Soulwoven: Exile is Up for Pre-Order!

Hello, dearest readers!

tl;dr Soulwoven: Exile up for pre-order on Amazon, releases 12/12/14; Survey up about creating Soulwoven audiobook.

Two news items for you today folks, and they’re big ones!

FIRST!

Soulwoven: Exile is up on Amazon for pre-order! E-book only for now, but it will launch in that format on December 12, 2014. Hopefully the paper book will be available on the same day, but I won’t know for a little while longer.

Just in time for Christmas! Hope you guys enjoy. And for your pleasure below: cover, blurb, and sneak peek.

Blurb:

Darkness is falling.

The dragon Sherduan is free, and the fate of the world balances on its claws. The Jin brothers and their friends are separated. Alone, they face shadows deeper even than those in their dreams.

Litnig wrestles with his heritage. Cole and Dil cling to shards of happiness as the world crumbles. Quay finds that, in the end, his weakness may outweigh his determination. Ryse and Leramis find in their homecomings not solace but soul-crushing ordeal.

And others enter the stage. Len Heramsun’s daughter follows Tsu’min as he tries to summon a force to oppose Sherduan. A prophet offers guidance to those he can find. In Nutharion, a boy of great power plots to reunite those spared by the dragon. And elsewhere, a ghost and a necromancer contend with the wages of sin.

Those who stood before the black wall when Sherduan was summoned were chosen. But by whom? And for what?

And will their courage create enough light to break through the darkness?

Sneak Peak!

ONE

One hundred days before the destruction of Nutharion City

The black rocks rose.

The black rocks fell.

The black rocks rose.

The black rocks fell.

“It’s not working,” Cole muttered into his sleeves.

He leaned on the railing of an old Aleani fishing vessel. The sea frothed and heaved. A wide, taut sail snapped and creaked over his head. In front of him, a series of flat rocks bobbed in the waves.

His stomach tumbled and rolled and dropped until he could barely pick out which direction was up anymore.

“Just hang in there,” Dil said. Her hand rubbed slow, gentle circles on his back.

His stomach tried to throw up, but there was nothing in it. He dug his fingernails into the railing and grimaced.

The fit passed, and he let his head slump again.

“I thought they said we’d see land by now.”

“They did.” Dil’s fingers continued their circling. “It’s out beyond the rocks, hidden in the fog.”

Cole raised his head. There was a heavy bank of clouds beyond the flat-topped rocks. He couldn’t see anything inside it other than spots of lighter and darker gray.

“Ugh,” he said.

He put his back against the rail and slid down until he reached the deck. Aleani sailors bustled in front of him in flashes of blue and brown and white. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against his temples.

“Do you want some water?” Dil asked.

He nodded, and her feet danced away.

The Aleani had sent a ship, but it hadn’t exactly been what he was hoping for.

The Skellup was maybe forty feet long and ten wide. It was crewed by seven tanned, bearded fishermen from some town in the Aleani borderlands that Cole had never heard of. The ship seemed seaworthy, but it was slow, the area belowdecks was crammed and stank of fish, and there almost always seemed to be somebody working its bilge pump.

Only the captain spoke any Eldanian. When Quay asked why the Skellup had been sent to find them, the red-capped Aleani had spit over the side of the ship and muttered about crimes and judgment.

Cole wondered what sort of welcome they’d get when they reached Du Fenlan.

The wind raced over his neck, and he shivered.

He felt squashed and adrift, as if all the months of pent-up change that had started with Litnig’s dream were crashing down on him all at once. He no longer had a mother, no longer had a home, no longer had the thieves who’d been his adopted family for so long.

All he had left was Litnig, Dil, and Quay, and Litnig was changing too. There were times that Cole looked in his eyes and couldn’t find the brother he’d grown up with.

Those times scared him.

A lot.

