by john | Nov 24, 2011 | Fiction, Vampires, Writing
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! Here’s a little something I tossed together for your enjoyment!
Turkey Day Debacle
By John G. Hartness
I knew I was in trouble when I stepped into the grocery store. I looked over at Abby and said, in all sincerity “Remind what people eat on Thanksgiving again?”
“Well, turkey for starters” was the snotty reply from my shopping partner, a twenty-two year old newly turned vampire with a body to die for (if I wasn’t already dead) and an attitude to slit your wrists over.
“I remember the turkey, smartass. What else?”
“Jeez, Jimmy, how long have you been dead again? There’s stuffing, ham, cranberry juice, rice, gravy, biscuits, casseroles, desserts, Oh my God, the desserts! I’d almost forgotten the desserts!” She was leaning on the shopping cart writhing an a not-unpleasant way that was probably a lot more distracting to the live patrons of the store than it was to me.
“Stop that, you’re scaring the mortals.” I shouldered her aside and took the cart, heading towards the back of the store and the first mission – turkey.
“I was not!” Abby protested, but fell into step beside me. “Are you sure we can’t eat? Not even just a little pumpkin pie?”
“It’s not a good idea.” I remembered my first meal after turning, how everything tasted like sawdust and then upset my delicate digestive system for days. Even though our new place had multiple bathrooms, I didn’t wish that kind of suffering on anyone, dead or alive.
“What’s the worst thing that could happen? I’m already dead, after all!” So I told her, in extreme graphic detail, the worst that could happen. She turned even paler than normal, then shifted to a lovely shade of green before running into the restroom at the back of the store.
I parked the cart at the meat department and walked down the aisle looking at the different flavors of pre-cooked turkeys available for purchase. Cajun turkeys, smoked turkeys, spiced turkeys and Honeybaked Ham turkeys. The last one confused me a little. I wasn’t sure if it was a ham-flavored turkey, a turkey-flavored ham, or just a normal turkey-flavored turkey made by Honeybaked Ham people. Regardless I picked up the smallest turkey-style turkey that I could find. After all, only three of our six-person dinner party could actually eat food, so it’s not like Greg and I would be making a lot of turkey and O-Negative sandwiches.
By the time I’d picked up the cranberry sauce, Abby was back beside me, glaring at me every now and then for making her go barf. I was just pleased to share the misery. We picked out the rest of the supplies for our feast in relative silence, then I stopped dead in the middle of the dairy department.
“What now?” Abby asked, giving me a petulant look that she had perfected in her life as an adorable college coed. That life had come crashing to an end a few months ago at the hands of a visiting vampire, and now Abby was as (un)dead as I was. Her last confrontation with her maker didn’t turn out so well for the older vamp, so I kept the volatile young woman at arm’s length when she started tossing around nasty looks.
“Do you know if the stove works?”
“Yes. I checked it before we left tonight.”
“Do we have any pots and pans?”
“God, you’re really bad at this, aren’t you?”
“Cut me a little slack, Abby, I’ve been dead almost as long as I was alive, and I wasn’t exactly the most responsible person even when I was still human.” She must have seen something in my face, because she let that one slide. I’m not usually an angsty vampire, but sometimes, holidays in particular, it kinda sucks being dead and having abandoned most of the people that knew you when you were alive. That’s why this dinner was so important – there would be more people there than just me & Greg for the first time in a bunch of years. Sabrina Law, my almost-on-my-luckiest-day girlfriend and police detective with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and Father Mike Maloney, our best childhood friend, were joining Greg, Abby and I for dinner. We’d invited Bobby, our blood vendor from the morgue, but he was spending time with his family, all of whom were alive and unlikely to look upon him as an appetizer.
Abby nodded silently and took over cart-pushing duties while I fretted over the last few things on the list. Did I want to make fresh cranberry sauce or canned? After a brief but heated debate with Abby, I settled on canned. There’s just something a little charming about the gelatinous mass of cranberry sauce jiggling on a plate, still sporting the indentions from the side of the can. We finished up the last remnants of the shopping and headed to the front of the store. It was pretty close to deserted, there not being many people loading up on canned goods and milk at four AM the night before Thanksgiving. But when you’re the living dead you have certain restrictions on your movement that humans don’t have, and you end up becoming familiar with all sorts of places at all sorts of atypical times.
