it’s a dry heat

Tags

flood, memoir, poems, poetry, rain, writing

After twenty years in Phoenix, I thought I had seen it all. The monsoon season that peaks around August in Phoenix had done some terrible things to me. Once, I got caught on my bike in pitch-black night in a combination dust storm and rainstorm that was like a sheet of mud pouring right out of the sky.

Another time, I was trapped on my scooter in the middle of flooded streets, and cars and busses were trying to get past me in the dark, splashing massive waves against me, and I was pretty sure I was going to die before I got back to my lightless, powerless apartment to see if my cat was okay.

I guess at some point you just accept death as an option and keep going.

Tucson’s monsoons this year started earlier than I recall those in Phoenix rolling in, but they are no less violent. Last week, I got caught walking home from the store by a dust storm that turned the entire sky brown. Two days later, I got caught walking in one of the most insane rainstorms I have seen in twenty years. The big drops of sprinkles started in, and it wasn’t even minutes until I thought I was going to be knocked off my feet by the wind and drowned in the deluge at the side of the road. Cars and busses were pulling over because drivers couldn’t even see. By the time I made it home, I was drenched from head to foot.

So, Tucson monsoons surrounded by mountains and lightning, here is a poem for you. Now please stop trying to kill me.

The Flood

Grey mountains perforated the
underbelly of a great cloud
that admitted no horizon,
until nothing held back the rain.

City streets drowned, and vehicles
lost their way, taking with them
drivers, children, and families,
until no one held back the rain.

The entire valley filled with
rolling, churning torrents darkened
by earth and history of earth,
until no rim held back the rain.

No mortal knows what lies beyond,
where only floodwaters venture.
The deluge keeps her secrets well,
and she never forgets the rain.

Reflections on Writing Dekarna Triumphant

Tags

dekarna triumphant, memoir, meteor mags, writing

In the recent stories Antipodes and The Martian Revolution, things have not gone according to Mags’ plans and desires. In Dekarna Triumphant, she runs into trouble at the South Pacific station she founded back in Small Flowers. Mags thinks she has the situation all under control and expects Dekarna and the baby reptiles will be part of her personal army, but that rug gets pulled out from under her, and Mags must battle a fearsome nemesis whose rage is completely justifiable.

The resultant story is an ass-kicking freakshow full of brutality, but with moments of descriptive natural beauty.

With The Martian Revolution, I had an absolute blast returning to the heart of the series by featuring Mags, Patches, and Tarzi in a series of violent, vulgar, comedic action scenes. But after that, I felt emotionally drawn to the plight of my evil space lizard and how she rages against it.

I love how Dekarna is so remorselessly evil but is all about her babies! I love how she would stop at nothing to protect and feed her young, but she is the last reptile you want to mess with.

I think that’s why she makes a good villain for Mags, because Mags is the same way—just a more mammalian version. Mags would happily bulldoze a billion people into a ditch if she thought it would save her cat. Dekarna would do the same for her babies.

Finding that heart of the heartless reptile really brought her to life for me. I also empathize with Dekarna’s quest to be free and happy. She has been used and abused by everyone in her life—from her former commander to Meteor Mags—and every time she almost achieved freedom, some other asshole came along to enslave her. It reminds me of trying to make a living in my twenties. All I wanted was to be free.

That’s Dekarna’s life in a nutshell, and I wanted to give her a story where she was, at last, completely free. Free, unleashed, and totally fucking evil.

In the confrontation, Mags faces defeat. While I love it when everything goes Mags’ way, struggling against overwhelming odds and sometimes failing makes for a more compelling story, especially in an ongoing series. I’ve often felt that many of the early stories in the series made it too easy for Mags to get what she wanted. Though they are fun adventure tales, the dramatic tension isn’t very heavy. It wasn’t until the tornado in Blind Alley Blues that Mags really began to confront enormous, high-stakes problems she couldn’t entirely overcome. And that is where, in my opinion, the series began a major improvement.

So, I was a bit shocked by the reaction when I told a member of my workshop group that Mags would be totally defeated in this episode. The response was, basically, “You can’t do that!” I have never in my life heard anyone get so angry over one of my plot decisions.

It didn’t upset me or sway me, though. I mean, The Empire Strikes Back would have been a much less significant film if everything went great for Luke Skywalker at the end. Instead, his secret base is destroyed, his training is interrupted before he gets any real skill, his best pal is kidnapped and frozen, his scumbag nemesis turns out to be his dad and kicks his ass, he gets his frickin’ hand chopped off, and he falls to his doom.

Now that’s a story!

So, no, I didn’t change my plans for Mags’ defeat. But the angry reaction to those plans made me happy. It made me happy to know that someone else in the universe loves Mags so much that merely the thought of her being defeated would upset them! Because you know what? It upsets me too. Every time I throw a dramatic monkey wrench into Mags’ plans or write her into awful situations where she suffers pain and loss, it upsets me.

I think it was Alan Moore who said that no matter how much you love your characters, you must do horrible things to them. But that advice doesn’t make it any easier to do. I go through a whole range of emotions when writing about Mags’ struggles, including anger and sadness.

The emotional payoff for me comes when she triumphs, or is rescued by her friends, or maintains her (mostly) unshakeable attitude of rage and defiance even when the odds are against her. I like seeing what she’s made of. I admire her strength—not just her physical strength, but her emotional and intellectual strength—and I believe her qualities are best illuminated when she faces the greatest challenges.

I confess that in this episode, I intentionally “painted myself into a corner” by writing Mags into a situation she could not possibly escape. I did it on purpose, to make things more dramatic, but it was not a decision that made the writing any easier! That was okay because both Mags and I needed a challenge. But the result was that I eventually had the entire story written except for half of one scene, because I didn’t have a clue about how to get Mags out of what happened to her.

One of the recurring themes in the series is how Mags’ rash and reckless overconfidence gets her into trouble she can’t escape without the help of her friends. So, confronted with an insurmountable obstacle in writing this episode, I asked a friend for help. I explained the situation to her, and we brainstormed ideas for about half an hour. At the end, we had come up with an idea so bonkers, so absolutely insane, that I knew I had to write it. Even though I had my doubts about the idea, I couldn’t not write it!

Anyway, I wrote it, loved it, and the rest is future history. But like Mags, I needed the help of a good friend to make it happen.

Dekarna Triumphant is a kind of Empire Strikes Back ending to what will be the second omnibus collection of stories. It concludes a story cycle that began after The Battle of Vesta 4. In my reflections on Battle, I explained how that story essentially wrapped up all the ideas I originally had for the series when I first started writing it seven years ago. I mentioned how completing that story left me with a solar system where anything was possible, and I was looking forward to indulging my imagination with subsequent tales.

The twelve episodes from Hunted to Extinction through Dekarna Triumphant represent three or four years of playing in those fields of imagination, taking characters in directions I never originally planned, incorporating different narrators and narrative techniques, exploring the consequences of what the early stories established, introducing new concepts and characters, and bringing additional depth and growth to old ones.

And you know what? I loved every minute of it. I had a lot going on in my life that I was unhappy about, but writing the adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches was always a pleasure. I hope you enjoy their stories as much as I do, and I look forward to writing more. In the meantime, I’ll be putting together the second omnibus.

Dekarna Triumphant: Part 3 of 3

Tags

dekarna triumphant, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, self publishing, short story, writing

Continued from Part Two.

Part Three: Death Underwater

When Patches landed on the spikes, they did not impale her. But they made it impossible to gain her footing. She contorted her body, twisting one way then the other in a fury, striking out in every direction, to no avail. She bared her bright white fangs and howled her displeasure.

Then came the fire. The torches tossed in Patches’ pit did not burn her, but they set the wooden spikes ablaze. The reptiles, shrieking in their own language, backed away from the rising heat and churning clouds of smoke.

They ran to answer their mother’s call. Patches picked up their diminishing footfalls until the thump thump thump faded in the roaring, crackling chaos all around her. Flame hid everything else from sight.

Unseen by Patches, the spikes rapidly turned the color of charcoal. They weakened until they snapped and splintered under Patches’ thrashing. The collapse stoked the fire higher and brighter. The heat became a sun burning in the earthen pit. At its core raged one very unhappy calico.

At the bottom, she found her footing. She scrambled through burning wood until she bumped into the wall. Months before, she had escaped an asteroid cavern by scaling the walls. But the rocky asteroid had offered a firm surface to sink her claws into. The pit gave no such luxury.

Patches clawed the dirt in an attempt to climb. Earth crumbled under her paws. Seeking a more direct route, she leapt as high as she could. Where she failed to reach the rim, she tried to kick away from the wall for a boost. Success would have taken her over the edge.

She only gouged the dirt and kicked clumps of it into the fire. She fell again.

Patches landed on her feet.

Hell engulfed her, but its fuel was rapidly depleting. Patches helped it die by attacking the dirt. As she kicked and clawed the pit’s wall and floor, the dirt bath smothered the fire, bit by bit.

A scream pierced the jungle.

Patches knew the voice, but in the years since she first met Mags in 2027, through all the torments they had endured, she had never heard it in so much pain, tearing open the sunlit sky like a red, raw wound.

Patches flattened her ears against her head and screamed as loudly as her tiny larynx allowed.

Two leaps was all it would take. She knew. She could see the edge of her pit.

Failure did not dissuade her from trying a second time to make the jump. Nor a third, nor a fourth. Nor a fifth.

In 2026, Patches met the feline goddess of death. A skull had formed over the face of the moon and descended into the hiding place where the kitten shivered and trembled from fear. The stars gave her no warmth. But the skeletal goddess came to Patches, in her shallow spot dug in the dirt amongst tree roots and fallen leaves. The ghostly cat emitted a deep, rumbling purr like a mother to her nursing cubs, and licked Patches’ face.

Since that night, Patches had not once feared death, not even in the years before her transformation. Death became her ally. Death remained her friend.

That day on Isla Salida, as Patches failed time after time to escape, she paused in frustration at the bottom of the pit and lifted her scowling eyes to the sky. She glared into the sun overhead, knowing it could not blind her.

In its brutal, life-giving radiance, she once again perceived the great, grinning skull. The black hollows of its eyes appeared on the sun. The skull expanded until Sol was only a pupil in one of its eyes, and the nuclear-powered furnace merely cast highlights and shadows on the bony enclosure.

The vision parted its rows of naked teeth. What it said in its unearthly language was meant only for Patches’ ears. Other island animals noticed a chill on the wind, a momentary shroud of fear, an eclipse that passed over them as soon as it arrived.

Patches understood.

She tried again.

☠️

Months before, Mags had battled the queen of a hive of giant, genetically altered wasps living on an asteroid. In a display of savagery, she killed the beast with her bare hands and teeth. In the aftermath, the remaining insects accepted her as their new queen by rite of combat, and Mags’ friend Sarah helped her establish telepathic communication with them. Though all the wasps died protecting Mags’ during her ill-fated mission to Mali, a vestige of that mental link survived, a latent ability of which even Mags was unaware.

As the reptiles tormented the delirious pirate, and she cried out for her goddess to save her, she unwittingly broadcast her anguish on frequencies unknown to humans.

Her agony did not go unheard.

Forty meters away, hidden in the jungle shadows, a wasp nest hung from a tree. Within its muddy, papery caves, hundreds of six-legged inhabitants raised their antennae. Their frenetic labor paused. As surely as if their own queen had summoned them, they responded to the distress call.

A stream of wasps flew from the hive’s exit and gathered in a malevolent cloud of rage and purpose. Like a single entity, it flew.

One of Dekarna’s younglings gripped Mags by the ear and prepared to slice off the organ. His blade bit into her flesh and drew blood.

Intent on mutilating their enemy, the reptiles did not heed the approaching buzz of the wasp army. The hive’s warriors erupted from the vine-entangled trees and attacked.

Dozens of wasps swarmed on the youngling’s face. Stingers plunged into his soft eyes. When he shrieked, he gave them ingress to his mouth and the sensitive tongue inside. Beset by pain, he dropped his blade and tried, without success, to swat the wasps and spit them out.

The other reptiles met a similar fate. In the ensuing chaos, a thick coating of wasps landed on Mags and gathered on her bound wrists until her flesh was hidden. She feared the worst, but not a single stinger pierced her. Instead, a flurry of mandibles assaulted her bonds to slice through the plant fibers holding her captive. As she realized what was happening, the impulse she felt to struggle against the insects disappeared.

She did not, at the time, understand that the wave of calmness sweeping over her was pheromone-based. The swarm crawling all over her hands and forearms talked to her in its own language, one of scents and chemicals rather than words. Only another wasp could have understood it.

Even in her state of distress, Mags understood. As the wasps covered her calves and ankles and chewed at those ropes, too, Mags understood. The pressure on her wrists weakened. With all her might, Mags pulled her wrists away from each other.

The ropes split. Her hands found freedom. A moment later, amid the screaming from the reptiles, the ropes around her ankles weakened. Gravity finished the job.

Mags fell to the ground. The insects covering her limbs lifted away and chose new targets among her tormentors.

Mags struggled to her feet. Blood burned her eyes, but she had no trouble discerning Dekarna. The mother reptile grasped a smoking branch from the fire and swung it in an attempt to repel the relentless swarm.

Like a calico missile, Patches shot from the undergrowth. She launched herself onto the face of the nearest juvenile, who was already coated in wasps. The attack took him to the ground, and he could do nothing to escape.

Mags did not spare the breath to yell to her kitten. She barreled into Dekarna. With an inhuman shout and the full force of her weight, Mags tackled the reptile. She drove her enemy backward.

Dekarna stumbled over her own feet then lost them.

Mags clamped her arms around her prey. The charge took them through the scant meters of forest obscuring, until the last moment, Mags’ view.

In the fraction of a second before the pair plummeted from the air, Mags realized she had been held captive on a high point of the island, atop the towering cliffs.

The ocean punched Mags and Dekarna as hard as it could.

It failed to separate them. Locked in a grip of mutual doom, the combatants plunged into the sea. Both the reptile and the tortured mammal were stunned nearly senseless.

The weight of their hate bore them down. They sank like boulders, two victims of gravity, each trying to kill the other.

Mags went for the throat. She sank her teeth into scales but failed to draw blood.

Dekarna flung her tail across Mags’ back. The two were so close that Dekarna could not pry away her opponent.

Mags slammed her fists into the reptile’s abdomen. Her blows fell with diminishing strength. She had been through too much to hold her breath any longer.

Dekarna’s hands closed around Mags’ throat to choke the life out of her.

Mags inhaled water. Her eyes widened. She went limp in the reptile’s grip.

Before Dekarna could swim with her trophy to the surface, a massive shadow swelled below her and, in an instant, snapped her in half. Relieved of the weight, Dekarna’s head and upper body shot toward the surface. Her lower torso, legs, and tail disappeared into the ichthyosaur’s mouth, never to be seen again.

The prolonged lack of oxygen left Mags disoriented, unable to determine which way was up. Stars formed in her eyes in the lightless depths.

Before she drowned, the ichthyosaur rose beneath her. He buoyed her with air bubbles from below, pushing her upward. He caught her atop his enormous snout and lifted her out of the dark death surrounding her, into the sunlight.

She sprawled face down on the snout like it was a raft. Mags gasped for beath. Her monster gently paddled around the island, back to the shallow lagoon.

Mags clambered off and fell to her hands and knees in the warm water. She spat and wiped blood and snot from her face, swept wet hair away from her eyes. “Ichthy! What the fuuuck!” Panting, she rose to her feet and placed a hand on his face. With soft undulations, he hovered at the water’s edge. “Fuck yeah, buddy. Good save.”

In response, a shower of lights glowed above his surface, like a tiny galaxy.

“Good boy, ichthy.” Mags kissed the side of his face and nuzzled him. “Good boy.”

In the preceding year, Mags had experienced telepathic linkage with so many different cybernetic sea creatures that even without her octopuses’ help, she touched the ichthyosaur’s mind, and he touched hers.

He sent her the mental equivalent of snapshots from his travels, memories of what he had seen and smelled in the vastness he explored.

“That’s beautiful,” said Mags. But she sensed more than sharing. She felt a question. Mags understood its wordless meaning. She pet his metallic hide.

“Go,” she said. “Be free. There’s nothing left on this island for you to worry about. My little experiment is a bust.”

A second question.

“You’re sweet. But I can’t go with you. I’ve got things to do. Stuff to steal.” Mags held one palm flat against him and lowered her voice. “We can’t always be together. But you swim with me wherever I go.”

The king of oceans rested with her one final moment. His light display turned to warm hues of red and orange. With the smallest muscular movement, he drifted into deeper water. His tail flicked, and he oriented himself away from the island and toward the rest of his empire. He sank below the waves, became a shadow, and disappeared.

“If you see any ships with the GravCorp logo,” said Mags, “sink those bastards.”

She made her way to the shore.

Patches charged her from the tree line.

“Baby kitty!” Saltwater burned in Mags’ wounds, but she scooped up her calico. The two of them rubbed their faces together.

Patches chattered.

“How many are left?” Mags sniffed the air. “Nevermind. I smell them.” Mags pet her cat and considered what to do. “Don’t kill them. Leave them be.” She raised her voice to the trio of dragons unseen in the shadows and overhanging leaves. “Listen up, you little bastards! Scarper off! Your mum is dead, and unless you want to end up the same way, then leave us the fuck alone!”

Rustling from the jungle answered her. The juveniles backed away, but their scent remained nearby.

“Close enough,” said Mags. She set Patches on the sand. “I know, baby. I’m becoming a sentimental bitch in my old age. Now help me dig a grave. Before I fuckin’ pass out.”

The two of them got to work.

☠️

From the Letters of Meteor Mags.

Dear Great-Gramma,

Patches and I are on our way home to Ceres. I cleaned my wounds as best I could in the shower aboard the Bêlit. Hurt like a sonofabitch. I’ve got missing swaths of skin that will definitely require surgery, maybe a couple of grafts, and a headache that won’t quit. My reflection in the mirror looks like a steak someone tenderized with a hammer.

I bandaged what I could, took too much morphine, and started an IV for the blood loss. At least we’ve got tunes.

In case you couldn’t tell, my escapade did not go according to plan. All the octos I took to Earth are dead, and I buried some lizards I thought I could turn into allies. We never found the rest of their mama. The ocean took her.

The sun was setting before we left. A dark, blue-grey cloud lit around the edges by shades of peach and lavender pummeled the outer curve of the island with rain. Wind whipped the leaves of tropical trees and bent them to its will. Lightning blasted one into splinters.

On the edge of the storm, after what felt like bloody hours of digging a grave with Patches in the rough terrain beyond the lagoon—a tomb I’m sure she peed in—I gave a eulogy.

Here lie warriors so fierce they almost ended me—and that’s saying something. Their mother loved them as much as any reptile could. Maybe more. She would have done anything for her cubs, and I’ve always felt the same way.

Dekarna, I was wrong to underestimate you. May your babies find the peace you never found. May they sing the songs you never got a chance to sing.

May the goddess forgive us all.

I covered the grave with dirt and sand.

Epilogue: Born into a Mess

September 2030.

Life for baby octopuses is a journey fraught with peril. Few survive. The tiny hatchlings, no bigger than a grain of rice, drift in the ocean and become part of the plankton soup consumed by larger creatures. Swept into the baleen strainers in the jaws of whales, most young octopuses become food for less intelligent forms of life.

When Dekarna died, she left behind several clutches of octopus eggs she intended to eat. The denizens of her underwater larder went on without her.

In September 2030, a hybrid species explored Earth’s waters for the first time. Hundreds of descendants of the genetically altered octopuses burst from translucent eggs, changing colors as they swam.

Their mixed parentage, consisting partially of unaltered, earthly cephalopods, diluted that generation’s mental abilities. But they were not born without talents of their own.

Even as embryos in the warm seawater surrounding Isla Salida, their minds found each other and connected. When they escaped their eggs to live among the ocean currents, they maintained a tenuous link. When predators threatened, they joined minds and persuaded other animals to leave them alone.

South Pacific cetaceans suddenly found good reasons to abandon swarms of krill and plankton in favor of swimming and swallowing elsewhere.

The baby octos survived. But it would be years before their offspring spread throughout the seas, and even longer before they attempted to conquer Earth.

By then, everyone had forgotten them.

Everyone, that is, except Meteor Mags and Patches.

Dekarna Triumphant: Part 2 of 3

Tags

dekarna triumphant, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, self publishing, short story, writing

Continued from Part One.

Part Two: Reign of the Reptile

August 2030.

When Mags and Patches stepped out of the Bêlit and set foot on the beach, a formation of reptiles awaited them. Dekarna stood at attention to one side, and the younger warriors stood in two ranks of three. The blunt ends of their spears were planted in the sand. The stone tips gleamed in the sunlight. The youths resembled a military squad summoned for review by its commander, and the effect was not lost on Mags.

The smuggler raised a fist in salute. “Long live the resistance! You lot are looking top-notch! Sorry I’m late, but I brought prezzies.”[1]

Patches relieved herself in the sand and kicked it into a pile to cover her waste. Busied with the task, she did not notice the grimace that clouded Dekarna’s face.

Walking back and forth in front of the juveniles, Mags assessed her troops. “I see you don’t have any problem making weapons. Those knives are to die for! You gotta make one for me.” She clapped her hands together once with a resounding smack. “Now, my little angels, are you ready for something in a higher caliber?”

Dekarna struck with her spear.

It would have impaled a normal human, but Mags’ reflexes were faster. The spear tip sliced open the skin on the back of her head and ripped out chunks of her hair on its way through.

With even more speed than she had moved underwater to kill the octopuses, Dekarna pulled back the spear and struck again.

Mags dropped into a crouch to avoid the strike. Her fingertips plunged into sand. Adrenaline pumped into her blood, counteracting the disorienting first blow.

The juveniles stormed her. They toppled her and rolled her into the water, screaming battle cries in their mother’s native tongue.

Patches joined the fray. She sprinted after the troop and leapt onto the back of a young reptile’s head. Her claws sank into his scales.

He stumbled under her weight and fell face-first into the wet sand at the lagoon’s edge. The force drove him a meter forward, carving a wet gouge into the beach and scraping away his facial features.

Before the rut could fill with water, the fallen warrior’s siblings abandoned Mags and focused their rage on Patches. They formed a semi-circle around her, brandished their spears, and squawked at her in a challenge no ears on Earth had heard in more than seventy-five million years.

With the chaotic precision of a flock of birds, they ran from Patches, past their mother, toward the tree line, and into the jungle.

Mags rose from the lagoon. “Patches!” She spat through the saltwater clogging her airways. “Patches! Take the little ones!”

The angry calico gave chase.

With the back of one hand, Mags wiped snot from her face and flung it into the water. “Leave the boss bitch to me.”

☠️

Patches pursued the reptiles into the jungle. She had eaten lizards before, and her overgrown assailants meant little more to her than fast-moving snacks on legs. The tropical underbrush whipped her face. She ignored it.

Cats are ambush predators, no strangers to single-minded patience when hunting. Although Patches had herself been ambushed by the juveniles, her relentless focus remained undaunted even by the tangled plant life and insect swarms she plowed through.

The scent trail and thumps of running footfalls led her out of the chaotic undergrowth and onto a hunting trail trampled flat by months of use. Her speed increased on solid ground. The scents grew nearer. The sounds grew closer in her tuft-filled ears. Patches poured on the speed like a miniature cheetah, like a lioness chasing down a larger animal to feed her cubs.

Without warning, Patches’ world fell out from under her. The trail gave way, and she plummeted into a trap.

☠️

When Meteor Mags first battled Dekarna on Tannis, the pirate was armed to the teeth, including tear-gas grenades and her favorite Benelli shotgun, and encased in two layers of armor—one of which was her indestructible bodysuit woven from Patches’ hair.[2] In that fight, the newborn sextuplets had been too young to pose any threat, so Patches teamed up with Mags and focused her ferocity on Dekarna, too.

On Isla Salida, Mags stood alone, up to her thighs in water, with the sun in her eyes, and severely under-dressed for the occasion. Still, she had not left the relative safety of the Bêlit unarmed. From twin holsters on her hips, Mags pulled her pair of custom Desert Eagles, one in each fist, and fired.

Tumbling through the gritty seawater had not been kind to the pistols. Both misfired.

Mags tried a second time. “Fuck!” Without releasing her grip on the pistols, she glared at Dekarna. “Bring it, you crust-filled cunt! You and me!”

With a roar, Dekarna hurled her spear.

Mags dodged it. The evasion cost her a second—just enough time for her enemy to charge first. Mags ran to meet Dekarna head-on, but the water slowed her advance.

The two combatants collided with a force that knocked them off their feet.

Mags struck with her pistols, like clubs. But Dekarna outweighed her, and the reptile had months of experience hunting in that environment. Mags choked on seawater under the onslaught. Her fury was no match for her opponent’s.

Dekarna’s tail wrapped around the smuggler’s torso and pinned her tattooed arms to her sides. Tighter and tighter it squeezed, compressing Mags’ rib cage, making it hard to catch a breath.

Dekarna landed a savage blow on Mags’ skull.

The pirate’s world became a blur, then blackness.

Dekarna could have killed Mags then and there. The death would have given her some satisfaction. But a quick, unconscious dying would have brought no suffering to her prey.