Thunder grumbled in the northern sky. Cole felt a storm coming, even over his pulsing nausea. The air was getting heavier. The wind ripped like a wild beast out of the endless ocean.

Dil’s footsteps returned.

“Here,” she said.

Cole took a cup of water from her and sipped it. He hadn’t been able to keep more than the thinnest broth down at sea, and his body was starting to feel weak and jittery.

The wind picked up again, and a curtain of frigid spray blew into his face.

“You sure you don’t want to head below?” Dil asked.

Cole stifled the urge to shake his head—doing that would set it spinning for minutes.

“No,” he said. “It’s better out here.”

He looked up. Dil’s eyes glowed golden against the gray river of clouds behind her. Her dark hair, matted and caked with sea salt and dirt, swirled in the wind.

“You know,” he said with a smile, “your head looks like a charging octopus.”

Dil grinned and rubbed his arm. “Yeah? Well your face looks like a dead one.”

Cole laughed. Behind Dil, three Aleani sailors and the captain broke into a shouting match. A gust of wind shook the sail and spattered him with water.

“How’re the others?” Cole asked.

Dil shrugged and settled down next to him. “Same as they’ve been. Litnig’s grumpy. Leramis and Ryse are whispering. Quay’s a million miles away. Tsu’min isn’t talking to anybody.”

Cole finished off the water in his cup and sighed. “How far are we from Du Nordt?”

“Still a few days, if the wind holds. Quay says we’re passing between Patch’s Fingers and the Bay of Reeds.”

Great, Cole thought. He’d heard stories about the Aleani expedition to colonize the Bay of Reeds. All lost but a few. Famine. Cannibalism. Disease. He shivered and stood up to look back over the rail. This time he spotted hazy strips of land swimming in the clouds—a stripe of light colors that might signify a beach, a darker line that was probably forest beyond, and mountains disappearing into the gray cotton of the sky to the southwest.

We’re too close, he thought.

As if he’d called it, a gust of wind hit the ship and knocked it toward the rocks. His stomach leaped into his throat. More shouting erupted from the Aleani.

Cole’s cup clattered to the deck, and he braced himself against the railing with both hands.

After a moment, the ship stopped pitching any more than usual. His stomach settled and he turned back around. Next to him, Dil peered into the wind, her nose high in the air like she was sniffing for something.

Cole thought he might be able to see the storm. A line of cloud darker than the rest masked the northern horizon. Rain, probably. Lots of it, falling hard. It was moving toward them.

“Yenor’s balls,” he muttered.

The wind got worse, and the ship rolled sickeningly to port. Cole clutched the railing and stared at the horizon, willing his guts to calm down.

Voices speaking Eldanian broke the air behind him.

“—don’t really care right now, Lit. I want to find out what the heck—”

“How long did you keep it from me, Ryse? Who else did you tell?”

The second voice was his brother’s, and it sounded angry.

Cole followed the sound and found Litnig, Ryse, Quay, and Leramis exiting the staircase that led belowdecks. Quay strode to the aft castle of the ship, where the Aleani captain was standing next to his pilot at the wheel, looking nervously at the rocks to portside and the storm to starboard.

Ryse made to follow him, but Litnig held her back. “Who else knew, Ryse? Who else did you tell?” The wind picked up, but his voice cut through it. His face was getting flushed. His eyes flashed.

Nine-tailed, stepdancing hells, Cole thought. He stumbled his way across the deck.

“Did you tell him?” Litnig thundered. He jerked a thumb toward Leramis.

Ryse looked at her feet.

That seemed to say enough for Litnig.

“Yenor’s eyes, Ryse!” He ran a hand through his hair and grabbed a tuft of it. “Why didn’t you trust me? Why didn’t you—”

The ship rolled to port again, and Litnig stumbled into Cole.

Litnig outweighed him by a solid eighty pounds, but Cole had always been good at leveraging his weight. Even the sea couldn’t take that from him. He caught Litnig and wrapped his arms around him.