Even for the middle of the night, the front of the store was sparsely manned. I only saw one cashier working, no bagboys, and one pudgy twenty-something assistant manager leaning on the Customer Service counter. He had his phone in his hands and sported the studious look of a man very intent on an epic Angry Birds session. I walked over to the cashier and started unloading the cart onto the conveyor belt. I looked over the items and glanced back at Abby.
“I don’t think Hershey bars were on the list.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. These are not the candy bars you are looking for.”
“I’m not looking for any candy bars, and yet here they are. And don’t try to Jedi mind trick me. You know you can’t eat those, right?” She pouted a little, and I heard a little hmph from the cashier.
I looked at her and caught her giving me the kind of look that female grad students give to clueless frat boys right before they launch into a lecture on feminism. I raised my hand to her before she could start and jerked a thumb back at Abby. “Lactose intolerant. If she eats milk chocolate she farts like a basset hound. It’s amazing. Last time she ate a bowl of ice cream she blow out three windows in the kitchen.”
Abby threw a can of peas at my head, but I heard them moving through the air and caught them before I got a concussion. I put the last of our groceries on the belt and asked for plastic bags, pulling out a wad of cash that my dinner entree had been carrying around. I mentioned that on this holiday I was particularly thankful for muggers with lots of cash and not too much crystal meth in their bloodstream. Meth does nasty things to vampire teeth, too, so I was glad the thug I’d had for dinner was pretty straight-edge.
I saw the cashier’s eyes go wide a second before I heard the shotgun go off, so I had just enough time to reach over the counter and knock her to the ground when the gun went off. I ducked between the aisles and reached into my boot for my Ruger LCP. Which I immediately remembered was sitting on my bedside table, because what could happen, it’s a ten-minute trip to the grocery store in the middle of the night. I’m sometimes not the sharpest fang in the jaw, okay?
“Are you packing?” I hissed back at Abby.
“No, I didn’t think I’d need a gun in the produce section. You?”
“No, I picked today to give up on my general pessimism towards the human race.”
“Great timing.”
“Yeah, right. Can you check on the cashier? I kinda knocked her down a little.”
“A little?” Came a third, and indignant, voice. “You shoved me into the middle of next week. You’re strong for a skinny little dork!” I looked around and saw the cashier’s head poking out of the end of the aisle.
“Thanks, I think.” I replied dryly. “You wanna get back under cover before or after you get shot?” Her head snapped back behind the conveyer belt, and I glanced back at Abby. “Keep her alive.” I whispered, then I stood up.
The sound of shell racking into the chamber of a twelve-gauge shotgun is unmistakable, and that’s the first thing I heard when I stood up. Much to my chagrin, the sound was much closer than I had expected. Therefore, so was the gun. I looked over about ten feet from the end of my aisle and there stood our robber du jour. He looked pretty comfortable with the shotgun, but didn’t look like he’d robbed many grocery stores. He looked more like he’d been out hunting for his Thanksgiving turkey the old-fashioned way and decided to knock over a Piggly Wiggly on the way home.
“Hey.” I said, holding my hands out where he could see I was unarmed.
“Hey.” He said back, pointing the shotgun at my head. I knew from recent experience that a well-placed load of buckshot could in fact kill a vampire, because it can blow a head clean off a body, thus counting for decapitation. So I didn’t want to do anything that would end up with me dead. Um, deader. Or really dead. You get the idea.
“Can I help you with something?” I started moving slowly towards him, trying to keep my body between his line of sight and where Abby was hiding, and hopefully coming up with a better plan than the one I was currently exercising.
“Get me the money from the cash register! And the safe!” He ended each sentence with a jab in my general direction of the shotgun. I made my way to the register and looked for a NO SALE button. No luck.
