on the car. To serve and protect.“

The poll has been reset, so voting for the December scene can now commence!

This week, I reached into my vast collection of rejection letters and pulled out this double-sider from Marietta Publishing:

Side one is a flier advertising Tom Piccirilli’s short story collection The Dog Syndrome.  Checking Wikipedia, that places this rejection at around 1997.

Side two is the rejection. It’s a very nice rejection, but unfortunately, I have no idea what story it was for.

If I still had my submission tracking database up and running I could find out, but that requires MS Windows and MS Access and I don’t have either of those anymore. Important safety tip, kids — when possible, avoid proprietary formats!

Incidentally, if you’re looking for a short, creepy, moody novel, you could do worse than Tom Piccirilli’s A Choir of Ill Children. I picked that up at World Horror 2004 and rather liked it.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been working on a new edition of A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder that, among other things, restores the infamous missing epilogue, plus fixes various issues with the layout from the most recent edition, which was a scan produced by BookSurge of the original DarkTales edition of Crows.  This edition is now available at my Lulu storefront and should become available at Amazon.com and other outlets over the next few months.  I also plan to do a Kindle edition once the ISBN and distribution is finalized.  In the meantime, please visit my Lulu store and check it out there!

Another thing I changed is the teaser excerpt at the beginning of the book.  The original one emphasized the book’s more horrific turn as it nears the end of the story:

His mouth opened, forcing hers to open, too …

She felt the first clammy, sticky bubbles of slime coming out of his throat, dribbling into hers. Salty mucous, gunk like the stuff that had slurped out of the dashboard of their car after it had died by the side of the road. Her stomach heaved, heaved so hard she thought it should be strong enough to knock him right off her, though of course it wasn’t, that was just a desperate fantasy as the stuff choked her. She couldn’t breath; he had gummed up her nose with snot, her mouth was full of it. He wanted her to swallow, that was it.

Swallow, and breathe, and be like him

What can I say? Back in the day, I liked to go for the gross-out, as they say. But the new teaser is from a scene earlier in the book, one that several readers have particularly liked:

Nick Garson had watched, with a sort of detached interest, as his hands had reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his gun and started shooting at the man in the bulldozer …

It wasn’t until the bulldozer crashed into the pit that Nick began to think that maybe this was something he could get in trouble for; so he tucked the gun back into his jacket and went back to his car, thinking that he would just be moving along back to Buffalo, leaving no one the wiser that he had ever been here.

There were still a lot of loose bullets on the driver’s seat. He scooped them up before he sat down, and then watched his hands reload the gun. He wondered why they were doing that; maybe they were expecting to be called on to shoot someone else.

His two little friends were just sliding the clip back into place when he heard the sirens approaching. Somebody must have heard the shots and called the police. Bad hands, Nick thought. Bad, bad, bad! Loading the gun when they should have been helping him drive away!

The cop car came tearing in from the north, braked rapidly and stopped at an angle at the side of the road. Two policemen got out, looking around cautiously. They had their own guns out; he could see the weapons in their hands.

One cop reached into the cruiser and pulled out the radio mouthpiece and started talking into it, while the other kept his gaze flicking around the scene. They seemed quite wary. Reasonable, Nick thought, considering that there had been gunfire. Funny; he felt more like a witness than a perpetrator, as if he should run over to them with his palms in the air and say I saw who did it, officers, it was these hands here!

Of course, he wasn’t about to do something crazy like that.

An improvement? I think so. But still, in the end, this remains a horror novel, and that nasty mucousy stuff from the first teaser still plays a surprisingly major role in what happens at the end.

Don’t forget to vote for the November scene-of-the-month — it will be posted next week!

The Kindle version of Dragon Stones is now available!   There was a slight delay while I satisfied Amazon.com that I am, in fact, the author of and have electronic rights to Dragon Stones; no doubt this process was tightened up somewhat after the 1984 fiasco, when Amazon allowed a publisher without distribution rights to sell 1984 in the Kindle store, then reached out and deleted it from customer Kindles when the mistake was discovered.  They certainly don’t want a repeat of that; plus I wouldn’t want someone else peddling copies of Dragon Stones to Kindle users, so I guess it’s a protection for both Amazon and authors/publishers.  (But we know who Amazon is REALLY protecting.  Nudge nudge wink wink.)