“Easy, Lit,” he said. The ship righted and his head tried to turn a somersault, but he controlled it. “Calm down, all right? Just calm…”

Litnig turned his head. His hair had grown long and shaggy, and his cloud-colored eyes were red-rimmed and underlined with shadows. “Cole,” he growled, “stay out of this.”

Cole squeezed. It was the same thing Litnig had done to their father at least a dozen times.

He hoped Lit would get the message.

“Cole—”

Cole squeezed tighter.

“I’m warning you, Cole. Don’t—”

A few fat drops of rain struck Cole across the face. The storm clouds were growing closer. The rain began to drum against the deck. The wind shoved them toward the rocks.

None of that mattered. He couldn’t control it. He couldn’t even affect it. All he could do was hold on to his brother, and if he was very lucky, make him listen. “Lit,” Cole said as quietly as he could, “do you remember when ’Ta would get mad?”

Litnig’s muscles bunched underneath Cole’s fingertips. “Don’t talk to me about ’Ta,” he growled. “You don’t understand, Cole. You don’t…”

“So tell me,” Cole said. His arms were starting to get tired.

Litnig mumbled something.

“What?”

“I said, ‘I can’t!’” Litnig roared. He lowered his hips and broke free of Cole’s grip. His elbow slammed into Cole’s gut and sent him stumbling backward.

As he did, the ship rolled to port again, deeper than it had before.

Cole scrambled to keep his balance. His arms wheeled. The ship rolled deeper, and he found himself staring upward and northward into the darkening sky. Litnig reached for him, but he was too far away, and Cole was falling toward the portside rail, falling toward the sea—

He crashed into something warm. Something just about his size. Something that grabbed at his arm and yelped as it was knocked into the ocean in his place.

The Skellup righted itself and began to climb another swell. The wind screamed. Cole turned in a slow circle.

Dil was gone.

It took a second for him to register the fact.

Dil was gone.

There was a warm place on his shoulder where he’d crashed into her. He craned his head over the side of the ship, but the swells were so high he couldn’t spot her.

Gone, he thought again. The word didn’t seem real.

He faced his brother. Litnig’s eyes shone wide and panicked. His face had gone from flushed to ghastly pale.

The Aleani shouted and heaved and pulled at things. The storm grew fiercer. Another wave struck the ship.

Cole shivered in the wind and the rain, and then he began to move.

He spotted a coil of unused rope hanging by the stairs to the aft castle. Not too heavy, not too light. Enough to hold his weight but not drag him down. He picked up one end. It felt old and coarse.

Everyone was talking, but he didn’t care.

Dil was gone.

He fumbled numbly to tie the rope around his waist.

He used good knots. Climbing knots that had borne his weight as he scrambled up stone walls in Thieves’ Rise. He handed Litnig the other end of the rope.

“Cole…” said Litnig.

Cole stepped toward the portside railing. His body still felt shaky and weak, but that hardly mattered anymore.

Litnig’s hand landed on his shoulder, pulling him back, keeping him on the ship, keeping him from Dil.

Something inside Cole snapped.

“Don’t you fucking touch me!” he shouted. He whirled around, elbow first, harder than he meant to, harder than he’d hit Lit since they were kids. There was a heavy crack. A dark red welt formed under Litnig’s left eye.

Litnig let go and reached for his injured cheek. Cole spun around. The ship rolled and heaved. His stomach tried to jump out of his throat.

Cole ran forward, planted one foot on top of the railing, and leaped into the sea.

It was an ugly dive, and his face hit the water with a cold, wet slap. His chest contracted, but he’d spent enough time in thrice-damned freezing water not to lose his breath or his head anymore. He didn’t sink too deep, and soon he was back on top of the salty swells, treading water and sucking in breath while the wind sent drops of spray skittering along the heaving ocean surface.