“How do I open this thing?” I whispered to the cashier, who was curled up behind my knees.
“You need a manager’s keys.” I looked around, but the fat manager kid was nowhere to be seen.
“We’ve got a little problem there,” I said to the man with the gun. “You see, it takes a manager’s keys to open the register, and I’m not a manager. In fact, I don’t even work here.” I chuckled a little, giving the whole thing my best we’ll laugh at this later vibe, but he didn’t laugh along with me.
He aimed the shotgun straight at me and gave me a cold look. “Then you better find a manager real fast, or I’m going to spread pieces of you all over the front of this store.” Bingo. As soon as he made eye contact, I locked gazes with him and started pouring mojo into him.
I looked at him confidently and said “You do not want to hurt anyone. Put the gun down and lie down on your stomach.”
He looked at me like I was crazy and replied “I don’t want to hurt anybody, but if I don’t get some money in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to shoot you in the face.” Crap. Either my mojo was on the fritz, or Greg’s latest theory was right – that mojo didn’t work when the subject was under a big load of adrenaline. Or he was one of the rare people my mojo just didn’t work on, like Sabrina. But the adrenaline thing made more sense.
I held up my hands and started toward him, slowly. “Okay, but the last place I saw the manager was over at Customer Service. He’s probably run halfway to Charleston by now, but if he dropped his keys, they’ll be back there.”
He waved the shotgun towards the counter. “Go get ‘em.”
I never took my eyes off him as I made my way to the counter, trying to keep the counter and Abby in my peripheral vision the whole time. It worked like most things in my life, which is to say not at all, because I tripped over a buggy and went ass over teakettle about eight feet from the Customer Service desk. I went down in a gangly tangle of spiky hair, black jeans and polished chrome, making enough noise to raise the dead. If I wasn’t already risen.
Abby, being the smarter of our duo, took the diversion as an opportunity and sprang up from her hiding spot in the checkout aisle and chucked a can of cranberry sauce at Shotgun Guy’s head. He turned back to her just in time to get a shot off before the can caught him right between the eyes and sent him reeling to the floor. Abby jumped for the sky and the shotgun blast passed harmlessly under her. Well, harmless to her. A bunch of magazines about Demi and Ashton’s divorce and the Dancing with the Stars finale got blown to shreds, and her box of Hershey bars was pretty well destroyed.
I untangled myself from the shopping cart and walked over to the prone robber. I kicked the shotgun away from him and searched him for any sign of another weapon. Seeing her was clear, I tied his hand behind his back with his own shoelaces and mojo’d the manager kid into thinking the cashier had taken him down with no help from anyone. Abby bespelled her into thinking the same thing, and then erased our transaction from the register. I blew the surveillance tapes to bits with the shotgun, loaded the groceries into the buggy, and headed towards the car.
“Abby, did we just steal our Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked as I put the last bag in the trunk.
“Well, you can look at it two ways. One, you were going to pay for it with stolen money in the first place. Or two, it was our just reward for a good deed. But yeah, if you wanna be honest about it, we did.”
“I think your moral compass points north less often than mine does.”
“Says the soulless undead creature of the night with the priest best friend and a cop girlfriend. You’re a CW show waiting to happen, so don’t give me any crap, pal.” I slid behind the wheel and drove us home in silence, deciding that sometimes discretion really is the better part of valor.
*****
The next night about eight, after everyone laughed their way through the story of our shopping trip and Greg hacked the NFL network to get the game, we all settled in for dinner. Greg, Abby and I had glasses full of nice, thick blood, while Mike and Sabrina had plates loaded down with the grub we’d all spent much of the early evening preparing. It had been a good night, nobody new was dead, Sabrina had brought her cousin Stephen and his husband Alex to the party, and I stood to propose a toast.
“Tonight, I’m thankful for all of you. For old friends and new, you guys are the reason I get up every night to do what I do. You all make my world a better place, and I thank you for it.” A chorus of “hear, hear” and “you’re such a dork” rose from my friends, and I sat down to drink while they enjoyed dinner.