As Dekarna dragged Mags’ motionless body ashore, she fumed over her memories. Too many in her life had used and abused her, including her former commander. Every time she came close to achieving freedom, someone else came along to enslave her.

She chose the mammal she had captured to pay the price for those injustices. Dekarna intended to make Mags suffer until the final agonies of her dying breath, and to prolong that moment for quite some time.

☠️

The juveniles’ trap for Patches resulted from of a month of planning with their mother. Dekarna knew the seven of them together could never defeat a well-armed spaceship. Instead, she constructed the ruse of remaining under the octopuses’ control and loyal to the smuggler—until Dekarna’s prey was drawn out of the ship and lulled into a false confidence. Then, with her primitive weapons, she could win.

Dekarna never believed she could kill Mags with one unexpected blow. She and her brood built a plan—a plan to catch the mammals off-guard, separate them, and exterminate them.

Her plan went well. She had not attained the rank of Major for nothing.

Dekarna’s children led Patches down a pre-determined path. They knew the well-worn hunting trail like the scales on the backs of their hands.

Dekarna helped them dig the trap three meters deep. She showed them how to carve branches into sharp sticks and plant them vertically in the bottom of a pit so the spikes would impale any animal who fell. She taught them to cover the pit with leaves fallen from the tropical canopy, so a foe would not detect it in a chase.

Seconds after Patches fell in, the young reptiles emerged from leafy shadows to stand around the hole, raise their spears, and chant a raucous, birdlike chorus that could not be translated into human speech, except for the word victory. They lit torches and tossed them into the pit.

Their celebration reached Dekarna’s ears. She called her children to join her.

☠️

Mags.

Where the fuck are my octos? It’s my first thought when I wake up.

Next: I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be staring at a strand of skinless, barbecued rats right in the bloody face. Christ, there’s more of them. Roasted rats on ropes and smoked serpents hanging from the—

Wait. Why are the trees upside down?

Nevermind. It’s just me.

That’s why there’s blood dripping into my left eye from my split lip. I don’t even want to know how bad it is. When I probe with my tongue, the teeth behind the lip feel loose. Without thinking about it, I try to wipe my eye.

Jesus bloody fuck. I can’t move my arms. They’re bound by rope, and rope connects them to my ankles. More rope has me dangling from a tree branch. The ground’s a meter from my head. “Patches!”

My kitten doesn’t answer. Instead, my captor steps into view. That fat fucking cow.

“You stupid snake! You slimy, overgrown pile of frog shit! Let me the fuck down! I will rip off your arms and piss on the stumps!”

She doesn’t like that. Nope. Not one bit. She hits me with a well-carved staff I don’t have time to admire before it’s leaving bruises on my legs, belly, and arms. Whose idea was it to weaponize these lizards, anyway? “Gah! Stop, you whore! Puta madre! Fucking stop!”[3]

She does.

The blood’s been rushing to my head for I don’t know how long. It’s still light out, and not just from the bonfire. The burning wood chokes me. Heat singes my tail.

Judging from the sun’s position—which is right there, yeah?

Nope. It’s over on that side.

It’s all over the place.

Fuck me running. I feel like a drunk bitch who can’t focus on what’s in front of her face. The surrounding jungle is a buzzing blur. The ground and the sky spin so fast I can’t tell which I’d rather puke on.

Maybe both. My guts give it their best shot.

The shit gets in my nose. I gag and cough.

With one hand, the lizard brings me to a halt. The world keeps spinning around her.

She says some shit to me. I know by the inflection. I can even make out some of the words. I’ve touched her mind briefly, thanks to my octos. My babies had the ability to translate any language, human or otherwise, to any mind they included in their weird experiments. I guess I picked up a few things.

What I think she’s telling me is that she killed my fucking octos! She’s bragging, strutting back and forth, yelling at me, and I think how nice it would be if she did one of those villain monologues while I sort a way out of this mess.

She doesn’t.

That slut wasn’t born yesterday. For all I know, she’s older than me. Nobody knows how long these lizards live. It could be hundreds of years, like a tortoise.

For a moment, while she picks up the knife, my blood-addled brain recalls the missing member of my island entourage: the ichthy.

Last time I was here, I set free a cybernetic ichthyosaur, and he was supposed to be working with the octopuses to keep the island safe from intruders. Yes, the same useless octos I can’t hear at all anymore. What the hell happened here?

The lizard pinches a patch of skin on my upper arm like she’s testing it for something. Her claws draw blood. She holds firm. She slides an obsidian blade into my skin, like she’s slicing a roast, or peeling an apple, and I can’t help but scream.

I thrash and try to kick.

She snaps her tail around me and holds me in place.

I hate her so fucking much. What is she doing to my arm?

She steps away and holds a trophy to my face. Something wet slaps me, and I can’t make it out until she pulls it back.

My skin.

I know it’s mine because it has three of my star tattoos, and on the other side it’s raw and red and dripping, and my arm is screaming like a cat caught in a Cuisinart. I might be bleeding to death.

She holds the skin to her teeth and rips it in half. She chews it twice with her open mouth and swallows.

“Bitch! You are fucking dead! Do you hear me?” But I can’t move, and I can’t even tell if the words make sense anymore.

She eats the rest of it.

I barf again on my own face, but only bile.

Those dickheads Patches was chasing step out of the forest. Where the fuck is Patches?

I only see a couple of them, but I smell and hear the rest. They stand around the fire, chattering, like they’re blessing their blades in the flame. Where the hell did they pick that up?

I don’t know if they understand the curses I hurl at them, but I know the looks in their eyes. They surround me. They stink like rotten meat. Dekarna grabs my tail and pulls it. Hard.

They go at me with the knives, and the pain is even worse than before.

Goddess help me.

---

[1] “Prezzies” meaning “presents”.

[2] The bodysuit was a gift from Tarzi and Celina on Mags’ birthday in 2029. See The Battle of Vesta 4.

[3] “Puta madre” literally means “prostitute mother” but is typically translated as “motherfucker”.

KDP: Hardcover Beta Review

Tags

hardcover, KDP, meteor mags, self publishing, singing spell, writing

In case you missed my post from last month, I was invited by Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to participate in the beta version of their new program for producing print-on-demand hardcover books. I promised you an update when the first, physical proof arrived. Guess what came in the mail today!

All I can say is that the book looks and feels amazing. It’s sturdy and way more substantial than I expected for a smallish 150-page book. The print options I chose were for white paper and a gloss finish on the cover.

Some folks believe you should use cream paper for fiction, but I have produced books in both cream and white, and the white paper looks and feels better to me. I also find the high contrast with black text makes white paper easier to read. I’ve produced books with both matte and glossy covers, and I tend to prefer the shiny gloss that really makes the colors vibrant. But matte finish is also nice, and I’ve gone with that several times when it felt right.

The binding is beautiful inside and out, and I love the way that about a quarter-inch of the cover color and design is visible inside the book when opened, where the cover wraps around the edges.

I think authors will be pleased when this hardcover option is available to everyone. I already feel the urge to make hardcover editions of about half a dozen of my books. I’d love to release the first Meteor Mags Omnibus in hardcover, but at more than 580 pages, it exceeds the maximum page count of 550 for a KDP hardcover.

Besides page count, authors will want to consider price points and profit margins. My paperback edition of The Singing Spell has a wholesale printing cost to me of less than USD $3. But the printing cost for the hardcover is $7.28. (Again, this is for a 150-page book. Longer books will cost more.) To sell the hardcover and make a reasonable per-unit profit on Amazon, I needed to price it at $14.95, as opposed to the $6.95 price for the paperback and the $2.99 bargain price for the Kindle ebook edition.

This doesn’t make much of a financial difference to me, since I design my own books, but authors who need to pay a designer to format the cover for a hardcover edition will want to consider whether they can recoup the additional expense with hardcover sales at a higher price than the other editions. Will their target market be willing to spend the extra bucks for a hardcover? It’s a question I can’t really answer for anyone without market research.

Either way, I expect my fellow authors and readers will be impressed with the quality of these hardcover editions, and I’m looking forward to the day when this program is no longer in beta testing but available to all self-publishers using the KDP platform.

Update: The hardcover edition of The Singing Spell is now available on Amazon.

Dekarna Triumphant: Part 1 of 3

Tags

dekarna triumphant, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, self publishing, short story, writing

Here is a draft of a new Meteor Mags story, in three parts.

METEOR MAGS: DEKARNA TRIUMPHANT
Episode 30 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.
© 2021 by Matthew Howard. All Rights Reserved.

Held against her will on a South Pacific island, the last surviving soldier from a race of evil space lizards reclaims her mind from her tentacled, telepathic captors, trains her children as warriors, and triumphs over her greatest enemy: Meteor Mags.

☠️

For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

—Henry Beston; The Outermost House, 1928.

☠️

Prologue: Into Their Graves

August 2030. From the Letters of Meteor Mags.

Dear Great-Gramma,

Patches and I are on our way back to Earth. The last visit didn’t work out so well, but at least my ribs healed since then.[1] Back in May, I promised to supply the reptiles on Isla Salida with weapons, food, and whatever else they need to become my personal death squad under the control of the octopuses I left to watch over them.[2]

Before I left, I ran into Fuzzlow and Donny. They don’t talk much about losing their drummer and our good friend, Batalla, in that colossal clusterfuck on Vesta last year.[3] But they’ve kept busy on Ceres, helping with the reconstruction, getting in Celina’s hair, and composing new songs.

Lonso invited the guys to join his interspecies band, but Donny and Fuzz don’t want anything to do with jamming in a cephalopod-controlled groupmind. I explained to them how awesome it was to play with Lonso’s traveling freakshow on Ceres, but I suspect the boys think I am too mentally unhinged to be a reliable source.[4]

They might be right. Not everything has gone according to plan with the octos. Besides the weird states of mind I’ve experienced since mentally merging with their mama last year—goddess rest her soul—some of them tried to kill me and Patches and Plutes on Titan a couple of months ago.[5]

I chalked it up to a misunderstanding and moved on, especially since no mind like theirs has ever existed, and they are still, in so many ways, like children: haphazardly learning, making mistakes, taking some lumps, and getting sorted about their place in the universe.

Donny and Fuzznuts are less inclined to forgive my tentacled toddlers. And I get that. Everybody’s baby is someone else’s monster.

I wasn’t shocked when the boys brought up recording another album as the Psycho 78s. You know how they are. “Come on, Mags! It’ll be great!” Nevermind that I have a million things to do right now. Fuzz said, “When are you not busy?”

I was like, “I’ll be free about four days after I’m dead.”

“Fuck that.” Donny tossed me a beer.

They’re good guys, as far as guys go. A good beer, too. I didn’t recognize it. Definitely not one of the brands I stole by the shipload to keep our cozy dwarf planet stocked. Not one I ever drank in the Belt, either—and I’ve been to every bar in the System. I asked where they got it.

“We made it,” said Fuzz.

“Get out.”

“For real,” said Donny. “We’re thinking of opening a brewery and music venue here.”

The conversation turned to who would play there, and all the Ceresian bands that have been inspired by Dumpster Kittens, and how the new community center is nice but maybe not rowdy enough for our taste. Pretty soon, they had me agreeing to appear onstage.

What can I say? I love those guys, even if I give them hell. I’d never say it to their faces, but I expect to outlive them, and I’d like to jam with them as many times as possible before I end up shoveling dirt into their graves.[6]

If I’ve learned one thing about life in one hundred and six bloody years of existence, it’s that you need to enjoy the people you have while you have them, because you never know when they’ll be gone for good.

Anyway, I think I made them happy. They gave me and Patches a case of bottled homebrew for the road, and I hugged them and kissed their cheeks.

Then it was time to go. What with all the nonsense of the last month and that mess on Mars, I’m way behind on my promised visit to the island.

But I’m sure my octos have it all under control.

Love,

Maggie

xoxox

☠️

Part One: The Fall of the House of Octopus

May–July 2030.

One hundred and forty million years before humans first walked the Earth, octopuses lost their shells. Without the stiff enclosure that protects other mollusks, the eight-armed marvels could squeeze their bodies through any tube or crevice larger than their beaks.

This ability helped octopuses find shelter from predators. But given their innate curiosity, it also got them into plenty of trouble. Still, they survived, adapted, and evolved into hundreds of species. It wasn’t until 2029 that a new stage of octopus evolution introduced another survival advantage that also allowed them to get into all kinds of unimagined trouble: telepathy.

When Meteor Mags—with help from Patches and Tarzi—assisted the hatching of that first generation of genetically altered baby octopuses in an abandoned asteroid laboratory, she inadvertently changed the future of marine biology. But the change did not happen overnight. During their first year, Mags’ “babies”, as she liked to call them, met other members of the space pirate’s crew, started a rock band, gave concerts and influenced societies on Ceres and throughout the Asteroid Belt, and terraformed Titan with the help of a mysterious, multi-dimensional object.[7]

In May 2030, Mags took fifty of her babies to Earth for the first time. She enlisted them to control the mind of one of her enemies who recently had babies of her own: Dekarna, the former second in command of the forces of space lizards Mags fought so many times. Mags intended for the reptiles to become her private warriors and the guardians of one of two installation sites planned for the free-energy system she wanted to bring to Earth.[8]

The mission’s fifty octopodal volunteers had a second motivation. They knew their lifespans were short, and their identity as a groupmind would die without a new generation to carry on their unique lineage. Only in Earth’s oceans could they find potential mates to spread their genes far and wide, and, through telepathic instruction, perpetuate their identity and all they had learned about the universe.

In June 2030, the cephalopodic swarm began courting the local octopuses in the South Pacific waters surrounding their adopted island home of Isla Salida. Competitors could not match their hypnotic songs, transmitted from mind to mind. Potential mates swooned, in their gelatinous way, seduced by the allure of higher intelligence and the survival advantages it offered.

But octopus reproduction does not end well for the parents. Males who offer sperm are often strangled to death in the process or eaten soon thereafter by the females. Mothers live longer, laying hundreds of eggs and watching over their clutches until the hatching.

Even then, a female octopus abandons eating during her single-minded attention to her eggs. She begins a time of starvation and senescence that reduces her focus, clarity, and mobility. Her aquatic world fades around her as she uses what little energy she has left to tend to her unborn descendants. Their birth signals her death.

Mags failed to account for these realities in her plans. She did not consider how the reproductive imperative encoded in her octos’ genes meant they would be diverting their attention and ending their lives.

In July 2030, thousands of fresh octopus eggs piled up on the stones and coral around Isla Salida. As the male adults died off, and the expectant mothers ignored their task of controlling Dekarna, Mags’ plans came undone.

☠️

July 2030.

Dekarna crouched on the rocky edge of a cliff high above the outer edge of Isla Salida. Her clawed, naked feet gripped the stone. Her prehensile tail was straight and stiff for most of its length, balancing her body weight in her hunting stance. Only the tip of the tail slowly swept the air, back and forth.

Her right hand held a wooden spear. Dekarna had shaped one end to a lethal point using fragments of rocks beaten to a sharp edge with other rocks. Her children lacked her skill with making weapons from the island landscape, but they were learning.

The thought of her offspring brought what passed for a smile among reptiles: scaly lips pulled back ever so slightly, formidable teeth exposed, and a forked tongue flicking in a delicate dance.

The tongue, like a snake’s, picked up the scent of prey. Mammalian megafauna had never colonized the island, but rodents flourished, along with many species of birds accentuated by seasonal colonies who temporarily nested on the cliffs to lay delicious eggs and hatch easily devoured younglings.

The island also provided a steady supply of smaller reptiles who basked on its sunbaked stone, snakes who stretched up to five meters in length, and hordes of scurrying, skittering insects who often exceeded the size of a human hand and provided protein for Dekarna’s brood. Combined with the bounty of fish, eels, and mollusks in the adjacent waters, the island’s biodiversity made it a predator’s paradise. Dekarna and her children ate well, ate often, and thrived.

Dekarna allowed the sun to heat her blood. It charged her like a battery. She was not exothermic like the island’s native reptiles. She generated her own warmth. But even a monstrous reptile from space could enjoy a beautiful day.

Her tongue flicked again to taste the salty spray of seawater as it bashed against the lithic boundary between island and ocean.

All her life, she had dreamed of such moments. Born in outer space and conscripted into military service, she rose in the ranks due to her courage, ferocity, intellect, and dedication to the cause of reclaiming Earth for her species, to making a new home of the blue planet they had left for the stars so many millennia before.

Her dream drove her onward, from boot camp to battlefield. No matter what hardship or humiliation she encountered, she held the dream of a home planet in her teeth and would not let it go.

Her commander had destroyed her dream through his incompetent obsessions, and she had only come to Earth through the machinations of the space pirate known as Meteor Mags.[9]

Dekarna flicked her tongue again. A low, rumbling growl escaped her throat. She had not thought of her commander nor his nemesis in—how long? Her pupils expanded and contracted. How long?

She struggled to remember. She shut her eyes and let the awareness overtake her.

The accursed smuggler! Behind closed eyes, Dekarna saw flashes of her military career, her long-dead commander and how he inseminated her fallen form on the battlefield. How he almost got them both killed. How Meteor Mags—

The dragon roared. Dekarna gripped the spear in both hands and crushed it in her grip. She bent it until it broke and shot splinters in every direction.

The smuggler. The smuggler and her octopuses. The degradation at her hands. The mental slavery—not just Dekarna’s, but the only creatures she had ever loved: her children.

Dekarna hurled the broken pieces of her weapon to the ground. She did not, at first, realize her insights into her situation were the result of the octopus matings and the subsequent loss of control. She was too busy racing down the rock formations, crashing through the tropical forest below, trampling everything in her path and screaming orders to her offspring to meet her.

Had the smuggler wanted a death squad? Fine, thought Dekarna in her native tongue. She will have one. But the death will be hers. The reptile crashed through the underbrush onto the beach.

Dekarna’s children gathered around her. She told them the truth, and she saw in their eyes they also were free from mental captivity. She guided them, and they helped her make weapons to destroy their captors.

☠️

Dekarna plunged into the sea. Her tongue thrashed the saltwater in search of only one scent: octopus. Her tail propelled her. In one fist, she held a new spear. Strapped by animal skin and handmade rope to her forearms and upper legs, blades knapped from shards of volcanic obsidian caught the sunbeams penetrating the shallows. They went fully black as the light faded.

In a matter of minutes, Dekarna found the first clutch of eggs.

When the mother octopus sensed the reptile’s approach, she squirted a blast of ink. Octopus ink is meant to do more than obscure a predator’s vision. The substance contains scents intended to fool a beast into thinking it has suddenly found food rather than a murky cloud.

Dekarna was not fooled. Her muscular swimming carried her forward, through the cloud, to her target.

Near the nadir of her lifeforce, the mother octopus moved too slowly to put up a fight or escape. The photoreceptors and color-changing cells in her skin camouflaged her, making her nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding stone. The precaution did not save her.

Dekarna’s spear struck like a lightning bolt. The pointed tip pierced one of the octopuses’ three hearts and its central brain.

Dekarna ripped the spear from the gooey head and struck again. When she drew the weapon toward her mouth, the impaled octopus came with it. Frantic motions of eight independently thinking arms waved away the monster in a final attempt to protect the clutch.

Dekarna snapped the arms into her jaws and destroyed them. The remaining hearts and eyeballs burst in her mouth. She spat out the beak.

The eggs offered no defense against her attack. Dekarna speared them, smashed them with her tail, and—anchoring herself with one hand gripping the underwater rock formations—stomped them into a gel that dispersed in the agitated sea.

Flush with satisfaction, Dekarna sought her next target. She made her way around the island’s perimeter. The infanticide repeated itself dozens of times, punctuated only by the reptile’s need to rise to the surface for air. She gorged herself on her kill as she carried out her mission.

Before she was through, she considered an alternative. With the fresh taste of octopus in her mouth, she decided to let a few clutches survive. The eggs would not hatch immediately, so why not save a few for later, as a treat for her children? They could eat the embryonic octos raw or cook them over fire on the beach. What greater pleasure could life offer than feasting on one’s enemies?

Dekarna snatched a mouthful of eggs but did not swallow. She carried them to the surface and climbed onto land. After shaking herself like a dog ridding its fur of water, she squatted in the sand and urinated to mark the location of her larder.

She took her dinner home.

☠️

Kilometers away, a monster roamed the ocean. Twenty meters long and with enough electrical power to sink a fleet of manmade ships, the cybernetic ichthyosaur feared nothing.

Before he met Mags, he spent countless years in isolation, imprisoned underground in a tank fashioned by his captors and creators, with nothing to keep him company but the decaying corpse of his mate.[10]

The parts of him that were biological rather than mechanical remembered the seas by instinct. But his ancestors had died out millions of years before, and the shapes of seabeds and coastlines, even the positions of continents, had changed so much since prehistoric times.

He propelled himself through a herd of a hundred hammerheads. They scattered and gave him a wide berth. Hammerhead sharks hunted with electrical receptors in their flattened snouts. But the electricity from the ichthyosaur signaled something too large to eat, something that could only mean their deaths if they interfered. Sharks had not survived multiple mass extinction events by being foolish.

The ichthyosaur ignored them. The waters near Isla Salida gave him plenty of opportunity to study their species. His curiosity about what else swam in his new kingdom led him farther and farther from the island.

Undeterred by the greatest, coldest depths, and capable of producing his own light, he cast his enormous eyes on sea floors never seen by humans. Strange creatures thrived in the sunless terrain. Nearly one hundred percent of the energy required for life comes in one form or another from the sun. But a tiny fraction capitalizes on energy from below, from the planet’s brutally hot, metal core and the magma surrounding it, boiling, churning, bursting through the crust.

The ichthyosaur discovered multicellular civilizations with no central brain. He studied geothermal vents where raw, savage chemistry assembled itself into the fundamental proteins for new life: the same processes responsible for his most distant ancestors’ creation.

The ocean revealed her secrets to her king, and he was pleased. He set off spectacular lightshows as he rose from the depths, bringing illumination to the eyes of species that had never seen the sun.

He didn’t feel angry like Dekarna. The octopuses subjected him to far less severe mental control. Truth be told, he adored Mags and required little encouragement to help her. If not for the smuggler, he would have remained trapped in the tragic crypt where he was made.

Still, the octos had kept him on a leash. As their influence faded, the invisible leash grew longer and longer. Eventually, he found its breaking point.

Then he was gone.

The ichthyosaur broke the waves to splash the surface. His massive tail, beating side to side, shot him out of the water. His metallic skin caught the sunlight. A trillion beads of water sliced the silver reflection into gleaming diamonds. A spray like stars exploded then fell from the sky.

He missed his friends on the island. He had lived without anyone to play with for a long, long time, and the mollusks and the mother reptile were good company.

Flocks of a dozen bird species caught his eye. He had never seen their kind before. They divebombed the surface to plunder a frenzied school of herring, a bait ball herded by air bubbles and driven toward the sky by dolphins in a sophisticated hunting maneuver.

The ichthyosaur swam closer to observe the conflict in detail. Leaving vortexes in his wake, he resolved to pay a visit to his old friends.

But first, he had more empire to explore.

☠️

August 2030.

Isla Salida’s August weather brought nights a bit too cool for the reptiles’ liking, but daytime in that dry season offered uninterrupted hours of direct sunlight. The sun kept the island warm at an average high of twenty-five degrees Celsius, like a pleasant Spring day, and made the surrounding waters just as balmy.

Dekarna’s youngsters frolicked in the surf at the edge of the black-sand lagoon lining the inner curve of the crescent island. Though not yet as tall as her, each one had reached at least one meter in height. From the shore, while carving a tree branch into a strong, smooth staff, Dekarna admired the half-dozen lives she had brought into being.

Like kittens, they played at battle to sharpen their skills. Some hunted the silvery, darting fish in the shallows. Their shrieking and chirping amused their mother, until a dark spot appeared in the sky and grew larger.

Months before, on Tannis, Dekarna saw a similar speck descend from the stars. She had been soundly defeated at the hands of Meteor Mags, and that defeat led to her enslavement on the island.[11]

Dekarna raised her sword-filled mouth and roared a warning. All across the island, from one crescent tip to another, echoes of rage called her warriors to attention.

Never again would they be enslaved by the smuggler.

---

[1] For Mags’ disastrous previous visit to Earth, see Antipodes.

[2] As detailed in Small Flowers.

[3] See The Battle of Vesta 4.

[4] Mags performed on Ceres with Alonso’s band in Small Flowers.

[5] As shown in The Crystal Core.

[6] Mags’ expected, though not guaranteed, lifespan is 200 years thanks to the magic ring she inherited from her great-gramma.

[7] As told in Red Metal at Dawn and subsequent adventures such as Small Flowers and The Crystal Core.

[8] See Small Flowers for more detail. Mags’ failure to install the second unit appears in Antipodes.

[9] For her commander’s folly, see Red Metal at Dawn and The Battle of Vesta 4. For Mags’ machinations, see Small Flowers.

[10] See Hunted to Extinction for the ichthyosaur’s backstory, and his liberation at Mags’ hands in Small Flowers.

[11] See Small Flowers.

Reflections on Writing The Martian Revolution

Tags

martian revolution, memoir, meteor mags, writing

My recent story about the Martian revolution in 2030 is a fairly quick read at only 16,000 words, but it took six months to finish. I’ll tell you a bit about what happened along the way—both the challenges and successes—but let’s start with the two main lessons I learned.