“Dil!” he screamed into the storm. The Skellup’s low, rolling gait had already taken it past him. He took a few strokes away from the ship, keeping the rocks to his right. The swells pulled at him more strongly than he’d expected them to. He bobbed six or eight feet up and down with every one. The cold sapped what strength was left in his arms and legs.

“Dil!” he screamed again.

The water churned in dark, angry mountains. The rope around his waist played out foot by foot. He kicked and pulled and spat and shouted.

“Dil!”

A voice called out in return, far to his right. Toward the rocks. The water swelled, and for a moment he was on top of everything.

He spotted a dot in the water near one of the rocks.

Cole’s legs scissored, and he swam as fast and as hard as his numbing body would take him. The line stretched out. The rock drew closer, even as his face lost feeling and the outsides of his arms and legs grew rubbery. When he was on the crests of the waves, he saw that the dot was coming out to meet him. It grew closer, closer, larger, larger. No longer a dot but a person. No longer a person but Dil.

He’d almost reached her when the line caught around his hips and dragged him backward.

He cursed and shoved down on the rope belt as it took him underwater. It didn’t budge. His knots were strong.

Cole rolled over. His head broke the surface again, but he was on his back, not swimming but trolling through the water like a worm on the end of a fishing line. The cold, briny sea filled his mouth. He spat it out and spotted Dil in front of him. She was just out of reach, struggling through the chop. She looked worried, and she was getting farther away. She wouldn’t catch him, couldn’t catch him—

His fingers closed around the handle of his knife.

Cold, confused calculations ran drunkenly through his brain. He pulled the knife.

He cut the rope.

It didn’t take much. He slid the blade back and forth twice, and then he was free—no longer being dragged anywhere but with the current. The frayed end of the rope skimmed across the tops of the waves and flew beyond his reach.

Arms grasped his shoulders. Legs kicked next to his in the waves. He turned to face them.

Dil wrapped her arms around him. Her eyes shone a bright, lustrous gold. “Cole—why?” she whispered.

Cole kicked to stay above the churning surf. The wind whipped sheets of spray into his eyes. A sheet of lightning forked across the bottoms of the clouds.

“I love you,” he mumbled into her shoulder.

As if it solved everything. As if it solved anything.

They floated together, a mile or more offshore, a mile or more from safety, surrounded by wind and water and black, jagged rocks.

And filled by desperate, flickering love.

Thanks for reading! Pre-order here!

SECOND bit of news!

I’m going to make an audiobook of Soulwoven. I’ve gotten a lot of interest from people I talk to at signings and conferences, but I also want to poll you the hardcore fans so that I can make sure you get what you want. To that end, I’ve put together a quick survey about your audiobook preferences. If you’ve got a minute, fill it out and let me know what you’re after!

That’s all for now, friends and readers. Thanks as always for being the wind in my sails. I am so, so excited about Exile. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written, hands-down. It’s tighter, deeper, darker, and more beautiful than the first book was. Early readers have been excited about it, and I hope you will be too. I can’t wait to get it to you. :-)

Yours in sweat and ink as always,

Jeff

Soulwoven Audiobook?

Okay guys, it's going to be a busy week here in Soulwoven land. Lots of news to relate, and we're starting with this:

I'm going to make a Soulwoven audiobook.

I've been going to conferences and talking to readers this summer, and two trends have emerged in my conversations:

1.) People love audiobooks. People who read lots of books love them even more.

2.) People like the way I read my own work. A lot. Every time I do a reading, I get lots of love afterward.

So I'm putting those two things together and thinking, "Alright, let's do an audiobook."

I've put a lot of time into researching how to do it, and I have a basic plan in place. I also fully expect there'll be lots of experimenting and failing and fun things to share along the way.

But before I do any of that, I want to hear from you.

I've put together a real quick survey for my readers about their interest in an audiobook version of Soulwoven. I want to make sure I give you guys what you want. And I have to decide how to much to invest in the project in terms of time and money.