I’m pretty happy with how Dragon Stones turned out for the Kindle,  so I’ll probably do this with the other books I have electronic rights for.  At the moment that’s just Long Before Dawn (Hard Shell Word Factory, which is in the process of being acquired by Mundania Press, has electronic rights to Night Watchman), but I am working on a reissue of Crows through Lulu.com which will, among other things, have the missing epilogue restored, along with a new cover, and without any missing pages (thanks for reporting that, Mango’s mom!).

Anyway, I’d encourage anyone with an Amazon Kindle to check out Dragon Stones.  As with other Kindle books, you can get a free sample, and text-to-speech is enabled because unlike some publishers, I don’t mind if you want to have your Kindle read to you in the car. The more opportunities for reading the better, I say.

Don’t forget to vote for the November scene of the month!

The votes are in and once again The Wolf is the reader’s choice for scene of the month! Continuing with the way I’ve been doing it, this is the next scene in sequence from the last one, rather than a random scene. Enjoy!

The flatbed truck, ironically enough, reminded Greg of the pickup that had gone off the road. It was the same color, a muddy greenish brown, and just as battered, and he figured that if it happened to barrel-roll down a hill, it would spread just about as much crap out behind it.

“Man, I never seen nothing like that before,” the driver said again. “That trailer looked like God was using it for a football. You’re a lucky guy.”

“Yeah,” Greg said. “Lucky.”

They passed beneath the Interstate, the span high overhead, supported by massive concrete pilings covered with bird shit. The creek splashed alongside the road at this point, now that they had reached the valley floor. He saw clots of foam skidding along its surface and stuck up against rocks, remnants of the stuff that the helicopter had dumped on the burning truck and surrounding vegetation. He supposed there would be paramedics down there now, dropped in by parachute maybe, scraping the driver out of the remains of his vehicle. When they were done they would probably have about enough to fill a bucket.

They came to a cross street, this one paved with actual blacktop, and with a yellow line down the middle. Greg supposed that made it a highway. They turned left and headed deeper into the valley, eventually reaching a lakeside hamlet. Well, maybe it wasn’t really a lake so much as a big pond, a temporary pause before the creek continued its journey through the mountains. The road wound along its bank, cattails and rushes waving erratically as the truck passed. Might be a nice place to visit, except now they were going to be stuck at the lodge without a vehicle.

Greg lost sight of the pond as the road veered away from it and entered the town. He saw a single stoplight some distance away, but they weren’t going to reach it; they were approaching a garage whose sign matched the logo on the doors of the flatbed cab. Below the sign was a smaller one indicating that the facility was approved by the auto club, but he wasn’t sure how recent the endorsement was; the rusting metal plate looked like it had taken a blast of buckshot in the distant past.

The garage was across the street from a row of kitschy trinket shops that were obviously aimed at tourists, and flanked by a greasy spoon on one side and a small supermarket on the other. The driver guided his truck into the lot, deftly maneuvering between an old Volkswagen Beetle and an enormous SUV that looked like it should have sported light artillery. Once in the lot, he began a series of incremental turns that eventually got the truck’s rear end facing the larger of the two maintenance bays.

Greg got out of the truck and left the driver to work on lowering his vehicle while he went into the office. It was to the right of the garages, a small, square room with dark paneling and darker furniture, including a battered coffee table piled high with outdoorsy magazines. There was no one behind the counter, though there was an old bell there, the kind that you tapped with your finger to summon a bellhop. He gave it a pat, but instead of a light jingle, he heard what sounded like a school klaxon ringing in the garage. There was no immediate response. Greg turned away from the counter and noticed a pay phone nestled in the shadows near the restroom.

A pay phone. How long had it been since he’d had to use one of those?

Fishing in his pocket, he headed for the phone to call his insurance agent. Instead of a quarter, though, he came up with the item he had picked up from the road near the trailer wreck. He had completely forgotten about it when the police had arrived, but now he looked at it, wondering if he should give it back to them. A bullet, hand-forged, not smooth like the ones you saw behind the counter in the sporting-goods section.

“You own the SUV?”

He turned. A mechanic in grey, greasy overalls, looking for all the world like an older version of the driver of the flatbed truck, had entered through the back door, and was standing there looking at him the way a scout might look at a future first-round draft pick. “Yeah,” Greg said, putting the bullet back in his pocket. “That’s mine.”

