My Wix-site

I've got a website.

Dragging and dropping all over a template is wondrous compared to trying to code.  Now Wix is just waiting for me to cave and cough up $5/month just to do away with those header-footer banner ads.  Bastards. 

This blog might migrate to the Wix-site once that gets all official-like with a real grown up domain name and all.

And still trying to decide whether or not to drop the Lucid pre-order and see if I get more traffic by just releasing the book into the wild 'FREE'.  Have a few days left to ponder.

Haven't written a lick.  Kind of go back and forth between a couple options, but the whole business side of being one of a million or so indie, self-published types is gruesome indeed for the writing ethic.   

 

    

Lucid preview and pre-order available at Smashwords. 

The Lipless Gods. Free at Smashwords, Apple, and Kobo.

LUCID

“I saw on your blog that they put chips in some of the higher ups," I said.  "I mean for the Lucentologists.  That that was something you’d heard of them doing.”

Ruth shrugged. 

“Kip heard that," she said.  "One of the girls she was in the Becoming phase with told her that her Counselor had mentioned that.  How some of them, like the important ones, the important church members, someone like, I don’t know, a Jack Ford, had a chip implanted on them that was like a GPS kind of thing.  So if they went nuts, you know, off reservation, they could be found.  Or so if something silly like all of this happened, they could be tracked.  Or found.  I think, or at least Kip thought, the Counselor had been full of shit.  Like he was trying to impress the newbie.”

“Do you know where they’d put the chip?”

“You know, probably someplace easy to get to.  It’s not like they would crack open someone’s skull, you know,” she smiled and swiped hair from her eyes, “but probably most likely I would think, it’d be the shoulder.  Someplace like that.  Someplace easy to get to.”

Lucid cover sketch courtesy Jenny Dayton.

Lucid preview available at Smashwords. 

The Lipless Gods. Free at Smashwords, Apple, and Kobo.

Jenny Dayton = Awesome

Almost the finished version -- the author possessive needs nipping, but other than that, pretty much a heartbreakingly gorgeous image.  

Why Jenny Dayton isn't world famous and far beyond the reach of mere mortals like me is a question for the ages. 

The guy at The Book Designer listed The Lipless Gods in the best of March e-book covers. Which is nice. I guess.  

The incomprehensible failure to bow down to Jenny's prowess in comparison to her competition leaves me feeling miffed if not on the verge of violence, but given the fact this poor slob has to look at hundreds of e-book covers every month the erosion if not outright death of his aesthetic gauge is understandable...yet somehow absolutely unforgivable.

Part of me is concerned some cranky Scientologists might take issue with Lucid, and part of me would luxuriate in the attention...at least until they show up to hang me by my thumbs or tickle me or whatever it is they do to jerks they mistakenly presume are attacking their beliefs. 

And the novel isn't an attack.  I know fat little about Scientology.  It's a YA novel.  A mystery.  Bad things happening to good and not so good people. 

And maybe Jack Ford, the mega movie star character, does bears some resemblance to Tom Cruise, but I'll be damned if Jack isn't one of the most sympathetic characters in the book.  Plus, I've had personal contact with Cruise and can vouch for his being a nice guy (...if answering a phone at the Ixtlan front desk some 20 years ago and hearing "This is Tom Cruise for Oliver" qualifies as enough raw data for adequately gauging character).     

Lucid preview available at Smashwords. 

The Lipless Gods.  Free at Smashwords, Apple, and Kobo.

LUCID

There aren’t lampposts out in the country.  Dark is dark.  Alternatively, when they're there, lights stick out against the black background like a fully lit baseball stadium. 

From the front porch you could see the light show.  The satellite relays on some of the news vans protruded upwards and lights came from inside the vans.  And one or more of the tents set up on Skinny Arbogast’s land featured a generator of some sort.  Multiple sedentary lights glowed from within tents, distinguishing themselves from the flashlight glow and the headlamps floating in orbit around the makeshift camp, squatters doing their best to navigate the lumpy earth.

Earlier in the evening we’d watched a news report on ‘Camp Maddy’ and one of the people from the camp, a Lewis, had told the reporter he was just going to screen Jack and Maddy movies on his iPad while waiting for the chance to actually see them live and in person.  The reporter had asked him what he’d do if that chance didn’t materialize. 

“Not gonna happen,” said Lewis.

“You’re going to see them.”

“Absolutely.”

“Meet them?  Get an autograph?”

“Don’t need it.  Maddy’s already signed my heart a thousand times every second of one of her movies.  She’s the best.”  The fan turned to look at the camera and then directly at the camera.  His left eyelid drooped.  His face was sunburned.  And he had a pronounced gap in his teeth. 

“We love you, Maddy,” said Lewis.  “We love you.”

 

Lucid cover sketch courtesy Jenny Dayton.

Lucid preview available at Smashwords. 

The Lipless Gods.  Free at Smashwords, Apple, and Kobo.

LUCID

He was a cheery, red-cheeked gnome.  His mouth gaped open revealing a row of small teeth, too small and too white, eerie, like kernels of an albino corn.  His eyes were shut in mid-song or mid-burp.  Beer foam from the tiny mug in his tiny hand had stuck to his beard from one of his increasingly drunken draughts of the ale. 

I hoped he’d had enough beer that he wouldn’t feel the impact. 

At the same time, I could care less. 

On the first swing, the glass pane in the door between the back patio and the kitchen cracked and splintered.  Dozens of future individual chunks of glass formed, ready to be popped free of their frame.   

I checked the drunken gnome.  He seemed to be holding together.  This one not ceramic, but hefty, made of stone.  I made sure my grip around his backside was firm and I swung him into the glass a second time.  A third.

Mojo barked each swing.  Emotional support.  

 

Lucid cover sketch courtesy Jenny Dayton.

Lucid preview available at Smashwords. 

The Lipless Gods.  Free at Smashwords, Apple, and Kobo.

LUCID 5.8.16

Ruth angled her right arm up vertically, hand in front of her face, and laid her left arm flat so the tip of her fingers touched the right elbow. 

It was an ‘L’.  Imperfect if she did it or if I did it, but the intros to all the Lucentology videos and the cover of Forward, the Lucentology guidebook, featured a slender, genderless figure whose arms were positioned so that the ‘L’ their arms made looked comfortable, not too bendy or painful - the way a normal person would manage the position, sockets and joints being what they are. 

That ‘L’, right hand hitting the head, left elbow near the heart, the only supplies you needed to change and move forward into the person you were meant to be.  To become ‘lucid’. 

 

Lucid cover sketch courtesy Jenny Dayton.

Lucid preview available at Smashwords. 

The Lipless Gods.  Free at Smashwords, Apple, and Kobo.