So if you've got a few minutes, I'd be everlastingly appreciative if you filled it out. You can find it here.

Cheers, and come back tomorrow for bigger, better news.

Jeff Seymour, Patron of the Arts

In the old new always days, very rich people gave artists money to make art. I've always thought that sounded awfully nice. Nice to be on the rich-person-giving end, I mean. Every once in a while (twice, in the last two years, actually), I come across an author whose submission is so freakin' good that I would pay them outlandish amounts of money to write more, just so I could read it, were the funds available, and then that submission fails to get through an acquisitions board. Those are sad days.

But there are other ways to be a patron of the arts, even if you're poor broke desperately hoarding your resources for one reason or another.

I'm a huge fan of Clarkesworld Magazine. Have been for years. They publish such. good. fiction. The stories aren't always perfect from a technical standpoint, but they almost always sweep me up and carry me away and make me think. The rate of success that magazine has at doing that is, frankly, astonishing.

So a few months ago I signed up to be a patron of Clarkesworld, via this thing called Patreon. Mostly I did it because I wanted a print copy of the magazine, and mostly that's the enjoyment I've gotten out of it. I've thought of it more like a subscription.

But today I read perhaps the best Clarkesworld story I've come across yet ("Five Stages of Grief after the Alien Invasion," by Caroline M. Yoachim), and I realized, with pride, that I helped make it happen. See, the August issue of Clarkesworld is noticeably bigger than the previous issues have been. That's because they've taken their Patreon money (my money!) and used it to buy more stories. Maybe Caroline Yoachim's was one of them. Maybe it was in the magazine because I (and a few dozen other people) are chipping in $10 every month.

So now I will call myself Jeff Seymour, Patron of the Arts, proudly. Because despite being a starving tinypotatoes writer and editor, I am wealthy enough to help make the publication of great art possible.

And my God, how awesome is that?

Sale! New Story! SO MANY THINGS!!!

Okay you guys, I've been pretty pathetic about keeping up on the blog lately. I apologize for that. But I've been busy, and now there's news that cannot possibly ignored, meaning I'm back here again to share it.

Said news is on three fronts:

First! SOULWOVEN is on sale! Today through 8/31 it’s available for $.99, and on 9/1 and 9/2 it’s available for $1.99. If you don’t have your copy yet, now’s a great time to get one, and if you’ve got friends who might be interested in reading it, now’s a great time for them to get one too!

Second! The e-book version of SOULWOVEN has been updated to include a teaser for Soulwoven: Exile, the next book in the series, which will be out on December 5 or 6 (see how I snuck that announcement in there?). I’m working on getting Amazon to update it for people who’ve already bought the book, and I’ll post again once I have that done.

Third! You may remember that I wrote a short story for All Hallow's Write last year called WHAT LIES IN DARKNESS. Well, I read it to some people at InConJunction this year and they loved it so much I decided I ought to clean it up and put it on Amazon. So now I have. It’s just $.99, and it’s a hell of a spooky read. If you like scary stories, click through and check it out. If it doesn’t hook you, I’ve done something wrong. Description and opening chapter at bottom, for the click-shy.

Also, it's currently sitting at #62 on Amazon's Horror Short Stories bestseller list. Feel free to join the crowd on this one. It's a good crowd.

Finally, as always, thanks for reading. Readers are the wind in my sails and the reason I do this thing. I hope you enjoy what I’ve got on tap for you this weekend. Let me know if you do! I always love to hear from you.

Yours in blood, sweat, and ink,

Jeff

Ellie Mailer can’t sleep. When she tries, the darkness over her bed sticks its fingers down her throat and squeezes. Her uncle’s footsteps rock the floorboards above her head. And there are bad storms coming through every night.

All these things she can handle. But when a man with darkness where his face should be comes to her door, she enters a world of shadows and secrets and death, where she’ll be all that lies between her little sister Georgie and a creature that enters homes and eats the hearts of those who live within.