“I got some bad news,” the mechanic said.

Oh no! Bad news from a mechanic! And you thought all the horror in this story was going to come from the werewolf!

The poll results have been reset, so feel free to start voting for the November scene-of-the-month.  As I mentioned a while ago, The Wolf is nowhere near being finished, but there are still plenty of scenes to go before we run out of story!

This weekend, I decided to spend a little time formatting one of my books (Dragon Stones, natch) for the Amazon Kindle.  The Kindle, of course, is an e-book reader notable for its built-in “Whispernet” wireless client, which allows the user to shop and buy books and have them delivered directly to the device without ever having to connect it to a computer.  I got a Kindle 2 for my birthday this year and it quickly became my preferred way to read books.  But this isn’t a post about the Kindle, it’s a post about creating Kindle content.

If you have electronic rights to a book in Amazon’s catalog, you have the ability to start selling it in the Kindle store via a link on the book’s listing.  This link takes you to the “Digital Text Platform” section of Amazon.com, where you can enter your book’s information and then upload a file to be converted into a Kindle HTML document.  (This will all look pretty familiar to anyone who has used one of the modern online self-publishing services such as Lulu.)  Yes, HTML — the Kindle is, essentially, displaying web pages.  More on that shortly.

I uploaded the PDF version of Dragon Stones as my source file, and the Amazon.com converted did a respectable job turning it into Kindle HTML.  It stripped out the page headers and footers, including the page numbering, page numbers not really being meaningful on a device where you can grow and shrink the font size as you read.  The converted document was certainly readable in the “Kindle preview” on the DTP page.  Does this mean that you can take your book, upload it, and publish it to the Kindle without knowing any HTML?  Ummm, not so much.

The HTML conversion, while good, is not perfect, which is why Amazon recommends that you review the file and why you have the ability to download it and edit the HTML, then upload it again.  In particular, I noticed and fixed a couple of irregularities introduced by the conversion:

• Some font sizes were rendered either too small or too large
• Some text alignments were not respected; in particular, a section at the beginning that contained centered text was rendered left-justified instead.  This appears to be due to (alert:  impending geeky digression ensues) how the Amazon converter applies CSS classes to paragraphs; it created a large number of CSS paragraph tags (“<p>”) that included text alignment instructions with the “!important” modifier, causing it to override the “center” instruction on the block of text in question.  The solution I went with was to remove the class declaration from the “<p>” tags in question.
• Page breaks were removed.  This is a big one.  HTML doesn’t natively support page breaks (after all, a continuously scrolling document, which is what a web page is, doesn’t have “page breaks” per se), so it might seem to make sense that the converter ignores them.  Fortunately, the Kindle supports a nonstandard page break instruction tag (“<mbp:pagebreak />”). This tag is your friend; use it.  Otherwise your reader is going to find that “CHAPTER TWO” starts a few lines underneath the last paragraph of “CHAPTER ONE”, which, while it will not make your book unreadable, does make it look a little sloppy, not to mention confusing.  (Side note:  This is a Mobipocket tag.  It doesn’t appear that the Kindle officially supports all Mobipocket tags, but it supports some of them, at least.)
• It treated “<br>” tags as open-ended.  Technically they are, because to close a tag, you need the slash before the greater than sign (“<br />”).  However, some HTML editors don’t add this slash.  I’ve never seen a browser treat “<br>” as open-ended, but the Kindle evidently does.  I discovered this because my own HTML editor is one that doesn’t put the slash in, and for some reason a “<br>” tag in my document had gotten a style associated with it, like so:  ”<br style=’text-style:italic;’>”.  This was causing the entire page after the “<br>” to be rendered italicized.  It took me a little while to track down the source of this formatting issue, simply because I wasn’t looking for “<br>” tags with style declarations in them.  As soon as I spotted one, though, I knew I had found the culprit.  Removing the style declaration fixed the unwanted italicizing.

In addition to these changes, I did some additional minor cleanup in a few spots where I didn’t like how the text had rendered, and changed the title in the HTML header which, interestingly, was “Long Before Dawn“.  I’m pretty sure it was getting this from the OpenOffice.org document style, which I must have created while working on Long Before Dawn.