First: The more moving parts you have, the longer it takes to assemble the machine. When plotting a story with two or three characters in a limited setting, you have fewer things to keep track of. Seven years ago, I used to crank out first drafts over a weekend, from 5,000 to 15,000 words long. They took a lot longer than that to revise, but most of the first drafts went quickly.

Those were simpler times in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches. Episodes had only three to six main characters in only one or two settings. Plus, I was free to make up things as I went along, because so much of the “universe” was unexplored, and I could invent unresolved plot threads on the fly to set up stories I wanted to tell in the future.

As the series progressed, it encompassed many more characters and settings, and those dangling plot threads needed woven into the fabric of everything we already knew about Mags’ life and her solar system. When writing about any event or character, I needed to bring my internal continuity editor on board to make sure I hadn’t contradicted any previous facts in the more than 300,000 words of established history.

Plus, I chose more ambitious settings as I went along. I started with what you might call “stock footage” for the early stories: things I’d seen in movies and comics that I basically stole or used as blueprints. But after boiling those stolen bits in my own kettle of ideas for a few years, they became a stew with a flavor all its own.

As a result, I sometimes needed to step back from writing the story and return to planning—which leads me to the next lesson. The suggestions I’ve given other writers for years once again proved their usefulness. Finding renewed success with so many of my basic methods reinforced my confidence in publishing them for a wider audience.

In My Life as an Armadillo, my recent book about writing and workshopping, I assert that writer’s block is a myth, because you can always write something—and I give suggestions about the fundamental, foundational pieces of writing you can do behind the scenes to overcome any feeling of being stuck.

I needed to take my own advice a bunch of times for The Martian Revolution. I reached points in the narrative where I realized I had not fully developed my own understanding of a setting or character. I needed to step back and write about those things “off the record”, behind the scenes. That empowered me to come back to the main narrative and write through several scenes and character-driven moments from a deeper understanding and keep moving forward.

Not that I wrote it all in order, from start to finish. Instead, I started from a series of scene synopses built from several thousand words of notes I’d compiled while writing earlier stories that led up to these events. From the scene summaries, I picked whichever I felt most emotionally drawn to when it was time to write.

The challenge of that approach is that you end up whittling down the unwritten scenes to the ones you feel the least emotionally involved with. But that helped me discover, as it has in the past, what it would take to get me emotionally involved in those scenes. After all, if I am not captivated by a scene as the writer, what hope is there of involving any readers?

To get to the emotional core of some things, I did a ton of exploratory writing and description of characters—not just physical descriptions, but about their true motivations, their likes, dislikes, strengths, flaws, histories, relationships with and feelings toward each other, even things that remain unspoken in the narrative but formed a subtext for my own understanding of these characters.

All of that takes time, and no one really gives you credit for doing it as a writer, just like no one gives you credit for studying an instrument for years and practicing for untold hours after giving a great concert performance.

But it wasn’t like I spent every day of six months working on one story. I published the previous collection (The Singing Spell) in October 2020, but then I needed to move at the end of January and didn’t have a place lined up. So, I packed all the stuff that would fit into a rented 10×10 U-Haul truck, threw out everything else, and drove to another city a couple hours away. I hoped for the best, but total disaster was also a possiblity.

The resultant upheaval of my life made it difficult to focus on my story, so I decided not to worry about it. I found solace in writing about something every day. During my week in a hotel, I used my mini-tablet and wireless keyboard to type thousands of words of ideas for the next couple of episodes. During the subsequent saga of three weeks with no Internet in my new place, I revised and edited the collection of essays about writing and workshopping that became the book I published in March 2021. Sometimes I just wrote letters to friends to gather my thoughts.

Plus, my neglected blog needed a shot in the arm, and I had a million things to do to get my new life started and reconnect with my clients. In the meantime, I let The Martian Revolution simmer on the back burner of my mind, and every now and then I felt inspired to make more notes about it or write a scene. Those notes and the extra time proved helpful when I got around to finishing the first draft in mid-March 2021.

I never saw this as being “blocked” as a writer. It was more of a question about where to direct my writing and editing energies on any particular day during a series of life challenges that disrupted my groove. It helped that I had multiple ongoing projects to choose from, some of which were more analytical, some of which were more creative and free-flowing, and all of which were in various stages of development from brainstorming to hammering out a final draft.

Maybe that is the third lesson. I often meet writers who are struggling with a single work, and they feel disheartened when they run into obstacles in their life or with the story itself that prevent them from making progress. But if you have a few irons in the fire at the same time, you can usually find one that strikes your fancy on any given day. Not everything in the universe depends on your finishing your current novel or short story when you have a few of them to tinker with at once. Having options gives you freedom, and having options you truly care about means you can always find something to write.

Three Changes at Kindle Direct Publishing and Amazon for Self-Publishers

Tags

amazon, books, case laminate, casewrap, CD, compact disc, hardcover, KDP, print on demand, self publishing, writing

Three changes are taking place this month at Amazon’s platforms for self-publishing. Two involve Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), and one is happening at the Media On Demand platform that replaced the old CreateSpace function of selling compact disc albums.

Media On Demand is terminating compact disc sales, apparently due to a lack of demand and the increasing market preference for digital streaming and downloads. I’m sad but not surprised. Although my wholesale cost for each of the two music albums I made available on CD was only $4.99, I felt the retail price where I could make a decent per-unit profit was too expensive at $17.95. CDs are nice, but that price always seemed unrealistic to me. On June 4, CDs will no longer be available from Media On Demand, including wholesale copies to the creators, so creators will need to stock up if they want copies before then.

Next, KDP has begun offering print-on-demand paperbacks in Australia. This requires authors to adjust the pricing of each of their POD books for that market. That’s an easy process inside your KDP account, but since I have around thirty books in print, it took me about an hour to make all the adjustments. Still, I’m excited about this development.

Finally, KDP is currently running a beta version of the ability to make print-on-demand books available in hardcover! (Note: The linked pages for this program might only be currently available to KDP authors who have been invited to the beta program and are signed in to their account.) While not available in all international markets, they will be available in the USA and a few other countries. Many of my fellow authors will be excited if this works out, because my self-publishing customers often ask about hardcover editions.

The new hardcovers won’t be the kind with dust jackets. Instead, they will be “case laminate” hardcovers. Casewrapping is common for specialty books and textbooks, where the image is printed on a material that is wrapped onto the hard binding and glued in place, not a removable paper sleeve.

From a technical perspective, this new format will require some graphic design software skill, because formatting a cover for the casewrap is more complex than just clicking a button! Compared to a paperback cover, the casewrap cover must be created at dimensions both wider and taller so the printed image can be wrapped around the hard binding. It also means there is extra width to account for the “folded” area on each side of the spine. To help cover designers implement these changes, KDP provides a cover dimensions calculator which will also generate a PDF or PNG template to use as a guideline, and the templates are created specifically for your book’s trim size and page count. That is handy!

I spent a couple hours tonight re-doing the cover to Meteor Mags: The Singing Spell and Other Tales, getting a new ISBN and barcode for the hardcover edition, uploading and reviewing the files, and ordering a physical proof copy. I will update you on how it turns out, once the proof arrives. My understanding is that “author copies” will not be available for hardcovers. Those are the copies an author can order at wholesale price, which you already know if you have a POD paperback with KDP.

So, goodbye compact discs and hello hardcovers! And hello to Australia! Feel free to share your experiences with these changes in the comments on this post.

The Martian Revolution: Part 4 of 4

Tags

Cat, Mars, martian revolution, meteor mags, Patches, rosalia, science fiction, self publishing, shondra, tarzi, writing

Continued from Part 3.

Part Four: End Game

The Rendezvous

Mags and Patches arrived at the hub to find it locked down. Between the two of them, they made short work of the lobby door, ignoring the alarms they set off and the dead bodies they encountered. When they found the elevator required a code, Mags put a couple dents in it with her stolen steel-toed boots.

The criminals destroyed a different door and took the stairs instead. With pauses to catch her breath and clutch her ribs, Mags grumbled the whole way.

When they arrived at the entry to the room Tarzi had invaded, gunshots greeted them. Mags stopped beside the door and took cover behind its frame. She said, “Take the point, tough girl.”

Patches burst into the room. She leapt onto the helmeted face of one of Rosalia’s goons who was shooting at Tarzi. She howled as she destroyed him.

Mags stepped in. Her bullets sent the last of the grey-clad enemies to their graves.

Tarzi shouted, “Mags! Patches!”

The smuggler ejected a magazine and slammed a fresh one into place. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” He paused to observe her blood-soaked, shredded Port Authority uniform. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Nothing a little murder can’t solve. Jesus tapdancing christ. Is that Rosie?”

“Yeah,” said Tarzi. “Mags, I didn’t—”

“You traitorous bitch!” Mags knelt beside the corpse. She gripped it by the collar of Rosalia’s uniform and pulled the lifeless, shattered face close to hers. “Don’t you ever fuck with my cat!” A cascade of vulgarities went unnoticed by the single ear still attached to Rosalia’s head.

Mags released the collar and let Rosalia fall to the floor with a thud. “Where the hell is Shondra? When I get my hands on her—”

“What do you mean? The last I knew, she was on her way to set you free.”

“What?!”

Tarzi filled her in on the events of his imprisonment and release.

“Holy crap,” said Mags. “If she didn’t make it to my cell, then where is she?”

“Couldn’t say.”

Mags considered the new information for half a minute, pacing back and forth and cursing under her breath. “Alright, T-man. Let’s put this high-tech hub to use and call her.”

Mags no longer had her phone, but she was not one to forget anything numeric. She switched on a console and entered Shondra’s private number.

☠️

The Treaty

Shondra’s face filled a two-meter-wide screen with a pleasant smile. “Hello, kitten.” Her eyes drifted over Mags’ shoulder to Tarzi, then past him and around the room. “Looks like you have it all under control. The hub is secure? Are we plugged in and ready to take control?”

Mags slammed her fist on the console. “Goddamnit, Shondra! You told Tarzi I was delusional! A psychotically delusional bitch from hell!”

“Are you disputing that fact?”

Mags frowned. “You could have said it more nicely.”

“I’m sorry, Maggie. You are an astoundingly beautiful and musically gifted… totally delusional, psychotic hell beast! You’re practically feral!”

Mags purred. “That’s more like it.”

“Where’s Rosie?”

While Mags and Tarzi focused on the video call, Patches wiggled her butt and leapt onto a machine in the corner. Quietly tapping its screen, she set up an encrypted group message that included Celina, the Dumpster Kittens, and anyone else’s address she remembered. An extended claw softly clacked on the glass while one paw pad typed a message.

sup niggaaaz. chillin lika villin on marz. Patches snapped a photo of her fuzzy face in extreme close-up, framed by blood-smeared walls and corpses behind her. how u like me now. She tapped “send”.[1]

Patches sprawled before the monitor as dozens of messages lit up.

sall good, she typed. back n da crib soon. xox. Despite the flurry of replies, she rested her chin on one paw and closed her eyes. Her whiskers twitched as she listened, with her mind half asleep, to the call with Shondra. Patches liked her human friends, but people failed to understand the importance of frequent napping. They were all so busy. Except maybe Donny.

“Listen,” said Shondra. “That’s how it needs to be. You don’t get to pay the cost to be the boss. I already paid it. What you get is a friend on Mars who agrees that Earth can fuck right off.” Her eyes followed a few flicks of Mags’ tail. “You and I need to work together, not against each other.”

Mags stamped her foot. “Everyone gets access to the free-energy system. But we keep the K Drive between you and me. No one else gets that tech.”

“Agreed.”

“And I can come and go as I please on Mars without fake passports and all this sneaking around like a common criminal! I want a full pardon from the New Martian Coalition. That goes for my whole crew, too.” She swept her arm as if they were all there with her.

“Mags.” Shondra leaned in. The camera went out of focus for a second before she snapped into place as sharp as ever. “Don’t think so small. I’m prepared to sign a treaty with Ceres and officially recognize whatever weird social experiment you have going on there. Now will you quit fucking around and go install the rest of your system? If we want to light up this planet, let’s not take all goddamn day!”

Mags shouted, “Fine, Shondra! I’ll do it! Fuck!”

“That’s great. We need to put out a broadcast about it. How long will it take?”

“It takes as long as it takes! We’ve gotta go halfway around the twatting planet!”

“Call me when you’re done, then. I’ve got places to go. People to execute.”

“You took my phone!” Mags kicked a rack of servers so hard that sparks flew. Shondra’s face flickered. “Me voy a mear en los hoyos![2] You’re lucky I have a backup on my ship! Four hours,” said Mags. “Four fucking hours! Then I’ll call you.”

“My favorite words.” Shondra leaned closer to press a button, and the screen went black.

Mags put her hands on her hips. “I swear, Tarzi, that woman will be the death of me. Let’s hope she doesn’t run this planet like a dominatrix.”

Tarzi said, “Didn’t you do that for a while?”

Mags waved one hand in the air with too much energy to be convincingly dismissive. “Lies! All of it lies.”

“What about Madame Meteor’s House of Humiliation?”

“That comic book was completely unauthorized!”[3]

“The art was pretty good.”

Mags broke her rage to smile. “The art was stellar. So were the outfits.” She racked a bullet into the chamber and holstered her stolen pistol. “Come on, Patches! Time to go.” Mags could not see where Patches was napping, but she followed her nose. “Wake up, lazy butt! We’ve got a planet to power!”

Patches opened one eye halfway. Her nictitating membrane covered most of it.

Mags saw the messages on the monitor. “Oh, shit!” She scrolled up to glance through them all. “Everyone at home is freaking out!”

Home, thought Tarzi. Funny she should use that word for Ceres. As Mags’ fingers flew across the touchscreen Patches had used, Tarzi said, “Please tell me she encrypted that message.”

Mags snapped at him. “She’s not stupid! Even if her spelling sucks.”

“I think she does it on purpose. How many people did she call ‘nigga’?”

“Fucking everyone!”

“Good girl, Patches.” Tarzi rubbed one tuft-filled ear between a thumb and finger.

Patches purred and slowly swept the tip of her tail across her throne.

“You are such a bad influence on her.” Mags finished an update to everyone on the calico’s distribution list. A parade of celebratory emojis marched up the screen as replies came in. Donny sent an eggplant and a trio of water droplets.

Mags slapped her forehead. “We have the most advanced extraterrestrial communication system in history at our fingertips—and Donny is sending icons about ejaculating!”

“At least he seems happy.”

“If he were any happier,” said Mags, “I’d have him euthanized.” She drew herself to her full height. “Let Shondra’s people clean up this mess. Are you two ready to go?”

☠️

The Installation

Tarzi.

Aboard the Bêlit, on the way to the installation site, Mags changed outfits. She stripped off her ragged, filthy Port Authority uniform and tossed it aside. “I need a skirt,” she said. “Here’s the problem. The Martian north and south poles are covered in ice caps, and we’ve got reason to believe there’s a massive subterranean lake under the south.”

She rifled through drawers and flipped through clothes on racks in her trio of closets. “If we install a SlimRod there, we potentially interfere with water-mining in the region. Or the miners might break the damn thing. We don’t want to mess with all that. Besides manufacturing, water mining is the next big moneymaker. Ceres is back to making trillions, but we haven’t even come close to tapping the full market potential.”[4]

Without deciding on an ensemble, Mags returned to the console to bring up a pair of digital maps. She swept a hand across them. “Point is, Shondra found two other permanent locations that can work. One of her crews installed the first unit to the north. That leaves the second for us. We’re en route to the Leibnitz mountains on the rim of the Aitken base—far enough from the glacial ice to relax for a few years, but close enough that the math wasn’t total brain surgery.”

I was typing a message to Hyo-Sonn. “That’s nice.” I didn’t give a donkey’s fuck about where we were going. I just wanted the day to be over.

Mags found legwear to match her skirt and plopped on the edge of her bunk to pull on her stockings. “Tarzi, we’re talking about the oldest known meteorite impact in the history of the entire solar system! Aren’t you even the least bit excited?”

I set my tablet in my lap. “Thrilled.”

Mags picked up a mirror from her bedside and started fixing her makeup. “I know this isn’t how you planned to spend your birthday. Shit, my b-day last year sucked so fucking much I can’t even believe it. How many of our friends were killed? And they died on my watch.”

She slammed down her eyeliner and applied black and bright-red lipsticks until the center of her colorful pout was accentuated in scarlet. “I promise I will make it up to you. Someday, a few years from now, you’ll realize this was one of your most important birthdays. We’re in the center of it all, making it happen. Or trying to, at least.” She stood and swished her tail. “Let’s make history.”[5]

“I’m sorry to be a downer. This is all just so fucked up.”

Mags set a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry about Rosie. She was my friend, too.”

I never could stay mad at Mags for long. How many times had she nearly gotten me killed? But there we were. I set my hand on hers. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“I know,” she said. “But you did have a choice. And you made the right one.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Being right doesn’t make life any easier. But it’s better than being dead wrong.”

When I didn’t answer, she reclined in the captain’s chair and fidgeted with the straps and buckles on her thigh-high boots like I wasn’t even there. I loved that about Mags. She had a way of letting me know she’d always be there for me, but she would totally fuck off if I needed time to myself.

“So,” I said, “tell me more about this bloody awesome mountain range. Sounds like it’s freezing.”

No matter that I’d been on Mars for half a year and studied files on every crack and crevice of its known geography. Patches jumped into my lap and purred. I pet her while Mags told me what I already knew.

Sometimes it’s just nice to be with friends.

We ended up outside on the ice, and I can’t even tell you how cold that mountain was, or how insane Mags was for wearing a skirt. The wind was like a frozen steel blade cutting me from every direction.

Not that it mattered to Patches. She frolicked like we’d been dropped onto Tahiti or something. I love Patches, but how does she do that? Meanwhile, my bollocks were clinking together like ice cubes in a cocktail, and my cocktail was rapidly shrinking to a shot glass.

Mags hammered her SlimRod into place, shooting sparks in every direction across the snowy iron dust all around us. I knew the song she sang to keep a beat while hammering, but I never thought I’d see a planet liberated to it.[6]

When Mags finished, she invited Patches to step up and turn it on. The fate of a planet—maybe the entire solar system—relied on a single cat’s decision to interrupt her winter wonderland and flip a switch.

Patches yawned. She stretched in the snow. Her fluffy paws allowed her to walk on the surface like a lynx. She sniffed the SlimRod and bobbed her head up and down, never quite touching the object. Patches wrinkled her cheeks and held her mouth open slightly, pondering the scent with the Jacobson’s organ in the roof of her mouth.

Springing onto her hindlegs, Patches gripped the switch in her forepaws and pulled it toward the ground. She activated a system that changed Martian history forever. The planet broke its ochre silence and hummed an unfamiliar tune.

Mags shouted, “Hang on, Tarzi,” with no indication of what I should hang on to. The hum built to a roar. A shockwave smacked the planet. All three of us fell into the snow.

Like an orchestra tuning up before a performance, the shockwaves aligned on the perfect pitch—the perfect note to power a planet.

Two seconds later, I didn’t hear it at all. The note propagated through Mars and became a part of it, an invisible character in the background. A ghost.

A ghost that would power everything.

Mags got to her feet and snapped a photo of Patches sprawling on the ice and flecks of red stone at the base of the SlimRod. She sent it to Shondra. Mags spoke a message for the voice-to-text translator. “All plugged in here. Just in time for your little speech.”

She put the phone up her skirt. A flash went off. I did not even want to know. A second later, she said, “Let’s go watch her on the big screen.”

☠️

The Broadcast

Tarzi.

Aboard the Bêlit, I dropped into the co-pilot’s chair. Patches filled my lap. Mags switched on the pair of meter-wide monitors atop the console and adjusted the volume.

Two identical portraits of Shondra filled the screens. Mags handed me a beer, cracked open one for herself, and kicked back in the captain’s chair.

“People of Mars,” Shondra began. “My fellow Martians. Today is the end of history and the beginning of a new era. From now on, Mars will govern itself. Our laws will be our own. Our economy will be our own. Our pride as the number-one extraterrestrial producer of goods will be our own. We will be one planet. One people. One victory.”

Mags adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose. “Good slogan.”

“Forces,” Shondra continued, “loyal to corporations on Earth, butchered some of the leaders of our revolution. Those forces have been dealt with, and we will no longer tolerate such interference from Earth, nor from her corporations. But I beg you to learn to live in peace with your neighbors, regardless of former loyalties. Now is the time for Mars to become one planet. One people.”

“And,” I said, “one hell of an energy source.”

Mags said, “She’ll get to that.”

“We are not,” said a pair of massive Shondra faces, “merely equal as Martian citizens. We are equal in power. Within twenty-four hours, the new administration will begin distributing a new technology. This tech is a simple piece of electronics you can install in your house or on your land, and it taps into a global energy system you can access for no cost. It can power a home or a farm or a mine, using an open-source converter.

“Our government will provide hands-on support for both personal, home installations and larger commercial applications. But make no mistake. We intend to bring free energy to everyone on our planet, and our projections show this is an achievable goal within half a Martian year.[7]

“The local offices of the Port Authority and the Passport Command are now under the control of the New Martian Coalition.”

Shondra’s eyes went up and to the right, as if she were trying to remember. I’m sure it was unconscious that she licked her lips while thinking.

“Oh. My name’s Shondra. You might know me from the shipyards. I’ll be in touch every twenty-four hours until we get this sorted.” Her playful smile disappeared, and she raised a fist. “Long live the resistance.”

The broadcast ended. The screens went black.

Mags laughed and shook me by the shoulder. “Is that it? No love for the brave defender of freedom and his felonious feline friends?”

She stood before I thought of a comeback. “What a fucking rip-off!” Mags faced the blank monitors with her hands folded behind her back, and her tail whipped everything in its reach. Eventually, the whip settled, and her fingertips rested on the console. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Tarzi, I’ve got a two-room suite booked in a hotel that Shondra doesn’t know about. They’ll cook us anything we want, even late. I mean anything. Are you hungry?”

I said, “Starving! I could eat a slow-roasted maggot off a whale dick.”

“It might be on the menu. How about fish and chips?”

“That,” I said, “sounds perfect. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

☠️

Epilogue: The Cake

5 July 2030.

“Happy birthday, T-man!” Mags strolled into the master suite with a chocolate-swirled cheesecake in a chocolate crust on a platter. Lines of caramel glaze and walnut pieces adorned the top. “I heard this was your favorite.”

“Oh, fuck yes,” said Tarzi. “How did you get that at three in the morning?”

“Get it? I fucking baked it for you!” She set it on a table between two chairs.

“Yeah, right.”

“I have friends in the kitchen.”

“Where are the candles?”

Mags laughed. “You are so demanding! Check this out.” From a pocket on her skirt, she pulled three joints. “Why blow out candles when you can light one up?” She gave him a doob. “Make a wish on that, motherfucker. One for Patches, too.”

Patches leapt onto the table, snatched up a joint in her fuzzy jaws, and jumped to the floor. She ripped into the spliff and chomped with wild abandon, rolling on her back in the debris and trapping green flecks in her tri-colored fur.

Mags pulled something else from her pocket. “Forks!” She stabbed hers into the cake. “To Mars and her stupid revolution, I say ‘Fork you, bitch.’”

Tarzi plunged four plastic tines into the cake. “This whole forking planet sucks.”

“You don’t like it here?” Mags held out a lighter and lit his joint, then hers.

“Fuck no.” Tarzi took a deep inhale, held it, and released it. “Oh, that’s some good shit.”

“Have I ever given you anything that wasn’t?”

“Not even once. But Mars can sod off. I am so sick of paperwork. I want to go home.”

“To Earth?”

“Not Earth. It hasn’t been home since my parents died. I did talk to their lawyer, though. Signed some papers. I own the property and the rights to their publications, and they had a solid life insurance policy.[8] That’s nice, don’t get me wrong. But do you know what I want?”

Mags leaned in. “Tell me.”

“I want to be closer to Hyo-Sonn.”

Patches shredded the carpet.

“And you and Patches, too! I mean, thank you for setting me up on Mars. It definitely helped me get my head together after all the shit that happened last year. But my future isn’t here. It’s with you and my friends.”

Mags sat back in her chair and flicked ash on the carpet where it charred a black scar then burnt out. “Tarzi, you and I have a lot in common. We both had to grow up way too soon and deal with shit no kid should ever deal with. But you know what?” She took a puff.

“What’s that?”

“You dealt with it. I’m proud of you, little man. But I don’t think it’s nearly as proud as I could be.” She scooped a chunk of cake and paused before shoveling it into her mouth. “This is just the beginning. Happy birthday.”

Tarzi lifted a mountain of sugary calories. “Does that mean you’ll take me back to Ceres?”

Mags swallowed her mouthful and stabbed the dessert again. “Tarzi, I will take you to Ceres or anywhere else you need to be, and I will stand by your side as far as you want to go in this life. May the goddess have mercy on anyone who gets in our way. You’ve kicked more arse than anyone your age should need to, and I love you for it. Always have.”

“Thanks for saying that, Mags. I love you, too.” Tarzi took a bite. “Oh, fuck, that’s good. Did you bring any rum?”

---

[1] Patches has been a huge fan of gangsta rap ever since she merged minds with Mags in Red Metal at Dawn. She also loves texting her friends—especially Tarzi—since no one but Mags can understand her when she talks.

[2] Spanish for, “I will piss in your eye holes!”