This is the story of the summer Ellie cut off her uncle’s fingers and heard her best friend die. This is how she learned what lies in darkness.

Excerpt:

Chapter One

Fingers in the Dark

I DIDN’T SLEEP A LOT when I was fourteen.

It was the darkness above my bed. Not the lack of light but what was in it, lying there, waiting for me. Every night it dripped down from the ceiling and into my mouth, seeped into my shirt and over my chest and my stomach and thighs. Squeezed.

The school psychologist told me it was just night terrors, but it wasn’t. I know that now. I was never asleep before the darkness came.

The summer storms were especially bad that year, and that didn’t help. They were big rollers that came crashing across the plains and broke on our little suburb like it was a rock out on the ocean. The rain drummed on the roof like an army of gnomes with gnarled fingers, and the wind pushed against the side of the house as though it wanted nothing more than to roll it over and crack open its belly to get at the good stuff inside.

Me and my little sister Georgie, we were the good stuff.

My uncle stayed with us that summer. His bedroom was right above mine, and he didn’t sleep much either. Even when the storms were going on, I heard his feet on the floor. Pacing. Turning. Pacing. Turning.

That’s all the setup you need. The rest I’ll tell like it happened.

You asked me about darkness. About what’s inside it.

I’m going to tell you about the summer I found out, and I cut my uncle’s fingers off, and my best friend died.

***

I’M TRYING TO BREATHE.

The darkness is in my mouth, and it feels like a handful of fingers. It’s pulling my cheeks out, pinching my tongue and trying to push it to the side so that it can go deeper. It feels so real—like there’s a man wrapped in it, floating up in the dark spaces near the ceiling, and his arm’s behind the fingers, pushing. If he gets them to the back of my tongue, he’s gonna tear it out and eat it, and then he’s gonna stick his arm down my throat, rip a hole in my esophagus, and yank out my heart through my mouth.

So I grab the sides of my bed and I fight it.

Creak.

Uncle George is still awake, somewhere up above me. The red lights of the clock by my bed read 2:30 a.m. My parents have been asleep for hours; I heard them stop arguing around midnight.

Creak.

There’s a storm outside too—a real rager by the sound of it. The gnome fingers are hammering, hammering, hammering on the roof. Even in the basement, I can hear it. The house feels like it’s about ready to give up the ghost, and me and Georgie with it.

Georgie’s the reason I can’t let the darkness win, even though sometimes I want to.’Cause if it gets me, it’ll go for Georgie next, and I won’t let that happen.

Our daughters, Frank. It’s not right… Mom said before Dad hushed her for the last time.

Most nights I beat the darkness. The man and his fingers get weaker, and then he goes away, and I can breathe and sleep.

Creak.

Uncle George must be pacing real slow. There’s only one board in his room that creaks: the one by the door.

Some nights it feels like the darkness is gonna beat me, and I give up on trying to sleep and go stand in the living room to watch the storms roll through ’til dawn. This is gonna be one of those nights, I think, and I might as well just admit it.

The fingers have got hold of my tongue pretty good now. One of them grazes the dangler in the back of my throat, and I choke.

I roll over and slip off the bed, spit out the darkness’s fingers. They try to work their way back in right up ’til I walk away, the bottom cuffs of my pajamas dragging on the cold wood floor.

Creak.

Uncle George rattles the door upstairs, and I freeze. My heart jumps into my throat.

Creak.

The door doesn’t open.

I sigh in relief.

GEORGIE’S NOT IN HER ROOM across the hall. I can tell ’cause her door’s cracked. She’s only five, and half the time when she thinks she’s got the door closed she doesn’t.

She gets up in the middle of the night sometimes too. It must run in the family, ’cause my mom and dad take pills for it.

