Cliffhanging for real

How about you? What is the craziest, riskiest, most exciting, or most over-the-top thing you’ve ever done…and why did you do it?

Cady in Hunting the Corrigan's Blood

Enter some new information that REALLY fouled things up…and an innocent bit of deception on Cady and Badger’s part that is going to have a hellish backlash.

I keyed in the link to the navigation deck, and Badger’s face floated in front of me. “Any luck?” he asked.

“A fair amount. I have an idea on where we can start looking for our client’s ship. We need to get ready to run. Meanwhile, have you gotten any information on the holos?”

“The strangest information of all,” he said. He looked weary and frustrated. “Whoever the three men were who came after you, they had the best security I’ve ever seen.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because according to all official records, none of the three of them have ever been here.”

“What?!”

“Never. I’ve run the worm through every databank on Cassamir Station, and pulled the data stream from every security monitor. Hell, I located the security cam that shows the view of you and Peter Crane having lunch. It also shows the table where the three of them sat while you ate.”

“So use that.”

“You don’t understand. They aren’t at the table.”

I felt my mouth drop open; I knew I looked like an idiot. Still, no one underrated the magical art of making yourself disappear more than I do. “You mean someone has completely cleared them out of every record in the station?”

“Yes.”

“My God. That’s impressive.”

So the three men who had killed Sarah and who had nearly killed me had someone on Cassamir Station covering up for them. Someone well-placed enough to gain access to every security file on the station that included the men, and talented enough to erase the men from every record without leaving signs of tampering. “Could you do that?” I asked Badger.

“Not a chance.”

I nodded. I couldn’t have done it either. “Connect into the VeCRA system and see if you can find any records on any of the three of them there. If they don’t show up in VeCRA databases, we can spread out further.”

VeCRA is the Verzing Community Regulatory Agency, the bureaucracy that keeps tabs on the loose coalition of settled planets in this sector of space. The other sectors have their own agencies that work with VeCRA; and the non-allied planets usually have their agencies (and those may or may not cooperate); and the fanatical confederacy, Oeoslong Legion, has its slew of agencies. Even if we searched through all of those databases, we still might not find our people, because settled space is too damned big for bureaucracy to keep under its thumb. There are scores of settled planets that opt for anarchy–they don’t keep records; they don’t pay dues; and they don’t answer anybody’s questions unless they want to. If our thugs were from one of those places, we would probably never run them down. Still, we had to look.

“Before you start the VeCRA search, though, I need you to make me some fuzzy, ugly digital two-D’s from the doppler images, and I need them fast.” I told him the shots I wanted, then added, “Mess them up some when you print them. Make them look like we got them from a … oh, a Clarion MicroSure-Shot digicam, and make them look like we’ve enhanced the hell out of them.” I paused for a second, thinking. “Be consistent with the angle. Something that someone could have obtained from long-range, or at least from outside the dining area, if that’s the best we can do. I have an idea; find someone in Ferlingetta who could have taken them, and create the series from that person’s viewpoint.”

Badger grinned. “Invent an insider, huh?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Send them via Gen-ID to Peter Crane as soon as they’re done … and time is important, here. I told him they already existed. While you’re doing that, I’ll file our flight plan.”

What these folks have all had in common is their ability to buy via PayPal (and thus to use Smashwords).

I promised to re-investigate Smashwords, and it remains as bad a deal for writers as it was before. I think I’ve come up with a workable alternative, but it will be a lot of work for me, so before I leap into it, I’d like to get just a rough idea of interest.

If you only have access to US products via a PayPal account, please let me know here, as well as a little info about where you are, or why you prefer PDFs, or why you prefer PayPal.

Format will be PDF. I simply don’t have the time or the ability to create a bunch of different versions of my work for all the platforms out there.

Prices will match the prices I offer elsewhere, and the content will, aside from format, be otherwise identical. I’m considering doing this as a matter of accessibility for folks who might not be able to get my work otherwise.

ADDED LATER: My take on the whole true self-publishing vs. packaged publishing issue.