[3] Madame Meteor’s House of Humiliation first appeared in print in the Asteroid Belt in 2026. Mags publicly disavowed any involvement with its production.

[4] One of the main Ceresian exports is water extracted from the pockets of its sub-surface ocean, purified, and sold to various interests in the system. The 2029 super-tornado destroyed many of the water-mining facilities, but the reconstruction of Ceres in 2030 restored most of them to capacity.

[5] Mags quotes the 2004 song Let’s Make History by The (International) Noise Conspiracy. On her favorite album, Armed Love. Örebro, Sweden: Burning Heart Records.

[6] Mags likes to sing John Henry when she installs the SlimRods. The first verse is:

John Henry, when he was a baby

sittin’ on his mama’s knee,

picked up that hammer in his little right hand,

said, “Hammer’ll be the death of me, me, me.

Hammer’ll be the death of me.”

The song is a traditional ballad about the U.S. folk hero John Henry, a railroad steel-driving man who challenged an early steam drill to a contest and won—but died in the process.

[7] A Martian solar year is 687 Earth days. Shondra is promising planet-wide access to the new energy system in roughly one Earth year.

[8] Tarzi was contacted about his late parents’ estate via voice mail by their lawyer in Hunted to Extinction.

Of Mars and Moms: A Memoir

Tags

comic book blogs, memoir, mom, mothers day, quarterly report, writing

It’s the week of Mother’s Day, and I’m currently working on a new story about a couple of moms, so this seems like as good a time as any to tell you that Mom occasionally drops by this blog to see what I am up to.

No, she doesn’t much care about comic books, experimental poetry, or the violent, profane fiction I torment the rest of you with on a regular basis. But she does care about her boy who has long since outgrown boyhood and is rapidly approaching his 49^th birthday. So, I’d like to give some credit where credit is due.

This blog wouldn’t exist without Mom. Besides the fact that I wouldn’t have been born without her, she helped me get a jumpstart on reading at a young age. I was way into superheroes and dinosaurs by the time I hit kindergarten, and if not for Mom’s infinite patience with reading dinosaur books with me when I was a child, I wouldn’t have been conversant about stegosaurs and pachycephalosaurs while I was still in pre-school.

As a result, my kindergarten teacher must have thought I was some kind of child prodigy, because I was enlisted into an advanced reading group that deciphered complexities of the English language such as “See Jane run” while the rest of the class had nap time. Let me assure you: I was no prodigy. I only had some advanced reading comprehension, and a decent memory of things I’d read—both of which eventually served me well in slacking my way through high school.

Besides dinosaur books and basically any book about animals, space, or history, I had a youthful passion for comic books. That love did not diminish in my teenage years! But by then, times had changed.

In the mid-1980s, comics experienced a cultural shift. No longer were they relegated to the magazine racks of convenience stores and drug stores. Shops dedicated entirely to comics appeared, and the publishing industry responded by creating “direct market” titles meant solely for distribution to those shops. You might take comic shops for granted now, but they were a pretty big deal at the time.

When I was old enough to legally have a job, I picked up a gig as a golf caddy on the weekends to make a few bucks. The work itself truly sucked on a Saturday morning, but some of the old golfer guys tipped me nicely, and I’d leave the place with cash in my pocket. I wasn’t old enough to drive, so Mom would pick me up.

Our first stop? The comic shop. While Mom patiently waited, I discovered series and back issues that to this day remain among my all-time favorites.

Those reading experiences undoubtedly shaped me and influenced my future as a writer, editor, and that apex (or possibly nadir) of human evolution we call a comic-book blogger.

Mom, if you’re stopping by today, thank you for putting up with learning how to pronounce all those dinosaur names back in the 70s, for making sure I always had plenty of books and comics to occupy my mind in the 80s, and for encouraging me to keep exploring my creativity all the way into the 2020s.

You rock!

The Martian Revolution: Part 3 of 4

Tags

Cat, Mars, martian revolution, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, self publishing, tarzi, writing

Continued from Part 2.

Part Three: Sacrifices

The Cell

Meteor Mags awoke in pitch blackness and felt herself for injuries. She discovered every item of her clothing had been removed. The tape around her ribs was gone. She touched one ear lobe then clasped a hand to her chest, just below the neckline. Her fist closed on nothing. Even her jewelry was gone.

“Son of a bitch!”

Reflexively, she put one finger to the bridge of her nose to adjust her glasses. They were gone, too.

“Fuck me dead.”

The phone stashed in her bra, the knives strapped to her calves and forearms, three small-caliber pistols hidden along her curves, and the circuitry in her jewelry—all of it gone. No way to contact Tarzi, no way to summon her ship. No way to—

“Where the hell is Patches?!”

Mags comforted herself by turning her ring around her finger, then holding it in place. “The only way they’d take you is by chopping off my goddamn finger.” She considered the fact. “Shondra must have strip-searched me. Rosie would have definitely chopped the finger. That fucking whore.”

Mags cradled her forehead in one palm and shook her head. “I can’t believe I trusted that cow!” She sobbed once, and again, then filed away the emotion to be reviewed later—or maybe never. Mags pulled herself to her feet and slumped against a brick wall that offered all the warmth of a glacier. “Shondra,” she said, “what’s your game?”

She smacked the wall with her open palm, made a fist, and shook it in the darkness. “You cunts! If you hurt Tarzi, I will end you! Do you fucking hear me?!”

No one answered.

In a darkness where not even her catlike eyes could gather light, Mags began running her fingers over every centimeter of the enclosure. She pressed her nose to within a millimeter of the surface, seeking any scent she could find. At first, the only sounds her ears picked up were the pulse of her heart, the flow of her breath, and the barely perceptible padding of the balls of her feet as she made her way around the room. Beyond that, past the edge of human hearing, the electromagnetic hum of her prison whispered to her above the dull roar of the city.

She felt her way around the frame of the only exit. Her side of the door held no hinges and no hint of the locking mechanism. Just a slab.

By her estimation, to claw through the miniscule crevice around the edge of the door and pry it open might take two-hundred years—assuming they fed her enough calcium to keep her nails growing.

If they didn’t give her food or water at all? No more than ninety-six hours before total, catastrophic organ failure. For cats, at least.

“Fuck.” Mags abandoned her probing and sat cross-legged on the floor. She pressed her palms together and the tip of each finger to its opposite. She tried to focus on Sarah. “Angel, can you hear me?”

She reached only silence.

“Octos? Are you there?”

Nothing.

“Pick up!”

Still nothing.

“Unreliable sons of bitches!”

Immediately, she felt bad for saying it. She was, after all, one of their three mothers.[1] No one understood more than Mags that sometimes a person, or a fucked-up mutant cat hybrid type of person, or even a cephalopodic groupmind needed to wander off for a bit without being disturbed. “Sorry, babies. But if you get this message, call me. Shit just hit the fan on Mars.”

While she waited, Mags cursed the unresponsive door until she was hoarse. Then, like any sensible feline, she curled in the corner for a nap. Her stream of consciousness became non-verbal. Something like a movie made of emotions, memories, and fantasies played in her mind.

One eye remained half open. In her sleep, her ears twitched, alert as radar dishes—searching, hoping for a signal.

☠️

The Basement

Through a pair of metal doors, Shondra burst into the garage below the ground level of Tarzi’s prison. She ran down a concrete ramp. “Get ready to roll!”

Twelve of her elite awaited her. They snapped to attention and disappeared, four at a time, into three armored vehicles arranged in a line like a convoy. Only Shondra’s driver remained outside her vehicle, saluting.

Shondra shouted, “Let’s go!”

“We got a problem, boss!” Despite her warning, the driver obeyed Shondra’s command, climbing into her seat and starting the engine.

“Make it quick!”

“All the blocks from here to prisoner extradition are a fucking war zone. The radio’s lit up with reports of fires and buildings collapsing in the streets. There’s no guarantee we can get through.”

“Fine,” said Shondra. “We do it anyway. We have a political prisoner to free, and a couple of flaming speedbumps are the least of our worries. Move out!”

The driver gave the order.

Powerful engines built in the finest shipyard in the solar system roared to life. The convoy sped to the garage exit. The wide metal door, half a meter thick, raised at a coded electronic signal from Shondra’s driver.

Here we come, kitty. Shondra opened a panel on the dashboard, found a box of ammunition, and began refilling her empty magazines. Hang on.

As Shondra’s vehicle reached the exit, a blast with the light of the sun pulverized the wall above the garage door. Stone and cinder block pelted the transport in a torrential sheet so dense it stopped the forward motion and buried Shondra alive, along with everyone else inside.

She gripped her driver by the shoulder and shook the senseless body. Blood ran from its forehead. “Damn it!” Shondra lowered the window on her side. An avalanche of dust and rubble poured into her face, onto her lap, and down around her feet.

Shondra choked and coughed. To the survivors in the back seat, she shouted, “What the hell are you waiting for? Dig!”

Sunset came to Mars. It gilded the stone above Shondra’s crew with a fiery glow before vanishing into blackness. By the time the crew got free and dug out the lead vehicle, Shondra was far too late to save Mags.

☠️

The Captain

“Passengers of Tycho Airlines, flight two thirty-six, this is your captain speaking. Thank you for joining us this evening. We’re on the final approach to the city of Hevelius. Please stow all carry-on items in the overhead bins or beneath your seats and return your seats to their upright positions.

“We’ll be encountering a bit of social unrest on the ground. We have reports of mass looting, urban riots, and armed insurrection. I see—fires. Fires everywhere. What the—

“Folks, we don’t know for sure what’s happening, but please remain calm. Flight attendants will come by in just a second to collect your—

“What the fuck? Is that a rocket from the surface? It’s coming right at us! Mayday! Mayday! Two thirty-six to tower, requesting emergency—

“Get the hell off me and fly, motherfucker! Mayday!

“What? My mic is still on?”

☠️

The Station

Oblivious to her trajectory, an unconscious Patches smashed into an airplane. Her body punctured the hull, and the collision killed everyone aboard—some upon impact, some who were sucked out of the plane into the sky, and others when the wreckage screamed down to the ground and exploded.

Members of Patches’ human crew had called her a living weapon. But they had never seen her become a lifeless projectile, nor imagined the damage she could do in that state.

Patches would never know about the plane, but it slowed her ascent. She reached the apex of a graceful arc, fell under the spell of artificial Martian gravity, and rocketed back to the surface.

Hevelius was the largest city on Mars. Where Patches landed was a matter of luck. She could have crashed into multi-family housing, or the commercial district, or a park. Instead, she plummeted into a power station.

The force of impact shattered the generators’ metal housings and sent a fiery sphere of shrapnel expanding in every direction. It destroyed a city block and shut off the power to dozens of neighborhoods.

In the crater, a web of electrical wires still connected to subterranean backup generators cradled Patches. Where the explosion severed them, arcs of lightning sprang to life, crackling white, outlined in blue. The energy leapt across her fur, overcame its carbon-based resistance, and lit up the calico cat from the inside.

The surrounding neighborhood was fortunate that annihilation came first, because the caterwaul Patches unleashed would have made a grown person wish for death. Nothing of its kind had been heard on Mars nor anywhere else in the solar system.

A ball of lightning held Patches in its center. Her body levitated as she screamed, and all her mental faculties and her heartbeat clawed at the door of oblivion. Her neurons fired erratic signals. She convulsed in the air with her eyes as wide as two black planets in twin halos of green, and her limbs thrashed like swords in a cyclone without sense or reason.

Circuit breakers kicked in. The lightning ended. Patches fell through the cables and tumbled into the crater’s dark heart.

She landed on her feet.

From Patches’ point of view, Rosalia’s betrayal took place only a second before. Fresh hate filled her heart. Patches scrambled to the surface, leaping from one dead wire to the next, sinking her claws into plastic sheathing, relentless and unstoppable.

When she got to the surface, she ran a paw twice over one ear. For a golden moment, she allowed the sunset to grace her whiskers. Then she broke into a run.

The fading sun cast a rusty orange glow in the final moments before dusk. It drew a cat-shaped shadow on the streets. The shadow turned into a blur and vanished into the complex crevices of Hevelius.

☠️

The Subway

Patches rubbed her cheeks against a building’s corner—first one cheek then the other with increasing intensity until the flesh beneath her fluff smashed into the brick. To an outside observer, the ritual would have looked painful, but Patches loved it.

Pain had not troubled Patches since July 2029. Back then, on the brink of death, she awoke in a tank of bubbling energy that channeled the entire power of a planet-sized moon into her.[2]

She had neither requested nor desired that fate, but it was hers, and she accepted it. What did any cat need to deal with but the present moment?

She never mourned the absence of pain. If Patches had been born as any mammal except a cat, she might have found a reason to be thankful she could still feel pleasure.

But rather than feel grateful, Patches assumed that pleasure was her due, that objects and sentients who brought her pleasure simply did what the universe had declared to be her birthright, and no one should take those pleasures from her.

Patches worked herself into a frenzy, biting the spot she scented with the glands in her face, standing on her hind legs to carve long gouges with her foreclaws. All around her, war blossomed into being.

Looters plundered Hevelius. A rocket launcher turned a storefront into a fireball. Lights and gunfire and propeller noise from overhead battled small-arms fire, Molotov cocktails, and chanting, surging crowds. Bodies in Port Authority uniforms, ship-builder’s gear, and makeshift guerilla outfits fell from windows and dropped from aircraft. Mutilated corpses littered the streets.

No matter.

War, as far as Patches could discern, was humanity’s natural state. She assessed the tableau of destruction and suffering. She might as well have been observing a cloud or the erratic motions of a butterfly in the wind. They were not things she could affect nor cared to, merely natural objects to be avoided on the way to her purpose.

Patches folded back her ears and ran at top speed through the chaos. The buses had stopped running, but many trains still ran. Patches followed the signs to a platform underground. She had only three seconds to study the subterranean maps before an explosion from above shook the station.

Chunks of the collapsing ceiling fell around her. The dust rendered everything invisible—everything but the light of an oncoming train.

Seeing the station falling to pieces, the train’s engineer decided to skip it and keep moving. The train smashed debris to the sides, denting its hull and sending up a shower of sparks and flame as metal and stone crashed together against the sides of the tunnel.

Patches waited at the edge of the platform, but the train did not stop. Her eyes narrowed to slits in the incoherent light and murky dust clouds. As the train sped past, she launched herself, dug her claws into its metal exterior, and held on.

The tunnel walls slammed past her. She pulled herself closer to the hull. In the narrowest of passages, her indestructible hair and spine carved a groove into the concrete wall. Darkness swallowed her and the steel monster she rode, but she held fast.

Unseen from her underground vantage point, towers sprang onto the horizon: the Port Authority building where she had been captured, the surrounding structures which made up its prisons, and—though Patches did not yet know it—the communications hub that would be Tarzi’s destination.

Once the train passed the obliteration of the station where Patches boarded, she focused on the station markers. The train stopped at none of them and continued its frightful course without regard for a schedule. Patches chattered. The wind whipped away her voice. When she saw the stop for the Port Authority buildings approaching, she prepared to jump.

She hit the ground on all fours, but the momentum rolled her head-over-heels until she smashed into a monolith. Upon its surface were engraved three large words: Port Authority Administration. Patches arched her back, bared her teeth, and hissed.

She sniffed the ground for Mags’ scent in an ever-widening circle until she picked up the trail. She picked up Tarzi’s, too.

Patches had never known the love of biological brothers and sisters. At birth, she was separated from the other kittens in her litter. But to the extent that she realized Mags thought of her as a cub, then Tarzi must also be Mags’ cub. That meant they were nestmates, cubs from the same litter.

She lost his trail. It led away from the Port Authority building then vanished into the unknown.

But Mags’ scent was as plain as day.

Patches licked a paw between each of its claws. She weighed Tarzi’s life against every living being—human or otherwise—on Mars. Three times, she ran the paw over one ear.

She made her decision. If anything bad had happened to Tarzi, Patches intended to soak the red planet in the blood of her enemies until it drowned.

Some sins could never be forgiven. Some things broke so badly they could never be fixed. But Patches anticipated some small satisfaction to be gleaned from murdering every last person who had fucked things up.

She knew Mags would feel the same way.

Such were the thoughts of a rather large and fluffy calico cat as she followed her best friend’s trail and pondered the fate of a faithless planet.

☠️

The Door

Mags’ captors had not imprisoned her in the same building as Tarzi. Her impregnable cell occupied a ten-story monolith near the spaceport favored by visiting officials from Earth. It was a convenient location for the Port Authority to hold those prisoners who required extradition to Earth for legal or political reasons.

The criminals inside could only hope for one of two ways out: deportation or death. No one had ever broken into the prison. No one had ever escaped.

No one had ever told Patches.

All through the prison’s hallways, alarms blared like klaxons and flashed lights from their perches on the walls. Along one path through the facility, a stream of blood spread until it met the walls and pooled at their edges. At the head of the crimson river ran an especially purposeful cat.

Mags awoke to the screech of tortured metal. She sprang to her feet. Every hair on her body stood straight up.

Like nails on a steel chalkboard, Patches’ claws tore at the cell’s metal door from the outside.

After the initial shock, Mags pounded on the door. She could not see nor smell her kitten, but she knew. She shouted, “Patches!”

A howling whirlwind scaled the door and ripped apart its lock and hinges. They fell like dead birds to the prison floor. Their gleaming reflections caught Patches’ eyes, and she pounced on them.

She sprang away as the steel slab flew from its frame, over her head, and down the hallway. It slammed to a stop against a wall. From the empty doorway, Mags’ naked left leg extended, parallel to the floor.

“Motherfuckers!”

Patches sauntered to Mags’ side, rubbed against the leg planted firmly on the floor, and arched her tail. She sought Mags’ eyes and mewed.

“Baby kitty!” Mags scooped her calico into the cradle of her arms and rubbed her face into mounds of fluff. She listened as Patches rapidly chattered about her adventures across the Martian landscape.

“You did great, kitten. Where’s Tarzi?”

Patches told everything she knew.

“I have an idea where he’s headed. Did you kill anyone my size?”

Carrying her cat, Mags followed the trail of blood that led to her cell. She inspected the leaking bodies one-by-one until she found a reasonable match. She set down Patches and stripped clothing from a corpse. “One thing I love about the Port Authority,” she said. “They hire a lot of women. This one’s almost my size.”

Mags dressed in a dead woman’s clothes and tugged them into place where they didn’t quite cover her generous curves. Blood and gashes ripped by Patches’ claws marred the grey, woolen cloth. Mags struck a pose. “How do I look?”

She purred at the response. “Then it’s just you and me.” Mags plundered the dead for weapons and ammo. Racking a bullet into a stolen pistol’s chamber, she said, “That’s more like it. Let’s descend into the maelstrom.” [3]

They set off to find Tarzi and racked up a double-digit body count along the way. Thirty minutes later, smudged with soot and rust-colored dust, splattered with blood and bits of strangers’ organs, they arrived at the base of the communications hub.

Tarzi’s scent told them they had found the right destination.

☠️

The Bargain

Tarzi hoped to meet Mags at the hub. Instead, he confronted Rosie and her elite personal bodyguards, all heavily armed. The young man withdrew around the doorframe and shouted. “Don’t shoot! It’s me, Tarzi!”

They shot anyway.

“Will you bloody stop and listen for a minute? Rosie!”

She shouted back. “What do you want?!”

“I want to help,” said Tarzi. “I want to help you take over Mars.”

“I already have. Get lost!”

“Not even close. You need me. I’ve been on the streets, and this whole thing is turning into a disaster! It’s a disaster I can help you with. But,” said Tarzi, “the whole deal is contingent on freeing Mags.”

Rosie said, “Not a chance.”

“You can’t send Mags to her death and expect any of this to work. The riots aren’t shit. You’re asking for all-out war with Ceres and every outlaw in the Belt—without much help from Earth.”

“We can handle a few pirates.”

“Not these ones. And definitely not Patches.”

Rosie shouted, “Your little cat is gone! Don’t be stupid.”

“If you think you got rid of Patches that easily, you’re so fucked in the head that your IQ might go up when she eats your skull. You should be crapping your pants right now, wondering how soon it will be until she—”

“Tarzi! If I set Mags free, the first thing she would do is come to kill me. She isn’t one to forgive and forget.”

“She’ll never do either. She’ll never agree with you about your deal with Earth. She will hate you ’til the day she dies.”

“That makes me feel a whole lot better. She stays locked up.”

“Rosie, Mags hates the idea on principle. She likes to talk real loud and make a scene about her ideals. But if you show her a profit opportunity, all that goes out the window. You will never have her love. But you can appeal to her greed.”

“Why would I give her anything?”

“The free-energy system. She wants it. You need it. It’s a bargain.”

“I’ll get Shondra to make it.”

“The fuck you will,” said Tarzi. “Who do you think let me out of my cell?”

“What?”

“Shondra hates your fucking guts. She sent me here! Shondra plans to kill you and take over. If you want the energy system, you need Mags.”

Rosie pondered.

Tarzi pounced on the silence. “You want the economic boost from trading with Earth. But if you can provide free, unlimited power to any rock you want, think what that means for the future of mining and manufacturing! If you let Mags do this one little thing she really, really wants to do, then you create a space-based economy with unlimited resource potential. Do you want to rule Mars, or do you want to rule the entire bloody solar system?”

“She’ll still want to kill me.”

“Undoubtedly.”

Rosie said, “Will you talk to her?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you! What do you plan to say to Mags to convince her to go along with this plan of yours?”

Tarzi paused. “Let me think for a minute.”

He seized the lull in conversation. Tarzi slowed his breathing and imagined his favorite Swans album playing at top volume.[4] The brutal rhythms calmed him. Time stretched out. In what would look like a blur to the human eye, he stepped into the room with his pistol raised and put a bullet into the helmet of the nearest guard.

The guard’s head snapped back in slow motion. Individual bits of shrapnel and drops of blood began to break away from the helmet. The fragments and splatters barely expanded before Tarzi fixed the next guard in his sights. He fired again. A bullet pierced the second guard’s faceplate. Tarzi shot a third time.

Rosalia and her remaining guards pulled their triggers. Millimeter by millimeter, fingers squeezed. Bullets entered the air and slowly, deliberately, advanced on paths to where Tarzi no longer stood.

He dove for cover, but not before he sent one more bullet to its destination.

---

[1] The octopuses’ biological mother was an octopus also, but because Mags and Patches were present for their birth and merged minds with them and their mother, the octopuses consider the felonious felines to also be their mothers.

[2] In Patches the Immortal.

[3] Mags quotes a song title that belongs to both Radio Birdman and Wo Fat.

[4] The Glowing Man, by Swans.

The Martian Revolution: Part 2 of 4

Tags

Mars, martian revolution, meteor mags, science fiction, self publishing, shondra, tarzi, writing

Continued from Part 1.

Part Two: Knight’s Journey

The Torture

Tarzi.

Handcuffs bound me. Two goons in grey shoved me down and shackled my ankles to a metal chair that was bolted to the floor below a single incandescent bulb. The room smelled like piss and puke. A single vent the size of a postcard near the ceiling had given up on moving the air. Blotches and splatters of dried blood decorated the walls. To one side, a stainless-steel tool chest with a dozen drawers held contents I preferred not to imagine.

Shondra dismissed the soldiers with orders to guard the thick metal door, shut it behind them, and rested her bum against the tool chest. She raised one eyebrow as if my silent glare amused her. “This is one of the places where the Port Authority deals with pirates.” She lit up a smoke, took a drag, and held it out to me. “Have you met any pirates?”

The offered cig repulsed me. Not the smell of smoke. Just the offering. I spat on the floor. “Mags will fucking kill you.”

Shondra threw back her head and laughed. “She might!” Then she leaned in closer. Her eyes drilled into me. “Your precious Mags is a psychotic bitch from hell.[1] A murderous ball of boundless rage. And you know what?” Shondra ran a hand between her thighs and shivered. “It’s one of the things about her that turns me on. Not to mention that frisky tail. The way she paints her lips in red and black. Maybe she’ll smother me to death in her massive titties. Would that make you happy?”

“Sod off, slag. You are sick in the head.”

“Tarzi, you don’t know the half of it. Take this fag before I smoke it myself.”

What the hell. If I was about to die, I might as well have a smoke.

No sooner did I have it in my cuffed hands than she lit another. She said, “You don’t like me very much.”

“Fuck no I don’t. I’ll like you less when you’re torturing me to death. So let’s get it over with, you scab-faced, knob-gobbling, herpes magnet!”

Shondra looked around the room as if she were noticing it for the first time. “Is that why you think you’re here?”

I blew smoke at her. “Fuck you.”

She brushed ebony curls away from her face. “Such fire! No wonder Mags likes you. She tells me wonderful things about her favorite nephew, did you know that?”

When I didn’t answer, she continued. “Have it your way, then. I will show you the implement of pain I’m about to use on you. And I promise you, Tarzi, after the twisted shit I do to you with it, you will beg to cooperate.”

I expected her to open the drawers of the torture toolbox. Instead, she slid her hand into her pocket and withdrew a single object.

“This key,” she said, “unlocks those cuffs and leg irons.” She rested her other hand on the pistol at her hip. “And this nine-millimeter will send you to an early grave if you try to fight me. I suggest you relax. There are some things you don’t know, and we need to have a little chat. A meeting of the minds. Got it?”

“Not in the slightest,” I said. “You want to let me go?”