Once I was finished, I uploaded the HTML file to replace the one that Amazon.com had created out of the PDF.  Already being in the required format, it was passed through apparently unmodified, and I was completely happy with how it rendered in the Kindle preview; so I clicked “publish”.  Does that mean that you can now buy Dragon Stones for your Kindle for the low, low price of $4.99?  Nope:

Publishing Dragon Stones. Your book is currently under review by the Kindle Operations team as we are trying to improve the Kindle customer experience. Please check back in 5 business days to see if your book was published to the store. This will not affect any titles you are currently selling in the store, but uploading updates to existing titles will take longer to process

Drat.  I was hoping to have a link for you today.  Oh well, check back next week.

I doubt Amazon is conducting an editorial review of the content; most likely they are reviewing the format to make sure the presentation is satisfactory.  If I’m correct, this is another reason to download your file, review it, and make whatever changes are necessary to fix page breaks, fonts, etc.  Although HTML can be edited with any text editor, there are also a number of WYSIWYG editors available, including some free ones.  A good one to start with is Nvu or the Nvu fork KompoZer, which is the editor I’m currently using.  Another good choice is the Composer component of SeaMonkey.

That’s it for my Adventures in Kindling for this week.  Don’t forget to vote in the scene-of-the-month poll!

From the “Was This Really Homework?” Department:

What self-respecting kid wouldn’t want a pair of rocket shoes?

Many years later, a similar sort of device would appear in a game of “Paranoia” that I was refereeing.   For those who aren’t familiar with it, “Paranoia” was “a role-playing game set in a darkly humorous future”, a dystopian subterranean realm called Alpha Complex, isolated ever since an incident referred to as “The Big Oops” or variants thereof, and nominally ruled by The Computer (slogan:  ”Happiness is mandatory”).  If you think of it as 1984 meets Brazil meets Monty Python meets Idiocracy meets The Clone Wars, you will have a pretty good idea what it was like.

Anyway, the objective of the “Paranoia” referee was to kill the players (known as “Troubleshooters”) as quickly and as humorously as possible, and one method to achieve this was through the dispensation of new technology from the R&D department.  This technology, which was usually of questionable effectiveness and even more questionable safety, had to be tested by the players while on their missions.  (Failure to test R&D equipment was considered treason.  So was breaking it.)  The objective of the “Paranoia” player was to be the only one to survive the mission.

With that background material in mind, the particular mission where these shoes figured prominently was one that I called “Commie Cockroaches”, in which the Commies (omnipresent “Paranoia” enemies) unleashed a plague of giant robotic cockroaches on  Alpha Complex.  On this mission, one of the pieces of equipment assigned to the Troubleshooters by R&D was a pair of rocket-powered roller skates.  Surprisingly, a particular Troubleshooter was quite eager to try these out, and so at the first encounter with the Commie Cockroaches he put them on and fired them up, launching himself toward the lead Cockroach at a very high velocity. Sensing danger, the Cockroach lowered itself to the ground, essentially turning itself into a ramp.  The Troubleshooter raced up the Cockroach’s back and became airborne, sailing some distance along the chamber, until he smashed face-first into a rock wall at the end of the chamber and was reduced to a bloody pulp.  (In “Paranoia” one didn’t need to bother with things like saving throws vs. slamming into a stone wall or being turned into a thick yellow spray.)

Hmm.  Well, thinking about that always gives me a little giggle, anyway.  I suppose you had to be there.  Just to make this supremely nerdy, I was running the game online at college using their ancient network (I think it was a Burroughs or a VAX). Retro-cool?  Or merely dorky?  I leave that up to the reader.

Don’t forget to vote in the scene-of-the-month poll!

So over the holiday last week, we watched the movie District 9. Originally my wife had declined to screen this film, but after hearing from several friends about how good it was, she agreed to go see it. I had also told her it was supposed to be good, but apparently, after suggesting she might like Hellboy because it was made by Guillermo del Toro (she is a huge fan of his Spanish-language movies like The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth), suggesting she might like Kung Fu Hustle because because it was “probably like a Jackie Chan movie”, and trying to convince her that Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a classic of 80s filmmaking, I lack credibility. Go figure.

