The Question
Eternal
"My Blood Runs Cold" is the title. As soon as the preview goes "live", I'll post a link.
Troll Kingdom
This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!
Preview of first novel will soon be available on Amazon.
- Thread starter The Question
- Start date
Eggs Mayonnaise
All In With The Nuts
Well bust my buttons! 
...this doesn't mean you're going to delete all your posts here, does it?
...this doesn't mean you're going to delete all your posts here, does it?
The Question
Eternal
Nope, doesn't mean that. 
The Question
Eternal
Well, it's in "Publishing" status now. However, I'm not going to recommend anyone buy the preview -- it's only Chapter 1, and Amazon wouldn't let me price it at $0.99 where I wanted it; seems their minimum is $2.99. Since I'm only going to price the completed novel at $4.99 and hope to get it moving in volume, I'd say just wait for that.
The Question
Eternal
Um...is this a novel I can read online at school, or is it the stuff of 40 year jail terms if one of my little kiddies sees it.
It's hardboiled near-future dystopia. Think Sam Spade meets Fallout.
The Question
Eternal
The Question
Eternal
This thread was supposed to have gone in the Tea Room, btw, so if TPTB care to move it up there, it won't bother me at all if you do.
The Question
Eternal
To those of you who have purchased the preview, my personal thanks. I don't know who has and who hasn't, because Amazon doesn't show me that, so my (sort of form letter, unfortunately) thanks go out to each of you.
The Question
Eternal
Yes, you can. There is an Amazon Kindle app for PCs, Macs, most smartphones and iOS devices like iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.
The Question
Eternal
Hell, y'know what? Screw it -- I'm gonna post the preview here for free. If you feel like purchasing it? Go right on ahead. If you don't? Well, then, I've got it out there to tantalize people all the same. I hope you'll appreciate it enough to support me as I continue toward the completed novel, but if you don't? Well, that's the way it goes, too.
The Question
Eternal
The city has a soul, no matter how hard it tries to fight the fact. The streets full of pits and cracks, storefronts with glass so caked in dust that the holes in them are like cavities in rust-stained teeth, sleep in the shimmering heat of the day like lazy scorpions.
But that isn’t the soul of the city, not all of it. Those storefronts had been alive once. Once, they’d shone in the sun, but the sun didn’t reach them anymore. Street level in the city, people don’t live here anymore. Oh, not that it’s uninhabited – the law just doesn’t call the inhabitants people unless it absolutely has to.
There are high-rises blocking the sun from those storefronts,
and that’s where the bona fide people are. Wide, walled-in and air conditioned catwalks connect those high-rises, and an elevated rail connects the high-rises in this part of the city with their clones in the other districts.
Executives, managers, technicians, those are the people. The rest, well they’re down here with me. That’s the soul of the city. I don’t know if Fritz Lang would be happy or horrified, and on any given day I’m too busy dodging death and taxes to really care.
The city had started over up there. They called it The Great Regression, and maybe for them it was great. Everybody knows the history, but nobody paid any attention. Back in 2012, they finally tried the whole American Union business – not just North, the whole ball of wax. Well, the conspiracy nuts had been right.
The economy here collapsed like a drunk at the end of a long weekend. President Oakley ate a bullet – some say an assassin’s, some say her own. The Liquidation took care of the rest of the politicians. Oh, they got to keep working, but they did it with all their assets frozen. Most people don’t know it, but they were supposed to get those assets back. Well, they never did, and nobody except them much cared.
The fences went up in the south and in the north, too, I guess just to be fair about it. The boys who had been piddling around in the middle east got called home and put on those fences – sure, north and south both – and told to piddle around here instead. Central and South America didn’t really mind, they’d hauled away half of what was worth taking by then anyway.
Oasis Valley, back when maps still called it Phoenix and a cluster of suburbs – Tempe, Scottsdale, Mesa, Glendale, Gilbert and the rest – hadn’t had the hardest time making the change and it hadn’t taken the longest. People joked that it had never really left the mid 20th century in the first place.
Oh, it’s a decent enough place if you don’t mind the occasional shooting or stabbing taking place in a giant barbecue pit. You take the work you can get, especially when your total assets amount to a boat that never goes anywhere on a man made lake, moored to a slip of dock you hold onto with squatter’s rights and a gun that gets fed more ammunition than you get food.