“Not until you listen to me. But I think you’d be more inclined to listen if you weren’t chained to that goddamn chair.”

I held up my hands. “Fine.” Maybe I could have tried to meditate deep enough in that moment to slow my perception and grab her pistol, then put it to her head before she realized what was happening. But that solution left me with a locked door and guards on the other side, and no clue about the building’s entrances and exits. I decided to listen.

Shondra unlocked the shackles then the cuffs, though she held her pistol to my temple for the latter. She stepped away, out of range of my fists, and holstered it.

I let the fag dangle from my lips while I rubbed my wrists. “What’s this all about, then?”

“Rosie’s got big plans for Mars. I’ve played along to protect my interests. But the truth is: Mags is right. Fuck Earth and fuck the mega-corps. I hate them all. We don’t need them sinking their fangs any deeper here. We need to cut them off. Stake them in their goddamn hearts like vampires. Now is the time for a truly independent Mars. Don’t you agree?”

I dropped the fag end on the floor and ground it out with my heel. “I do. Keep talking.”

“Rosie’s been good to you, and she’s been good to me. She’s been good to Mags, too, in her own way—at least until today. But that sly cunt will be good to anyone so long as it advances her goals. When they’ve outlived their usefulness, they can kiss their arses goodbye.”

“You’re trying to tell me you’re any different?”

“Tarzi, Tarzi, Tarzi. Do you think Mags is any different?”

We locked eyes. As angry as I was with Shondra, I could see what Mags found attractive about her. Not just on the surface, but the way her eyes glistened with amusement and a savage confidence that the entire universe, including me, was her plaything—a toy to bring her pleasure. It was a quality I’d seen a million times in Mags’ eyes, and Patches’, too. A feline view of life.

I said, “Mags is different. She has an agenda, but it isn’t all about her. It’s about her friends.”

Shondra applauded. “You are so perceptive for a little boy!”

“I’m not a little boy, you fucking hose-beast, and you know what? This is the shittiest way I can think of to spend my sixteenth birthday. Get to the point!”

Shondra laughed. “Happy Birthday!” She looked me up and down like a piece of meat in a market. “Mags would never forgive me if I gave you birthday spankings. But come see me in a couple years, and I might blow out your candle.”

She set her hands on one arm of my chair and leaned in until her face almost touched mine. Her perfume smelled like sandalwood and tobacco. Underneath ran her natural scent, a hint of sweat and engine oil. I could have counted her eyelashes and the flecks of green and brown dancing in her hazel irises. She was way too close.

“The point is,” said Shondra, “we’ve all got goals, and we all use people to the extent we can get away with. You, me, everyone. In this case, Mags’ goals and mine converge. The person who has outlived her usefulness is Rosie. She just hasn’t realized it yet.”

I gestured for another smoke. “Great ethics lesson. What does all this have to do with me?”

“Everything, Tarzi. You’ll help me take down Rosie and do it in such a way that she becomes a martyr to the cause of Martian liberation—the kind of liberation both Mags and I want. And, I suspect, that you want, too.”

“Rosie has the entire Martian Resistance behind her. You want to take on all of them?”

“Just a few. Rosie, her bodyguards, her inner circle. All in a way that implicates Port Authority loyalists in her death, so that when I step up and take her place, the movement will rally around me. Instead of Rosie assuming control of Mars—” She pantomimed a curtsey with a nonexistent skirt. “I will.”

“Just like that?”

“We’ll have a bit of bloodshed first. Right now, all over Mars, my people are responding to Rosie’s little coup.”

“You were right there in her office! You could have stopped her!”

“Right,” said Shondra. “And I could have had my hide perforated by bullets or wound up in chains like you and Mags. No thank you. But when the dust settles, I need propaganda. A touch of disinformation. The important thing is unifying the people and the Resistance behind something they already want and are willing to fight for: our liberation. With Rosie gone, the movement will gravitate toward a natural leader.”

“Mags plans on being that leader.”

Shondra cackled. “Mags is fucking delusional! Listen to me, boy. She’s bitten off more than she can chew. She has her hands full with Ceres, and there’s no way she can control Mars, too.”

“You can?”

“Tarzi, I absolutely can. As head of the shipyards, I am the most powerful industrialist on this godforsaken rock. I have political connections and powerful friends, and I’ve treated my workers well. They would go to war for me, and they are proving that right now, from the major cities to the settlements. No one knows Mars better than me, and no one else—not even Mags—has the resources and cash to make this happen.”

I hated to admit it, but Shondra was making a hell of a lot of sense. I shrugged it off. “Great, then. You’ve got it all sewn it up. What do you need me for?”

Shondra licked her lips. “I thought you’d never ask.”

☠️

The Exit

Tarzi.

After she finished explaining, Shondra knocked on the door with a rhythm that must have been a code. When the door opened, a guard stood to each side. She shot one in the face. Before the second could react, she shot him, too.

Shondra handed me the nine-millimeter. It felt good in my hands. Perfectly balanced. A comfortable grip. It didn’t surprise me that a builder of her caliber would have great taste in firearms. She’d probably made Mags’ custom Desert Eagles.

Shondra pulled two magazines from her belt. “Armor piercing. You’ll need these.”

My shirt pocket held a copy of the map she’d given me, which she had not drawn herself. It was a printout of the facility’s fire evacuation plan. She’d highlighted a path in bright yellow. It began about halfway up the fifty-story building and snaked through a series of corridors, through fire doors and stairwells, and ended outside at ground level.

I’d already memorized it—a task that should have taken ten minutes but, when Shondra shut up and let me concentrate, took ten seconds.

I pocketed the magazines in my cargo pants. “You need to free Mags. Where the hell is Patches?”

“I don’t know, but she’s—”

At the thump of heavy, running footfalls in the hall around the corner, Shondra pulled a second pistol from a shoulder holster.

Three guards. The first one who came into view, Shondra dropped with a headshot. She missed the second, but I put two rounds into his torso. The third guard halted just out of sight around the corner. I fired three shots through the edge of the wall.

A scream, and the body fell into view, lifeless on the floor.

Shondra said, “You should conserve your ammo.”

“You should aim for center mass.”

She blew nonexistent smoke from the barrel of her pistol.

The gesture brought a smile to my face. “You’re as crazy as Mags.”

“I doubt that.” Shondra stepped over the bodies and advanced around the corner, keeping watch while I worked. “Hurry up! You need to go. Go!”

I raided the corpses for extra firearms and magazines. “Promise me you’ll set her free.”

Shondra said, “If you think anything can keep me from seeing my kitten again, you’re insane. Now get out of here.”

I did. In my wake, a series of explosions belonged to Shondra, creating a diversion. The fire alarm went off. It bought me time to get to the ground floor, and I only had to shoot six people to do it. At the bottom of the stairs, I sprinted for the exit door.

I hit it so hard I bounced off.

I stumbled and spun and was lucky I didn’t fall on my face. The goddamn thing was supposed to be open!

Several floors above me: shouts and footfalls. I tried the door again. Nothing. Had the system malfunctioned? I heard explosions outside. Was the door blocked by debris?

I didn’t have a clue. But the last place I needed to be was trapped between a sealed exit and an angry mob of guards and prisoners.

I ran back up the stairs to the floor above.

☠️

The Yard

Tarzi.

The door on the second story opened to reveal a courtyard full of prisoners and dozens of guards, bounded on one side by the building and surrounded on the remaining three sides by a two-story fence. On the two corners farthest from me, sentry towers held more guards and swivel-mounted machine guns that could sweep the entire enclosure.

Those guns were, for the moment, silent, despite intermittent bursts from semi-automatic rifles in the towers. I supposed the sentries didn’t want to strafe the crowd with so many of their own caught in it, fighting for their lives in hand-to-hand combat.

I needed to get through the chaos before the tools in the towers changed their minds, and before the crowd in the interior stairwell reached the door at my back. The gate in the fence between the towers seemed like the best escape route. Judging from the surging tempest of bodies already there, a cluster of inmates had reached the same conclusion.

I ran down the concrete stairs and into the melee. So much for a clean getaway.

I pushed my way through, trying to take advantage of any brief opening in the mob, dodging the fights around me as best I could.

It wasn’t good enough. I caught a fist in the side of my head, and the force nearly broke my neck. I stumbled and fell against a guard, only recognizable from his uniform’s rough, grey wool. I clawed at the fabric and struggled to remain on my feet. What I saw of his face before he shoved me away was a red, misshapen disaster missing half its teeth.

I would have fallen again, but the bodies pressed even closer. The people in the stairwell joined the crowd as their fight spilled out of the building, through the door I’d taken, and down into the yard. In every direction, a mosh pit without music lost any semblance of sanity and became a violent blur.

God, the stench of it. Even the rusty Martian wind couldn’t sweep away the fermented sweat, the breath from mouths full of rotting teeth, the piss-stained prison uniforms that hadn’t been cleaned in years and barely held on by their last synthetic threads. I pressed toward the gate, clambering up and over people where I could—people hardly recognizable as individuals but one seething blob of muscle and hate.[2]

In the moments where my head bobbed above the crowd, casual slaughter confirmed my decision to go through it instead of attempting to scale the fence. All along the iron perimeter, prisoners began to climb the bars. Many of them had no choice. People at the edges were being crushed against the enclosure.

Climb or die.

The tattered rags of their orange uniforms hardly clinging to their bodies didn’t surprise me. In my months of snooping through Port Authority files when I was supposed to be working for Rosie, I learned that a PA prison was just about the last place in the system where you want to be held. Torture was common. Food and hygiene were not.

Those orange rags scaling the fence made easy targets for the men in the towers. The machine gunners, freed from the fear of killing their fellow guards on the ground, swept the fence with abandon. Bullets shredded the prisoners. Some held on by one hand, grasping an iron bar as their last breaths left their bodies. Their flaps of skin snapped like tattered flags in the dusk before falling to the ground.

The killing cowered no one. It only fueled the rage of the living.

They were no longer alone. Outside the gate, a second crowd gathered and also appeared to be trying to destroy the barrier. Between the chaos, gunfire, and the setting sun, I caught only glimpses as the mob alternately swallowed me and spit me up.

I could perceive this much: The crowd outside wasn’t the grey of a PA uniform. It lacked any uniformity at all, and that told me it was either part of the underground resistance or Shondra’s people. Or both.

It hit me just how meaningless those distinctions had become. What the hell had Rosie and Shondra done?

Rosie held one of the highest positions in the Port Authority, but she was also a leader in the resistance. Shondra had organized her workers into a separate fighting force, but her shipyards worked hand-in-hand with the Port Authority while covertly supplying the resistance and making things for Mags.

Many people from those different factions worked side-by-side and lived in the same neighborhoods. The only differences were the colors of their uniforms and who signed their paychecks. But few of them were happy with the way things were run on Mars, and who was running them, and all those pent-up tensions had been set off like a bomb.

It all came to me in a flash I had no time to ponder. A sentry tower exploded, showering the scene with iron shrapnel. I caught a piece in the shoulder, and it sliced me open. The riot drowned my cry. Before I knew it, strangers crushed me against the gate.

At least I’d made it that far. Someone’s hand covered half my face, but through one open eye I saw a man outside reloading an RPG, presumably to take out the second tower. If that tower went down, I could climb the fence—as long as I wasn’t smashed into a puree against it.

I drew my pistol. Without much room to aim, I shot the man behind me. His hand fell from my face and gave me space. I shot the guy behind him in the head. A grey-clad fist from beside me landed in my stomach.

Since I’d met Mags on that fateful night exactly two years before, I’d been hit, strangled, captured, shot at, bombed, crashed, toppled from cliffs, set on fire, and landed in more than my fair share of fights. But I had never been punched as hard as that guard hit me.

Three bullets in the torso were his reward. I couldn’t even breathe.

But I could climb.

No sooner had I gripped a vertical bar in the iron fence than the second tower burst into a ball of fire and metal shards. It was louder and closer than the first one. The blast hit so hard that everything around me faded to a muffled, indistinct blur. The cuts and bruises from the explosion didn’t register at the time. I was so amped on adrenaline that I don’t even remember climbing the fence.

The next thing I knew, I hit the ground on the other side. All around me, people shouted and pumped their fists in the air. I was the first over the fence, but not the last. Bodies landed beside me, some on their feet. I stumbled forward, and someone caught me.

I couldn’t hear what she said, but her lips formed the words, “You’re a free man, comrade!”

I raised my fist in salute. “Long live the resistance!”

Someone went for my pistol. I swung my fist blindly to the side and throat-punched my assailant. That crowd was no safer for me than the last. I pushed forward, away from the gate and the yard, into the streets of Hevelius.

Night fell on Mars.

☠️

The Hub

Tarzi.

Approaching the hub, I ejected a magazine and replaced it. Mags was nowhere in sight. I put the thoughts of the people I’d killed far from my mind and took a second to appreciate the island of calm around the hub. Few if any of the average citizens knew the true function of the tower disguised as an agricultural administration building.

Shondra certainly knew, and she knew my PA clearance would give me access, assuming Rosie had been so busy setting off a revolution that she had not yet changed the codes. According to Shondra, Rosie intended to use the hub to control all Martian media broadcasts for propaganda purposes. Shondra wanted that power for herself. Whichever one of them could control the hub would command the flow of information for the entire planet.

Mags’ idle conversation at brunch seemed a lot more prescient to me then.

I typed a code on the panel beside the ground-level entrance and pressed my right palm onto a flat sensor.

I was in.

I passed an automated retina scan in the lobby, but no one guarded the metal detector. I climbed over a railing and went around it. From the other side, I saw dead bodies crammed underneath the reception desk. I didn’t recognize their faces, but the PA uniforms marked them as lobby staff and security.

Sucked to be them. I hoped I wouldn’t end up the same way.

An elevator took me to the top floor. The whole way up, I crouched in a corner, pistol drawn, ready to blast anyone that appeared on the other side of the door. But no one did.

I crept down the hall until I came to the main room. Inside awaited wall-to-wall racks of servers and consoles that could assume control of all Martian communications and media, from the radio towers at spaceports to the streaming news channels and satellite data.

Shondra had warned me. I knew I’d find Rosie there.

---

[1] Shondra has in mind the 2004 Horrorpops song Psychobitches Outta Hell. On Hell Yeah!, Los Angeles, CA: Hellcat Records.

[2] Tarzi lifted the phrase “muscle and hate” from Nitzer Ebb’s 1987 song, Join in the Chant. On That Total Age, Mute Records (UK) and Geffen/Warner Brothers (US).

Anyone Can Self-Publish a Book—Right? Not Necessarily.

Tags

self publishing, writing

A few times a month, aspiring authors contact me for advice on projects they have already begun, and they usually want me to help them self-publish their first book through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program (KDP). Most of the time, these authors face challenges that can be summed up in one sentence: They do not know nor understand the technical requirements for KDP, nor how to meet those requirements. In all cases, these authors have been lured by the oft-repeated idea that now “anyone” can self-publish. This idea is both true and false, depending on how you look at it, so I want to give you some insight about why it can be false, and how it can be true.

Saying that “anyone” can do something is part of the problem. Consider these statements: Anyone can play a Rachmaninoff piano concerto. Anyone can play basketball like Shaquille O’Neal. Anyone can be an astronaut. Anyone can be a university professor who lectures about quantum mechanics.

See the problem? All these professions require years of study, training, and practice. They require technical skills and long-term dedication to the craft. While I enjoy reading the works of Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, and other noted physicists, I will never be on their level of understanding the subject. I don’t even want to spend the time learning the math required to have an intelligent conversation with them. And if you put me on a basketball court with NBA players, I would get my ass handed to me. Heck, a bunch of random high schoolers could defeat me on the court.

But I’m pretty good—though not great—at making music with a guitar. People who are lured into self-publishing by the “anyone can do it” mentality remind me of all the times I was asked by someone during my twenty-plus years of performing, “Show me how to play that.” People assume that if you make something look easy, then it must be easy, so surely you can show them how to do what you do in a couple of minutes. But they don’t realize how much they don’t understand about rhythm, harmony, scales, and the language of music, and they definitely don’t realize how long you need to train your hands, muscles, and brain to play an instrument.

My experience in the world of self-publishing is no different. Someone might say, “Show me how to make a Kindle ebook,” but they don’t have the most basic software skills that take anywhere from hours to years to learn. Someone might say, “Help me set up my book on KDP,” but they have files that are completely unworkable for technical reasons they do not understand. They often do not know the language or terminology needed to even explain the problems. They have no idea what “image resolution” means, or what “Styles” are in MS Word, or the basic conventions for a properly formatted manuscript.

One author asked me on the phone about an “Izbin”, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. He was trying to pronounce “ISBN” like an acronym. That was somewhat less frustrating than the people who ask about “ISBN Numbers” without realizing the “N” in “ISBN” stands for “number”. I often wonder if they use their “PIN Numbers” to operate “ATM Machines” in a universe where the usefulness of acronyms has been destroyed by redundancy.

When it comes to printing paperback books, the problems compound. Have you ever tried explaining a “bleed” to someone who has no background in graphic design? I’ve encountered freelance “designers” who still don’t understand how to set up their files to meet bleed or resolution requirements, and “designers” charging way more than I do per hour but don’t have the first clue about the technical requirements for paperback covers. They might be talented artists whose creativity surpasses mine, but they don’t understand making books.

It isn’t like I was born with this knowledge or learned it all in a day. My first print-on-demand paperback in 2013 left a lot to be desired in terms of design and editing, and I’ve since taken it out of print to save myself the embarrassment. My first full-color art book was rejected by the printer for technical problems, and I couldn’t fix it for the life me, no matter how many hours I spent. It wasn’t until I had another year or two of experience that I was able to re-open the old files, realize what the problem was, and fix it in about five minutes. That five-minute fix took me years to build up to.

Then we have the problem of quality. The biggest complaint about self-published books is that the writing isn’t very good and has never been professionally edited. One author contacted me because she was upset that her ebook wasn’t selling on Kindle, and she asked if I had any marketing advice. I looked her up on Amazon, found her book, and used the “Look Inside” feature to see what she was trying to sell. The text had a ton of obvious spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors on the very first page. Plus, the cover was unappealing, and the description in the Amazon listing was even worse.

As is so often the case in my line of work, it fell to me to be the bearer of bad news and explain to the author all the ways in which her design, description, and the text itself were sending huge red flags to potential buyers. Everything about the book screamed, “Don’t buy me!” Fortunately, I was able to help that author with copyediting, formatting, and a cover re-design. Now she has a book she can be proud of.

I understand authors with a do-it-yourself mentality. If I didn’t have the same mentality, I wouldn’t be where I am today. But I came to the world of self-publishing with a few decades of experience in writing as a professional, making art as a hobbyist, and using relevant software in both capacities. And you know what? My first book still sucked. Despite all I had learned, I had miles to go before I could competently make a book, even farther before I could communicate all the requirements to others, and farther still before I could lead an entire project team in a logical, organized way where things went smoothly.

In the years since, I’ve focused on helping other authors. I’ve looked for ways to share what I’ve learned or put my knowledge and experience to good use so other authors can experience the profound joy of holding in their hands a book they made and can be proud of—and confidently sell. Even so, that rarely happened without a team.

While it might be true that “anyone” can self-publish, few people can successfully do it on their own. A team might include an editor, a graphic designer or illustrator, a marketing consultant, and even a ghost writer or co-writer. Since all those people tend to speak their own language, the team usually needs a project manager, too—not the author, who probably does not speak any of those languages fluently, but someone who can help everyone involved stay on target because he knows the entire process from start to finish.

Can anyone do what I do? Sure. It is far from impossible. I encourage my fellow authors to get into it all the time. But people getting into self-publishing for the first time rarely realize just how much there is to know, and they become easily frustrated when they encounter obstacles during the production, or if nobody wants to buy their book.

Maybe anyone can play amazing guitar like Joe Satriani, but it isn’t necessarily easy or quick to get there. Believe me. I tried to learn a few of his songs and still can’t do them justice even after months of practice. Even if I could compose and shred like Satriani, he never goes on stage without a team to support his performance, from his fellow musicians to the stage crew and his management team.

Maybe anyone can do what Satriani does, but only if they are willing to invest the years of study and practice, take the time to find a team to help them succeed, and persevere in an insanely competitive marketplace. They should also be willing to accept that their first album might not be their greatest album, but it can be a learning experience and a steppingstone to truly great things.

For more insights into writing and becoming a better writer by workshopping with others, check out my recent book My Life as an Armadillo. For a quick orientation to the world of self-publishing that will save you from a lot of headaches and wasted money, see A Passion for Planning. Good luck on your writing journey!

The Martian Revolution: Part 1 of 4

Tags

Cat, Mars, martian revolution, meteor mags, Patches, rosalia, science fiction, self publishing, shondra, tarzi, writing

Here is the first part of my pre-publication draft for a new Meteor Mags story.

METEOR MAGS: THE MARTIAN REVOLUTION
Episode 29 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.
© 2021 Matthew Howard. All Rights Reserved.
16K words. Science Fiction > Action > Adventure.

Torn between conflicting factions in the Martian Resistance, Mags’ unofficially adopted nephew Tarzi spends his sixteenth birthday in a struggle to survive. Betrayed and imprisoned on Mars by people they once thought were friends, Mags and Patches vow to soak the red planet in blood if that’s what it takes to rescue Tarzi and change the political structure of the solar system. But not everyone is who they pretend to be.

☠️

Though my soul may set in darkness,
it will rise in perfect light.

I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night.

—Sarah Williams; The Old Astronomer to His Pupil, 1936.

☠️

Prologue: Sixteen Bullets

4 July 2030. Tarzi.

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, dear Tarzi. Happy birthday—

You know, some small part of me hoped for a cake with sixteen candles. Maybe a chocolate cheesecake. A pineapple upside-down with cherries. Even a lousy white cake with cream-cheese frosting would do.

Instead, I got a nine-millimeter pistol with fifteen armor-piercing rounds in an extended magazine.

The sixteenth bullet waited in the chamber when I slammed a fresh magazine into place, but not anymore. It took out the first guard. I think I got two more. Then there’s the round lodged firmly inside the skull of my former boss, Rosalia—unless it exited the back of her head.

It’s hard to say for sure. She fell behind a server rack, and I can’t see much from here.

That was one hell of a lucky shot.

It helps that I can slow time. It does not help that half a dozen rough motherfuckers keep shooting at me with semi-automatic rifles. I hug the ground and listen. They don’t seem to mind wasting ammo. If they aren’t careful, they’ll shoot this room to bits. Then we’re all fucked.

I count the bursts of rifle fire and try to anticipate when they pause to reload. The console I’m hiding behind should buy me a few seconds.

After that?

Probably the end of my last birthday.

Fuck this noise. I can take a few of the bastards with me.

To a merry life, then.

And a short one.

☠️

Part One: Opening Moves

The Arrival

3 July 2030.

Meteor Mags and Patches arrived on Mars in the Bêlit. The Puma Broadcasting Network played Jerk of All Trades by Lunachicks.[1] Mags said, “That’s my jam!” She raised one hand to make the sign of the devil and danced beside the captain’s chair until the song finished.

Patches sprawled on one side in front of the exit. Her eyes narrowed to slits. Her bushy torso rose and fell in a rapid rhythm.

Mags said, “Are you excited to visit the birthday boy? He’ll be happy to see you.” She adjusted her hair and touched up her makeup in a mirror. “Can’t have Shondra seeing me looking like a dog’s breakfast.”[2]

But no amount of makeup could hide the bruises from her failed mission to Earth, nor the stapled laceration that ran through one eyebrow and past her hairline. She squirted liquid morphine on her tongue to dull the ache in her cracked ribs.[3] A slow warmth crept through her veins.

Patches mewed.

“Whatever, baby. Not all of us are invincible, and that shit hurts.”[4] Mags knelt beside Patches and scratched both sides of the fuzzy calico face. “Let’s go meet Shondra. It’s the middle of the bloody night here, but we’ll have lunch with Tarzi tomorrow. Maybe we can get some kisses before bedtime.”

Mags grabbed a passport for Margaret Reid and tucked it into a zippered pocket on her military-issue tactical pants.[5] They weren’t the sexiest thing to meet Shondra in, but they were comfortable and functional. After getting nearly blown to bits in Africa twenty-four hours earlier, Mags craved comfort.

The pair of feline adventurers locked down the ship and went to find their hostess in the Martian shipyards. Patches scampered ahead, sniffing here and there, chasing bugs and clawing a few pieces of Shondra’s property that would never recover. She looked over her shoulder to see if Mags was keeping up, then bolted to the other side of the street.

“Wait up!” Mags paused and held an arm against her ribs. “Goddamnit, I’m getting old. Wait up!”[6]

☠️

The Sleepover

As the owner of the Martian shipyards, Shondra easily afforded several apartments on Mars. Some she used to entertain customers. Some she kept secret between her and various lovers. Some were quiet places to get away from it all, purchased under aliases and known only to her. None of them was quite so luxurious as her private quarters within the shipyard.

Mags held a rocks glass filled with rum and settled onto a red velvet chaise lounge. Patches jumped up beside her. “Shondra, you live like a queen! Sorry about the cat hair.”

Shondra said, “Patches doesn’t shed half as bad as you. Every time you come around waving that tail of yours, it takes the maids an entire day to vacuum.”

Mags patted the lounge beside her. “That’s not even true. Come sit with me.”

