Evopunk Lives! Stones, Episode Two

He saw something silver glittering between the greenleg’s eye and earhole.

A Magpie control blob. What kind of maniacs would use those on big dinosaurs?

Okay, enough moping around. I decided to take a little holiday this morning and knock out a new chapter of the evopunk serial Stones.

Here's the deal. I am not going to be devoting myself to this in a serious fashion. It's playtime for me, no rewrites, no revisions, no serious plans, no more than a couple of hours writing any given episode. This is just for fun. And part of that fun is having an audience and getting a response.

You know what made me want to do another chapter? People asked. (Hey, Glendon! Hey, Peter!) And I got hits. The more interaction I get with this, the more interested I'm gonna be in continuing it. The Stones story could go on for a while -- but I'm also wide open to suggestions and requests. In the short run, is there a critter in the Morrison formation you'd like to see? Or another place, another period? A mystery you want resolved? More information on the Transit Authority? Some real aliens, or some more alternate time-line type aliens like the Magpies? Want to know why Skinner and Duke are refugees? The more you give me to bounce off of, creatively, the more fun I'm gonna have and the more episodes you're gonna get.

And just to sweeten the pot, how about a contest?

The first person to figure out the origins of Skinner and Duke's names gets an 8.5" x 11" signed print of any dinosaur image from my Picassa gallery. (Click here to peruse!)

STONES

click here for episode one

EPISODE TWO: STICKY TRAP

Skinner, perched on the carcass of the dead saddleback, felt exposed. An oxbow river to the right, with a riparian forest of cedars and redwoods bordered by cycads, but all around him was fern prairie, a rough terrain where it was hard to run and harder to hide.

Without taking aim, Skinner scanned the ultralight soaring overhead, his spex feeding the acquisition information directly into one of the rounds in his gun, a stop ‘em — a Self-Targeting Plasma Missile. Under the circumstances, it wasn’t quite overkill.

“If you shoot him without probable cause we’ll blow our contract,” Duke said.

“He’s here,” Skinner said. “That’s probable cause.”

“Not enough for the TA.”

“Shit,” Skinner said, and wheeled. There was something big coming across the prairie. His spex brought it into focus – it was a greenleg, one of three distinct local species whose skeletons would have been classified as Allosaurus fragilis if found fossilized. They were middle-sized, averaging around thirty-five feet long, and they roamed in small prides out in the open. It was strange to see one alone. But that wasn’t the only weird thing about the greenleg.

It had riders. This was something new. A howdah made of heavy nylon over a tube frame was slung across its back and fastened with thick straps, forming a nest on each of the big predator’s flanks. There was a passenger in each nest; they were both carrying guns. Guns aimed at Skinner.

Skinner threw himself back, putting the bulk of the saddleback between him and the incoming. A wad of something white, soft, and sticky hit the spot where he’d been standing. A hypersonic crack came from overhead, trailing the round that had been meant for Skinner.

Skinner didn’t have to look; he just pulled the trigger and let the stop ‘em do its work. It was a gyrojet round, essentially a capacitor hooked up to a rocket engine. It took a moment to get up to speed, then its course twisted skyward. Skinner kept moving; another round of glue smacked into the ferns behind him.

When the stop ‘em got to the ultralight the capacitor discharged, turned the round and the air around it to a globe of plasma so hot the aircraft and its pilot were vaporized. The only debris left were particles of grit and flakes of ash blowing in the breeze.

“Something’s coming out of the forest,” Duke said.

Skinner glanced over; the fat man had put down his chainsaw and picked up his rifle. He was aiming at something out of Skinner’s line of site. Skinner took a moment to scan the area with both his spex and the cameras mounted on his gun. Two more greenlegs with passengers, converging on them from different directions. They moved more quickly over the broken terrain than any man-made vehicle.

Duke’s rifle went off once, then once more. “Go for the riders,” he said. “Once they’re down —”

There was a smack and Duke grunted as a wad of glue slapped against him, fastened his right arm to his side, made him drop his rifle.

Skinner didn’t waste time taking out the passengers. Instead, as more glue rounds splattered against the wall of meat behind him, he dropped, braced his rifle against the ground, and used its railgun function to launch a four-ounce iron sphere at the closest greenleg. It hit the allosaurid so hard the beast turned into a giant meatbomb, flesh and bone and blood blasting a red fan across the ferns.

Duke cursed as another wad of glue hit him, then dropped to the ground. The glue must have been drugged.

There was a thump, and waves went through the saddleback. Skinner looked up and saw the head of the greenleg coming over the curve of the saddleback’s ribcage. He saw something silver glittering between the greenleg’s eye and earhole.

A Magpie control blob. What kind of maniacs would use those on big dinosaurs?

“Fucker,” the woman on the right side of the howdah said, and aimed her gluegun. The moment froze like a photograph and Skinner took in the green bandana on her head, the T-shirt with a grinning cartoon alligator and the cowboy cursive under it: Gatorheads.

No time to load the railgun; Skinner let loose with a burst of three nine-millimeter rounds. The woman’s face was still recognizable. Barely.