Sabrina suddenly grabbed her jaw and yelped. “Ow!” She spit something hard out into her plate, and Abby and I shared a look as a stray piece of birdshot plinked off of Sabrina’s plate. Then we all just looked at each other and laughed.
by john | Nov 20, 2011 | Return to Eden, Writing
For Sample Sunday here’s a chunk of my newest novel, Genesis – it’s a little like Mad Max meets X-Men:First Class.
The teens stopped cold at the scene in the store. Jake the storekeeper was on the ground in front of the counter, a large man looming over him holding a baseball bat in one hand. Jake was gasping for breath and holding his ribs, and the man standing over him wore a wicked grin. A thinner, equally filthy man stood by the door with a hunting knife in his hand. Christin and Matt froze in the door, then Matt bolted over to the man with the bat, drawing his pistol and aiming it at the big man.
“Drop the bat.” Matt said, and Christin wondered how he kept his voice from shaking.
The skinny man reached for her, and Christin dodged to one side, swatting his hands away. She put both hands on the counter and vaulted over it, putting the cash register between her and the thin robber. The third thug came into the shop then, and Matt’s eyes flickered over to the door, giving the first goon just enough of an opening to flick the bat out and knock Matt’s gun away. The man stepped forward and slammed his big fist into Matt’s jaw, sending the boy crashing to the floor next to Jake. Christin looked up at the noise, and the thin man caught her while she was distracted, pulling her kicking from behind the counter.
“Look what we found, Elmer. We got us some little busybodies.” The skinny man cackled, dropping Christin to the floor beside her brother.
“Yeah, but this one’s cute. Maybe we’ll take her with us to cook and clean up.” The big man rumbled.
“I don’t think so,” Christin spat back defiantly. “You wouldn’t like what I put in a stew. Like your ears!” The man she now knew was Elmer reached down and grabbed a handful of her hair, pulling her painfully to her feet.
He bent down level with her face and spoke very quietly and slowly. “Little girl, you’re old enough for me to have some real fun with, but I’m not into that kinda thing. Jed here is, though. So if you don’t shut up and stay out of our way, I’m gonna knock you slap out and give you to him for a birthday present. You understand?”
Christin’s eyes watered at the stench of his breath, a fetid mixture of beer, salted meat and human nastiness that had her stomach threatening to revolt all over the front of the man’s coveralls, but she managed a nod.
“Good. Now sit there like a good girl while we finish our shopping.” He dropped her back to the floor next to Matt, and picked up Matt’s pistol. He handed the gun to the third man and said “Watch them. If the boy moves, shoot him. If the girl moves, shoot the boy.” The other man nodded and leaned on the door, blocking it shut and keeping the gun by his side. The men moved through the store methodically, piling camping goods, hunting equipment and various tools on the counter. When they had amassed as much gear as they could carry, they loaded duffel bags with all their loot and started for the door.
Elmer stood for a moment at the counter looking down at the three of them sitting on the floor. Matt and the shopkeeper were glaring at them with eyes full of rage, but Christin was just trying to avoid the notice of the skinny Jed until they were gone. Elmer cleared his throat and said “I’m sorry we had to do this, Jake, but we ain’t had no work in three weeks, and now I don’t know what’s gone happen to us. We gotta get by best we can, and I’m sorry I had to knock you down for it. We won’t be back.”
“You better not, Elmer Clausen. If I so much as see you cross the street again I’ll kick your sorry ass and your worthless brother’s ass, too!” Jake spat a glob of yellow phlegm onto the big man’s shoe, and Elmer reared back to kick the old man in the face. As he did, Matt reached out, grabbed Elmer’s heavy work boot and pulled backwards with all his strength. The big man toppled backwards, dropping his bat as he flailed around trying to break his fall. Christin shot up and flung herself towards the door, hoping that she could get out and get help before the men regrouped. Jed was too fast for her, though, and he caught her around the waist, lifting her off the floor. She kicked uselessly at the air and squirmed, but the wiry man’s grip was like steel. He carried the struggling girl to the back of the store, into the small storeroom where Jake kept his cleaning supplies.