Anyway, as everyone knows by now, District 9 is the story of what happens when a large group of aliens currently segregated in a Johannesburg slum are about to be involuntarily relocated to a new and improved slum way out in the desert where the local humans won’t have to look at them anymore. The film has several political subtexts, none of which are presented with particular overtness; it can easily be enjoyed as a well-above-average SF actioner without requiring any knowledge of civil rights issues in general or apartheid in particular, or of the controversial behavior of certain private military contractors, or of weapons-trafficking issues in Africa. But these do give the film a more substantive feel than, say, something like Independence Day. (Which is not to say I didn’t love Independence Day. Nothing says “summer” like Will Smith berating an alien fighter pilot for making him miss a barbecue.)

I never delve too deeply into plots in these capsule reviews, so I won’t go any farther with the description than this.  Let me just say that all the SF fanboys out there (like me) are going to be very, very happy with this movie, especially once the hero starts negotiating with the Nigerian mafia in the hope of getting his hand on some of their weapons.  (Yes, I said “hand”, and I meant “hand”.  You’ll see why.)  Everything leading up to this point is essentially the part of the roller-coaster where the big chain is pulling the carts up to the top of the highest point in the amusement park; everything after this point is the thrill ride back to the ground.  And what a ride it is!

As for my wife, I’m not sure exactly what she made of this movie.  She agreed that it had some solid points to make about the state of the world, both in the recent past and currently, even as she declared its faux-documentary style to be somewhat “artsy” (a term she also applied to Watchmen which, to most peoples’ amazement, was my favorite film of the year until I saw this one).  She stayed awake for the entire thing, although there were some fairly lengthy stretches where she was either watching it through her fingers or inspecting the floor for loose popcorn or whatever.  These stretches tended to coincide with activity on screen that will remind the astute moviegoer of what happened to poor Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, only without Geena Davis telling anyone, “Be afraid.  Be very afraid.”  This is more or less exactly the same thing that happened when we went to see the aforementioned Hellboy and Kung Fu Hustle, except this time she didn’t look like she wanted to smack me.

But I probably still don’t have any credibility.

Don’t forget to vote for the September scene of the month!

The votes have been counted (or more accurately, the percentages have been looked at) and for the first time since I started the Scene-Of-The-Month, we have a tie!  Dragon Stones and The Wolf each received 49% of the votes.  Now we could have a runoff election, but what fun would that be?  Instead, here is one scene from each.