The greenleg didn’t flinch; he was remote controlled. Skinner couldn’t see whoever was in the other side of the howdah. He started to prep the railgun when he felt something punch his back hard enough to bruise, and that was it.

He was glued.

“Shelly? Shelly?” The man’s voice came from the other side of the greenleg on the saddleback. The predator’s eyes seemed dreamy, unfocused, and it stood still, just shifting its weight enough to stay balanced as its claws sank into the saddleback’s meat. Skinner saw a blonde head with a red face come across the greenleg’s back; the man screamed when he saw what was left of Shelly.

Behind Skinner, he heard the other greenleg approach through the underbrush.

“I told him we should just kill these shits,” someone said. “Jesus, what a fucking balls-up.”

As Skinner’s vision went glassy and then rippled, he noticed the man above him wore the same T-shirt that Shelly had. Gatorheads?

The man spat, hit Skinner in the face. “Fuck you,” he said. “Mr. Big Johnson’s gonna make you wish we’d just shot you. Just you wait.”

To Be Continued!

Cross Your Fingers...

Why is this man smiling?
Tune in tomorrow and find out!

Well, I typed a whole bunch of words yesterday but the five most important to me were 'the end' and 'to be continued.' After four years I've finished what I think is probably going maybe to be if I'm lucky a solid version of the first volume of the damned novel. The first chapters of this version are dated July 3, 2008 and the current draft is just over ninety-four thousand words. I've got a suspicion that the Monday night mob are going to tell me that some of it seems rushed and that I need to describe the settings more thoroughly.

Even if they don't, I still think that's the case. But I'm done enough to be able to look at the whole thing. I went through it and read each fiftieth page and thought about what had happened over the course of those fifty pages that had led the characters to this moment in the story. The manuscript is three-hundred and thirty-two pages long. It's a novel, all right. But is it a good novel?

Keep your fingers crossed.

One question that's starting to concern me is whether or not I should serialize the novel on-line. I'm not at all concerned about potential loss of individual sales. What I'm wondering is whether or not it will affect my chances of selling the book to a publisher. Gonna have to do some research.

Anyway, I'm going to let it sit for a while and focus on art for a couple of months before going back and doing a line edit, and then I'm going to be giving out reading copies.

(By the way, if anyone is interested in being a reader please feel free to let me know; put The Ghost Rockers into the title of your email and I'll get back to you -- the first ten people are in.)

After I get feedback on those I'll do one last edit and start looking for an agent. And while I work on those edits I'll also be starting to get into the next volume -- by developing one while finishing the other I'll be able to keep the continuity tighter.

The novel is very thoroughly plotted from the events leading to the end of the next volume on -- but the immediate future of things is entirely up in the air. I have no idea what's going to happen next -- which is another reason why I'll be working on that issue at the same time I'm reviewing the previous events.

It's a pretty odd piece of work -- it's hard to tell if it's a roast fantasy with a buddy soap opera stuffing or a confessional autobiography frosted with horror. There's a good bit of social realism and some fireworks and a few decent monsters and some tunes and fried egg-cheese-and-bologna sandwiches for Pete's sake.

Boy do I hope it doesn't suck. I mean, anything this big and loud and ridiculous -- it is just five inches to the left of being one of those things with a map and a glossary, if that, all kinds of ghosts and creatures and historical anachronisms and so on -- so of course it sucks.

But does it suck properly?

Speculative Biology of the Limbus Part One: A Desperate, Pathetic Plea for Thoughts and Inspiration

Another linoleum cut, this one based on a dried piranha I picked up at a flea market.

I'm asking for some inspiration regarding a certain element of the novel. Even if I don't get any response I'm sure that just laying it out will give me a chance to think about things in a different way.

So here's the official Spoiler Warning! If you might want to read the novel at some point, be warned that you're getting inside information here. My own thought is that if knowing this stuff ruins the reading experience for you than I haven't written a good enough book -- but others are more sensitive to these things than I am.

One of the most difficult aspects of writing the novel has been the ongoing process of conceiving the... Well, in this story it's a facet of the afterlife but you can think of it as Fairyland, Oz, Middle Earth, the Enchanted Forest, the Monster Zone.

It's called the Limbus. I chose the name after searching randomly through the dictionary. I needed a name for the place between life and the real afterlife, the place where souls got a chance to let go of their attachments to life before moving on.

Later I found out that in Medieval theology the Limbus was a place between Heaven and Hell, while in biology a limbus is an indeterminate area of tissue between two organs. This was interesting because if you put those two concepts together, well, that's what the Limbus is in the novel.

(For the record, my official position is to deny the existence of souls and the afterlife and any type of Easter Bunny stuff at all. My honest position is a lot spookier and more complicated and will be the subject of an upcoming essay.

But for the novel I'm proposing an unusual version of life after death that plays into cultural expectations and messes with them at the same time...)

Anyway. The Limbus is just a part of the natural world, of the cycle of life energies that extends far beyond our perceived existence. And it originated as part of the Earth before it grew into the Limbus.