There are markets here and there reclaimed from disarray and stocked with goods stolen off trucks out on the freeway. Families in apartments and houses try to imitate civilized life. But we don’t get the internet down here, no land line telephone or cable service. They send technicians and engineers down to go over power and sewer systems just to keep from having to smell us wafting up at them, and I guess that’s something. There are workarounds for the rest, some more shady than others.
The roof of my office is shingled with solar arrays, the payout from a favor I did for a wealthy widow in the Camelback District a few months back. She had a sweet tooth and I guess I looked like sugar to her. Well, she got what she wanted and I got a way to keep the office cool by day and lit by night.
I keyed the office lights on with the remote in my hand, then opened the door and shouldered an armload of groceries whose labels were all in Spanish only inside and over to the cramped kitchenette. I didn’t see the woman on my futon until she spoke up and I turned around to see who was about to get shot.
“Hello.” she was seven feet of legs and curves wrapped in bronze skin and topped off with a green eyed smile that would’ve made the Cheshire Cat nervous in a face that would’ve made an angel ashamed. The smile flashed at me under long, curly hair the color of melted chocolate. The way she was draped over the couch must’ve made the couch happier than it had been in years.
The little black one-piece dress looked like it was trying to hold on for dear life, and a pair of completely unnecessary six inch lexan heels complete with wide black leather straps crisscrossing up her overdeveloped calves told me she wouldn’t settle for all of it when twice her share would do.
“I need to have a talk with my locksmith.” I turned back and finished putting the groceries away. “What do I call you when the cops ask?”
I could feel her blink at me, and then the temperature went up a little. The smile must have grown. “You can call me Lady.”
I took another look over my shoulder just in time to see her cross one leg over the other. “Not dressed like that, I can’t.”
“And there’s no need for the militia. Don’t be unfriendly.”
“It’s the best you get for free. What do you want?”
“You’re Rocky Dylan.” She said it like it was a fact. A long time ago it had been.
“Not since I was eight years old.”
She gave the couch a break and slithered toward me like a seven and a half foot housecat in heat, and that made me nervous enough to open my jacket and let her see the butt of my .45. She veered off by a few degrees and turned the smile down a notch. “I have a job for you, Mr. Dylan.”
“All right, you’re gaining traction.” I leaned back against the refrigerator and took out a cigarette. She lit it. I didn’t miss the symbolism, but I didn’t say anything. “You gonna tell me about it, or is my couch gonna be the happiest thing in this room?”
“There’s a man in the Juacheca District, street level. That shouldn’t bother you.” She gave me a knowing look and put her lighter back into the side pocket of her dress, then smoothed a long-nailed fingertip down the magnetic closure to make the pocket disappear again.
“I guess it bothers you.” I looked up at her. Lit from below by the hooded light over my stove, her face was a lot more worried and a lot less impressive.
Oh, she was hot enough to stop pulses, all right, but the narrow-spectrum lighting showed me faint lines under her chin and I wondered how much of the organic woman was left in the cluster of implants and maybe cybernetics.
Then the height made sense: acromegaly. Gigantism, with the usual attendant deformities corrected by highly skilled surgeons. “What are you doing down here?” I asked her. “You’re one of the real people.”
“That’s my business.” she said in a voice that wasn’t all velvet smoke anymore. It was all cold talk now, and I told her that suited me a lot better. “Your business is to take a message to the man I told you about.” Her hand slipped into the other side pocket and brought out a sealed carbon fiber envelope with a silver magnetic stripe on the back that sported a GPS tag at one end.
“All right.” I looked it over. No sign of a name, no address, just a flat black flank on both sides, except for that silver stripe. “You’ll know when he gets it.”
“And when he does,” she leaned against the wall and fixed me with an expression I couldn’t read exactly through the haze her curves were putting up. “You’ll get five hundred.”
“Suppose I have expenses on the way?” Five hundred didn’t used to be a lot of money, but after the economy got dialed back a hundred years, a man who earned fifty a day was well off. Even executive salaries were capped at a hundred thousand a year. This dame was offering me serious loot for any job short of killing. Either she was joking or I was in for a bad time.
“Check your PayTab.” Her hands hadn’t moved. I took my reader from my pocket and fired it up. Sure enough, two hundred was sitting on my available balance that hadn’t been there the last time I’d looked. In the Memo field was a name, Taz Estrada.
“Estrada. That’s who the message is for?” She nodded. I put the reader away. “You’re wired.” I wouldn’t have seen the silver dollar sized flattened dome antenna at the base of her skull, not under that mane of brown hair. I didn’t have to; there was no other way she could have done the transaction without a handheld reader. It worried me that she knew my account ID, though.