Shondra finished at the mini-bar, and her silhouette strode across the massive windows overlooking the shipyards. For a silent moment, she turned her back to Mags and took a sip while enjoying the view of her empire. Below, the nightshift workers toiled in sprays of sparks from arc welders and the glow of halogen lamps. Above, the gleaming stars.

Eventually, she sat on the edge of the lounge and clinked her glass against Mags’. “To empires.”

“So long as they belong to us.”

Shondra took a sip. “Do you like it on Ceres?”

“Shondra, I love it! It sucked so bad when the old place on Vesta got wrecked, but my girls are doing amazing things on Ceres. It’s a dream come true.”

“I’m happy for you.” Shondra ran her fingertips up and down Mags’ thigh.

“What about you? It seems like you’ve got it all on Mars.”

Shondra’s eyes sparkled in candlelight thrown from the end table next to the lounge. “Not everything. There’s a certain kitty I wish would visit more often. But I make do. I’m a firm believer that you can have it all in life. You just can’t have it all at the same time.”

“Words to live by.” Mags took a gulp and laid back on the lounge, balancing her drink in her lap between her crossed legs. “Something is missing, though, isn’t it? I can tell just by looking at you.”

“Can’t sneak anything past those bright green eyes of yours.” Shondra took a drink. “The truth is, Mars is my dream come true. But the dream is tainted. I’m sick of our laws and government being controlled by Earth. Mars can govern itself. I won’t be happy until she does.”

“Cheers,” said Mags.

“Cheers.”

Mags said, “I’m here for Tarzi’s birthday tomorrow, but you know I am down with the Martian liberation. It’s been on my mind a lot this year. It’s the next big step to system-wide freedom from Earth’s interference. Let’s make it happen. You and me. Rosie can help.”

Shondra held out one hand. When Mags set hers in it, Shondra ran the backs of her nails over Mags’ wrist. “Are you ready for a revolution?”

Mags shivered. She smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Do you remember that Danko Jones song? Revolution—and Then We Make Love.”[7]

Shondra slid onto Mags. “Why wait?” She kissed the smuggler’s neck.

Mags winced. “Take it easy! I fucked up my ribs yesterday. Look, they’re all taped up.”

“I’ll be gentle,” said Shondra.

Mags set her drink on the end table. “Alright, then.”

Patches leapt off the lounge. She sauntered into the kitchen where Shondra had set out a pair of bowls. She was well-fed and napping on the bed for two hours before Mags and Shondra finally snuggled under the sheets and went to sleep.

Sunrise came early.

☠️

The Lunch

4 July 2030.

Kepler Mall sprawled across the Martian landscape. It shared one border with the rest of Hevelius, and the Port Authority considered it to be legally within city limits. But the three sides jutting from the city’s eastern-most boundary drew on the map a jagged explosion of commerce the local government struggled to keep up with.

Shoppers relied on global positioning data from the Martian Satellite Network to navigate the labyrinth of shops rising two hundred and fifty stories into the sky at its highest point. Wrapped around the peak in loops and dips, a roller coaster offered Mars’ bravest tourists a ride they never forgot.

In 2029, shopping in the mall without MSN data became a fad. After three months of people dying of starvation and thirst in obscure corridors, the Port Authority put a brutal end to that past-time. Much of the video was suppressed, and many of the bodies were never found. Within two weeks of the crackdown, the mall once again became a cheerful place that pleased its shareholders.

Mags and Patches met Tarzi on the scenic balcony of the Crimson Crane, a restaurant on the top floor serving breakfast twenty-five hours a day. Even after the installation of artificial gravity and a manufactured atmosphere, Mars retained its red tint. The planet’s iron burnished the underbellies of clouds, blazed on mountains in the sun, and frothed in ice-cold rivers running from the polar ice caps into once-forgotten stream beds.

Mags switched off her satellite connection and stuffed her phone into the pocket inside her bra. “They’re tracking us.”

Across the table, Tarzi slid a palm-sized disc onto the surface between them. “They were.”

“Nice.” She leaned back in her café chair and relaxed. “Did you ever think about what it would take to assume control of a massive building like this?”

“I always think about that over breakfast,” Tarzi lied. “But control what? The perimeter so no one can get in or out? The people inside so chaos won’t erupt? Buying the politicians and corporations who really control the thing?”

Mags purred. “Now you’re asking the important questions.” She lowered her voice as their waitress approached for the second time. “Don’t forget about the flow of information. In a system like this, data and media are your main weapons. If you control communication—”

The waitress sidled up to the table with three plates and a smile for Mags. “You had four eggs over easy and three slices of raw ham?”

Mags took one plate. “Thank you, dear. The dish of liver, you can set on the floor. It’s for my cat.”

Tarzi claimed the third plate of beans, bangers, eggs, and toast. His black cup of coffee stood in contrast to the sugary beast Mags ordered, topped with a mountain of whipped cream and cinnamon. When the waitress was out of earshot, he said, “Probably a plant.”

“Definitely a plant.” Mags sipped the hot espresso and wiped the whipped cream from her upper lip with the back of one hand. “Every business owner and employee in this mall is Port Authority, whether directly employed or financially backed. Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“I was wondering,” said Tarzi, “if Patches could make eating liver sound any more disgusting. What is she doing?”

“She isn’t rolling in it, is she?” Mags checked. “Liver’s gross, but it has massive nutrients. Along with the heart, it’s one of the first organs a cat eats when she takes down prey.”

“Right,” said Tarzi. He eyed the chunk of sausage on the end of his fork, then set it down.

“Happy birthday,” said Mags. She raised her cup. “To my favorite nephew.”

Their glasses clinked together. “I thought Anton was your favorite.”

“He’s definitely Sarah’s. Do you remember what it was like to be his age?”

“Sure,” said Tarzi. “The day I turned fourteen, I met a homicidal pirate who whisked me away on a series of random space adventures. Ever since then, it’s been a blur.”[8] He savored a sip. “Great kids, though. The stuff they’re doing in Dumpster Kittens totally slays.”

“Did you hear the Toilet Gator single?”

“Dunny Croc,” he quoted, “lives in a secret place.”

“It’s the kind of place that you can’t escape!”[9]

“Hell no, it isn’t. You need to market that. If I can’t have a Dunny Croc t-shirt by next week, then what the fuck are we even doing out here?”

“That’s what I’m saying!” Mags shoveled an entire slice of ham into her face, chewed three times, and swallowed it nearly whole. She sat back and crossed her arms behind her head. “You wouldn’t want to manage the entire publishing catalog of Two Black Roses Records, would you?”

Tarzi laughed. “Not in a billion years! Who is your second choice?”

Before Mags could reply, a drone interrupted. Like a miniature helicopter, it flew up and over the balcony railing and zoomed straight for the table.

Mags drew a pistol from inside her leather jacket before Tarzi even moved. But before she pulled the trigger, a familiar voice stopped her.

“Hi!” said Rosalia. “Happy birthday!”

Tarzi said, “Thanks, boss. How are things?”

“Great,” Rosalia replied from kilometers away. Her voice came through the drone’s speakers, and the drone’s camera sent video to her of Mags and Tarzi. “Listen, I hate to bother you, but can you come to the office for a minute?”

Mags holstered her pistol. “Give it up, Rosie. It’s the kid’s birthday!”

“I’m really sorry,” said Rosalia, “but I have a gift for you, and I want you to have it before I go away. Something’s come up, and I need to leave the planet in an hour. If you come in for a few minutes, you can have the whole rest of the week off!”

Mags frowned.

Tarzi said, “You drive a hard bargain. We’ll be over on the next shuttle from the mall. Alright?”

“See you soon.” The drone disappeared over the edge of the balcony.

Mags said, “She’s got some nerve, calling you in on your day off. We had plans!”

“Relax,” said Tarzi. “She’s awesome to work for, and she’s giving me a week off. It’s like five minutes from here on the shuttle.”

“Fine,” said Mags. “Let’s go visit the wicked witch!” She shoved another slice of ham and a couple eggs into her mouth and washed them down with half of the sugary, caffeinated monster on the other side of her plate. She tossed a wad of cash onto the table and waved to their waitress on the way out.

On the way to the shuttle, Mags and Tarzi cracked sarcastic jokes and laughed at recollections of their adventures over the past two years: the first time they met Donny and he tried to kill them, the time they fell into a cavern full of octopus eggs, the time Tarzi made fun of Mags and she repaid him by pretending to be permanently disfigured.[10]

Settling into her seat, Mags said, “Good times.” Patches crawled into her lap.

☠️

The Conspiracy

Rosalia’s office on the forty-fifth floor of the Port Authority Administration building had expanded since 2029. Back then, in a government post Mags’ bribes had helped her acquire, she was the secretary to the Chief Administrator, and she reported directly to Kaufman. But after Kaufman abandoned his post to join Mags’ pirate crew—an endeavor Rosalia assisted—a much more pliable man replaced him.[11]

That was no surprise to Rosalia. She had planned on it for years, played no small role in making it happen, and exploited it to her every advantage. Besides manipulating the Port Authority to the benefit of the underground resistance, besides leaking whatever information she felt would be useful to her for Mags to know, Rosalia redecorated. She knocked out walls between offices until she had the space of half a dozen rooms to herself on one corner of the forty-fifth floor. To maintain the new Chief’s feeling of superiority, she had his office re-done the same way, but with twice as much space.

The palatial results were an obvious waste of the PA’s budget. But who was there for anyone to complain to? Certainly not the Chief and his right-hand woman who had a knack for keeping him fat and happy with the spoils of power. And the government on Earth? In 2030, humanity’s home planet had enough troubles of its own, and a few hundred million dollars siphoned by corruption was the least of its worries.

When Mags arrived with Tarzi and Patches, they stepped into the second most opulent office in the Martian government.

“Damn, Rosie! I love what you’ve done with the place!” Mags admired the oil paintings on the walls of the foyer, any one of which could have paid a miner’s pension for generations, and the largest of which cost more than the gross domestic product of some Earth nations.

Rosalia hugged her. “Are you sure I can’t convince you to sell me Blue Poles?”

Mags laughed. “Not a chance. That piece has sentimental value. I can get you a good deal on a Monet, though. What’s with the goon squad?”[12]

Half a dozen guards stood silent, three on each side of the doorway.

“Don’t mind them,” said Rosalia. “Something’s come up, and I could use the extra security. Tarzi! Happy birthday!”

“Thanks, boss.” He held out his fist for a bump, and she met it. “How’d you find us at the mall? I had a signal blocker with me.”

Rosalia raised a finger in a fake scold. “That’s illegal.”

“What isn’t?”

“True enough. I sent my drone to the floor where there was a signal void. Your sitting on the balcony was luck.”

Mags said, “We like to dine in style. Is Shondra here?”

Rosalia’s amiable façade cracked for a fraction of a second. “How did you—”

“She has a unique scent. Now I know something is up. Why don’t you tell us what’s really happening?”

Rosalia said, “Follow me.” She led them from the foyer to the corner of the building, where a rosewood desk bigger than a coffin awaited. Behind it, two walls of windows overlooked Hevelius.

Near the far corner of the desk, Shondra reclined in a chair. She filed her nails with an emery board as if she had not a care in the world. Her face lit up. “Maggie!”

“Long time.” Mags gave her a peck on the cheek. “Do you mind telling me what’s so important that you had to interrupt my breakfast?”

Rosalia sat behind her desk and clacked her painted nails on its lacquered top in a staccato rhythm. “The Chief Administrator is dead.”

“Dead?” Tarzi stopped behind a seat. “What happened?”

Rosalia said, “You want to sit down for this.”

Mags sat directly across the desk from Rosalia, with Shondra on her right and Tarzi taking the spot on her left.

Patches rubbed her cheeks on the corner of a cardboard box on the carpet below one window. Satisfied with the packaging, she climbed in and made herself at home. She curled into a nap. Her fuzzy tail covered her nose.

Rosalia said, “An hour ago, I killed him. The body’s still in the office, but let’s just say the Chief isn’t taking any calls right now.” She relished a rare pause where both Mags and Tarzi were stunned into silence. “In other news, I’ll be moving into a bigger office.”

Mags broke into laughter. “Rosie, what the hell were you thinking? Hahaha! Don’t get me wrong. I thought about taking him out myself. But to what end? There’s no guarantee that you get promoted into his position. Not with the old-boys network in the PA.”

Rosalia rested her elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’ve gained the support of people in high places. The resistance will take care of any local opposition. A majority of the Martian people want me in that position, and Earth’s authorities will back me up.”

Shondra said, “Rosie’s been busy.”

“I guess so,” said Mags. “Still, I’m a bit peeved that all this happened without talking to me first.” She lit a stolen cigarette. “Any deal with Earth is probably fucked. The last thing they want is the Martian independence we’ve been working on for years.”

“No, they’re on board with the plan,” said Rosalia. “Earth is prepared to sign a new trade agreement with Mars once I take over.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Mags. “You’re not making a treaty with them, are you?”

Rosalia said, “That’s exactly what I’m doing. Earth will retain control over some things. Shipping. Trade. Interplanetary policy.”

“Fuck,” said Mags. “Basically everything? Fuck those arseholes! Earth needs to stay the hell away from Mars! You can’t trust any of those warmongering, baby-raping idiots! What are you—”

Shondra interrupted. “Mags, relax. This deal means a hell of a lot more money.”

“Fuck that,” said Mags. “If we want to get rich, then we put a boot in Earth’s arse and do things ourselves!”

Rosalia’s smile disappeared. “I knew you’d feel that way. That is why you’ve been chosen to be our representative to Earth. Our negotiator.”

Mags choked on a puff of smoke. “What? I’m the most wanted felon on Earth! They only want me dead or in chains.”

Rosalia said, “Precisely. But I solved that, too.”

“How? With a pardon?”

“Not quite,” said Rosalia. “Let me show you.”

In later years, Meteor Mags could never put her finger on exactly what prompted her to spring into motion. Was it, she wondered, something about Rosalia’s scent or inflection? The unexplained presence of the guards? The interruption of her meal? Sheer instinct?

Mags was out of her chair and lunging over the desktop toward Rosalia when the first tranquilizer dart hit her. Fired by a guard behind her, its metal tip sank into her backside and spit poison into her veins.

In the same moment, Rosalia’s fist smashed a button atop her desk. It sprang a trap for Patches. Two halves of a transparent sphere erupted from the floor, supported by metal arms that slammed the halves together, enclosing the calico’s cardboard box.

Mags’ hands went for Rosalia’s throat.

Rosalia kicked her chair backward. On her way to the ground, she fired a second dart that caught Mags in the meat below her collarbone. The back of the chair smacked into the floor. Mags’ trajectory took her over Rosalia to smash into the window behind her.

Mags struck the glass but landed on her feet. The sedative made her stumble. Before she could resume her attack, the office lit up like a lightning storm.

Inside the transparent sphere around Patches, a fury of electric current seized the cat with tendrils of white outlined in blue. Patches swung her claws until they shredded the remnants of the box trapped with her. Levitating in the center of the sphere, she could not reach its perimeter to destroy it.

Her feline howls drowned out all but the roar from Mags’ throat. The smuggler pounced on Rosalia.

Tarzi tried to leap to his feet, but he was tackled by a guard and taken to the ground. A stranglehold ended his shouting.

Mags straddled Rosalia and swung her fists. The blows fell without her typical strength. “I will kill you!” She took punches from Rosalia to her stomach. Though her eyes flashed with fire, Mags’ body betrayed her. She slumped forward and fell face-first onto her opponent.

Rosalia rolled the body to one side, cursing with the effort. She gripped a fistful of Mags’ hair and held the brigand’s head to the light surrounding Patches.

Spit streamed from the sides of Mags’ mouth and down her chin. Her eyes blazed, but she could not move or shout.

Rosalia said, “Thank your so-called nephew for this. He told me how Patches got deactivated last year by electricity.” [13]

Patches contorted within the ball of energy. Her legs struck out at unnatural angles. Her hair stood on end. Patches’ scream made Mags’ blood run cold in her veins.

Light and shadow performed a twisted ballet across Rosalia’s face, mirrored on Mags’ pale skin. “You should have joined us. You should have taken the deal.” She held Mags’ head firmly in her grip and forced the pirate’s green eyes to meet hers through the tears. “You brought this on yourself.”

Patches’ struggling came to an abrupt stop. A cylinder rose from the floor and swallowed the transparent glass bubble around her. Rosalia released Mags and assumed a place at the window, which she opened with the touch of a button.

The cylinder shot Patches into the sky.

“So much for your familiar,” said Rosalia. “She’ll soon be in orbit—far, far away. And you will be on Earth. A price for peace.”

Tears ran down Mags’ cheeks. She could not curse Rosalia, but Tarzi did. The young man wished unspeakable things upon Rosalia and her ancestors—until a soldier choked the sound out of him.

“Strip-search her.” Rosalia indicated one of her guards with her finger.

“I’ll do it.” Shondra set down her emery board on the arm of her chair for the first time since the confrontation. “I know her tricks. You do not want to try to disarm that bitch, even passed out.”

On the floor, before Tarzi’s eyes, Shondra removed all of Mags’ clothes and her hidden weapons. She said, “Let me take the boy. He knows things about her crew that can help us.”

Rosalia said, “You can have him. Get me something useful.”

Both Tarzi and Mags were carted off in chains—one struggling the whole way, and one completely unconscious.

Patches was nowhere to be found.

---

[1] From their 1995 album of the same name on Go-Kart Records: New York.

[2] “Dog’s breakfast” is Australian slang for an absolute mess.

[3] Mags was injured in Antipodes, which took place on 2 July 2030.

[4] Patches became indestructible in 2029, in Patches the Immortal.

[5] Mags has a huge collection of fake passports under aliases that are variations on her name in several languages. Mags’ great-gramma often used this same alias.

[6] Mags turned 106 years old in November 2029. Due to her magic ring, her expected (though not guaranteed) lifespan is 200 years. When she says she is getting old, she means really frickin’ old.

[7] On Wildcat. 2017, AFM Records: Schwalmstadt, Germany.

[8] Tarzi’s fourteenth birthday is the first scene in Old Enough.

[9] The complete lyric to Toilet Gator, which Mags and Tarzi quote here, appears in Small Flowers.

[10] These events were chronicled in Old Enough and Red Metal at Dawn.

[11] See The Lost Crew of the Volya IX for details of Kaufman’s desertion and Rosalia’s assistance in his escape.

[12] Mags’ ownership of and sentimental attachment to Jackson Pollack’s Blue Poles appears in The Ryderium Caper. It was a favorite of Gramma Margareta’s, and the poles inspired Mags’ free-energy system.

[13] As told in Daughter of Lightning.

a note about solving writing problems

Tags

self publishing, writing

A piece of advice in my new book about writing needs qualification. In My Life as an Armadillo, I state my belief that writer’s block is a myth, and the solutions to most writing problems involve more writing, usually freewriting about that problem or your emotional relation to it, until you get to the heart of it and work out a potential solution.

But I base this advice on an assumption about my audience of writers; namely, that they write because the written language is their primary way of processing information and expressing their creativity. That is not true about every person on Earth, and it might not even be true about every author. It certainly is not true of everyone working temporarily on a writing assignment such as a school paper, a business letter, or a memoir.

While my advice about writing through the problem can still help those people, it is not the only method nor even the best for everyone. Different people prefer different modes of communication, learning, and information processing. As an editor, I find the best way to help my authors work through a problem is to ask a few questions and encourage them to talk through it with me. Like many people, they feel more comfortable speaking than writing or typing, especially in a dialogue with an attentive and thoughtful listener. These conversations can lead to dynamic brainstorming sessions and bouncing ideas back and forth until we find a solution.

Other people are kinesthetic—not verbal—learners and communicators. They work through problems not by writing or talking but by walking or dancing, by doing yoga or lifting weights. Once they engage their bodies in motion, activity, or touch, the solutions come to them. Those are great options even for writers and other people in primarily non-kinetic modes. As much as I believe in writing through my problems, the process often involves stepping away from the keyboard to take a walk or a dip in the pool, or by cranking up the tunes and having a wiggle in the living room. Sometimes I even burn a calorie or two!

When you work through problems you encounter as you write, consider your mode of learning, communication, and information processing. Before you get back to writing, you might need to talk to someone, exercise, frolic, or do some tactile, hands-on work or craft. If you aren’t in a rush, you can even sleep on it. I often awake from a nap or a night’s sleep with a simple, direct solution to a problem that seemed impossibly complex before.

As I say in my book, any rules I propose are merely guidelines. Modify them to suit your personal style. What works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another—not in writing nor anywhere else in life.

If you know of any good self-assessments to help people identify their own mode of learning, please comment on this post.

New Season, New Book!

Tags

armadillo authors workshop, books, essays, self publishing, style, workshop, writing

Spring is in the air! And with the new season comes a new book. You might know that I recently moved to Tucson, and I experienced an ungodly delay of several weeks in getting connected to the Internet in the new Martian headquarters. I used that time to edit a collection of essays about what I learned as the leader of a writers’ workshop—a workshop I founded in February 2017 and which succeeded beyond my imagination. Before I left Phoenix, I passed the leadership torch to someone I knew would take excellent care of my baby, and I am happy to say that the group remains alive and well.

Over the years, I wrote about workshopping with other authors and the journey of improving as a writer. The result is the Kindle ebook My Life as an Armadillo: Essays on Workshopping and Writing.

My Life as an Armadillo collects my thoughts from 2016 to 2021 about writing and becoming a better writer by workshopping with others. It is not a complete guide to style nor a manifesto on how to run your own critique group, but I share it in hopes that you can learn from my experience and apply the ideas you find most helpful.

Essays are grouped into four main sections: Group Participation and Leadership, Starting a Major Work, Basic Revisions for Style, and Style and Substance. You will find guidance for leading a workshop group and getting the most out of participating in one, refining your prose based on style tips commonly given in workshops, and overcoming the fundamental challenges many writers struggle with.

Now available for only 99 cents at https://amzn.to/3c2Poga

Free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers!

Meteor Mags: The Singing Spell – now in print

Tags

meteor mags, meteor mags book, Patches, self publishing, short story, singing spell, writing

Five action-packed, cosmic episodes span time and space from 2.2 billion years ago to the end of the Milky Way galaxy!

Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

The Crystal Core: After the events of Small Flowers, Mags and her pirate crew discover some of her telepathic octopuses are missing, things in the outer planets are completely messed up, and it’s all Mags’ fault.

The Hive: Everything goes swimmingly on Ceres, until the crew is attacked by predators who want to feed Mags and her friends to their babies.

The Singing Spell: Celina’s memoirs recall some of her earliest adventures with Mags, including how Mags got into dancing, how Celina corrupted and encouraged her, and who they built a grave for after building their club on Vesta. This tale of love and friendship spans more than a century and more than one reality, revealing at last how Celina has lived an exceptionally long life alongside her favorite cranky kitty.

A Distant Light: Join the space monkeys of Svoboda 9 as they say farewell to their beloved leader.

Antipodes: Meteor Mags and her crew descend to Earth to bring free energy to the people, but they find themselves in the middle of an intercontinental war.

Might be unsuitable for children or carbon-based life.

Meteor Mags: The Singing Spell

Tags

fiction, meteor mags, singing spell, writing

METEOR MAGS: THE SINGING SPELL

© 2020 by Matthew Howard. All Rights Reserved.

Episode 26 of The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

UPDATE: This story now appears alongside four others in The Singing Spell and Other Tales, published October 2020.

Description: Celina’s memoirs recall some of her earliest adventures with Mags, including how Mags got into dancing, how Celina corrupted and encouraged her, and who they built a grave for after building their club on Vesta. This tale of love and friendship spans more than a century and more than one reality, revealing at last how Celina has lived an exceptionally long life alongside her favorite cranky kitty.

Word Count: 9K.

Seven sisters walk across the land,
singing creation, hand in hand.

Softly singing fish into the sea,
songs unfolding into you and me.

Sacred sisters, daughters of the sky,
springing into life the birds who fly,
shining brilliance, watching time go by.

—Sister Moon; Pleiades, 2020.

PART ONE: BEST FRIENDS

Snacks

In the early days of asteroid belt mining, back when Mags and I were building the club on Vesta, entrepreneurs opened bars to serve the rough and rowdy blue-collar workers. Gambling, prostitution, and fighting were the chief forms of entertainment, giving the miners a chance to blow off steam in a fog induced by copious amounts of drugs and alcohol.

Few musicians had made their way to the Belt in 2025, and those who did were in constant demand. But not all the Belt’s inhabitants were fans of that first wave of sonic settlers and their crowd-pleasing selections.

Under the table at her booth, Mags squeezed the handle of the .50 caliber pistol in her garter holster. “This music is bullshit!”

With a red plastic straw, I swirled the ice cubes melting at the bottom of a gin and tonic. “Some people are sentimental about these old songs.”

“Fuck them,” said Mags. “They’ve been playing the same top-forty garbage for more than fifty years.”

“Sod off, Magpie. I like this song.”

“Are you kidding me? I’d rather drag my vag through broken glass than hear REO Speedwagon again.”

“Oh yeah? I’d rather shove my face in a fuckin’ meat grinder.”

“I’d rather chop off my head, shove it a fuckin’ meat grinder, and have the brain sausage jammed down the gaping hole in my neck with a broom handle!”