Our house is a split-level, and the living room’s on the middle floor. I bet that’s where Georgie is. She likes watching the storms too. My heart’s still pounding from my fight with the darkness, so I take my time walking down the hall, let my toes squish in the brand-new carpet Mom made Dad put in last winter. It’s the nicest thing in the house. I’ve heard her say so.

The new carpet ends at the bottom of the stairs. I sigh and put my toes on the old stuff. It’s rough. Feels like a cat’s tongue. I hate that feeling. Like the stairs are tasting you, trying to decide whether to eat you or not.

Georgie’s not in the living room.

There are two big picture windows in the front wall. Just as I get up the stairs, the lightning flashes and the street lights up behind them. Everything’s stark white and black for a split-second—the crabapple tree in the yard, the Dawsons’ house across the street, everything. The sheets of rain are so thick I can see them.

When the lightning’s gone, I catch a flash of something white near the front door.

Georgie’s nightgown, I think.

The floors up here are hardwood. Better than the licking cats on the stairs, but cold at night, even in the summer.

Thunder rattles the windows. I flinch, close my eyes, take a deep breath. I’m old enough I should be used to the storms by now.

When I open my eyes, I see Georgie.

She’s standing by the front door. Two little windows run up next to it, and she’s pulled the gauzy curtain that covers one of them aside and is peeking out at the rain. I join her.

“Whatcha doin’, Georgie?” I whisper.

My parents wouldn’t hear a freight train come through, but I don’t want Uncle George to know we’re up if I can help it.

“Watchin’,” she says. Her voice sounds like it’s coming out of a toy or a cartoon.

“Watchin’ what?”

Her hair’s brown, and it curves down around her ears. Mom gave her a bowl cut last week, and she loves it. Georgie giggled while Mom tickled her neck with one hand and worked the scissors with the other.

“Nothin’.”

I squat next to her, ruffle her hair, and plant a kiss on her cheek, like Mom does. She squirms when I do it, but I don’t care. It’s more for me than for her.

The street looks pretty much the same through the little window as it does through the big ones, ’cept you can’t see the Dawsons’. You can see the long shadows from their porch light though. I’ve watched them from the living room. They sort of look like people, if you catch ’em from the wrong angle.

They’re sort of doing it now.

One of the shadows is moving. Coming toward us, strolling across the street like a human being.

“Georgie,” I whisper, “get away from the door.”

It’s just a feeling, but Georgie’s only five, and she doesn’t care if what I tell her to do doesn’t make sense. Thank God for that.

She moves away from the door.

Creak.

Uncle George’s door opens, down the hall that leads to my parents’ room.

“Ellie?” he whispers. “That you? You girls need something?”

My heart jumps into my throat. My tongue sticks when I try to answer him, and for a second I feel the fingers again, pinching, trying to reach inside me and pull something out.

I open my mouth and croak out nothing.

“Ellie?”

Creak. The other foot. He’s about to leave his room and come into the hallway. Our space, mine and Georgie’s.

“No.” The word comes out in a gasp. “We’re fine. Just getting some water.”

Uncle George stays silent for a second.

“Okay,” he says.

Creak. Creak. The door shuts.

The fingers in my mouth float away.

I stalk back to Georgie, grab her by the arm, and yank her toward the living room and the stairs. We’ll spend the night in her room, and I’ll sit in the rocking chair and read while she sleeps. I don’t want to watch the storm, and I don’t want to be upstairs with Uncle George.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

I freeze. Something cold cracks open on the top of my head and oozes down my neck. The feeling’s so real I touch my skin. My fingers come up a little clammy, but it’s just from sweat.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

Before I can tighten my grip on Georgie’s arm, she snatches it away.

“I’ll get it!” she sings.

Mom taught her to answer the door last week. It’s her new favorite game.

“Georgie, no!” I whisper.

But she’s fast as hell when she wants to be. She gets to the door before I’m even all the way turned around. Flicks the deadbolt over while I’m closing the three feet between us. Opens the door.

The chain stops it. It’s too high for her to reach.

