Easily The Best $.99 You'll Ever Spend

Here's a link to The Lipless Gods Smashwords page.

The blurb:

Sipe’s job: drive the heir to the crime throne from California back home to Seattle. 

The double cross: Sipe’s unaware Connie is willing to sacrifice anyone to get out of the family business for good. 

Sipe’s reality: betrayed, wounded, car less, phone less, friendless, looking down the barrel of a little blackmail courtesy the teenager that just discovered him unconscious in the tiniest of tiny Oregon towns.   

Tiffany’s deal: Sipe helps her locate a missing friend or the faked boob-grab pics make the rounds.  The local less than honorable law enforcement.  Her slightly crazy uncle.  Little Creek’s the kind of place the wrong kind of stranger can disappear – forever.

The Lipless Gods touches upon themes of broken families, teen prostitution, green energy, and of course, anger management challenged Olympic athletes and the mobsters who love them.    

Timberline

Dust covered, his pants looked derelict.  Sipe looked like a derelict, recently rolled, slow to heal.  The Amazon headed up the driveway waving and smiling and talking to the kids, Sipe took a snapshot of what he looked like and placed it in her head.  Maybe she’d called the cops before exiting the Forest Service.  Sipe imagined sprinting, surprising some Barney Fife on patrol, the cop hitting brakes on the gravel road, watching Sipe leap off the highway, start running through the tall grass for the thick timberline.  

Paddle ball

The woman in Lisa Henson's office kept smacking a rubber ball at me.  She had a paddle.  What I don't quite recall is whether or not it was a paddle ball or if the twerp was just armed with an inexhaustible arsenal. 

Monaghan (third from left below) was taking something to Janet Yang, her former Ixtlan boss, and now Lisa Henson's partner.  My takeaway from the visit with Monaghan to the Sony lot was wanting to cram a toy up a personal assistant's butt.  I don't think the p.a.'s conduct could speak to Henson's character.  One does not follow the other.  For example, Monaghan was awesome like the coolest babysitter ever awesome and Yang seemed more or less an exercise in oligarchy (example: Yang "asked" Monaghan to loan her car to Yang's boyfriend; the boyfriend promptly wrecked the car; pre-Monaghan, another assistant was "urged" to get a better car; the current model was simply by matter of association belittling Yang.) 

I've been watching Kingdom Hospital, Stephen King's Americanized version of The Kingdom.  Not until the end of episode 3 did I catch that Henson and Yang were the show producers.  I shouldn't let it influence my opinion of the show, but it probably will.  Immaturity only expands as I age.

Out of the blue Kingdom Hospital characters unveil odd mannerisms, so far nothing endearing, mostly all on the indiscriminate rubber ball as lethal weapon spectrum. 

Rupture-ready

Sipe held his hands up.  Empty hands.  Look.  Look how empty they are.  Moving slowly.  Closing in on the jittery squirrel.  Tiffany sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.  Her face so darkly pink he thought of fruit gone bad, rupture-ready at a touch. 

(The Lipless Gods, Chapter 14)

Jenny Dayton Is Awesome

So I think this looks pretty swell.

You sound like a horny little boy to me

For two years we lived in a big two story brown house in Ukiah.  The Forest Service owned property had a kitchen phone, basement phone, and a phone in the master upstairs bedroom.  Not only could you listen in to conversations, you could pick up, dial the house, and hear the other phones ring.

Like most of her teenaged lot, my older sister got bored in Ukiah, population 250.  Me, I had my own lawn mowing business.  No schmancy business name.  Word of mouth propelled success like "Hey, if you need your lawn mowed ask that pouty, vaguely creepy looking kid in glasses that mows my lawn".

Most the mowing jobs were in town proper.  Lehman Hot Springs a good dozen miles outside Ukiah represented the mamma jamma of outings - a fat $30 for a full day's work back in the summer of 1986. 

One day, the phone rang and some elderly Ukiah bird asked in as trembling a voice as possible if I was available to come mow her lawn.  

The frail old thing lived outside of town and the added ounce of logistics chilled my enthusiasm, but still, I always needed comic book money, and negotiations proceeded apace up to the point she said, "Well, I don't want you to mow my lawn.  You sound like a horny little boy to me." Click. 

I probably was a horny little boy, but like most of that sect, not acclimated to being called out on the fact. I'd answered the phone in the back of the house, and no doubt twitching if not outright shaking replaced the receiver in my parents' bedroom. Moments later, intruding on my moment of unreality, came the sound of my sister's laughter, trumpeting victory from the kitchen. My folks condemned her masterful ruse, at least publicly.    

Usually Julie wasn't that cruel.  I only remember one other incident from childhood, Julie watching in quiet Mengele-like contemplation as I tore through the local paper a dozen times, desperate to find the sister-spyed photograph of a bikini-clad Catherine Bach printed in that day's issue.

Henry in the forthcoming The Lipless Gods is me more or less.  Mows lawns.  Little Creek is Ukiah, updated to the 21rst century. 

Jenny Dayton - easily the best artist in the NW - conveys Henry in one image.  Hopefully I did half as well over the course of some 300 pages.