“So? I’d rather eat that sausage after you pooped it into a champagne glass.”

“Celina! What in the actual fuck is wrong with you?!”

I drained my glass. “You started it.”

“I did not!” Mags polished off a pint glass of rum and reconsidered. “Okay. I did. Wanna dance?”

“Not with you. You can’t even be nice!”

“Celina, are you shitting me? After all these years—”

“Yes, I am totally shitting you. You’d realize that if you weren’t wasted, you fucking cot case!”[1]

“I will kill this band.”

“Dude,” I said, “I believe it’s time for you to fly.”[2]

“Fuck yes, it is.” Mags snorted. “I take it on the run, baby.”

“Mhm. Cause that’s the way you want it, baby.”[3]

“So, I can kill them?”

“If you like,” I said. “But save the last dance for me.”

Mags squeezed my hand. “Let me see about these tunes.”

“The fuck you will. Sit down. I need snacks.”

“Snacks?”

“Snacks, you furry harlot! You are not starting a riot before we get something to eat.”

Mags sat back in the booth and sulked. “I am kind of hungry.”

“Then will you shut up and try not to kill anyone?!” I got up from the booth. “Do you want regular chips? They have yam chippies, and a salt and vinegar type—”

“I want chips,” said Mags, “made from a bloody potato!”[4]

I leaned my hip against the table. “We could get them made from grub worms. They’re high in protein.”

“You can’t get high on protein. I tried.” Mags squinted. “Do you know what I love about you?”

“Yes,” I said. “You know that if this band plays one more geriatric rock hit, I will lop off their bits and serve them to the bouncers. Grilled.”

Mags reared back in a laugh that rivaled the volume of the concert. “That’s a damn good reason.” She smacked her hand on the tabletop. “You fucking love that REO song, though!”

“What if I do? Now stay put. I’ll buy us another round and see what they can do about munchies.”

Mags drummed her fingers on the table.

I’d known the bartender for thirty-seven years. He understood my signal to make something special for Mags.

She lost consciousness on the floor of the club, leaving me to gather up the clothes she’d strewn about the place and tip the staff well enough that we might be welcome back someday, despite the broken chairs. When she awoke in the bedroom of my flat, things did not, at first, go well.[5]

Then they did.

☠️

Maggie Maid

Anyone who knows Mags knows she loves to dance naked. She’ll do it for tips, she’ll do it for free. She’ll do it completely pissed at the most inappropriate moments.[6] But she wasn’t always like that.

The first time I met her in 1938, she was in a fistfight with a bunch of blokes on a dock in England. They were trying their damnedest to prevent her from boarding a ship which, among other things, carried stolen goods I planned to deliver to the States.

I’m sure that little sheila could have killed them all if she had to. But I needed their services, not their corpses. On the other hand, I didn’t like seeing a bunch of drongos beating on a girl my age. Especially when they worked for me.

Then I saw she had rescued my lost cat, who bounded into my arms and just about had me in tears. I thought maybe that feisty cunt beating the fuck out of the hired help might make a good mate.

I broke up the fight and paid the lads several weeks’ worth of wages in a roll of cash before ushering a bruised and filthy Mags into my private cabin, which was hardly big enough for me, let alone the two of us and my cat, Starry.[7]

That’s where we had our first fight.

It wasn’t right away. We sailed at least a week before I explained the situation we were sailing to. When Mags heard what kind of club awaited us, she lost her shit.

I chalk up her destruction of most everything that wasn’t nailed down in my cabin to one simple thing, one thought that consumed that furry head of hers: What would Mama think?

My oldies were straight-up smugglers and criminals, and Mum was indigenous. Their marriage wasn’t even legal. In those years, many girls my age and younger were being kidnapped and sent to “re-education” facilities to be forcibly trained in English and get beaten and abused until they were stripped of all our culture and history. The white government didn’t even remotely consider native people to be Aussie citizens until the 1960s.[8] Even then, people called us stupid shit like “Abos”.

So, it wasn’t like I came up ignorant of violence, racism, and oppression. But Mags’ mum—as I discovered in many stories over the next year—had ideas about race, class, labor, and feminism that her daughter absorbed, but for which most of society did not yet have words.

In my cabin, I was treated to some of that maternal wisdom at great length and considerable volume. Little of my dinnerware survived.

I held Starry in my arms while Mags went into her little tornado. Eventually, I had enough of her bullshit. “Pipe down, willie wagtail! It was just a suggestion. You can do whatever the bloody fuck you want once we get off this boat!”

She set a plate on the tiny kitchen countertop instead of slamming it on the floor. “Anything I want,” she said. It was like she never heard the phrase before. “I can, can’t I?”

“Hell,” I said, “you can jump into the goddamn ocean right now, and no one could stop you. Do whatever you want. I was just trying to prepare you.”

“Anything I want,” said Mags.

I didn’t know if it was a question or not, so I said, “What’s on the list? Do you want to have a hug first? Then maybe clean up this fucking mess? It looks like a dog’s breakfast in here.”

She hugged me and Starry. He licked her nose. She kissed him and, without a word, got to work tidying up the disaster she had created. I took Starry on deck, and when I came back, the place was immaculate.

Funny thing about Mags. She likes to put on a show. That whole plate-smashing and screaming routine was a performance. But all I had asked her to do was think about performing on stage for an audience.

That would be at Bert’s place, our destination in the States. Bertrand hated it when I called him “Uncle Randy”. He hated it when I walked in like I owned the place and said whatever I pleased, and he probably hated the mountains of cash he raked in thanks to my parents’ black-market dealings with him.

I’m just busting his bollocks. Bert acted grumpy, but he was a sweetheart—at least, the closest thing you’d find in a seppo in the 1930s.[9] Fuckin’ savages.

On the other hand, the spastic sheila with a tail I had just picked up was more savage than any of them, and I figured she could handle herself.

One thing was clear. She would never dance the way I did.

Eventually, we got to the States, where I had a natter with Bert about my new friend.[10] The club was closed, so Mags amused herself on the stage while I told Bert what little I knew of her story.

When he first saw her, Bert just about shat his pants. Mags in all her underage glory paraded about his stage, doing Spanish dances her mum taught her, and her tail swished this way and that below her ragged, ill-fitting skirt. Once Bert collected himself, we arranged for her to stay with me and clean the place after hours to earn her keep—just so long as she kept the tail hidden and dressed like a boy.

At first, I found those conditions insulting. Then I realized they were for the best. If people had seen her as she really was back then, especially the type of people who wandered into Bert’s place for drunken entertainment, then goddess only knows what unspeakable hell would have been unleashed in that club. Someone would have tried to put his hands on her, and a whole mess of people would have died.

But I liked that about her, and I decided to keep her around.

Who am I kidding? We were inseparable. She was a good mate. The best, that crazy cunt. Sometimes I thought she’d get me killed, but I never doubted she would have died for me, too—or at the very least, come up with a plan that didn’t involve one of us dying.

Don’t tell her I brought this up, but she cleaned the fuck out of Bert’s club. That’s right: our little Maggie Maid. If you call her that to her face now, she’ll cut you. But she scrubbed and tidied and fixed things with a military precision we didn’t normally see in the hired help.

I didn’t get it right away. I just thought she was intense about a few things. I didn’t piece it together until the first time I saw her clean a rifle. She did it quickly, thoroughly, and accurately. Mags cleaned a weapon like her life depended on it. From what she told me, it often had.

You might think of her as a party girl these days, but Magpie was serious as hell back then. It’s how she was raised.

The better part of a year went by. I came and went on a few voyages to oversee my oldies’ business, and everything was fine, at least for a planet that was about to be plunged into the most gruesome war it had ever known.

As if that wasn’t enough, Mags started to fill out. Christ, she was a skinny runt when I met her, and look at her now. She also discovered, in the wee hours when the club was closed, that she enjoyed being onstage.

After hours, in the spare time she created by making a military operation out of her chores, the club stage belonged to my fuzz-tailed friend. She pretended to dance for people in the empty seats. Then she’d get caught up in the fantasy and lose herself in the performance.

She wasn’t as good as she is now, but she threw herself into it.

Some nights, she’d sing.

I had a list of things to teach her: better moves, ways to talk to the customers, how to get the most money out of someone while giving up the least of yourself. How to stay safe.

But at the top of that list was job number one. We needed to go shopping!

☠️

Jack’s Grave

In 2026, Mags knelt at a grave on Vesta. No physical body occupied it. Below the marker lay nothing but solid Vestan stone. The headstone sat 300 meters from the crater base at the south pole. Atop the rim of the crater, overlooking the tallest mountain in the solar system, our newly constructed Club Assteroid reigned. The lights in its windows and along the curved path from its parking lot shone below a clear atmosphere splashed with a million stars.

“I don’t know what to say,” said Mags.

I rested a hand on her shoulder. “Just say what you feel. I could leave.”

Mags set a hand on mine. “Stay with me. Please.”

“Take your time.”

Mags clutched a pendant. She had owned it since January 1938, when a boxer named Jack gave it to her. Jack took her in and fed her when she was alone and friendless, and the only reason she left him was to rescue a lost cat from some hooligans. Lucky for me! Turns out that was my cat, and although Starry’s been gone for nearly a century, he brought us together. [11]

Anyway, at a house on Meteor Street in London, half a year after her mother was killed, Jack showed Mags the basics of boxing and set her on a lifelong path of being a fearsome fighter. She never forgot him.

“Jack gave me this,” she said. “It’s a stone from Australia, where he’d gone for a few boxing matches. I didn’t even know where Australia was. He thought I was fuckin’ crazy.” Mags laughed. “He said the stone was a meteorite from a place called Vesta, and I told him I wanted to go there. He laughed at me. I didn’t care.”

Mags turned the pendant in her hand. The simple grey stone, sliced into a triangular shape and filled with chunks of minerals in brown, black, and yellow, was polished so finely that it caught the distant sunlight and gleamed. Years before, Mags had it mounted on a silver chain and wore it as a necklace ever since. “I promised Jack that if I ever made it to Vesta, I’d return this to its origin.” She wrapped her fingers around the rock. “Here we are, Jack. We did it. Celina’s here with us. I never could have built this club without her. I met her just days after I met you. So much has changed since then.”

Mags placed the necklace at the base of the marker. “I love you, Jack. Welcome to my new home. Hope you like it here.” She wiped tears from her cheeks with the back of one leather-gloved hand.

I said, “He gave you your name, didn’t he?” No matter that I had heard the story many times, or that Mags didn’t remember most of them. She loved to tell that story.

“He did. My ‘fighting name’, he called it. Meteor Mags.”

“And that’s the meteorite?”

“Yeah,” said Mags. “A tiny fragment of this huge rock we’re on right now.”

“Should we bury it?”

“Nah.” Mags wiped her nose. “Maybe it stays here. Maybe it falls again to Earth. I think it should be free.” She rose to her feet.

I asked, “What if it gets lost?”

Mags hugged me. “All of us are lost. Aren’t we?”

I squeezed her even tighter. “I never feel lost with you.”

She nuzzled my neck and kissed it. “We should get a cat.”

☠️

The Hosier

In 1939, I took Mags shopping. Europe was getting fucked by the Nazis. Poland, Czechoslovakia. Millions died.

The States wouldn’t join the war for two more years, until after the attack on Hawaii. In ’39, most of the country hadn’t recovered from the so-called Great Depression.

Believe me, it wasn’t so great.

Government tried, and citizens tried, and none of it amounted to a pint of piss. It took another world-wide war to pull the Yanks out of their mess.

Even then, plenty of stateside companies made huge profits by selling goods to the Third Reich. Prohibition of alcohol sales had ended by then, too. But before that was over, the eighteenth amendment created an underground criminal empire with connections, wealth, and power. The whole situation was a lit stick of dynamite.

I thought Mags had a bit of dynamite in her, too, and I didn’t think twice about throwing her on the pile of explosives. Hell, I was curious.

Mags grew up in the middle of armed urban warfare when most of the piss-ants in Chicago were still trying to sort how to chop off a toe or beat a few helpless teenage girls into hooking for them. I wasn’t any stranger to the underworld, but my impression of most people I met was—not good.

They lacked guts. They lacked conviction. Even the ones I liked seemed a bit dense. A snag short of a barbie, for fuck’s sake.[12]

I always knew I was smarter, but they had muscle. A ton of muscle, on a huge payroll.

Not that I thought of Mags as muscle back then. She was my friend, and—

Oh, fuck it. I totally thought of her as muscle, and I hoped she could help me make a few bucks. I had a list of people I’d love to exterminate to take over their rackets, and she was exceptionally qualified for the job. Agile, intelligent, and absolutely ruthless. Plus, she liked me.

It sounds mercenary, but we had fun. She was like a kid in a candy shop with all the American goods in those days, things you couldn’t get so easily outside the States, and it made me happy to see her happy. Trying on different things. Preening and posing in front of mirrors.

Even in her youth, Magpie had her moods. But when my little cyclone of destruction was pleased with something, she lit up like a star. You should have seen her.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I took Mags for a long walk through the streets of Chicago. She’d lived a rough-and-tumble life of poverty and violence before I met her, and nice clothes weren’t something she ever thought of as her reality. Those things always belonged to someone else—someone more privileged. Someone wealthier. I steered us through the commercial district until she stopped dead in her tracks.

Mags was entranced by a hosier’s window display. Plastic mannequin legs strutted in a variety of socks and stockings. I said, “See something you like?”

“All of it.” She pressed her hands to the window, and her breath made a patch of fog on the glass. “When we were in Spain, finding clean socks was nearly impossible. Mama had to steal them for soldiers.”[13]

“Let’s not steal these ones,” I said. “We can go inside and try them on.”

“Try them on?”

“Mhm.” I brushed a stray lock of hair away from her face. “See if you like them before we buy them.”

“I like all of them.”

“Why don’t we pick a few you like best?” I offered my hand, and she took it. We went inside.

Honestly, you couldn’t try on shit in that store, but I knew the owner. I had a chat with the girl at the sales counter, and I let her know I’d pay for whatever we needed. Mags must have cost me a month’s worth of tips trying it all on.

One pair of white, thigh-high stockings really caught her attention. They had tiny white hearts sewn into the lace, and a ruffle around the top. Mags pulled them on and wiggled her toes. She sprang to her feet. “These make me feel like dancing!”

She danced all over the bloody store. Up on the benches, in front of the windows. I couldn’t keep her off the sales counter. Eventually, I gave up and joined in.

Mags was about fifteen, not quite sixteen. Even then, she had infectious energy that swept you into whatever party was happening in her mind.

I bought those stockings and a dozen other pairs. Then we needed to find matching shoes and skirts and garters. I guess you can blame me for Mags’ obsession with legwear. I created a monster—but one with exceptional taste in socks.

She liked them so much that she started dancing at Bert’s club that weekend, and the solar system was never the same.

Sue me.

PART TWO: FOREVER

The Highway

In 1942, Mags and I were proper pissed without the foggiest clue where we were other than a stretch of barren, sunbaked trail in the wasteland of Western Australia.

We’d arrived by boat the week before in Fremantle Harbour and, after visiting with my oldies, liberated a 1942 Chevy RHD for the drive. It had been shipped from the States as part of the Allied support for my country, which had been suffering from attacks along the coast by the Japanese. Damn decent of the seppos, and I almost felt bad about nicking it.

The ute resembled a Jeep, built like a brick shithouse with sturdy tires I hoped could handle the rough terrain, wheel ruts, and patches of sand along what would one day become the Great Northern Highway. [14]

Back then, it wasn’t so great.

At first, the Chevy did pretty well! But long after we’d passed Yalgoo and entered the outback proper, where there isn’t fuckall but scrub, red dirt, and stunted trees, the damn thing sucked up the last of the petrol. It sputtered and rolled to a stop.

Were we even halfway there? Fuck if I knew. The gauges were broken.

Mags said, “The last of the spare gas cans better get us there.”

I said, “That was the last can.”

Mags pounded her fists against the steering wheel and called it a string of creative names.

I said, “That isn’t helping.”

“It’s helping me!”

“Fair enough. Welcome to Bandywallop.”

“That’s a place?”

“Sure,” I lied. “It’s just outside of Woop-Woop.”[15]

“What the fuck are you talking about?” She popped the hood and got out to check underneath, but that was pointless. The ute was fine, just empty.

I reckoned we’d be about the same in a few hours. “The middle of nowhere, Magpie. East Bumfuck. Have a nice day.”

“Do we got any beer left?”

“There’s a box in the boot.[16] Warm as goat piss by now.”

“Good enough.” Mags wiped her brow with the back of her forearm. The sun was a circle of hate directly overhead. She opened the boot to reveal the last of our supplies: twenty-four bottles of Swan Lager, courtesy of the brewery in Perth. We’d already murdered a couple of boxes. She handed me one and split open a longneck for herself, prying off the top with a ciggie lighter.

I smacked mine against the edge of the passenger-side door with one hand. The cap fell to the cracked, rust-colored earth and bounced once before lying still as death on the dirt. “Cheers!”

“Cheers.” Mags gulped half the bottle. “Let’s get to walking, then.”

“Might as well.”

She hoisted the box onto her shoulder and pushed her sunglasses back to the top of her slippery, sweat-covered nose. “You’re sure it’s this way?”

“Generally speaking.”

Mags frowned. “I am absolutely dumbfounded by the lack of confidence you inspire!” She drained the rest of her bottle and whipped it into the sparse scrub at the roadside.

I sipped from mine and trundled along beside her. “It could be worse, you know.”

“Sure,” she said. “We could be attacked by giant scorpions. Get our fuckin’ eyeballs and brains torn out. Have our flesh eaten by bacteria while we’re still conscious. We could—”

“You know what, Mags? Forget I mentioned it.” I took a sip. “You don’t regret coming out here with me, do you?”

“Nah,” she said. “Worst case, we totally fuckin’ die. But there’s no one I’d rather die with, if it comes to that.”

“We won’t die.”

“You seem awfully sure.”

“I had a vision.”

Mags laughed. “Celina, you crack me up. Remind me why I agreed to this in the first place.”

“Because you love me.”

Mags stopped in the middle of the old goat path that wanted to be a road. “Give me a hug.”

I held her for a long time. The sun abused us. The outback stretched before us with no end in sight. When she finally let me go, she said, “These beers will run out before sunset.”

“If you keep pounding them like that, they will.”

She let loose that psychopathic laugh of hers and set off in what vaguely seemed like the right direction.

I don’t know how we made it. The sky and the booze and the flat, dark-ochre ground all melt together in my memory. The sun rose and set at least once, and we stopped to sleep beside a meager campfire for a few hours. But we pressed on.

Eventually, we stumbled onto the spot: Yarrabubba. It’s one of the oldest asteroid collisions on Earth. The impact site is 70 kilometers wide, and it goes back 2.2 billion years. That sounds dramatic, but all there was when Mags and I got to it was a hill, a little red hill to mark the crash.

We climbed it.

We were out of beer by then, and the soles of our shoes were worn down to our blisters. Reasonable people would have died, but we weren’t them.

Besides, the fortuneteller told us we would make it.

☠️

Mags’ Ring

Money, boyfriends, empires. I used to think they meant something. I thought they were things you accumulated to prove you had power over your life.

Then I met Mags. Her raggedy arse didn’t have shit. She had the clothes on her back, and they were falling apart. But none of that seemed to bother her.

One night, when we were cuddling in our room upstairs at Bert’s club, I asked about her ring. I’d never seen her without it. With her hand in mine, she told me.

Imagine finding out your best friend will outlive you by at least a century.[17]

Sure, I felt bad for myself. Give me a break. I was barely twenty, and Mags couldn’t have been more than seventeen. At first, all I could think about was getting old and watching her go on without me when there wouldn’t be a damn thing I could do about it.

I turned her ring around her finger. You couldn’t take it off, and I’d tried a few times to test that theory. It was like once she put it on, it was on for life. Mags wore it like a wedding ring on her left ring-finger. I asked if she ever thought about fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years down the road.

“All the time,” she said. Her tail moved along my waist and hips like a feathered hand caressing my curves. “Someday, I’ll say goodbye to you for the last time. Same with all my friends, family, and any pets I ever have. It isn’t a happy thought.”

“I’d like to live with you forever.”

Mags wrapped her arms and legs around me in a full-body hug. “Forever’s a long time,” she said. “Too rich for my blood. How would you feel about the next 180 years?”

She was joking. Mags didn’t think anything of it, and she fell asleep next to me. For hours, I laid next to her, watching her tail occasionally flick and twitch while she dreamed. I thought about how nice her last sentence sounded.

That’s a long way of saying how we came to be at the fortuneteller’s table.

☠️

The Fortuneteller

Mags took a seat in the fortuneteller’s shop. “Are you a gypsy?” Even at eighteen, she was a paragon of tact.

“Mags,” I chided, taking a seat of my own.

“What? Isn’t that the word?”

The old woman across the table neither frowned nor smiled. Even in the dim light, her colorful shawl and the Indian print on her flowing dress spoke of sensuality and joy, but I suspect she was reserved when confronted with strangers and possible fools such as we were. Mags’ bluster didn’t make a ripple in the pool of dusky calm. “We prefer the term Romani.” The fortuneteller lit a cone of incense and set it in a pewter holder. The pewter had been shaped into a network of vines, all interwoven, and a pleasant blue-grey smoke drifted through the openings between their leaves. “What can I do for you?

I said, “We’re searching for magic.”

At that, she smiled. Her eyes sparkled in the candlelight, and the silver rings on her fingers did, too. Despite her age, I thought she looked quite beautiful and alive. Playful, in a quiet way, seasoned by decades. “Magic is everywhere. I can point you to it, but you need to see it for yourself.”

Mags lit a fag. “That sounds about right. We’re looking for a spell, but I don’t think it exists anywhere on Earth.”

The fortuneteller set a deck of cards on the table, facedown. “Where do you think it is?”

“The dreamtime,” I said. “We were hoping you could point us in the right direction.” I laid a trio of gold coins on the red velvet cloth. “If you would be so kind.”

At that, the woman raised an eyebrow. Without looking at them, she swept the coins off the table and into a brass bowl where they landed with a clink, clink, clink. She set the bowl on a small, circular table next to her, in a clear spot surrounded by strange bones, bundles of dried herbs, and a few piles of books. “That’s an odd place to search for a spell. Why don’t we start with a three-card spread?” She fanned the cards, still facedown, and swept the back of one withered hand across them. “Point to three cards.”

Mags reached to pick up one of them, but the fortuneteller’s hand blocked her. “Don’t touch them. Just point.”

Mags acquiesced then let me choose the next two.

The fortuneteller flipped one over. “The first card,” she said, “is where you start on this journey. This is the Two of Cups. It shows a partnership, perhaps even love between two soulmates. The universe has positive energy to send you, but you must find balance and harmony to receive it. The two people pictured here seek a deeper commitment.”

The old woman’s skeletal fingers moved to the second card and turned it over. “This is the next stage of your journey.”

“Oh, great,” said Mags. “He looks like he’s been stabbed to death.”

“I suppose. The Ten of Swords can be read a few ways. One possible message is that the dying person failed to listen to her own better judgment, and her lapse is responsible for her suffering.”

Mags flicked the ash from the end of her ciggie. “We’re fucked.”

I said, “Shush, Magpie. What’s the other interpretation?”

“The death of the ego. Next to the Two of Cups, it might mean that these two who seek unity must give up their idea of being two different people—the idea that they are individual egos.”

Mags purred. “I like that one better.”

I patted her knee. “Go on. What’s number three?”

“Four of Wands,” said the old woman. “Is one of you having a birthday party?”

Mags and I laughed. “Not yet,” I said, “but there is a question of birthdays. Who are these four women dancing?”

“The elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Here, they dance in unison, celebrating. They share their joy with each other.”

I said, “That’s exactly what we had in mind.”

Mags leaned in. “You’re saying these lovers need to have their separateness destroyed, but after that, they dance in a field of joy?”

The fortuneteller said, “That’s one way of looking at it.”

I kissed Mags on the cheek. “It’s a happy ending!”

She put her arm around me. “I’m a bit concerned about getting stabbed to death, but I do like the after party.” She nuzzled me, then asked the old woman, “How do we get there?”

“I’m afraid the cards won’t tell you that.”

I took a few more coins from my purse and placed them on the table. “We understand. But we’d like to hear your opinion.”

Again, a hand that looked like tree branches wrapped in wrinkled leather swept the coins into a bowl. Clink, clink, clink. “I see you two young ladies are serious. Give an old woman a moment.”

She pressed her palms on the table and rose from her chair. I’ve never seen anyone move so slowly. She made her way to the bookshelf that took up the entire wall behind her. The lights weren’t so good—just a few candles near the card-reading table—so I couldn’t see what she picked up until she came back, step by eternal step.

She set a brass stand on the table. The metal picked up every sliver of light the candles cared to throw at it. She set a glass globe in the stand. Freed from her hands, it also reveled in the candlelight. I swear I saw a million stars inside.

I didn’t notice how long it took the fortuneteller to regain her seat, and the only thing that snapped me back to the present moment was Mags squeezing my hand.

Clouds of incense drifted through the dusk and surrounded the crystal ball. They swirled for a moment, then buggered off to parts unknown.

The woman said, “The magic you seek is older than humanity.” She extended a bony finger toward Mags. “But you wear this magic now.”

“Damn right,” said Mags. “Great-gramma’s magic.”

