The upcoming, action-packed novel Rags and Muffin will release on December 10th, just in time for you to cozy up with it over Christmas break. Taking place in a sweltering city somewhere in the tropics and featuring a lot of fiery explosions, Rags and Muffin will help you think warm thoughts during the cold winter.
You can preview it right now. Chapters one through four are available as a PDF file:
Rags and Muffin Sample Chapters (PDF)
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.
Jake and the Dynamo (remember that book?) is still unavailable as of this writing since the unfortunate out-of-businessing of my publisher. I have no known date for a re-release, but I am seriously considering self-publishing within the next few months and also releasing volume 2 the same way. Volume 3 is also underway, though I’ve set it aside for the moment for another writing project. In any case, here is a preview.
It had been a Sunday afternoon in early spring. The weather was at last warming up, so Marionette’s drafty attic was comfortable again after a terrible winter. Although her joints didn’t stiffen up in cold as readily as a human’s did, and though she couldn’t suffer frostbite or pneumonia, she could still feel miserable. She had spent much of the winter warming her fingers over a small cast-iron stove and painting a few strokes at a time before needing to warm her fingers again.
Now down to shirtsleeves and green boyshorts, she spent a lazy Sunday lying in her cot. The paint-flecked bedclothes were in a tangled mess, partly over her and partly under.
Kasumi Sugihara, down to a sports bra and boxers, lay beside her and smoked a cigarette. In her magical form, she was Card Collector Kasumi, but for the moment, she was merely an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl. She and Marionette had wiled away the late morning and much of the afternoon reading magazines, talking about TV dramas, discussing battle tactics, and gossiping about which boys they hated.
Marionette held, balanced on her stomach, a crystal Pontarlier glass of milky absinthe louche. She gazed at it for half a minute, raised her head, and took a sip. A faintly bitter scent of blended herbs met her olfactory sensors, and then the drink slipped smoothly down her synthetic throat.