Cady in Hunting the Corrigan's Blood

So even though it’s a reprint, I’m going to treat it like a new release, and give you some snippets from it over the next several weeks. And when I bring it out on the multiple platforms with its new Afterword and the first chapter from WARPAINT included, I’m also going to give my readers a 99¢ intro price. The book won’t stay at that price, but if you’re signed up for my list, you’ll get the release date and the “price good until” date.

Cadence Drake is my personal favorite of all the many, many characters I’ve written, and she deserved better treatment than she originally got. So this time I’m going to do what I can to give her a chance to keep her ship flying.

So, meet Cady as I met her, as she introduced herself to me on the first draft, on the first page I wrote of Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood, which I should have back in print plus Kindle, Nook, and iBooks in early July.

Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood is © Holly Lisle. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

The corpse’s left eye squinted at me from mere centimeters away. Decomposition lent her face an increasingly inscrutable expression. The first time I’d regained consciousness, when I found myself tied to her, she looked like she had died in terror. After a while, she started leering at me, as if she had reached the place where I was going and took perverse pleasure from the thought that I would join her there soon. Now, having had her moment of amusement at my expense, she meditated; beneath thousands of dainty auburn braids, her face hung slack, bloated and discolored, the skin loosening. Threads of drool hung spiderwebbish from her gaping mouth. Her eyes, dry and sunken and filmed over beneath swollen lids, still stared directly at me.

For a while, when I’d been hallucinating, the corpse had talked to me. She’d whispered that they would come back and throw me out an airlock, into the hard vacuum of deep space; that my vile mother was stalking me; that I could never run hard enough or far enough to find freedom–that death would be my only freedom. But my mind was clear now. No hallucinations. No talking corpses. Just me and horrible pain and aching, tantalizing thirst and a stench that even several days of acclimatization couldn’t minimize; the stink of decomposition, of piss and shit, of the gangrene that I suspected was starting in on my right leg. Me … and all of that … and the body of the young woman who had waited on me during my business dinner with Peter Crane in the members-only club Ferlingetta.

I think it’s important not to overlook her. She and I, after all, were sisters of a sort. Kindred spirits. She was dead, and I was almost. We were bound together by our plight, and by flexible moleibond-braid wrist restraints that had been spot-grafted to our skin. And I figured we were where we were because we had something more than that in common. I didn’t know what, but something.

I guessed that I had been without water for almost three days. I could see the shifting of the station’s light cycles through the slats in the narrow metal door against which my rotting companion and I leaned. I recalled two separate spans of darkness and two of light. Two days that I knew of, plus whatever time I’d spent unconscious, and that felt like a lot. The gag in my mouth–permeable to air moving in but not to air moving out, so that I wouldn’t suffocate as long as I could exhale through my nose–didn’t prevent my tongue from turning into an enormous ball of hot sand. The worst thing was that my thirst didn’t distract me at all from my pain.

I hurt–but such plain words cannot convey the depth of my agony. Fire stabbed through my right side, a fire that burned hotter and more horribly with every breath I took. I’ve had broken ribs before, and I had them again. Whoever did this to me had fractured most of the bones in my right ribcage. My right hand throbbed, and when I tried to move it, the fingers didn’t respond. Perhaps my attackers jumped on it until they felt the bones give way and grind themselves into pulp. If that wasn’t what they did, it was what it felt like they had done. A million needles buried themselves deep in my thighs; my lower legs throbbed as if they had swollen beyond the capacity of the flesh to stay together and as if they would now burst. My left leg was bent so that my knee jammed into the metal wall behind the corpse, while my broken right leg twisted backward at an angle so acute the shards of my lower femur poked forward from above where my kneecap should have been like fingers trying to claw their way out my swollen, tattered flesh.

I wondered if Badger would ever find me. I didn’t think he would find me alive. Not anymore. But I didn’t want him never to know what had happened to me.

I beat my head against the metal door jammed up against my right side, and listened to the booming echoes thundering away into a cavernous, uncaring silence beyond. The first time I came around, I’d pounded myself into a stupor trying to get free or to get someone’s attention. But whoever had grabbed me had made sure I wasn’t getting out on my own … and equally sure that no one would wander along and rescue me.