“Not just hers. She harnessed what came before.”

“Before what?”

The fortuneteller ignored Mags’ question and closed her eyes. She placed both hands on the glass orb.

Mags gave me a look that said, What the fuck? But I raised one finger to my lips.

The fortuneteller spoke ten words that would forever change my life. “The red hill,” she said. “You must go to the red hill.”

☠️

The Red Hill

“Here we are!” Mags fell onto the hilltop and laughed. “This legendary Barlangi Rock can kiss my fat white arse! Can’t even get a burger out here.” She sprawled. “Goddamn, I’m tired.”

I curled up beside her in the red dirt. It glittered with shards of quartz, though most of the surrounding outcrops were granite. “Shush, Magpie. I’ll sing a song, and you sing with me.”

It was all I could do to maintain a singing voice. In forty-eight hours, I’d only had a dozen beers while stumbling down that piece of shit road. The Swannies dehydrated me, but they also numbed me to that fate.

Mags whispered between cracked lips. “That old woman didn’t know dick. We’re gonna fuckin’ die out here.”

“Probably,” I said. “But as long as we’re dying, sing this one with me.”

Mags held my hand. “You start.”

In the stories Mum used to tell, the ancestors sang the world into being—the Earth and all the plants and animals, even the First People. The Hindus have a similar idea: Om, the primal sound, a vibration that kicked the universe into being. I like that idea, that everything we are and touch is music.

Mags likes it, too. You know how she is. If there’s anything she loves more than kicking arse and liberating cargo, it’s music.

If the ancients could create the world through song, then it made sense that we could contact them by singing. We just needed to speak to them in their language, right?

Back in ’42, Mags hadn’t mastered as many instruments as she can play these days, but she was off to a good start, and she had a beautiful voice. I think about times I used to eavesdrop on her singing after hours at the club, and it makes me cry. Not a sad cry, just overwhelmed. That feeling you get when someone touches your heart, but it’s too much, and it all spills out of you.

Atop the red hill at Yarrabubba, we sang together. I started with a tune Mum sang at bedtime. She claimed it was the song that sang the moon and stars into being. Overhead, the sky faded from bright blue to black. Every star in the southern hemisphere sprang to life, and the moon rose over the horizon like a bride in a glowing white gown.

We entered the dreamtime.

☠️

The Crash

More than two billion years ago, a meteorite smashed into what is now Western Australia. I remember it well. I was there.

Mags and I were singing, lying on our backs in the rusty dirt, when the moon and stars came out. Another light twinkled into view. Within seconds, it grew so bright it outshone the moon.

Mags gripped my hand, but she didn’t stop singing. I reckon she knew, as well as I did, that it wasn’t a star, and there was no way we could run far enough away to survive before it hit.

You might imagine the sound of an incoming meteor as many different things: a whistle like a bomb dropped from a plane, a scream of increasing volume, a roar. But what struck Yarrabubba that night began as a harmony, a three-part harmony between me and Mags and that wayward stone. I took the alto, as low and sultry as I could manage. The meteor took the energetic tenor. Mags belted out a soprano I didn’t know was in her range. The fourth harmony, the bass, was the explosion of that massive space rock slamming into Earth.

But a couple billion years ago, Straya wasn’t even Straya. It was just a section of one massive super-continent where all the places we know today were a single land mass, surrounded by one sea. Australia didn’t completely split from what’s now Antarctica until 30 million years ago.

Still, the asteroid impact shook the continent down to Earth’s mantle. The land it shot into the sky changed the weather. The tsunamis it generated reshaped coastlines around the planet. The fire it started burned for years.

As for me and Mags? It blasted our bodies into atoms and scattered them through wind, water, and earth, all across the globe.

We were proper fucked.

☠️

The Song

I can’t say for sure how long it took for me to realize what had happened. On a geologic scale that big, little things like years don’t seem so bloody relevant. But at some point, I heard a song, faintly flickering at first, like the light from a candle on a peak past the horizon. I felt drawn to it, but I couldn’t move. Hell, I didn’t even have a body. I was just one little atom spinning in the darkness.

Then I realized it was Mags. Her voice, though far away, came from all around me. I tried to say something, but I had no mouth. For what might have been a hundred million years, I tried to move closer to that song, wherever its source might be.

That was a dumb idea. Eventually it sank in. I wasn’t in one place any more than Mags’ voice was. I was all over the place. I wasn’t just one atom, but all my atoms, strewn across the bloody planet. And if that was true, I reckoned, then it was probably true for Mags, too.

I felt like giving up and drifting on the wind and waves.

But I don’t know if you’ve heard Mags sing before. Maybe you’re not a fan of the Psycho 78s or her solo album, or the stuff she’s been doing with Small Flowers lately. Or that new B-side she did with Dumpster Kittens. But I am, and it’s because when Mags sings, everything makes sense to me. Even when she sings about how senseless and stupid everything is, it’s like she’s singing just for me, lending her voice to what needs to be said, even if everyone else is afraid to put it into words.

So, I did what any sensible sod would do. I sang along.

Fragments of me recalled how Mum’s people thought of Straya in terms of songlines: a musical geography of the landscape and the stars above, rich with our history and destiny ages before the written word or printed maps of any kind.

After a moment that might have been seconds or millennia, Maggie’s song came closer, or I came closer to it.

Then it stopped.

“Celina? Celina, can you hear me?”

They were the first words I’d heard her speak in eons. “Magpie! What is happening to us?”

“I miss you.”

If I had a face, I would have smiled. “No, you don’t. You hit me right on target, every time.”

Laughter followed. “I think I sang a trillion verses!”

“Me too.”

“Keep singing with me. It’s got to be our only way out of this.”

I agreed. “You take the melody. I’ll harmonize.”

From all around me, a purr. “I almost got my hands back. It’s all about the vibration.”

“Then let’s vibrate, baby. Take it away.”

She did.

Over the next few hundred million years, we improvised. With time to spare, we harmonized every possible combination of the twelve-tone scale in every imaginable rhythm. Then we started in on semitones and microtones. Together we wove incessant song while continents split apart and drifted into place. As the world began to take its current shape, so did we.

No longer scattered so thin, my atoms gathered together. Looking back on it now, I realize that the waves of our song rippled across the planet, and our atoms rode those waves, like when you shake a blanket across a bed to bring it into shape. We shook the entire Earth, and tiny pieces of us began to coalesce into coherence.

That’s not to say it all went smoothly. I witnessed multiple mass extinctions, even more asteroid collisions, and the death of countless species. But life always came back, in all its myriad forms, in the oceans, air, and on the land.

I know it’s selfish of me, but despite all those deaths and rebirths, there was only one life I cared about, and she sang with me through it all.

If you ever wonder why my cranky kitty and I are inseparable to this day, keep in mind that for a couple billion years, all we tried to do was get back together.

Eventually, the shreds of my body realigned. The same happened for Mags. All the time singing. Then there was the two of us, and I slipped my hand into hers in a gesture that must have taken an epoch or two.

“Celina,” she said.

“Maggie.”

No other words were needed.

How long that moment lasted, I can’t say. But we weren’t done yet. We had not met the rainbow serpent.

Goorialla, some tribes called him. He’s credited with many things. Some are true. Some are not. But one thing is for sure. That motherfucker is gigantic!

The enormous snake appeared, and he must have been a kilometer of scales, rippling in iridescent colors, slithering around us until we were enclosed within his coils.

Above that spiraling cage, he reared his head. I was sure we were done for. His tongue flicked in and out of his mouth, smelling us. Mags held me close, and the reptilian tongue whipped us both, taking in our scent. I did not let go.

The serpentine face withdrew to a great height above us, like a mountain, but the voice emanating from its open jaws felt as near as anything I’d ever felt, like the way Mags’ song had come from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. The monster god spoke four words. “Why are you here?”

Mags almost answered first, but I put a finger to her lips. “We want to be together.”

“You are in the space of sacred songs. What makes you mortals think you have the right?” The tongue flicked at us again, smelling us and rudely slapping us about.

It stunk like hell, and I couldn’t think of anything clever to say. I clung to Mags.

She smacked the giant tongue. “Hey, fuckface! You call the tune, and we’ll sing it. We got a couple billion years of practice, so bring it on!”

That wasn’t the nicest thing to say to an ancient ancestral deity, and I was sure he would swallow us whole and shit us out onto some ethereal landscape as amorphous globs of snake poo.

But he just laughed, if you can imagine a snake laughing.

Mags gave me a squeeze and raised her voice. “Listen, you legless freak! We were just getting warmed up. Now call the tune!”

Maybe he was amused that a tiny mortal considered herself the equal of gods. But his coils undulated around us, and he called the tune. It was that tune—a song without a proper name but older than time itself—that welded the magic of Mags’ ring to me. And believe me, we sang that tune like it was the last one ever written.

For as many years as we had spent trying to reunite, nothing prepared me for the moment where our bodies and souls merged into one person wearing the same ring. It was like Mags and I were overlaid on top of each other, and for just one second, my ring-finger and her ring-finger shared the same space and time, enclosed by the silver band her great-gramma made. The rainbow serpent encircled us, and his scales turned the same silver color as Mags’ ring. The magic that promised to keep Mags alive for two hundred years became a magic I shared.

Then the serpent opened his mouth, and his fangs were also gleaming silver. Beyond them, only blackness. In a strike as swift as lightning, he swallowed us whole. The darkness was everywhere and everything, with nothing beyond its edges.

☠️

The Waterhole

We awoke at night in a pool of fresh water near Perth, sputtering and wiping our faces. I knew it was near Perth because I saw the lights of Fremantle Harbour, from which I’d sailed a dozen times.

Mags said, “Where are we?” She found a handhold on the side of the hole and pulled herself to dry land. She held out one hand for me.

I grasped it and followed her up. “Goorialla is the god of waterholes. He travels between them.”

“Gooey who?”

“Goorialla. That giant snake you just cursed out.”

Mags’ tail snapped every which way to rid itself of water. “That fuckin’ guy.”

“We’re lucky he didn’t eat us.”

“He’s lucky I didn’t eat him! But I will say this.” She scooped a handful of water from the pool and lapped it up. “Damned decent of him not to puke us up on that bloody crater in the middle of nowhere.”

“He’s not all bad.” I practically inhaled water from my cupped hands.

We sated our thirst. “Mags? My oldies’ place must be just a klick from here, right over that hill. Why don’t we stop in for a cuppa and a lie down?”

Mags collapsed on the rock. “I’m so buggered, I could pass out right here.”

“Me too. Or we could enjoy some cozy pillows and curl up next to each other. Maybe sing ourselves to sleep.”

Mags lifted her prone figure onto one elbow. “I’ve had about enough of singing for the next ten trillion years,” she lied. “But let’s go cuddle.”

☠️

Gratitude

In Mum’s native language, people don’t say please or thank you. The words don’t even exist. It’s true that I think a few polite words go a long way toward helping everyone get along without killing each other, but I also see the wisdom in not relying on words alone.

Mum’s family didn’t omit those words out of rudeness, but because they felt gratitude should be demonstrated. If someone did something nice for you, then you bloody well did nice things for them, too! That was how it worked. You couldn’t just say thanks and expect that to be the end of it. You had an obligation to help those who helped you.

Mum and Dad lived that idea. By modern standards, they were rough and inelegant with each other in the way they spoke. But not a day went by without one of them demonstrating love. It might have been Mum reserving the best cut of meat for him, or Dad brushing her hair by candlelight after dinner. It might have been the way she never pressed him to talk about what was troubling him, or the way he always told her everything once he simmered down.

It was the opposite of the powers from Europe who dressed up their actions in pretty words on their mad quest to conquer the world. They liked flowery speeches about nobility and liberty, but Europe’s hearts were filled with greed, not love, and their words rang hollow.

Mags and I always saw eye-to-eye on that. She’ll never have a career as a diplomat. She prefers abusive language. But she always understood that gratitude isn’t a word, but an action.

After our experience in the dreaming, we had no debate over whether we should do something. It was only a question of what we could do to show our gratitude. The spirits of the dreamtime had granted our wish, and though we were a bit too young to understand all the implications of that gift, we knew we needed to repay the ancients who gave it to us.

It took a while to get it sorted. In fact, it took nearly two years. But in 1944, Mags and her gramma reunited in the wake of the Allied Operation Overlord. Magpie traveled to France and saw firsthand the destruction of not just the country of her birth, but of her gramma’s estate.[18] She resolved to make a new home for women displaced by war, and she wrote to me in the States to ask if I would join her.

I didn’t even finish the letter before I knew I was in. We were still a couple of hot-headed young sheilas, and rough as guts back then. But we had an opportunity to create something new in a place where all hope had been lost. And maybe—just maybe—we could make enough difference in the world to show our gratitude to the powers who brought us together.

I booked my ticket overseas, and a new chapter began.

---

[1] “Cot case” meaning an insane person, presumably for occupying a cot in a primitive mental hospital. Also used as a derogatory term for any inebriated or otherwise mentally incapacitated person.

[2] Richrath, Gary Dean, et. al. (1978). Time for Me to Fly. On You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can’t Tune a Fish. Nashville: HoriPro Entertainment Group (acquired in 2019 by Mojo Music & Media Group).

[3] Richrath, Gary Dean. (1980). Take It on the Run. On High Infidelity. Nashville: HoriPro Entertainment Group (acquired in 2019 by Mojo Music & Media Group).

[4] “Chips” are known as French fries in the States.

[5] “Flat” meaning apartment.

[6] “Pissed” meaning drunk, not angry.

[7] Celina is recounting events from the end of Curtain of Fire, from her perspective. That story also introduced Bert and his club, and his scene which Celina retells here. Celina was 17 in 1938 when she met Mags, despite lying about her age, and Mags was 14, turning 15 that November.

[8] The Australian government did not recognize indigenous people as citizens until 1967, with the passage of the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals). Even then, nothing about the law gave the First People full rights of citizenship, such as suffrage. The constitutional change merely granted the Australian government the power to make laws regarding indigenous peoples and count them in the national census.

[9] “Seppo” meaning people of the United States. Historians disagree over whether the term derives from “separatists”—because the USA separated from England—or because seppo is short for “septic tank”, which rhymes with “Yank” as in “Yankee”. As to why Australians and people in the UK use rhyming slang, that’s an entirely different subject.

[10] “Natter” meaning a chat.

[11] Celina is summarizing events told in more detail in Curtain of Fire. Mags next recalls a conversation she had with Jack in that story.

[12] “A sausage short of a barbecue”, much like the saying “not playing with a full deck”. In other words, mentally deficient.

[13] Mags is recounting experiences mentioned in Curtain of Fire. The difficulty of finding decent socks during the anarchist uprising in Barcelona in the 1930s is documented in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Socks might not sound like a big deal, but a lack of clean socks contributed to horrifying foot diseases.

[14] “Ute” meaning a utility vehicle, which could be anything from a Jeep to a light pickup truck.

[15] Bandywallop and Woop-Woop are remote, imaginary towns, similar to “Hicksville” in the States.

[16] “There’s a 24-pack in the trunk.”

[17] See Great-Gramma Magdalena’s explanation of this phenomenon in Curtain of Fire.

[18] Weight of the Universe shows this moment in a flashback and tells a story about life at the home Mags and Celina helped create.

seven short poems

Tags

poems, poetry, singing spell, writing

These seven seven-line poems go with a new short story called The Singing Spell, which should be ready to share soon. The subjects relate to the story, and the first letters of each line spell out the poem’s title. It’s not a form I usually work in, but I thought it would be fun to try something different.

PATCHES

Pressed close to the ground,
a solitary huntress hungers
to taste what scurries and forages unaware.

Calico colors—brown, black, and white—
hide her in the sun-dappled forest floor.

Everything comes down to
survival.

BILLION

Before history,
I knew you
like a light or a
lyric or the
iridescence of a hummingbird.

Only now,
nothing separates us.

NEBULAE

Nurseries of infant stars,
expectant giants and
black holes hungering for birth,
ushered into a theater of
light and violent gravity where
all who ever lived await
eternity’s epilogue.

MINERAL

Maybe next time,
I come back a stone.
Nowhere to go or
escape, just
rock.

Alabaster.
Limestone.

SERPENT

Sometimes you need to shed
everything to find the
right skin.

Pent-up explosions
emerge as something new.

No one ever mourned
the cell she escaped.

FORTUNE

Fate remains silent,
only speaking in unsolved mysteries.

Road signs vanish, and
travelers lose their way
until that unexpected
night, when
everything at last makes sense.

HIGHWAY

How we got here
is less important than why.

Go as far as your
heart can take you, and
when you reach the
arid edge of time,
you will find me.

Reflections on Writing The Crystal Core

Tags

crystal core, meteor mags, writing

UPDATE: In October 2020, I published The Crystal Core as part of the collection The Singing Spell, but you can still read it for free on this blog. Here are some personal reflections about writing the story.

Some of Mags’ adventures began as basic plot ideas, some grew out of an idea for a scene or a piece of dialogue, and some started as a concept about an object or situation I thought it would be fun to write about. The Crystal Core is an example of all three of these possibilities combined.

The plot inspiration goes back to The Battle of Vesta 4, where I realized I had given my pirate crew a too-powerful object: the multidimensional “triglyph”. If I had included the triglyph in that story, the conflict would have been far too easy for the crew to overcome. Rather than address the situation, I decided to ignore it for a while and come back to it later—hopefully with a plausible explanation. Along the way, I wrote 1,000 words of notes on possible narrative paths to take with the triglyph.

While writing Small Flowers, I planted the seeds for the triglyph’s return. Plutonian questioned Mags about why she didn’t use it, and she revealed she had forgotten about it. The epilogue ended on a minor cliffhanger. Mags discovered the triglyph was missing from her armory where she placed it at the end of The Lost Crew of the Volya IX. By then, I’d reworked my original notes into an idea to use the triglyph to terraform Titan.

But as I mentioned in my reflections about Small Flowers, I watched a ton of documentaries that influenced that story and the shorter pieces published with it. I’ve been reading about space, stars, and black holes since I was in third or fourth grade, but I don’t recall learning about the diamond cores of white dwarf stars until early 2020. My mind was blown by the idea that these huge diamonds are burning in outer space, but I didn’t know what to do with that concept. So, I asked a friend what she would do with a huge crystal from space.

She said, “Build a radio.”

That was the moment my plot ideas and my “high concept” intersected, and I knew I needed to write that story. I started cranking out more notes and scenes around the concept, but I was confused by some aspects of crystal radios.

Fortunately, a member of my writers’ workshop (the illustrious Jeff Duntemann) is a ham-radio enthusiast, so I called him. He cleared up my misconceptions, enlightened me about a few missing pieces of the puzzle, and showed me where I needed to patch up the science to achieve some minimum standard of plausibility.

This is one of the best things about having writers, artists, and musicians as friends. I can call them unexpectedly and, without much preamble or small talk, say crazy things such as, “Can you help me build a giant crystal radio from a star core?” That’s how I end up having intriguing and educational conversations for an hour or more about things most people never think about.

The Crystal Core became a unique episode in Mags’ adventures. It has long passages of narration about terraforming Titan and building the giant space radio, scenes where I flexed my prose muscles to see if I could write about science but keep it poetic, beautiful, and interesting. Those scenes alternate with discussions that focus on dialogue and character interaction.

But I wanted to do something even weirder with the story: use multiple narrators. I wanted to get inside the characters’ streams of consciousness when they encountered the new rulers of Titan and got their minds messed with, telepathically.

I’ve read a ton of science-fiction prose and comic books that did similar things, but I sometimes find them difficult to follow. I like challenging narrative techniques in prose and film and comics, but I don’t like it when I feel the author is wanking instead of clearly telling a story in the most effective way possible. As I’ve written before in essays on narrators and points of view, the choice to get creative with narrators or structure needs to be more than a demonstration of how clever the author is. I’m not impressed by being incomprehensible. I’m impressed when the choice of a narrator or structure is perfect because any other choice would not tell the story as effectively.

You can judge for yourself how well I lived up to my own standard. Sometimes my reach exceeds my grasp, and that’s a normal part of growing and improving as a writer. Much of my writing in Mags’ adventures is a journey toward being able to live up to my own expectations about what makes a good story, or what makes beautiful prose, or what is entertaining to read. I feel I get closer to my ideals as the series progresses and, like most writers, I’m sometimes frustrated that I didn’t quite have the “chops” to do justice to some of my earliest stories. But with each story, I work on improving everything from descriptive language to comedic timing, from plotting to character development, and the myriad other things that make up a great story.

The Crystal Core continues a trend that began in the opening scene of Blind Alley Blues, which is a diary entry from Mags. In Small Flowers, I incorporated the idea that Mags writes letters to her somewhat-deceased great-gramma, which gives Mags more opportunities to narrate events in her unique voice. These letters have often been “behind the scenes” projects that never saw print. I wrote a good letter for Voyage of the Calico Tigress, but it didn’t quite fit the overall structure, so I cut it from the final version. With Small Flowers, I tried to weave the letters into the story in integral ways, and The Last Patches Story completely hands over the narrative reins to Mags so she can tell an imaginary bedtime tale about Patches. (One of my original ideas for that story involved using Patches as a first-person narrator, but I didn’t care for how that played out.)

With The Crystal Core, I wanted to extend the boundaries of what was possible with using other members of the pirate crew as narrators, too. Other than Hang My Body on the Pier, which featured excerpts from Great-Gramma’s memoirs, Crystal Core is the first story where anyone but Mags gets a shot at narrating. Dr. Plutonian narrates a scene and, like the scene of Mags’ narration that follows it, it takes place while the telepathic octopuses are disassembling his mind. I set myself the challenge of showing this confusing state of mind while making it absolutely clear to the reader who was talking, what was happening, and why.

I feel like it worked, and initial feedback told me it worked, so I considered why it worked. The text contains details that help, such as Mags’ straight-up telling the readers exactly what she thinks is happening to her mind. But in terms of remaining true to a character’s unique voice when slipping into first-person internal monologue, I think the key to success was the amount of time I have spent living in these characters’ heads for more than half a decade now.

They might have started out as comic-book caricatures, but over the years these characters have become more complex and real people to me. I suspect any writer who spends a serious amount of time on long-form stories will tell you the same thing. When you, as an author, share and invest so much of your life and your thoughts and your feelings with your characters, they undergo what I think of as the Pinocchio Effect. At some magical point or phase in the journey, the characters stop being puppets on your strings and become real to you. They take on a life of their own. They place demands on you. They help you understand yourself in relation to them. You know they are mere fictions, but like the golem of Jewish mythology or the monster of Dr. Frankenstein, they become imbued with their own lifeforce, their own desires, their own path in this world.

I’m lucky, compared to some novelists. Many novelists go through the pain of creating and bringing to life a set of characters that will never be seen again after the novel’s final page. But because I am writing an open-ended, ongoing series with roots that stretch for hundreds of millions of years into the past, and branches that extend beyond the end of our universe, I don’t feel any need to finish working with my characters or close the final page on them. I have all the time in the world to get to know them—or at least, all the time I have remaining on this planet.

By the time I got around to giving Plutonian a scene to narrate, I had spent so many years with him that I felt confident I could write in his voice. He delivered an extended monologue in The Lost Crew of the Volya IX where he told Mags about an event in his past. That was the first scene I ever workshopped, about four years ago now. I love a good monologue, but that’s different from being inside the character’s head, which is what happens in The Crystal Core.

I didn’t know for sure how The Crystal Core would end when I started drafting scenes, but my workshoppers will attest to the fact that I am a big believer in writing the ending before the story is finished. As a writer, I’m not interested in taking a mysterious journey into the unknown by simply starting with the first page of a story and writing until it feels finished. The mysterious journey is the reader’s experience, not the writer’s.

People who write by the seat of their pants often encounter the same problems over and over again: not knowing where they are headed when they are in the middle of the story, and therefore not knowing what scenes or moments of character development matter, or how to advance their plot. They often arrive at unsatisfactory endings, assuming they don’t give up in frustration halfway through—something that’s happened to many writers I know.

My advice? Once you are clear on the characters and their motivations and central conflicts, write an ending! Know where you are going! Writing without knowing how your story ends is like trying to play a game of darts while wearing a blindfold. You might hit the bullseye out of pure chance or luck, but it’s doubtful. If, instead, you draft the ending earlier in the process, then you know what you are aiming for, and you can construct a story that inevitably leads to that conclusion. Yes, the ending might need to be revised by the time you finish the rest of the story, so don’t sweat too many of the little details. A draft of the ending is only there to give yourself the gift of direction and purpose.

For The Crystal Core, I had about half of it drafted before I tackled the ending, but I knew I needed a firm finish to guide me through the middle. I asked myself, “What would be the most logical and consistent ending for a quasi-intelligent and supremely powerful object, especially after it encountered my octopuses?”

The ending is influenced by my love of science-fiction comic books where the fate of the entire universe (or even the multi-verse) is at stake on a daily basis, and it’s a logical development of my push to constantly expand the scope of possibilities within Mags’ adventures. The Crystal Core, like The Last Patches Story, is an attempt to connect the lives of the pirate crew to huge, cosmic-level events.

It was a fun story to write. I enjoyed expanding the boundaries of what I could do with these characters and their universe, connecting the cosmic experience to the personal stories, and seeing how big I could go in fewer than 8,000 words.

My only question is, “What’s next?”