“I hoped you’d figure that out.”
“So why don’t you deliver the message?”
“The man’s a ‘phobe. He won’t touch a core. Not in his head, not even in his hand. He’s a lot harder to find than you were.” She looked disgusted, like she’d just bit into a doughnut and got a mouthful of rat.
“Smart man.” I said, just to see if her scowl could get deeper without breaking something.
“I don’t think I like you much.”
“That should keep things honest.” I pocketed the envelope. It was thick and heavy, and felt like a quarter pound of papers nobody wanted to read.
She headed back toward the front door, plucking a black coat that looked like silk and probably wasn’t from the chair beside the door. “You’d better go now, Mr. Dylan. The sooner that message gets to him, the sooner you get your five hundred dollars.”
But that isn’t the soul of the city, not all of it. Those storefronts had been alive once. Once, they’d shone in the sun, but the sun didn’t reach them anymore. Street level in the city, people don’t live here anymore. Oh, not that it’s uninhabited – the law just doesn’t call the inhabitants people unless it absolutely has to.
There are high-rises blocking the sun from those storefronts,
and that’s where the bona fide people are. Wide, walled-in and air conditioned catwalks connect those high-rises, and an elevated rail connects the high-rises in this part of the city with their clones in the other districts.
Executives, managers, technicians, those are the people. The rest, well they’re down here with me. That’s the soul of the city. I don’t know if Fritz Lang would be happy or horrified, and on any given day I’m too busy dodging death and taxes to really care.
The city had started over up there. They called it The Great Regression, and maybe for them it was great. Everybody knows the history, but nobody paid any attention. Back in 2012, they finally tried the whole American Union business – not just North, the whole ball of wax. Well, the conspiracy nuts had been right.
The economy here collapsed like a drunk at the end of a long weekend. President Oakley ate a bullet – some say an assassin’s, some say her own. The Liquidation took care of the rest of the politicians. Oh, they got to keep working, but they did it with all their assets frozen. Most people don’t know it, but they were supposed to get those assets back. Well, they never did, and nobody except them much cared.
The fences went up in the south and in the north, too, I guess just to be fair about it. The boys who had been piddling around in the middle east got called home and put on those fences – sure, north and south both – and told to piddle around here instead. Central and South America didn’t really mind, they’d hauled away half of what was worth taking by then anyway.
Oasis Valley, back when maps still called it Phoenix and a cluster of suburbs – Tempe, Scottsdale, Mesa, Glendale, Gilbert and the rest – hadn’t had the hardest time making the change and it hadn’t taken the longest. People joked that it had never really left the mid 20th century in the first place.
Oh, it’s a decent enough place if you don’t mind the occasional shooting or stabbing taking place in a giant barbecue pit. You take the work you can get, especially when your total assets amount to a boat that never goes anywhere on a man made lake, moored to a slip of dock you hold onto with squatter’s rights and a gun that gets fed more ammunition than you get food.
There are markets here and there reclaimed from disarray and stocked with goods stolen off trucks out on the freeway. Families in apartments and houses try to imitate civilized life. But we don’t get the internet down here, no land line telephone or cable service. They send technicians and engineers down to go over power and sewer systems just to keep from having to smell us wafting up at them, and I guess that’s something. There are workarounds for the rest, some more shady than others.
The roof of my office is shingled with solar arrays, the payout from a favor I did for a wealthy widow in the Camelback District a few months back. She had a sweet tooth and I guess I looked like sugar to her. Well, she got what she wanted and I got a way to keep the office cool by day and lit by night.
I keyed the office lights on with the remote in my hand, then opened the door and shouldered an armload of groceries whose labels were all in Spanish only inside and over to the cramped kitchenette. I didn’t see the woman on my futon until she spoke up and I turned around to see who was about to get shot.
“Hello.” she was seven feet of legs and curves wrapped in bronze skin and topped off with a green eyed smile that would’ve made the Cheshire Cat nervous in a face that would’ve made an angel ashamed. The smile flashed at me under long, curly hair the color of melted chocolate. The way she was draped over the couch must’ve made the couch happier than it had been in years.
The little black one-piece dress looked like it was trying to hold on for dear life, and a pair of completely unnecessary six inch lexan heels complete with wide black leather straps crisscrossing up her overdeveloped calves told me she wouldn’t settle for all of it when twice her share would do.
“I need to have a talk with my locksmith.” I turned back and finished putting the groceries away. “What do I call you when the cops ask?”
I could feel her blink at me, and then the temperature went up a little. The smile must have grown. “You can call me Lady.”