It started out as a farm in Florida and the first sign that it was becoming something other than a patch of land was when the living things both plant and animal began to change.

In the Limbus organisms can change shape to match the desires and fears they have for their bodies. This notion was originally in place to allow for some metamorphoses on the parts of the lead characters but then I realized that if that was a natural law of the land it would affect the plants and animals in the Limbus as well.

Another aspect of the Limbus is that time passes there much more quickly than it does on Earth and the difference in rates is continually increasing.

I put those two things together and realized that I had inadvertantly dunked chocolate into peanut butter and the result was an environment where Lamarckian evolution (a discredited model of evolution based on the idea of purposeful change) would take place while the characters were watching -- where the ecology as well as the species would change drastically over the course of the novel in a way that would support the story.

So here's the question: What kinds of animals would evolve out of the population living on a subistance farm in Florida in the early eighteen-hundreds?

I'll post further information on the environment next time but here's a taste of what I've got down so far and frankly I'm thinking my imagination is a bit lame.


A hill of monstrous animal bodies joined together in a single mass as though they’re devouring each other or are locked in coitus or both. Pressed in between a wingless rooster ten feet tall with scimitar spurs and a hog with the legs of a racehorse and jaws like an alligator I see a familiar shape. It’s human. I wonder if it’s someone I know.

And:

Then the sound of a branch snapping came from the woods. I looked over and saw that a tree was shaking; the motion died. Then I saw a treetop pull away from me. There was another snap and the tree lashed back into place. I saw something reddish-brown in the treetops.

As I got closer I could hear chewing sounds, see more of the animals. I shouldn’t have approached them but I could not for the life of me figure out what they were. They had the heads of cattle, horns neatly curled in front of their ears. A beautiful dark roan with white bellies and white stripes at the haunches, they were six feet at the shoulder with another three feet of neck; their backs sloped sharply, rear legs distinctly shorter than their forelegs. Long tufted tails whipped at insects; they looked like cows trying to be giraffes.

I stood still and watched them feed, wrapping their long prehensile tongues around small branches and pulling them loose from the tree. There was a surge in the music and I snapped back into consciousness and started backing away.

There was a snort from the brush in front of me, deep and powerful, and a clot of dirt and grass arched through the air. I’d been looking up and the bull was close to the ground. Built like a pig with a narrow muzzle made for grubbing in the dirt, it was far more massive than the cows, thick neck holding a head easily two feet across. One horn hooked down below its jaw and it dug it into the dirt and threw another clod into the air. The other horn curved out and forward, more than a yard long. The bull was sideways to me; it glanced at me, arched its back and shook its head.

And:

“Just give me your story, son, and I’ll decide if I think you’re lying. But half a moment.” He stuck the fingers of his free hand in his mouth and whistled loud, one short, one long, one short. I heard the sound of something big galloping towards us.

It was a dog, a fox-faced yellow dog the size of a quarter horse. His long bushy tail curled up over his back. He had a saddle and blanket on its back but no bridle.

And:

The watercourse was broken up by huge boulders and overhung by trees. They had white trunks and broad hand-shaped leaves, their trunks almost hand-shaped as well with a broad mass laying on the ground and fingers a couple of feet thick thrust up from one edge, the opposite edge rooted in the ground. I had no idea what they were; some kind of sycamore?

And:

Something that looked like a dragonfly with soft droopy wings and a body loosely dangled between them was working a cascade of tiny pale-yellow blossoms on a tree; it was at least three inches long and as bulky as a mouse. With a buzz and thwap it was dropped from the air by a beetle as long as my hand and as thick as a cigar. It folded its wings under their green cases and began to loudly munch the nectar-eating dragonfly.

And:

As I got in the water I noticed the water-skimmers at the water’s edge. Like the other insects I’d seen this trip they were oversized, too big to skim the water. Instead, they stuck close to the shore and waded. I’d bet real American dollars that there was some extra oxygen in the air if the bugs were getting this big.

And:

The Deacon’s new dogs didn’t look the same as Tap. One had a saddle, one loaded with gear, they were gray as ash with just a sandy hint of yellow over the ribs. They were longer and rangier than Tap had been, easily six feet at the shoulder but still narrow enough to straddle, their fur sleek and close to the body. Their paws were broader, the toes spread wide as if for gripping, and they had the easy lope of a Rhodesian ridgeback.

But it was their demeanor that had the real difference. I didn’t look in their eyes, didn’t look directly at them. They returned the favor and pretended I wasn’t there. They weren’t interested in me at the moment and I knew better than to approach animals of that temperament. They had the vibe of a bad Doberman along with the skittish wildness of a wolf cross. They were one-man dogs — for as long as that man could maintain dominance.


So there's a taste of it. I'll have more on the environment tomorrow. Yeah, this is definitely a fantasy novel -- but there are aspects of it that I'm treating as if they were Golden Age science fiction, where an admittedly unscientific premise is given a dose of rigorous speculation...

What the hell am I doing, anyway?