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As anyone who has read "Shards" knows, it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. (Okay, two huge cliffhangers. Sorry about that.)
It’s going to be a little while yet until part two of "Shards", AKA "The War of the Ravels", will be available, so in the interest of alleviating excess worry, I’ve posted the resolutions to the cliffhangers at the links below.
These are first drafts, so they are subject to change, but they are definitely the direction the story is going in part two.
Unless I change my mind.
This Isn’t Disneyland
Be advised that some of the material posted here may (and, in fact, does) contain strong language and mature themes. Also, people often get killed in various ways; it's an occupational hazard when you're a character in a horror story.
Note that most of the Amazon.com links on this site go through my Amazon affiliate gateway, which means Amazon gives me a kickback (or, if you're buying one of my books, an extra kickback) on the purchase price. Hope you don't mind ... There's no extra charge applied by Amazon for using the gateway.
This week’s Teaser Tuesday is from Haunted House, by J.A. Konrath and Jack Kilborn (who, despite having different names, are in fact the same person, unlike, say, “Simon & Simon”, who had the same name but were different people). The setup is that a number of characters from previous books by the same author have been brought together in a house where, apparently, everything is trying to kill them. If that sounds a bit “Saw”-ish to you then, well, I’ll have to take your word for it, because I have never seen a “Saw” movie. But it does sort of sound like what I imagine a “Saw” movie might involve.
This month my free book from Amazon is Tears in Rain by Rosa Montero. The astute reader may recognize “tears in rain” as part of Rutger Hauer’s epic Famous Last Words in the film “Blade Runner”, appearing here as listed on Wikipedia:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. [laughs] Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like [coughs] tears in rain. Time to die.”
So my quest to save money continues this week with Bad Juju and Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem, a collection of short stories by Jonathan Woods. It’s sort of like what you might get if Joe R. Lansdale, Elmore Leonard, and Carl Hiaasen spent the night together drinking and trying to top each other with crazy stories about life in an unnamed Caribbean republic. For some reason, the setting keeps making me think of a much, much seedier version of Catalina Island, probably because that’s the only island I visit on any sort of regular basis.
As Ariel’s hands grabbed my throat, I kneed him in the jewels as hard as I could. The next instant he was writhing on the floor like a dying insect.
Oh, ouch. I’ve got nothing to add to that one!
And, of course, here is this week’s excerpt from The War of the Ravels, my current work in progress:
The sun lay very near the horizon now, thick and red, coloring the sky with swirls of angry color. The bottom of the chasm became obscured by a thick layer of luminous fog that oozed up from the sea, as if someone had dumped a massive quantity of dry ice into the water and then lit it from below with flood lamps.
Still reading “Ghosts: The Complete Series” by Amy Cross. At this rate, I’ll be finishing it up just in time to become eligible to borrow another book from the Kindle Lending Library. After spending all my book money for, oh, the next year or so on car repairs last month, this is a good thing. Long books FTW!
“Just tell me,” I say. ”Don’t say I can’t handle the truth.”
And in case you were wondering, she is not talking to Jack Nicholson.
And of course, here’s this week’s teaser from “The War of the Ravels”!
In effect, she would be using herself as the battery to power Daras-Drûm’s prison. That might work for a while, but the way everyone talked about this entity, she didn’t think she’d be able to contain it for very long; you didn’t get to be nicknamed “the death-wind” without having some kick.
Indeed, one way to get nicknamed “the death-wind” is to be a demonic entity with a group of necromantic priests as followers commanding legions of the dead; another is to be Tucker the Vizsla. Guess which one Daras-Drûm is …
This week I’m reading “Ghosts: The Complete Series” by Amy Cross. It’s a set of eight books—actually more like novellas—that, together, add up to about 150,000 words, or about the same length as “Shards” and “The War of the Ravels” put together. I borrowed it for free from the Kindle lending library. So far I like it much better than the last book I borrowed. The premise of “Ghosts” is that God and Satan, as part of a bet with each other, erase their memories and come to a small town in Texas to try living as humans, and an angel comes to find them and bring them back where they belong — or, as the angel might put it, “Beings that would correspond to your ideas of God and Satan are in town and I, a being who would correspond to your idea of an angel, am here to retrieve them.” Weasel words aside, it’s a quick, amusing read so far. And now for the teaser!
“He smuggled pure adrenalin into the execution chamber, injected his own heart moments before the governor was about to give the order to kill him. Everyone was very annoyed, as you can imagine.”
Or, as Steve Dallas once told Bill the Cat: “How would we look if we let you die in prison before we could execute you? Pretty damn silly, that’s how!”
And of course, here’s this week’s teaser from “The War of the Ravels”!
“Nobody’s doing any farmhouse-barricading,” Mercy said. “Doesn’t work in the movies, won’t work here.”
Oh dear. Barricading oneself in a farmhouse? That can only mean an impending zombie attack! Or something worse …
This week’s teaser is from The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, which I just started reading the other day. Boy vs. girl in the World Series of magic, as Prince (almost) said once.
This week’s Teaser Tuesday is–wonder of wonders!–NOT from 1Q84, which I finally finished. (Huzzah!) It is, instead, from The Secrets of Pain, the 11th book in the Merrily Watkins series of subtly paranormal mysteries from Phil Rickman:
Her face was flushed, but only by the sun through the firework blaze of extreme stained glass. The new Thomas Traherne windows, four of them, were small and ferocious, with individual dominant colours: the almighty white, the crucifixion red, the pagan green.
And as always, this comes with a side helping of a couple of lines from the page I’m currently working on in The War of the Ravels.
When that faded, it grew very dark, then gradually lighter again, the illumination divided into separate pale pools. It took her a moment to spot cobwebbed arrow-slits in the left-hand wall, between the buttresses, high above her head.
It’s time for Teaser Tuesday again! I’m still reading 1Q84by Haruki Murakami (this book is immense, but I’m almost finished!), so here’s another two sentences from it:
And he handed her the urn, feeling a little guilty, but honestly relieved. I will probably never see these bones again, he thought.
And as before, here are two sentences from the current scene in part two of Shards that I’m working on. I’m going to cheat a little and include two lines of dialog; it adds up to more than two sentences, but they’re very short ones!
“But death isn’t a thing. It’s the absence of a thing.”
“How do you know that?” she asked. “Have you died?”
First, the actual Teaser Tuesday, from the book I’m currently reading — 1Q84by Haruki Murakami:
“He tried his best to become an invisible observer, staying quiet, keeping the effect of his presence to a minimum, silently waiting for that time to come. As the days passed, the difference between one day and the next grew fainter.”
And now the bonus Teaser! Just to let everyone know that part two of Shards is in fact in the works, here are two sentences from the current page I’m working on. I think it manages to avoid any spoilers for those who have read part one:
“The dog statue itself had become animated, but the old man had smashed it to get at the contents, depriving the carven creature of a body; its jaws opened and closed as if trying to bite or bark, and its one remaining leg scrabbled futilely on the slick floor, causing it to turn in a slow circle. She felt oddly disturbed by this, as if a real animal had been harmed.”
Of course, I can’t say for sure that those two sentences will survive unchanged into the final version (in fact, I can almost guarantee they won’t), but they’re there for now. I would post the original two sentences that they replaced, but this scene is changing almost completely from the original, so there is no direct comparison. Perhaps next time!
Thanks to Shannon’s Moments of Introspection for cluing me in to the existence of this meme by posting a couple of sentences from Shards a few weeks ago!
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