There’s a man outside, wearing a black double-breasted suit and a hat. I can’t see his face. I’m looking straight at it, but I can’t see it. All I see is darkness.

“Hello,” he whispers. The sound feels like the edge of a knife in my ears. “Can I come in?”

My palm hits the door and slams it. I flick the deadbolt back and tug the curtain over the windows. I bundle Georgie up in my arms, and I run like hell back downstairs. When we get behind her door, I prop the rocking chair against the knob—We don’t have locks we don’t have locks why the hell don’t we have locks?—and drag her dresser over, and then I sit cross-legged on the ground and listen.

No footsteps.

No one coming.

No one trying to get in.

Just Georgie crying because she doesn’t understand and the storm thundering away outside.

And the feeling of fingers, trying to rip out my tongue and get down my throat.

Thanks for reading. Get the rest here!

On Sunsets

I'm away right now. Not doing normal things, like working and writing and e-mailing and whatnot. Really, I shouldn't even be blogging. But I had a thought yesterday, and writing it down will help me remember it better. So I'm going to do it here where I can share it with you.

Watching sunsets is important.

For me, anyway.

I used to do it a lot. Like, whenever I could. And I've had a lot of great ideas while doing it. Somehow over the past few years, I've been doing less and less of it. Yesterday was the first time in recent memory that I sat down and watched a sunset. I had nothing else to do during that time. No one to talk to. No task that needed to be completed. It was just me and the world, reenacting a human ritual I suspect is an ancient as anything that could even remotely be called humanity.

And I felt more at peace and connected with the world than I have in some time.

So, sunsets. Stop and enjoy them. Even SANDMAN's Lucifer got something out of it. You will too.

Hairy-Footed Women, and Other Protagonists We Need More Of

Today's post brought to you by this, which is awesome.

Also of note! The price for the Soulwoven e-book has dropped to $2.99.

Gender norms are a topic of note in my house, my family, my reading, and, sometimes, my writing. I will admit that discussions of them often make me uncomfortable (aka aware of my privilege) and fill me with doubt as to whether I'm secretly a reprehensible human being despite all my efforts not to be.

But sometimes, they're just awesome.

Like today, when my fiancee sent me a link to this post about someone changing The Hobbit so that Bilbo is a girl. I am, I will admit, an unabashed fan of swapping the genders of protagonists and seeing what happens. So this is really in my wheelhouse. But also there's the picture. And in the Facebook link I was sent (embedded at bottom), there's an even better picture of a woman cosplaying the hell out of Bilbo, hairy feet and all.

I'm sure I'm late to this party, because this blog post went up seven months ago and I'm always late to the Internet party, but it's still cool.

And it made me think how much the world could use more female protagonists with hairy feet, hairy legs, hairy armpits, etc. Because hairlessness is a feature of childhood, and that's, well...problematic. I'll let you fill in your own dots on that one.

So what other kinds of protagonists could we use more of? Let me know and maybe I (or someone I know) will get a great idea for a story built around them. :-)

Post by A Mighty Girl.

The Coolest Thing

This is mostly just a chance to be happy, which I don't do often enough on this blog. Because writing really does make me happy. Sharing stories makes me happy. Touching lives makes me happy. Moving people makes me happy. That's why I do this instead of something else.

Yesterday I found out that people have been sharing a quote from Soulwoven:

"And of all the futures she could have, she didn't want a single one that didn't have him in it."

It's from the end of chapter thirty-seven, and it means a lot to me.

And I am absolutely beside myself with joy that other people feel the same way.

Wattpad, at some point, made a graphic of it. You can see it here. And now it's turning up on Instagram and elsewhere, and I'm just absolutely tickled.

This is why I write, plain and simple.

Thank you to whoever at Wattpad made that graphic and put it up on Pinterest. And thank you to everyone who's shared it, and everyone who's read the book and been touched by it. You guys are wonderful.