Behold my 95-year-old grandma posing for her birthday:
This is one awesome lady, folks. You can behold the magnificence here. Or, If that’s not your cup of tea, you can look at some links.
Instead of evicting tenants, land-lord gets a job. Wow. Just wow. More people like that would be great. Speaking of great, ever wonder what goes through an editor’s mind during manuscript preparation? Note how the article emphasizes this is a GOOD editing scenario. Oh, and if you’d like some interesting brain-candy, check out this graphic novel adaption of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, online for free. Nifty!
Got twenty five million dollars to spare? How about a house?
Bizarre shoe. Yes, that’s a shoe. Yes. It really is. Dang, that’s creative. Speaking of creative, here is a very, VERY good article for those of us still in the process: seven things learned from querying.
Check out the plague doctors. Look at those guys! The bird masks! The leather pants! I am seriously working these into my books somehow. I am also working in semi-colons. I like semi-colons. Speaking of which: In defense of the semi-colon. Preach it, sistah.
And now, a snippet from a book about Notte – the first vampire. Feel free to picture this all with an Italian accent. 😀
My memories are not what they should be. I am aware that I was a young man once, human, a simple scholar, reading the stars and raising a family barely younger than I. That is, after all, how it was done in those days. Once one could create children, one did.
All that I have are single images, mental snapshots, viewed in sepia as if from a great distance, and these pictures came to me at great price. I do know this much: I was born, and later, I was made.
The ones who made me took me from my young family. They took me from my studies, from the protected city which I knew, and they changed me. They gave me to the stars I loved in a way I had never been given before.
There are times when I have wondered what difference it makes to be born through pain. My sepia dreams of the changes done to me are accompanied by pain, such pain, but of course, I did not at first remember them, and so my question is likely moot.
The first real memory – real, in color, with all senses engaged – was waking in the woods and finding that I lay under stars I loved but could not name. Finding that the night was no longer dark. Finding that all I wanted was to feed.
The hunger is beautiful, my friend. Delicious; intoxicating, like the finest aged and herb-touched alcohols of ancient priests, but far more potent. I woke, and I hungered; the Beast became me. The Beast became all that I was.
I ran through the woods. The trees, the shadows, the darkness – every sound in the air, every little heartbeat and pulse, from the tiniest spider to the largest lizard – I heard and felt and craved. I wanted to drink them all, to feel them pulsing inside me without conflict because I no longer had a pulse. Yet they were not enough. I wanted what I could not name – man-blood – but all I found at first were animals. So, after a time of searching and whining in wordless frustration, I pursued the largest animal I saw.
The deer fled from me. My Beast was not yet stealthy; finesse was a silly concept, considered at the back of my mind and then discarded. I was faster, that was all. She could not flee. Ah, my friend, my friend, the blood! Glory, bliss! Sweet, tangy, powerful, every cell filled with something I could not even identify, and as I drank, for the briefest of moments, I knew myself to be strange. Blood did not taste like this. I had tasted blood in the past. I knew I had, although my past was lost to me; I recalled waking and nothing more. But this!
The Beast tasted blood, and it became his one true love. His beloved; to be caressed, and treasured, and embraced and savored and until forever became ever more and always! The blood was all!
Then came the cold, strange shock of dead blood as the deer’s heart stopped, and I – the Beast – knew the horror of rejection. Then came the cold inglory of the blood that deserted me. The harshness of blood that no longer spoke or sang, that thickened perceptibly to sludge, that tasted now of foulness and the grave. I turned away from the corpse with a cry and vomited some of what I had taken. The memory of bliss hurt. I wept.
