A Snippet from Hellbender.

My first snippet for Science Fiction Fantasy Saturday is taken from my Appalachian dark fantasy novel, Hellbender (Raw Dog Screaming Press).

Description:There are some strange things happening at the edge of reality where love is forever even when death isn’t and where magic doesn’t have to be seen to be believed.

Henry Collins' quiet life is changed forever the day he buries his little sister.

Her death forces him to enter a strange world whose very existence he spent his whole life denying--a dark wilderness where the old magic thrives--a place far darker and deadlier than the Appalachia he grew up in. To avenge his sister Henry must slip past the boundaries of logic and reason to a place where the only reality is survival. He won't be able to come home until his life is no longer simple, his heart no longer kind.

This is a tale of star-crossed lovers and civil revenge by uncivil hands, written in blood that is barely thicker than water.

--

If I could’ve carried her by myself, I would have. But just the weight of the pine and spruce box was more than I could bear alone. The linens that covered her body and her clothes, the last she’d ever wear, made her heavier. The coins that covered her eyes added a few ounces more.

I could’ve carried her, by herself, forever.

January wasn’t a kind time for a burial, but we don’t get to choose. Old Christmas hid the sun behind a flat grey wall of clouds. January has a way of taking a person's optimism and crushing it beneath its bony heel.

I’d take June, when long days kept wayward pessimism at bay for just a few hours more, when blackberry blossoms spilt over old stone fences while young rabbits got fat and lazy. I’d take Solstice over Old Christmas any day.

--

Check out other author snippets at the official site: Science Fiction Fantasy Saturday

(BAD) LOVE IS IN THE AIR! Get THE DEVIL AND PRESTON BLACK free for your Kindle for some Valentine's Day reading. Promotion starts today.

More Wild and Wonderful West Virginia!

      Even though sun fell at my back, the sky ahead was still thick with rain. Through the scent of wet concrete and stinky neoprene I could smell my mountains.
      My Appalachians.
      For better or worse, like how a dog belonged to its fleas.

      All this happened as the sun slid across the sky and dipped toward Canaan Mountain on the other side of the valley, four or five miles away. It was a circus of pink and gold that lingered the way that only a summer-bound sunset can.

     "That’s why I’m here." He took an old pistol and a box of rounds out of a shoebox and threw them into the pack.
     I had to look away. "Ben...."
     "For snakes. Let’s go." He tossed the old pack over his shoulder.

     By the time we hit Seneca Rocks the sun was halfway into its trip to noon. Shadows stretched out from the mountains, hiding coolness in their breeches. At the climbing school guides sipped coffee and stretched their ropes. Ben pulled right up to the porch. Tourists lingered by their cars, as far from the guides as was proper. The stoners were slack-lining, their gear littered picnic tables. One had dreadlocks and a shaggy beard. I could smell weed as soon as I got out of the Jeep. Say what you will about raft guides, but at least they got wet once a day.

     We strode over the gashed earth where skidders and bulldozers had torn through the soil. Past smoldering piles of ash that used to be tsuga canadensis, kalmia latifolia. Indian pipes, whorled loosestrife, and flowering raspberry were little more than smoke signals now. A first-hand account of the destruction.

Download Hellbender for you Kindle at Amazon.com or for other devices at Smashwords.com.

HELLBENDER is here!

Here it is in the Kindle store http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006AHKFRU

For other eFormats try Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/106486

I've also made Hellbender part of a bundle with The Devil and Preston Black for a special price on Amazon and Smashwords.

HELLBENDER Less than 24 hours until the brood hatches!

Get your Kindles ready, because they ain't going to be the same after this. Are your Nooks waterproofed?

The eVersion and a bundle are ready to go live first thing tomorrow morning, so you'll be able to jump right into HELLBENDER, or start at the very beginning with my man Preston Black in a specially priced bundle. All I can say is you're going to get dirty.

Hellbender Scrapbook.

     The smell of the spruce had ignited crazy dreams all night long. They weren’t memories though. I knew because the dream-forest was more climactic than any I’d ever seen. Spruce trees, three hundred feet tall and ten feet across at the base, rested on a bed of humus so thick I nearly sank. Laurels dense enough to confound a team of trackers kept intruders at arm’s length. The laurel hell went off in all directions, like a green quilt. When I opened my eyes, I expected to be in the center of a large, primeval forest, the kind of place that died long before I was born, but the old green was gone.
     Killed by axes and steam trains.

"Belsnicklers came to our farm every Christmas, dressed in sackcloth with coal dust all over their faces. Scary sons of bitches. Us kids had to just stand there while they threw candy on the floor. If we fidgeted they whipped us with switches. I've even seen elder spring from the frozen ground on Old Christmas Eve—"

The remains of an old brick pump house sat between us and the mine. The old machine house looked rough, but it still had four walls and most of its roof. Red dog and ash from old coke ovens paved the yard all around it.