I took another look over my shoulder just in time to see her cross one leg over the other. “Not dressed like that, I can’t.”
“And there’s no need for the militia. Don’t be unfriendly.”
“It’s the best you get for free. What do you want?”
“You’re Rocky Dylan.” She said it like it was a fact. A long time ago it had been.
“Not since I was eight years old.”
She gave the couch a break and slithered toward me like a seven and a half foot housecat in heat, and that made me nervous enough to open my jacket and let her see the butt of my .45. She veered off by a few degrees and turned the smile down a notch. “I have a job for you, Mr. Dylan.”
“All right, you’re gaining traction.” I leaned back against the refrigerator and took out a cigarette. She lit it. I didn’t miss the symbolism, but I didn’t say anything. “You gonna tell me about it, or is my couch gonna be the happiest thing in this room?”
“There’s a man in the Juacheca District, street level. That shouldn’t bother you.” She gave me a knowing look and put her lighter back into the side pocket of her dress, then smoothed a long-nailed fingertip down the magnetic closure to make the pocket disappear again.
“I guess it bothers you.” I looked up at her. Lit from below by the hooded light over my stove, her face was a lot more worried and a lot less impressive.
Oh, she was hot enough to stop pulses, all right, but the narrow-spectrum lighting showed me faint lines under her chin and I wondered how much of the organic woman was left in the cluster of implants and maybe cybernetics.
Then the height made sense: acromegaly. Gigantism, with the usual attendant deformities corrected by highly skilled surgeons. “What are you doing down here?” I asked her. “You’re one of the real people.”
“That’s my business.” she said in a voice that wasn’t all velvet smoke anymore. It was all cold talk now, and I told her that suited me a lot better. “Your business is to take a message to the man I told you about.” Her hand slipped into the other side pocket and brought out a sealed carbon fiber envelope with a silver magnetic stripe on the back that sported a GPS tag at one end.
“All right.” I looked it over. No sign of a name, no address, just a flat black flank on both sides, except for that silver stripe. “You’ll know when he gets it.”
“And when he does,” she leaned against the wall and fixed me with an expression I couldn’t read exactly through the haze her curves were putting up. “You’ll get five hundred.”
“Suppose I have expenses on the way?” Five hundred didn’t used to be a lot of money, but after the economy got dialed back a hundred years, a man who earned fifty a day was well off. Even executive salaries were capped at a hundred thousand a year. This dame was offering me serious loot for any job short of killing. Either she was joking or I was in for a bad time.
“Check your PayTab.” Her hands hadn’t moved. I took my reader from my pocket and fired it up. Sure enough, two hundred was sitting on my available balance that hadn’t been there the last time I’d looked. In the Memo field was a name, Taz Estrada.
“Estrada. That’s who the message is for?” She nodded. I put the reader away. “You’re wired.” I wouldn’t have seen the silver dollar sized flattened dome antenna at the base of her skull, not under that mane of brown hair. I didn’t have to; there was no other way she could have done the transaction without a handheld reader. It worried me that she knew my account ID, though.
“I hoped you’d figure that out.”
“So why don’t you deliver the message?”
“The man’s a ‘phobe. He won’t touch a core. Not in his head, not even in his hand. He’s a lot harder to find than you were.” She looked disgusted, like she’d just bit into a doughnut and got a mouthful of rat.
“Smart man.” I said, just to see if her scowl could get deeper without breaking something.
“I don’t think I like you much.”
“That should keep things honest.” I pocketed the envelope. It was thick and heavy, and felt like a quarter pound of papers nobody wanted to read.
She headed back toward the front door, plucking a black coat that looked like silk and probably wasn’t from the chair beside the door. “You’d better go now, Mr. Dylan. The sooner that message gets to him, the sooner you get your five hundred dollars.”
The Question
Eternal
If you want to support my efforts, send a donation via PayPal to [email protected]
DarthSikle
GFHH Moderator
LOL.
I purchased the preview before I got to the rest of the thread where you posted it.
I purchased the preview before I got to the rest of the thread where you posted it.
DarthSikle
GFHH Moderator
LOL. Forget the forgive part and just fill me on what you think i did.
The Question
Eternal
I appreciate that, DS, that's mighty decent of you. I posted it figuring, y'know, there might be a lot more folks here who don't have the ability to run the Kindle app, y'all are my friends and I hadn't really expected to make money with the preview anyway. But I'm very grateful that you put some support behind it, DS, thanks again for that.