THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN #1 READING/SIGNING

When: Thursday October 15 7 PM-9 PM
Where: The Human Bean Coffeehouse
998 SE Oak St. Hillsboro, OR (503)747-6731

What:(clears throat, pops mic)

A weird little railroad town in Central PA that becomes the drain plug for Armageddon.

A girl the hero fell in love with when he was no older than Dante living 'La Vita Nuova', forged into a heroine worthy of the hardest hard SF by brute necessity, thrown back in Time too late, every time, to find her Taliesn again and get the hell home.

Twenty-two years of chasing the shadow with a camera, and realizing that only a lens separates you from it. Nietzsche covered that. (The monster's taking your picture, too...)

All this, and so much more, and more before... Come on down and sit on round. The Reverend has been a-building this here Fire Sermon since he was old enough to type.

News From The Front

Blistering day of work today, punctuated by the odd power nap and even odder news articles to cleanse my mental palate, or maybe soil it so much my eyes for the work became fresh...

In any case, I finished The Big Reggae Story I've been trying to do for three years. Originally, it was an alternate history quasi-SF piece that switched lives with Bob Marley and Samuel R. Delany.

It didn't fly. I'll leave it right there. Chip Delany is a polymath and a prodigy. I'm not. I couldn't pull that one off.

But the core premise was sound, and an interesting riff in America in the Fifties about Sun Records down in Memphis, that was sound too. I needed a set of lives closer together to switch, to make the story truly sing. Then I discovered Jackie Opel, a Barbadan transplant whom many reviewers called 'The Jackie Wilson Of Jamaica.' And the premise for 'Higher And Higher' was solved.

5500 words and one power-nap later, I woke and fired up the Facebook demon, to hear that a story I truly, truly believe in that got roundly rejected has been tentatively accepted in an anthology. So maybe there's hope for "Higher And Higher" as well.

Back to work. More to come.