My attempts at screams for help came out as throaty little whimpers, my thunderous head-banging left nothing but unbroken silence in its wake, and finally, with my head throbbing and flashing lights whirling behind my eyelids, I gave in and let darkness descend.

Giggling woke me.

The corpse was staring at me, but now she was awake, too. The warmth of our tiny cell hadn’t done her any good.
“You’re dead,” she told me. “Just like me. Now that we’re both dead, they’re going to come back and break your bones and suck out your marrow. They’re going to eat your body, and drink your blood, and beat drums with your bones.”

Delightful. It was so nice to have company.

“Nobody’s going to rescue you,” she told me, and her grin grew wider. “It’s too late for that. You and I will never tell our secrets.”

I knew all about my secrets; I hadn’t planned on telling them anyway. But I did wonder what hers were. I tried to ask her–subvocalized around the gag, but she just laughed at me.

“That’s why we’re here. We had such juicy secrets.”

I hated being dead. I hadn’t wanted to die, and I really hadn’t wanted to die at twenty-eight, beaten, shoved into a locker with a snide corpse, and deprived of the chance to make twenty million rucets.

That money would have let me pay off the loan on my ship, a refitted single-crew fantail corsair with a full-sized cargo hold and berths for twelve, a ship I’d named Hope’s Reward.

And all I’d had to do for the money was find a missing yacht, Corrigan’s Blood, that had belonged to Peter Crane, the owner of Monoceros Starcraft, Ltd., and bring it back.

The corpse flashed a wide smile; it kept growing wider as her face started to rip. The bones bulged out, and her jaws came at me, teeth gnashing. I heard them whirring and clicking and thumping … clicking … thumping … whirring …

I beat my head against the door again. Pounded it hard, trying with all my strength to break free from the hungry, grinning corpse, fighting with everything in me …

But right now, I like this.

NOTICE: This material is copyrighted, unchecked raw first draft, probably buggy. Please don’t post typos or corrections (I do my edits at the end of the first draft of the project and will not see your comments when I revise). This material may not survive to publication. Do not quote or repost anywhere or in any format. Thanks.

Crazed, starved, they clung all over my shuttle’s hull, bashing at it with anything they’d been able to grab. Those crammed up against the moleibond forward port were trying to bite me, unable to understand why they could see me, but couldn’t reach me. The screeching and clicking of their teeth and claws on the hull made my skin crawl.

Insane, all of them. Staring, mindless monsters—Legends, they called themselves when they were functioning normally, or vampires, though in truth they were neither. They were humans who’d changed themselves into horrors.

They’d bled dry the little moon I was trapped on, and without fresh human blood to drink, hadn’t been able to hang onto their sanity long enough to escape. Starvation had stripped them of their pretense of humanity, revealing their pure essence. But it didn’t kill them. It couldn’t kill them. Ever.

I would have destroyed them, had there been fewer of them, had there been more of me, had I had a way to shoot them with the one weapon that would have destroyed them—my blood. Only by my best guess, there were a couple thousand of them on and around my shuttle, swarming over it and me like ants on sugar. Like rats on a corpse. Like…name your own nightmare.

They blocked my sky.

My shuttle hull was moleibond. Best stuff in the universe, moleibond: light, impervious to radiation, indestructible. You can shoot massive shock waves through a moleibond hull and turn the entire contents into pudding, and a cleanup crew can come along with a big hose and a pressure sprayer and have the ship ready for resale in the time it takes to wash out the goo.

Moleibond is impenetrable unless you have moleibond cutters—but even a little resort moon will have moleibond cutters on it.

So my theoretical outside survival time was limited to the arrival on the moon of a dinner wagon—a transport full of live tourists. The second one of the Legends got fresh blood, his mind would start working, he’d realize that my survival was their destruction, because I had seen what they were, and he’d go get the damned moleibond cutter and come after me. All he had to do was cut a hole in my hull. One hole.

My real survival time was a couple of days, because I’d failed to fully stock the emergency rations. Carelessness on my part, or exhaustion, maybe. I had three days worth of water, and almost no food. It would have been enough had I been hoping for quick rescue from my home ship.

