Monday, December 19, 2016

At the End of the Tunnel, Light: Update on Work in Progress

Pleased to report my literary-suspense manuscript, Cucariva, is nearing the end of first draft. I'm pretty excited about it but like any first draft I know it may be improved: I have a few terrific beta-readers lined up but if you are interested, please let me know. Here's an excerpt:

With dark comes cold and he shivers but does not rouse from his slumber against the stone, grown cold against his back. Rather sees himself from on high, some celestial remove, telescoping eye of a voyeuristic moon. Lunar eyebrow raised at this strange hominid figure drawn up in chilled repose against this marker of the dead. He feels in his sleep for what covering there might be, but his hands find only a ghost-white latticework of cobwebs, garish, of the sort sold to Halloween revelers. He sheaths himself no matter, cocooning for the viscid warmth. Mummified creature, All Hallows Eve has passed, save here, where lives only death and spirits abide no aegis but the explication of their demise.
And now such spirits as here dwell amble forth from out the shadows, coin of the realm for all days to come. Approach this prostrate, swaddled figure, raise him up, these non-corporeals, by force of will reserved for the indignant dead. The earth beneath him tremulous, shifting, falling away, dark waters rising in its wake. He is trussed up in his cobweb suit, Sunday best, and is it Sunday or who rightly knows, in this madness which time forgot? Limbs splayed, flush against this sacred stone, come before this patronage of peers who row into the onyx waters of this world fallen away. Strange and spectral oarsmen sallied forth for this the hour of midnight judgment. Through gauzy lens he watches a giant, moonlit hare lope uncertainly across the firmament. Put down your bow, Orion, I'm only grazing here.