HELLBENDER Creepin' up on ya.

Today I locked down the formatting for the Smashwords Edition eBooks. Kindle's next. Witches, whiskey and revenge--you ready?

Hellbender Excerpt!

I originally posted this for Jeremy Bates' Halloween Hop and wanted to have it on a standalone page.

This is one of my favorite parts of the book, and it shows Henry, and his world, in transition. To me, this excerpt embodies the spirit of HELLBENDER.

Hellbender Excerpt

HELLBENDER draft finished!

From HELLBENDER:

     My words were rooted in these hills, carried on the backs of the Irish farmers who followed the Potomac southwest instead of crossing the spruce-covered ridges of the Allegheny Front. My muscles formed from climbing white oaks and boulders, from hauling firewood. The mountain rivers that flashed through narrow canyon walls, over boulders and under high railroad bridges, flowed through my veins. Laurel brakes nestled beneath Pottsville sandstone ledges were my nursery. Sad fiddle tunes, played by old-timers beside a dying fire were my genetic code.
     In these mountains I’d seen things that Alex would never believe: floods, rockslides, forest fires and blizzards. One time I saw a bear defend her cubs from hunting dogs while I hid in the upper branches of an old oak. Later, on that same trip I saw a blacksnake swallow her young when a hawk flew over. One time, near Smoke Hole I found a cave where thousands of bats roosted, then came back a year later to see that the Forest Service had barricaded its entrance to protect them. When I was really little I saw West Virginia’s last confirmed cougar trapped and beaten on the plains above Red Creek. The musky smell of its urine as it pissed itself had made me cry.
     From a clearing on Spruce Knob I spent weeks watching two comets, Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake, as they streaked sunward in a cycle of rebirth as old as the solar system. Then on a backpacking trip to Roaring Plains I saw the sky strangely empty of planes and contrails for three whole days, only to return to a world much different than the one I had left.
     In my short life dead rivers had struggled back to life, the orange-stained rocks are the only reminders of a time when nothing would live there. In my short life mountaintops disappeared, bulldozed into tender streams. None of this could I have seen from anywhere other than here.
     And I couldn’t prove most of it.

PREVIEWS AVAILABLE

Just so yinz know, free previews of THE DEVIL AND PRESTON BLACK are up and waiting to be read.

Here's the one at Amazon.com. If you don't have a Kindle, download the free Kindle Reader software on the right hand side of the page below the sample. It's basically a Kindle app for your PC.

And here's the CreateSpace preview. This is where the print version of the book will end up.

THE DEVIL AND PRESTON BLACK

You'd think finding a song named after you on an old record would be kind of cool. But that's not how it goes down for Preston Black.

What starts out as a search for his old man turns into a quest for an original version of "The Sad Ballad of Preston Black". Turns out the song is about his deal with the devil, a deal Preston doesn't really remember making.

When the devil decides it's time to cash in things get really interesting. People he loves get hurt, and Preston starts to wonder if a long fall into an icy river is his only way out.

Lucky for Preston, he has help. A music ethnographer with connections in some of Appalachia's darkest hollows convinces him that his salvation can be found in the music. Preston can buy that. It's the hexes, curses and spells he has a hard time with.

And it's the ghost of John Lennon who convinces Preston to do something about it.