Only problem there was that my home ship belonged to me, I flew alone, and at the moment, I was on the damn shuttle.

And I couldn’t call out via com-link for help from anyone else, because once I landed, I discovered that all live com to and from Tropica Petite had been cut. Tropica Petite was running a stream of programmed fake chatter through its com, making the resort seem like someplace real people would still want to go, and someone had set its autodrone handling shuttle landings.

No rescue would be coming.

Meanwhile, I was—judging from the appearance of my attackers—the last source of living blood on the verdant, terraformed moon, and at least two-thousand mindless monsters were determined to have me for lunch.

In my favor, I had myself, my shuttle, my wits and my rage.

I was, in other words, in deep shit.

And this had started with a job I took just because I had to keep my ship in the air, had to pay my docking fees and refueling, had to pursue the monsters I hunted. This was not supposed to have anything to do with the damned Legends. This was supposed to have been a milk run, a simple job of locating two women who’d extended their vacation without notice and getting them back home to their worried, waiting husband.

WARPAINT first draft, © 2012, Holly Lisle. All Rights Reserved.

Urchin King, by Katharina Gerlach

Holly: In a single sentence of thirty words or less, describe your main story, hero, conflict, and why my readers will love your book.

Katharina: As second born twin, street-urchin Paul should be dead, but instead he takes his challenged brother’s place and battles the lawmaker’s soul-devouring ghost to save his life and his family.

Holly: What is the core of this story, your passion for writing it, the reason you wrote THIS book and not something else?

Katharina: As a kid, I hated history. If anyone had told me that I might enjoy it one day, I would have laughed (at best. At worst, I would have made some rude gestures). When my best friend found an archive dating back to the 15th century in her attic (yes, her family lived in the same place for more than 600 years), I discovered there were stories behind history (maybe that’s where the ‘story’ bit of the word comes from). After that, I was hooked. By now, I have learned so much of Europe’s history that it permeates most of my stories. So when I had this flash of twin brothers separated by a law nobody dared to change, I knew it had to take part in a magically enhanced medieval Europe. From there, the idea simply wouldn’t let go of me, so I wrote it.

H: Which character do you most love, and why?

K: My favorite character in this book is the main characters brother Rupert. He’s mentally challenged and a very loving young man. His heart is the size his brain should have been. He loves his brother, his nurse, and his parents unconditionally. Although he’s slow to learn, he isn’t stupid. It just takes him longer to understand difficult concepts. I love him best because he’s the closest to a perfect human being that ever came to me during my writing.

H: What was the most difficult part of writing this book, and why?

K: This was the first book I wrote with your “How to Think Sideways” course and there wasn’t a single spot that was truly difficult. In fact, writing it was so much fun that my family found it really hard to get me away from the computer. There were a few small issues but they were easily resolved with Muse Bombs or LUC (terms students of HTTS are familiar with). With the books I wrote earlier, I would always hit a wall at some point but with this story that never happened.

H: Give me your favorite quote from your book, and then tell me just a bit about the context.

K: “As long as the king is dead, you are the king,” Sir Orran reminded Paul.
Paul shook his head. “I am not the heir to this kingdom. My elder twin Rupert is. But I will go on to pretend I am him after we saved Cordelia’s son.”

This is a snippet from way into the book when Paul (main character) finally reveals his true identity to his mentor Sir Orran. I like the way he sticks up for others although he knows he’ll be in trouble. (BTW, Cordelia is his brother’s nurse)

H: How and where can my readers find you and your work?

K: I have a website at http://www.katharinagerlach.com and a blog (linked from the website). Also, I am the initiator of the Independent Bookworm, a site aimed at readers of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Historical novels which can be found at http://www.IndependentBookworm.com

H: Thank you, Katharina. I appreciate you taking the time to tell me about your story.

Katharina’s book page is here: http://www.katharinagerlach.com/english/buecher.html

Superheroes on the Town

Well, no, not really. I intend these to be interesting and fun, actually, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you say.

This week’s question:

Which superhero would you pick to accompany you if you knew your evening was going to end in a kidnapping attempt, thugs with machine guns, and at least one helicopter chase, and why?