“Naw, missy, you ain’t gettin’ out of here that easy. You’re gonna give ol’ Jed a little taste before we get done here. Now just lay there and be good.” He tossed her to the floor and turned to lock the door behind them. The small room was dimly lit by a small window set high in one wall, and Christin could see nothing that would help her get away from her captor anywhere on the floor. Christin scooted on her butt along the floor until her back hit a shelf, then she clambered to her feet and made ready to fight off the skinny man.
Jed looked at her standing there, fists clenched and hair tousled, and let out a cackling laugh. “You’re a feisty one, ain’t you? That’s alright, I like ‘em with a little spirit.” He unfastened his belt and pulled it through the loops in his jeans. He wrapped the buckle in his calloused fist and let the worn leather dangle. As Christin looked around for anything she could use as a weapon, Jed flicked the belt out at her legs. The leather snapped painfully on her calf and Christin jumped sideways, only to find the belt flashing in at her from the other side. Again and again he lashed out at her legs and arms with the belt, striking like a cobra at her flailing limbs. Christin started to feel dizzy, and the edges of her vision started to sparkle.
Not now, she thought furiously. I will not faint now. Her head felt stuffed, like the air pressure in the room was too great, and she shook herself to clear her vision. The belt snapped painfully across her right arm again, but this time she reached out and caught the lash before Jed could pull it back. He grinned a nasty grin at her and pulled hard on the belt, dragging Christin into his arms. He put his hands on her upper arms and leaned in for a kiss. The pressure in Christin’s head increased until it felt like someone was stabbing her in the nose with an icepick, then she felt a huge rush outward, and Jed suddenly flew backwards away from her.
The skinny would-be rapist flew through the locked door, splintering it and landing in the aisle of the store. Christin looked down at her hands, which were surrounded by glowing blue sparkles, as if she was generating electricity from her body. Jed clambered to his feet some five yards away and pointed the pistol he’d taken from Matt at her. Christin raised her hands to ward off the bullets she expected to rip through her body, and felt that rush of power again. From behind clenched eyes she heard a terrified scream, and opened her eyes to see Jed running for the front of the store. She walked after him, hands crackling with energy, and watched as he bolted right past his cohorts and out into the street.
Matt stood over the other two men, bat raised for another swat as she made her way to where he stood. Matt took one look at her and dropped the bat. Elmer and his other partner scrambled to their feet and ran for the door as Matt and Jake gaped at Christin. “Sis,” Matt said “what happened?”
“I have no idea.” Christin said as a wave of weariness passed over her like a blanket and she collapsed in the front of the store.
If you like what you read, you can buy Genesis at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
by john | Nov 19, 2011 | Business of publishing, Writing
I missed my Friday post yesterday. Sorry about that. I kinda forgot what day it was until it was late, and then it didn’t happen. Anyway, here’s what’s up in the land of Hartness.
I wrote a short story and submitted it to a magazine. We’ll see how that goes. It’s a stand-alone story that grew out of a lunchroom conversation. If it gets 5 rejections, I’ll self-pub it and you can read it then. This is part of my ongoing plan to get enough SFWA credits to join. I’ll be writing more stand-alone stories and submitting them around while I’m doing my novels and my Bubba stories. Don’t forget, Ballet of Blood is available now! At $1.49 it’s a little more expensive than my other shorts, but at 9,000 words it’s half again as long. Voodoo Children, the first Bubba short story, is one of my best sellers for the month, so that’s pretty interesting.
What makes a best-seller for me, you ask? Well, I didn’t intend for this to be a numbers post, but we can go there. Let’s start with the fact that my sales are off by 50% from the high point this summer. A lot of that has to do with an Amazon algorithm shift, which kicked me square in the nuts, but I’m still making plenty of cash. Here are my numbers so far this month –
Black Knight Chronicles –
Hard Day’s Knight – 214
Knight Moves – 200
Back in Black – 175 (I have NO idea why Book #3 consistently outperforms Book #2, but it does)
Black Magic Woman – 90
Movie Knight – Crazy numbers since it’s been free this month – 1,247
The Chosen is plugging along at 149 copies, just a little below its average pace of 10 copies per day.