      I wish I could say I found that record the first time I walked into the joint. But honestly, I'd been going into Isaac's every week since he'd hung his shingle out. Ever since I started giving lessons next door, at least. Killing time at Isaac's was easier than killing time with Mick's Strats and Twin Reverbs. The guitar shop had become too much like work, Mick too much like a boss. If I showed up early he always found meaningless little jobs for me to do, like tuning the Guilds and refilling humidifiers. If I showed up a minute late he was all, 'Get yourself a watch.'
      So I'd hide out at Isaac's until my lessons arrived, soaking up the juju that dripped off the old vinyl like heat from a spotlight. The simplicity of an album, its lack of moving parts, spoke to me in a way CDs didn't. Vinyl had a tender, handmade quality that made me believe that the music had been born into a more authentic era. Like a record could somehow be more sincere than a CD or mp3. But I knew all that was a load of crap. In the end, only the music mattered.
      For me, walking into Isaac's gave me the same feeling some people get when they walk into a church or a mall. I can't describe it. Maybe enlightenment, but I'm not sure if I've ever experienced that feeling. Either way, all I had to do to soak up the collective wisdom hiding in all of those vinyl grooves was appreciate the music, and try to understand where the artist was coming from. I swore if I browsed long enough I'd find whatever guidance I needed to get me through my paper-thin life. And since my own father ran off long before I ever learned how to hold down a G chord, I'd never have to worry about overdosing on guidance.
      The guys my mom brought home didn't have a lot of wisdom to pass on. They all either wanted to preach to me or beat me. So I didn't need a semi-employed union pipefitter around giving me shit when I had the Holy Trinity of John Lennon, Joe Strummer and Bruce Springsteen helping me down the path of lyrics and music. Each of these guys came into my life when I needed them the most. And each left just like my own dad did--long gone before I ever had a chance to say goodbye. But their lessons stuck. Joe Strummer taught me it was okay to throw a few bricks, and that a cop was something I really didn't want to be. From John Lennon I learned that if you were clever they hated you, and for a fool it was worse. From Robert Hunter I learned the devil's friend sure ain't a friend of mine.
      In hindsight, I should've listened to Hunter. Call it irony, but the morning I found the old LP that had me standing on the Westover Bridge thinking about taking the final jump, I'd been browsing near Ozzy, a friend of the devil if the devil ever had one. Before that LP I assumed lyrics were just lyrics. Didn't know they could be warning labels too.
      Besides, the douche bags who worked at Isaac's treated me like I had the musical tastes of a ten-year-old boy. I couldn't help it I never heard of Black Flag or The Pixies growing up. My brother and me were pretty much forced to listen to whatever mom played in the car. Mostly country. Kenny and Dolly singing "Islands in the Stream." Garth Brooks, if we were lucky. Most people didn't have to dig as deep as I did to find something they recognized in an old record or song.
      And digging deeper was pretty much what I was doing the day I found my LP misplaced behind Blizzard of Oz. On my way to return the record to the BLUEGRASS section the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen stepped out of the CLASSICAL stacks. She smiled. I smiled back. She asked what I had in my hand. On the cover a bunch of anonymous pickers sat in front of an old log cabin. The back of the record said Uncle Mason's Front Porch: Best of the Blackwater Sessions.
      And on the track list, between "Pretty Polly" and "Hangman's Reel" was a song called "The Sad Ballad of Preston Black", written by E. Black.
      I knew right then and there that if I could ever find the man who'd written that song, I'd have found my dad.



In less than twenty-four hours THE SAD BALLAD OF PRESTON BLACK shows up in Amazon's Kindle Store. This is kind of a soft release because there'll be a few bugs to iron out--I'm afraid some the internal links won't work and a heading or two may be off-center. But it's what I've been working on for the last few years. And I'm damn proud of it. And I did it independently, without any hand holding. And this is the format my writing was meant to appear in.

A few years ago this type of freedom wasn't available to a writer, unless you were lucky enough to to have an editor at a small press who was willing to take risks with formats. I think seeing the kind of fun Mike Arnzen had with his Gorelets and Audiovile made me wonder what kind of sweetheart deal I'd have to get to be able to work in those formats. Now I don't have to wonder anymore.

As soon as I get my Kindle formatting straightened out I'm going to start recording the soundtrack to The Devil and Preston Black. I already have the guitar worked out for three songs, and have complete lyrics to one, have banjo and electric guitar parts and bass lines for a few more. I'm still looking for somebody to help me with drum tracks and I'm hoping a sexy violinist will show up to put finishing touches on everything. After I get the title track finished I'm going to complete the book trailer I started.

The cover is temporary, too. I put it together out of necessity, but have been talking to Jim Sherradin of Hatch Show Prints of Nashville, Tennessee about a proper cover. Hatch is a traditional print shop that does concert posters for the Ryman Auditorium and Grand Ole Opry. I'd love to visit them over the summer and see how it's done, and hopefully document part of the process.

You know, I dropped more than a few characters talking about the Big Six and the state of publishing and all that, so I'm not going to do it again here. But in a way I feel like I no longer have to do it here, or anywhere. The industry used to be the biggest obstacle to publication and I KNOW they vetted writers and I KNOW their goal was deliver to first-rate stories to readers. But somewhere along the way they became the enemy to writers like me--writers who's only platform was a love of storytelling and a masters degree. And there are a lot of us out there. We like the idea of not having to write to a marketing department or a demographic. We like the freedom of writing for ourselves and being able to get it out there without the hassle of toeing the line or trying to impress an agent.

Writing and publishing this book has been the most gratifying experience I've had since I typed my first Chapter One back in 1998 when we were living in a tiny apartment down in Orlando, Florida while working for The Mouse. The challenges I face are my own, but a community is starting to gel. I've met so many people going this route who are more than willing to help a brother out. (I'm looking at you, M Stephen Lukac. How many other writers can pick up writing advice at Shop 'n Save?)

I got goosebumps writing this. Every writer should be able to feel this way about their work. Now they can. I don't care if my mom's the only person in the world who ever reads my book, because it's out there like H1N1. And I didn't have to compromise or give away 80% to do it.

In 2011, this is what happy, successful writers looks like.