Tag: excerpt

‘Rag & Muffin’ Excerpt

This is an excerpt from my novel Rag & Muffin. It is currently on an editor’s desk, but since I am getting ignored rather than rejections, I may move to self-publication in the near future. Anyway, this has to include a language warning since it’s more explicit than what I normally post on the blog.

In the dark, on her grass mat, Miss Alice sat in the Padmasana—Lotus Posture—one of the basic positions of Yoga. She had heard that if she practiced Yoga, she could make her Sammohana stronger.

She wanted to make it stronger.

It was the only thing she had.

She tried to focus on her breathing, but it was hard: She kept thinking about the men, about the chair, about the buzzing whine of the drill and the horrible pain it made when it went into her head. The back of her neck hurt. Her brain throbbed with a monotonous ache that made it difficult to think, and she still felt vestiges of the sickness and chills she got the last time they dug into her skull.

She didn’t understand why they were doing this to her. She didn’t even hate them. But she felt stark terror every time the door opened because it meant more agony, more screaming, more sickness. It meant their greasy hands and bad smells. It meant being hit and slapped and tied down. It meant searing pain.

She heard steps outside. She heard a hand rattling the knob. She heard the knob turn with a groan and a click.

The metal door opened with the ear-splitting creak of rusty hinges. Once again, she used her only weapon.

As he came through the door, she looked into his eyes. With a stab of pain, she felt her ravaged Heaven Seed gland squeeze down, and a pleasant ripple ran across her body. She began to speak, to order him to release her—but he simply walked over and slapped her on the mouth.

“Don’t you ever try that on me, you little cunt. And stop wasting your juice.”

It was the man they called Harman. The really bad one, meaner than the others.

Sammohana never worked on him.

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‘Rag & Muffin’ Sneak Peek

Featured image: Character designs from Magical Girl Ore.

This is a section from the draft of Rag & Muffin, my next novel to appear after Dead to Rites. This passage may or may not be in the final version in this form:

Only one spot in Godtown did not swell with the cosmic beat nor touch the underside of heaven, but remained dark—a mere part of earth or perhaps of something lower than earth. That was the Talbot Refinery, which stood near the Green Line on the edge of the Elysian-occupied West End.

In the refinery, workers—mostly outcaste marjaras unable to find decent jobs anywhere else—committed the worst blasphemy known in this world: They took the Tuaoi Stones from the mines with which the Elysians had profaned the sacred Vindhya Mountains, and they performed unspeakable deeds to alter those pure crystals into something base and ignoble in order to feed them to the Elysians’ demon-possessed automata.

More powerful than any mundane science, the magic called Runetech had made the Elysians the masters of the world, but the ghosts in their machines hungered for profaned Tuaoi Stones. Thus, in the midst of the holy city, the Talbot Refinery was an outcrop of hell, and it alone could resist the flurry of religious ecstasy and exultation that beset the rest of Godtown every morning.

Just as Meru closed, Talbot’s portal, like a mouth of the underworld, opened to swallow a long string of buses containing the workmen for the morning shift. Like giant jacks dropped from the sky, anti-tank caltrops flanked the road leading to the refinery’s heavily fortified entrance. In a booth at the gate, an underpaid and overworked human babu did his best to check the workers’ and drivers’ papers, which were handed to him—with much shouting and babbling—through half-opened windows along the buses’ sides.

Looming over it all like a colossus and casting its stark and menacing shadow across this scene was an enormous machine, vaguely man-shaped. Thick, bulky armor enclosed it, and it bristled with weapons ranging from conventional autocannons and missile-launchers to rune-powered accelerators and psi-blasters. Every once in a while, one of the intricate symbols carved into the machine’s armor glowed blue or green, letting all below know that it was alive—and that it was watching them. Somewhere deep in its guts, dangling from anti-shock suspensors, was a thing that used to be human.

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Rock on with ‘Dead to Rites’

I am working on Dead to Rites, the second volume of Jake and the Dynamo, which is much longer than I’d expected it to be, but I have finally reached the rock concert, a scene I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.

Amidst the roars of the crowd, the keyboardist started in, and the other instruments soon followed. After several opening licks, Vanessa, with a voice rough and raw and passionate, started singing.

The crowd jumped and shouted and waved. Jake couldn’t make out most of the words, but when Vanessa reached the refrain, she roared out:

“Beaten, battered, bruised, and torn, and stabbed with a million knives! But we’re still alive!”

All around the stadium, people, Dana included, pumped their fists in the air and shouted, “We’re still alive! We’re still alive! We’re still alive!”

“Let me hear you, Urbanopolis!” Vanessa called. “We’ve had a hard couple of weeks, haven’t we? But they can’t keep us down! All the forces of evil in the whole darn universe can’t keep us down! Shout it loud! Shout it proud! Shout it so the Moon Princess can hear you! Let her know that her children are still alive!”

“We’re still alive!” the crowd cried. “We’re still alive!”

The lead guitarist stopped playing and tossed his guitar into the air. With a high leap, Vanessa caught it, landed back on the stage, and moved into a squealing guitar solo. “Keep it going!” she shouted.

“We’re still alive!” the audience chanted. “We’re still alive!”

In spite of himself, Jake swayed back and forth to the deafening, punishing music. Dana had her feet on the lowest rung of the railing and was leaning precariously over the side, pumping a fist and banging her head. Her wild, unkempt red hair flew about her face like raging flames. Overhead, the moon shone brightly, and a few stars twinkled.

Then Jake understood. Slowly, he raised a fist. The humans had been through some tough battles in the last few days, and it was true that everything in the cosmos and beyond was out to kill them—but they kept going. They suffered, and they bled, but they always gave better than they got: Innumerable alien races had set upon the Earth to wipe the humans out, but most of those races were now dead, and humanity lived on. They survived. And tonight, in the music of Metal Huntress Vanessa Van Halensing, humanity was letting it be known: They were cutting loose with a rebel yell and lifting a middle finger to the universe.

“We’re still alive!” Jake shouted. “We’re still alive!”