Genesis has started off more slowly than I thought, only doing 24 copies so far. But hopefully we’ll see some residual effects next week of my blog tour.
Like I said, Voodoo Children is blowing me away, moving 159 copies this month
And Ballet of Blood has shipped 7 so far. There are a few other assorted things out there, like my holiday story The Christmas Lights. It’s sold 7 copies this month and I’m just as thrilled with that as I could be. It’s a little litfic story that I put up there hoping to sell a few copies ever. It sells five or so a month, and that’s just brilliant with me.
I’ve done a ton of work this week on Red Dirt Review and Ebook Deals Today, the other two sites I actively run. RDR is an online literary magazine that updates every Monday and Thursday. You can check it out online, via RSS, or you can subscribe to it on your Kindle. I’ll also be publishing print and ebook anthologies from the submissions to RDR quarterly.
Ebook Deals Today is a place where authors can feature their bargain ebooks, so you can go there to get daily deals. All ebooks will have at least half a dozen positive reviews on Amazon and be $6.99 or less. So check it out if you’re looking for a good deal on a good read. You can follow the site at @ebookdeals2day on twitter.
Then I spent a couple of hours today updating the ebook files for The Chosen to reflect the revisions the book has gone through. I once again worked with Lynn O’Dell and her team of editor ninjas at Red Adept Editing Services to clean up tense issues, word choice issues, repetition issues and mommy issues. Okay, they didn’t really help me with mommy issues. That’s what tequila is for. But if you haven’t read The Chosen, I now once again recommend it. I’ve spent a lot of time with those people recently, and I like them again. They’re fun. It’s worth a read.
Once I got that done, I reformatted the print edition of Hard Day’s Knight and got it uploaded. I’m down to just three hard copies left with the old cover, so I wanted to repaginate the whole thing and get copies with the new cover on it for my December signings. We’ll see how that works out. Tomorrow I’ll probably spend some time doing the same thing to Back in Black. I have a lot of copies of that one on hand, but when people look at the big canvas print of my new HDK cover, and the Knight Moves cover, they want Back in Black with the new cover. So I might be having a paperback sale here on the site after Thanksgiving. Keep your eyes open!
by john | Oct 26, 2011 | Fiction, Return to Eden, Writing
Aside from being a killer book cover, it might help to know a little about the book, huh?
Genesis is the first volume of the Return to Eden trilogy. Unlike The Black Knight Chronicles, which is an open-ended series of stand-alone stories featuring the same characters in a string of related, but largely unconnected adventures, Return to Eden will be a traditional trilogy. It’s a three-book story, then we’re done.
The story centers on 17-year-old Christin Kinsey, her brother Matt, and the group of survivors they assemble in their journey. In the aftermath of an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) attack, everything with a computer chip is fried, effectively throwing the world back a century in our technology. Most cars don’t work, most household appliances don’t work, and even if they did, there’s no electricity to power them. There’s no TV, no internet, no game consoles, no cell phones and no iPods.
Sounds like Hell for Teenagers, doesn’t it?
Well it gets worse. Not only do the teens have to learn how to survive in a world suddenly devoid of most of the creature comforts we’ve grown up with, but the basics of civilization start to erode with the infrastructure. Small-town sheriffs become more like feudal lords than law enforcement officers.
And then there’s the odd little fact that everyone between 13 and 20 seems to have suddenly developed superpowers. With the interference from technology gone, people are able to touch magic again, old, elemental magic. But only if you’re young enough, or open enough, to believe. So now the adults are acting like the kids in Lord of the Flies while a bunch of super-powered teenagers try to stay alive.
And all Christin really wants to do is make sure her mom is safe.
That’s a brief rundown on Genesis and the whole Return to Eden series. Available 11.11.11 wherever books are sold.
