A bit of free fiction today, since Fantasybookspot.com has posted 'The Funeral, Ruined,' to help promote Paper Cities.

This means you can read the whole thing here:

It was the weight that woke Linette. Her weight. The weight of herself.

The flat red sky above Issuer was waiting when she opened her eyes. Five hours before, when she had closed her eyes, it had been a dark, ugly brown-red: the middle of the night. Now it was the clear early morning red, and a thick, muggy warmth was seeping through her open window with the new light. There would be no rain today. Just the heat. Just the sweat. Just that uncomfortable, hot awareness of herself that both brought. The worse was Linette’s short, dark hair, dirty with sweat and ash. The ash that had come through the open window during the night. It had streaked her face and settled in her mouth and she could taste it, dry, burnt and unappealing in her gums. Her left arm, with its thick, straight scars across the forearm, felt heavy and ached; but it always ached. It was a dull, lazy ache in the heat, and a sharp, pointed pain in the cold, as if, with the latter, the brittle weather was digging into her fractured bone to snap it. Her feet, tangled at the bottom of her coarse, ash stained brown sheets, sweated uncomfortably, and her long, straight back could feel the sweaty outline of the bronze frame beneath the thin mattress that she lay on. There was no end to herself, Linette thought, and she would never be able to sleep again, so aware of it was she.

This is one of my Red Sun stories, the world in which the current novel is set. The novel proceeds nicely, and I have a few more days left till I have the whole thing done, and then three or four weeks or rewriting the final bits, fixing up the changes I made and making it pretty, basically. If you're curious, 'The Funeral, Ruined' is the story where I finally nailed the braiding style I wanted for the book down, so you can have a read of this to get a pretty decent taste of how that should work in a novel.

My story, 'Possession', is up on the newly revamped Fantasy Magazine Zine. It's a Red Sun story, and is about a woman who lives in a giant hole that runs through the world, and the woman she finds. It was inspired by the above photos. I quite like the story, myself, though me writing about what I like in it strikes me as a little self absorbed, so I'll spare you. Below is the opening for it, and after that a link, where you can read it entirely. Drop back and let me know what you thought once you're done.

"Three days before Eliana Stein found the girl made from bronze, the stocky Botanist noted the passing of her twelfth year living in the Aremika Shaft, though she did not celebrate it. That was the kind of woman she was: pragmatic because she lived alone, modest because her vanity did not extend to her celebrating her own successes, and fatalistic, because surviving the passage of time, she believed, was an act of submission, not rebellion."

Link.

My story, 'Black Betty', is now live on Lone Star Stories. Fiction from Forrest Aguirre, Claude Lalumiere, and poetry from Pam McNew, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, and Mikal Trimm are also there, so if you don't like me, you might like them.

What inspired me, originally, about this story, was a form that I saw used by the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, in a piece called 'In A Bamboo Grove'. In it, Akutagawa uses a series of different narrators to talk about the murder of a woman, each of them with a conflicting version of what has happened. The story was adapted, years ago, by Akira Kurosawa for the film Rashomon, which is, actually, a title that Akutagawa used for a different story, and one that I think is a little more successful in its emotions at the end than the previous. It's also a lot more straight forward, however, and where's the fun in that? Anyhow: what interested me was the use of that broken up narrative device, and the different voices I could use, and the dramatic tension I could get out of what is, essentially, a series of monologues.

I wrote the story at the start of the year and, ten months later, I still like the way it came out, which is not always true for me. But, it's not like my opinion is worth anything on these matters. Go read it and tell me what you think.

Link.