The Wolf

Dragon Stones

Michelle watched as Greg moved away from the edge, staying well away from the debris field that surrounded the trailer. She checked her cell phone again, thinking maybe it would have miraculously gotten a signal. Still nothing, though. Suddenly Mike said: “Look, look, I was right! The truck blew up!” Robbie started crying again. “Michael!” Michelle snapped. “There were people in that truck! They’re probably hurt!” He looked crestfallen. Of course it hadn’t occurred to him that if the truck blew up, the people inside would be dead. In his cartoons, everyone bailed out of their exploding vehicles and walked away with nothing but a few smudges on their jumpsuits. Greg was back beside the SUV. “Stay put,” she told the kids, then slid out to join him in the road. Her legs felt wobbly and she grabbed onto the mirror, steadying herself. Greg said: “You okay?” “Adrenaline crash. Hows the truck?” “Upside down and on fire.” “Did you see any … any bodies?” He shook his head. “What about in the trailer?” “I don’t want to get too close to it,” Greg said. “There are traps all over the place, and who knows what else.” He wrinkled his nose. “It’s not just the trailer that stinks, is it?” “No, its the car, too,” Shells said. “Must be whatever was in that bottle.” “Look at all this sh … stuff.” Greg cautiously approached the trailer, avoiding the junk in his path. He paused, then knelt down and picked up something with a dull shine, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger, eyeing it curiously. A siren intruded on the stillness. Greg straightened and came back to the SUV as a sheriff’s car approached from the direction of the freeway. It slowed, then stopped, turning partially sideways to block the road, as if the officer expected there to be a lot of traffic trying to sneak through. Both front doors of the sheriff’s car opened at once and two men got out. Their uniforms were similar, all buttons and zippers and big round-brimmed hats, but one was dark brown and the other light brown. They were both wearing large mirrored sunglasses, even though the day was fairly overcast. The one in dark brown circled around the front of the car and headed to the broken railing, while the other one opened the back door of the vehicle so that a third man could get out. This one was dressed in a plaid shirt, blue jeans, and hiking boots, and carried what looked like a walking stick, but he had some sort of plastic badge clipped to his pocket so he had to be some sort of official. The light brown guy went to join his counterpart in staring over the edge of the cliff, while the hiker guy approached the trailer. “How did you guys get here so fast?” Greg said. The official ignored him, and instead waded into the debris field. He used his walking stick to poke around in the papers and other junk. The light brown cop came over to them. He had the unfinished look of someone just out of school. “Sir, ma’am,” he said, nodding to each of them. “Are you all right?” “We’re fine,” Michelle said. She spotted his badge among all the other shiny things on his uniform; his last name was Miller, as in Barney. The other cop had started talking into a portable radio as he watched the smoke waft into the air. She thought she heard him say something about a helicopter. The guy who looked like a hiker joined them. “What’ve we got here, Darwin?” Miller said. “Definitely a poacher,” he said. “He’s got urine lures, ankle traps, snares. There are furs nailed up in the trailer, look like wolf pelts. I’ll have to get them analyzed to be sure.” “Wolf pelts?” Shells asked. “Look, what’s going on?” Greg said. “This guy almost killed us. Look at my car.” “Yeah, looks pretty fucked up,” the hiker said. His plastic badge had his picture on it. The picture, badly out of date, reminded Michelle of the lumberjack featured on the brand of paper towels she used to buy. “You’ll need a flatbed.” “Well, I think it’s drivable, but—” “You haven’t noticed your passenger side rim is bent all to hell, then.” After a moment, Greg said: “Shit.” He disappeared around the other side of the car. “Okay, obviously you’re not responding to the accident,” Michelle said. “What are you responding to?” “Campground attendant up the road reported a suspicious trailer,” Miller said. “While he was on the phone with us, the vehicle departed the facility. We rolled to intercept it.” “Except you intercepted it first,” Darwin said. “Yeah,” Miller said. “I better call a truck to come get the trailer.” He headed back to the police car, which still blocked the nonexistent traffic. “Mr. Shanley, there, is the county sheriff,” Darwin said, gesturing at the cop in the darker uniform, who was now sitting at the edge of the road as if he were considering sliding on his butt down to the bottom of the cliff. “Mr. Miller is a deputy. I’m a wildlife enforcement officer. They brought me in because of the nature of the call.” “Wildlife enforcement.” He nodded. “I deal with people hunting without a license, illegal trapping, violation of camping statutes. That kind of thing.” “So this guy was hunting illegally.” “If he has a license for all the firearms I saw, I’ll eat Miller’s hat. And a number of these traps are simply illegal. Some of them look homemade, so obviously he takes his poaching very seriously.” Greg came back, looking grim. “The passenger side is a mess,” he said. “You should see the gashes. I think we left all our paint on the rocks.” “Hey, look at it this way,” Darwin said. “You made out better than the guy in the truck.”

