The thought of breakfast had kept her moving the last five miles.
“Jesus, Stove, you been walking all night?”
“Howdy, Pete. You been stealin’ coffee again?” She sticks out her hand.
“Only when I find some,” he says. He half-stands and shakes her hand before returning to his squat. “Where’d you get the fire helmet?”
She squats silently beside the smoky fire and waits until Pete hands over his cup. She wraps her fingers around it and drains it off, even though it burns going down. “Any of you other fellers givin’ it away for free?” she asks.
“Every chance I get,” says a low voice. “Course, it’s only beans.”
Continue reading ‘Dawn’
The tiny electric spark had barely enough energy to ignite a speck of dust, and that speck’s pitiful flame was only large enough to ignite the two specks nearest it. The walls of the grain silo burst outward, and all the windows on this side of town cracked at once, leaving gaping holes that immediately let in the dry night air. A dog began to bark.
A hundred yards away a twisted pair of wires ran up under a truck’s battered hood, and inside the cab the young woman let her hand drop from the ignition. She opened the door, jumped down to the ground, and walked slowly away beside the tracks.
I’m down in the weeds, trying to interject the perfect fifty words somewhere into the last third of Boggle and Sneak, to clarify a plot point that has stumped a couple of readers. I feel about eight inches tall, pretty much like the creatures in the story.
For January: A heist featuring a drifter named Stove and a posse of mean-spirited hoboes only she can see.
I was up in St. Paul today, so I ate a bowl of pho at Saigon and then ensconced myself across the intersection at the Rondo Community Outreach Library and wrote two stories for The Ox (plus another one later sitting at Kopplin’s.) The one that seems most presentable is Greengage.
I’m back from headquarters. Mozhi and I sat under the bamboo, drank espresso, listened to the blackbirds, and worked out the designs for Boggle and Sneak, Pismo, The Derby Ram and Dirty Northern Book. Happy neurons!
My parents came over last Thursday and took care of the girls, and I sat by the stove in the shed and hacked out the first six stories for The Ox.
Then I spent a long long time in the company of The Virus.
Emerging now…
Happy December!
Boggle and Sneak and Pismo are nearing print-ready status. In two weeks, I’ll be traveling (in an armor-plated all-terrain Chris-Craft) to Mozhi’s secret headquarters, to work with him on the book designs. If all goes well, you can look for publication announcements in January!
As of today, my friend Maryalice (that’s her holiday greeting above) will be doing some of the illustrations for the blog. She was over on Friday, and we got into a speed-drawing contest. I ended up being so inspired that I immediately produced a comic in the form of a deck of ninety-nine cards (Web and print versions will be out shortly).
That was so much fun that I started work on a book of ninety-nine 750-word stories including Azuki Beans, in which a chain-letter leads to love won and a house destroyed, and Saint-Nectaire, in which a farmer digs a hole and strikes soup.
The comic is called BOTHER-Chickens (trust me on this) and the blitzenjammer book will be called The Ox because I needed ninety-nine arbitrary nouns and The Oxford Companion to Food was the book o’ nouns closest to hand.
Thanks Maryalice for the inspiration, and thanks Nana for the child care!
Wish me luck and an inexhaustible source of energy!
In preparation for next month’s draft, I am outlining a story loosely based around the Baba Yaga / Hansel and Gretel stories, in which a teenage boy (rather than a girl, as in Vasilisa the Beautiful, or a brother and sister as in Hansel and Gretel) with a difficult relationship with his father (rather than stepmother) discovers a hermit (rather than crone) living in the north woods and decides that he and the hermit are modern-day Cossacks: wild men, raiders and runaways from the serfdom (as it seems when you’re sixteen) of modern life. As Vasyl crawls deeper and deeper into this fantasy, he fails to consider that the hermit may have his own agenda.
By coincidence, Nadya Lev at Coilhouse also has Baba Yaga on her mind this week. (Perhaps she is also menaced by eerie, spindly buckthorn limbs spontaneously uprooting themselves and forming knobby matted fortresses in the woods surrounding her house?) The Bilibin illustration in her post is the same one that inspired me to start work on the Vasyl story a few weeks ago.
Holy Hannah! I just looked up at the ceiling, and there is a GRAPPLING HOOK hanging on a nail driven into the center beam of the woodshed, right above where I sit to write! What’s THAT doing there?!?