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New Stories Coming!

In Poland in winter
Corvidae includes crows, ravens, jays, magpies,and more. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Remember that sneak peek a few posts back? I now have release dates to share!

Corvidae, an anthology edited by Rhonda Parrish (whom you may remember from Fae), will become available on July 7, 2015. Its sister anthology, Scarecrow, will go on sale August 4.

Though these two collections can stand independently and there’s a limited overlap of authors, these books are intended to function as a pair. My own stories, “Sanctuary” in Corvidae and “Judge and Jury” in Scarecrow, read as two short stories but form one continuous tale.

And here’s the official word:New Stories Coming!

a falling cabin and the two-seater privy of Modern Restrooms

Route 66: Ruins and Ghost Towns

This entry is in the series GDB & Route 66

One of my favorite things about Route 66 is discovering relics of a previous age, America’s answer to ancient ruins.

Sally Sparrow: I love old things. They make me feel sad.
Kathy Nightingale: What’s good about sad?
Sally Sparrow: It’s happy for deep people.“Blink,” episode of Doctor Who, written by Steven Moffat

Route 66 is full of old things, and many of them are falling apart from decades of abandonment. Here’s a gallery of some of my favorite findings.Route 66: Ruins and Ghost Towns

An 1864 photograph of the Taq-i Kisra. Note the figures standing atop the arch; tourists have always been stupid yahoos.

Tyspwn or Ctesiphon

An 1864 photograph of the Taq-i Kisra. Note the figures standing atop the arch; we've always had stupid yahoos as tourists, I guess.
An 1864 photograph of the Taq-i Kisra. Note the figures standing atop the arch; we’ve always had stupid yahoos as tourists, I guess.

A drive problem is preventing more Route 66 updates — don’t worry, the photos aren’t lost, just presently inaccessible — so it’s background day here at the blog! Today we’re going to learn a tiny bit about the city where Saman, one of the Megistanes in So To Honor Him, resides — when he’s not traveling, that is.

The Megistanes, as you may recall from a previous post, were a hereditary priesthood serving four empires in succession. By Saman’s time, they were under the Parthians. Tyspwn, known better today by its latinized name Ctesiphon, was the capital city of the Parthian empire.

Tyspwn or Ctesiphon
the U-Drop Inn, Shamrock, TX

Route 66: Texas

This entry is part 15 of 17 in the series GDB & Route 66
decrepit building with empty sign, surrounded by scraggly weeds and utterly forlorn
the Texas Longhorn Motel, or what’s left of it. “The First/Last Motel in Texas.”

Glenrio, as we saw on the eastern border of New Mexico, straddles the state line on an abandoned stretch of road. What shell is left of the Texas Longhorn Motel (“the First/Last Motel in Texas”) sits a few feet over the border, but there will be no guests.

Eastward, we come to Adrian, the geographical midpoint of Route 66 — probably depending on exact alignments, but who really cares to quibble? Adrian has 166 residents, per their sign, and I’m not going to begrudge them their midpoint status.

Midpoint sign for Route 66, Adrian, TX
Sunflower Station, western gifts

The gift shop and cafe across the street is adjoined by Sunflower Station, another boutique, where you can sign the pickup truck. We didn’t stop or take the time. That probably makes us Fake 66 Cruisers or something. Losers.

Route 66: Texas
BAIT by Laura VanArendonk Baugh. BAIT. They eat us to live. We eat them to live forever.

Writer Brains and Research

Jules Verne, French science fiction writer of ...
Jules Verne, the godfather of plausible speculative fiction. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Fantasy is even harder to write,” I alleged recently, “because you have to make the science work.”

If the science in a story isn’t plausible — whether you actually call it science, as in hard sci-fi, or whether it’s simply background dressing or setting, as in a romance set aboard a diving boat — the rest of the story won’t be plausible, either. In the romance above, for example, even if the story is supposedly just boy-meets-girl, if the couple blithely dives hundreds of meters without special equipment and resurfaces without ill effects, I’m not going to buy the happily-ever-after.Writer Brains and Research

one does not simply stay calm during a panic attack

Preview: Panic Attack

I wanted to share an excerpt from a short story I sold a few months ago. This is taken from near the beginning: He could not look away, could not move, could not speak . His chest was tight and his lungs constricted, and a distant part of his mind… Preview: Panic Attack

the Cuervo Cutoff, two dirt tracks running off into tall grass

Route 66: Remote 66

the Cuervo Cutoff, two dirt tracks running off into tall grass
East of Santa Rosa, NM

As the Route 66 series continues (and we have 5 states to go!), I thought I’d share a few thematic galleries of photos which might go together well but be lost in a state-centric post.

Today’s theme is the abandoned road. I’ve mentioned that we sought out many alternate alignments or discarded sections of old Route 66. Here are a few of my favorite pictures from those less-traveled segments!Route 66: Remote 66

neon Blue Swallow Motel sign lit in twilight

Route 66: New Mexico

Across the state line into New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment!

The first major city Route 66 reaches heading east is Gallup, immortalized in Bobby Troup’s obligatory Route 66 road song. The city sits close to the Hogback, a “ridge of upwardly tilted sedimentary rock” (The Place Names of New Mexico, by Robert Hixson Julya), and allegedly because of this geological constriction Gallup was a potential bomb target during the Cold War, as a single strike might have taken out railroad, pipeline, wired communications, and Route 66 all at once.

Route 66: New Mexico
old typewriter welded onto a chain pedestal at the Bottle Tree Ranch

Found Story Bits

Sometimes you walk away from a story in progress for a little while — in this case, because I’ve been working a lot and traveling — and you forget what you were doing. And then you come back, and you read over what you had, and you’re like,… Found Story Bits

yellow sign with black rabbit silhouette and words HERE IT IS

Route 66: Arizona, Part 2

We ran west again from Winslow to pick up Meteor Crater, which was closed the night before and also was closed the last time I’d been through the area. (“Meteor Crater is closed.” Like they roll a mile-wide tarp across it at night, or maybe one of those motorized pool covers.)

sign: Meteor Crater is closed. Opens at 8 am.
A really, really big tarp, I’m telling you.

But I am (as astute readers might have noticed) a bit of a nerd, so we ran back the next morning to arrive just as they were unlocking the doors and presumably rolling up the tarp.

Meteor Crater

Meteor Crater is the site of the first crater impact to be recognized as such, and where impact science was basically re-invented. It’s an impressive hole in the ground. Best calculations by modern science suppose a 150-foot wide chunk of space rubble came screaming through our hundred miles of atmosphere in just 10 seconds before plowing into a pulverizing a sizable part of Arizona. Fragments scattered up to 7 miles around the site. The crater is three-quarters of a mile wide, and they think parts of a meteor sank as deep as 3,000 feet. Wow.

Route 66: Arizona, Part 2