After they’d noticed the eagles approaching, Ponn had spotted T’Sian moving toward the gates of Astilan. He’d hurried hurried after her, calling for her to stop, but she didn’t even turn to look at him. He soon lost track of her in the shadows. Figuring she must be going out of the city to transform into her dragon shape, he gave up following and hurried back to the inn. Gazes turned to him as he entered, then turned away again. Some here had seen him earlier and knew him as the strange woman’s companion; to others he would merely be a foreigner, and of little interest. The older woman who that morning had peered out at them from the kitchen now stood behind the bar, filling tankards and bantering with obvious regulars; over the course of the day he had learned that her name was Jalla, and that she was the owner of the Sack of Sorrows. He hurried through the room and up the stairs to the hallway, where a shuttered window opened onto the roof of the dining area. He opened it and climbed out, peering off to the northwest, but was unable to see anything now that the last of the daylight had failed. Nor could he see the dragon; he assumed she had taken to the sky to engage the eagles, but she was just as invisible as they were. Suddenly a series of explosions rocked inner Astilan. The eruption of light turned Varmot’s castle into a silhouette, flat and black against the flashes. A sound like a huge crash of thunder threatened to deafen him; moments later a wave of force, like a great hot wind, knocked him off his feet and sent him sprawling upon the thatched roof of the inn. The rumble died away in his ears as he scrambled across the dry, prickly grasses toward the window. He hauled himself back into the hallway, then turned, blinking away the angry purple flashes that marred his vision. The interior of Astilan was aflame in a half-dozen places, throwing orange light into the sky. Had T’Sian made good on her threat to burn the town? What else but a dragon or a volcano could have generated so much destruction so quickly? He raced back downstairs. The common room had emptied of patrons and servers, leaving only Jalla, struggling to haul a massive strongbox out from behind the bar. Ponn went to her side. “Leave that,“ he said. “The city is under attack!“ “This is all the money I have in the world,“ she retorted, “and I’m not leaving it here to be looted!“ “Let me help you, then,“ he said, reaching to pick up the chest by one of the handles. “No! It’s mine!” “I’m not trying to rob you, you foolish woman!” “Leave off!” She swatted his hands away. “Fine,” Ponn said. “Burn for your coins, then, and see how much good they do you in the spirit world.” Abandoning her, he went out into the street. The sound of a nearby blast still echoed among the buildings. People ran back and forth against a backdrop of flame and smoke; hot embers wafted through the air like a torpid swarm of fat, luminous beetles. One landed on his shoulder; he smacked it out with his hand, leaving a black smudge on his new cloak. Another explosion erupted from the direction of the southern gate. He covered his ears as the roar rumbled over him, the ground shivered beneath his feet. Not T’Sian’s doing; her breath destroyed silently, no louder than a whisper. The men on their eagles were responsible for this chaos. Seeing no good way through the inferno, he returned to the inn. Jalla had apparently given up on taking all her money; the chest stood open and she was stuffing handfuls of coins into her apron. She did not look up as he entered. “There’s no way out,” Ponn said. “The fire is everywhere. Do you have a large oven, as for baking bread?” She did look up then, staring at him. “You want bread?” “No, I don’t want bread! Listen to me. I know how you plainsmen do your baking. Do you have a brick oven or not?” “Yes. In the back.” “Show me.” Looking perplexed, Jalla closed and locked the strongbox, then led him into a tiny office behind the bar. The coins in her bulging pockets clinked and jingled as she walked. A poorly-fitting wooden door let them out into a long, narrow yard behind the inn. The yard was littered with refuse: Old bedding, tablecloths, a mound of rotting vegetables. The oven stood at the far end, a weathered, dome-shaped heap of bricks and mortar with an iron door, thick walls, and a tiny ventilation hole at its peak. It was smaller than he had hoped, little larger than a child’s tree-house, and he began to wonder if this idea he had formed was a very foolish one. But the thick walls of the oven kept in the heat, so it stood to reason they would keep it out as well. He could see flames over the walls surrounding the yard. The fire was burning closer, racing along thatched rooftops, consuming spindly structures like so much deadwood. He hurried to the oven, felt the iron door. Cool to the touch, as he had hoped. He opened the door, revealing a black opening large enough to crawl through on hands and knees. “In here,” he said. Jalla looked aghast. “You’re trying to cook me alive!” Exasperated, Ponn said: “I had your bread this morning, and it was not fresh; you did not use this oven today. Perhaps you will be extremely lucky and the fire will spare your inn; if not, perhaps you will only be very lucky, and the walls of your oven will prevent us from being burned to death.” She merely gaped at him, as if he had sprouted a forked tongue like the dragon’s. Well, it was her choice to follow him or not. He crawled through the low opening like a bee into a hive. The interior of the oven was dark as a moonless night on the ocean, except for the sliver of light that came through the vent-hole at the top; the walls still felt slightly warm from its last use, whenever that was, and exuded the odor of bread and yeast. He heard a huffing and scratching as Jalla entered. She pulled the iron door shut behind her, sat huddled on the brick floor, and said, miserably: “We’ll roast for sure.“ She was probably right, but there was no reason to make her still more panicky by agreeing with her. “Move to the center,” he said. “It will grow hottest near the edges.” Jalla glanced at the walls as if they might grow hands, seize her, and hold her tight while the fire roasted her. She slid away from them, joining him in the spot of light beneath the vent-hole. He wondered if they should stop it up, but maybe it would help the heat escape. Suddenly Jalla drew a breath and said: “Your companion—what about her? Is she out there in the fire?” “If she is,” Ponn said, “she is probably enjoying herself immensely.”

Hmm, the scenes are about the same length.  At least I’m consistent!

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