Eli watched the pirates leave, his mind still trying to process what he had just heard. The idea of using hallucinogenic mushrooms to start a war was something akin to what the Cartographers were in the business of doing, not a band of freewheeling pirates whose plan to raid a train included utterly destroying the track said train was on while over a 400 foot drop.
Eli froze in place when he heard the train car explode behind him. He scrambled over one of the benches lining the car and looked out a window. Flames and splintered wood filled the sky.
Where were Hester and Violet? He had lost sight of them shortly after the track buckled and began to collapse. It had since stopped. Eli wondered if he should go back and find them.
The sound of propellers whipping through the air outside put that notion away from his mind. He looked up and saw one of the pirate airships speeding by, toward the rear of the train, toward the cargo car.
Eli knew he had to get there first.
Continue reading “Serial- The ‘Shroom Job, Part 5”
Woodhollow Tales is a short novel I started writing in the summer of 2001. It was originally intended to be fictionalized account of the events of my first summer out of high school, and my last summer before joining the military and starting the rest of my life, a concept I was still too young to completely understand. The course of human events completely derailed what the story was going to be about…everything that had happened that summer didn’t seem to matter anymore. Sometimes I wondered if it happened at all. I put the story away and forgot about it.
Violet had already started moving before Hester hit the platform. The sudden movement of the train caught her off guard, however, and she stumbled. Hester, being much more graceful, hopped over her and kept going.
Violet scrambled to her feet and found it hard to keep them under her. The train was definitely moving forward, and gaining speed quickly. The collapsing steel and wood structure of the train track roared throughout the valley. She dared not look back as she found her balance and pushed forward.
“How many rounds do you have left for that thing?” Hester asked, leading them to the rear of the car and squeezing herself into the tiny space between the door and the wall.
“Three,” Violet said, somewhat embarrassed. The feeling only grew when Hester fixed her with a perturbed gaze.
“I can only hope the other three rounds now reside within the corpses of three pirates,” Hester said. Violet’s failure to reply prompted a frustrated roll of Hester’s eyes.
The hardest, and most time consuming, aspect of writing is editing. I try not to edit right after writing something. When I finish a project, I put it aside and forget about it, so that when I come back to it months, years and now, decades (a recent development that I don’t like to think about, lol), it almost feels like I’m discovering it for the first time. It also allows me a chance to look at it through the lens of different life experience–I may not be in the same state of mind, or I’ve learned something more since I wrote it. With the oldest stuff it’s like a completely different person wrote it, and what I wrote ten, fifteen or even twenty years ago can surprise, amuse, or even disgust me.
Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Editing”
As soon as Violet returned to the compartment she heard several heavy thumps hit the roof of the train. Eli pulled his hands from his bloody nose long enough to look around, confused.
“What the hell was that?”
As if in answer, a large, heavily muscled pirate swung into the train through the window. His bulk propelled him forward and he barreled into Violet, lifting her off her feet and through the door behind her.
The NorEastern Empire spent much of its six year war against Crowndon getting its posterior kicked. Though masters of subterfuge and intelligence gathering, the NorEastern empire had neither the resources nor the military prowess to endure a long standing war, and by the time of the battle of the Divide, they were all but broken.
Continue reading “Blackwood Empire- The R1637 Dragonfly and the Battle of the Divide”
Today’s post is an excerpt from the novella “Where, No One Knows”, which I wrote for NaNoWriMo last year. In it, Pixie Sinclaire is tasked with infiltrating Where, No One Knows, a floating prison made out of three enormous interconnected ironclad warships. Her task: find and extract her former lover, Rigel Rinkenbach, before he unlocks the secret to creating Blackwood and gives it to the NorEastern Empire’s enemies.
Things don’t go as planned, however. For no sooner than Pixie arrives on the ship does a woman named Dougherty lead a mutiny, throwing the ship into chaos. She also wants Rinkenbach, for very different reasons. Pixie and Dougherty forge a fragile alliance, and come up with a plan to get Pixie onto the command ship where Rinkenbach is being held.
The Doomsday Toad
A Tale of the Blackwood Empire by RB Pierce
Lots of weird things go through a man’s mind when he hasn’t moved in twenty four hours. He begins to question things. It starts with “what am I doing here”, in regards to the task he is currently performing. That then leads to the same question, only in regards to existence. Eli had gone past both points and back again.
Blackwood Empire 