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Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:14:55 -0700

"They call me Black Alice, and I live in Detroit, Michigan, a dark, violent metropolis full of desperate criminals and stalking predators - and those are just the ordinary humans. You might ask yourself what Lovecraftian demons, Obsessive-Compulsive vampires, power-hungry magicians, and heavily armed religious fanatics have in common. I'll tell you. They're all conspiring to ruin my day."

Feel free to check out our serial novel, Black Alice -- it's an urban fantasy set in Detroit, Michigan.
Chapters: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7

We welcome and appreciate feedback. Thanks for stopping in!

http://JavaElemental.stumbleupon.com/review/28589242/

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 09:28:37 -0800

All the writing advice in the world tells you that first, you write your rough draft, and then you go back and revise. Pfft, we say. Besides, MrJames and I figure if we get the framework laid out properly, first, the rest of the stroy will flow that much more easily. So, we've spent a lot of the last couple of weeks poking at chapters One through Three, getting them the way we want. We've finally got three chapters we can live with (although, admittedly, I'm still dickering with One). Here they are:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

http://JavaElemental.stumbleupon.com/review/27723974/

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:21:33 -0800

Black Alice: Chapter Two (Second Draft, MrJames)

��Benny's car continued to make unsettling noises as I drove. I was following the tug, the sensation of the part of my shadow that I'd attached to the shooter's vehicle. While I did that, the rest of the shadow uncoiled and stretched. She sent tendrils and ribbons of darkness flowing out, all over the car. She liked to explore new places, and whenever it was safe, I let her. It made it easier to control her when it wasn't safe.
��The shadow could see through my eyes, of course. We were so close, so tightly bound that the boundary between us had blurred over the years. But when she explored like this, it was a very tactile thing. I could feel the takeout wrappers and empty coffee cups in the backseat. I could feel her oozing into the trunk, where she explored the tread of the spare tire, and the musty cardboard boxes full of papers. There was a gym bag there, too, under Benny's cooling body. It was full of sweaty clothes and masculine toiletries. As usual, she fed me the sensations of what she discovered. She supplied feel of it, the shape, the smell and taste of her discoveries, along with some alien sensory input that I never could really integrate. I supplied the names, the concepts that gave some kind of sense to what she discovered. And she didn't discriminate. She tasted the stale donut in the trash in the backseat, and the droplets of dried coffee in the takeout cups there. She explored Benny's body well enough that I knew he was going commando under his tailored suit and that he'd been sweaty when he died. The sweat tasted of quiet anxiety, not fear, which was interesting. The blood tasted perfectly normal, and she was curious about the transformation that was going on in him. Then again, she was also enjoying a little game in the undercarriage of the Lexus. She had encountered a spider on the undercarriage, and gleefully pursued it as it fled her touch until it finally leaped free of the moving car. At the same time, she was in the engine, savoring the vibrations and noise and exploring the damage done by the drive-by. The wind was making whistling noises through the bullet holes and small parts of her were dancing to the music of it. Also, she was attached to a bronze SUV a few miles away, clinging tight and singing a silent beacon to me. And she was in my head, whispering commentary on the whole shebang. Sometimes I thought of her as a them, or an it, but none of those words quite fit. She was Other. She was from Outside.
��I took in all that input, and managed to drive the car and fiddle with the radio. Living with the shadows does wonders for one's ability to multitask. I finally turned off the radio. There was too much on my mind, it was only making it harder to think. In the back of my mind, whispering murmuring continued, but I was used to that.
��I couldn't quite remember how I'd become an Outlander, a human being with an alien entity in the hole where my soul should have been. That part of my life was a dim, hazy blur, and everything before that was a complete blank. I do remember wading out of the surf in Texas as a young teenager, naked and screaming and clawing at my hair, while in my head a shadowy thing screamed, horrified at the meat prison it found itself in.
��Good times.
��Read More >>

http://JavaElemental.stumbleupon.com/review/27475380/

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:52:00 -0800

Chapter Eight (Complete)

You'd be tempted to think Pardell was a bigger guy at first glance, until you realized it was the layers of clothes. A filthy, army green canvas jacket over a flannel shirt gone so grungy you could barely see the pattern, over a stained gray sweatshirt, and God knew what else. Baggy jeans gray with wear and dirt, knees torn to ribbons, revealing the faded red long johns underneath. Scuffed boots, possibly older than me, and at least a size too big, tied up tight to hold them on. Brown work gloves with the fingers gone, dishwater blonde hair matted into dreads, sticking out from under a navy blue knit cap. I was pretty sure Pardell was a white guy - figured the blonde hair was a give-away - but his skin was dirty, tanned, and weathered to the point where it was hard to tell.

He approached us, grinning the big, shit-eating grin that showed off his five or six remaining teeth. They were all gray and black, rotting out of his head. His face was a skull, skin stretched tight over the bones, huge beak of a nose proceeding him everywhere he went.

Compared to Pardell, the six near-dead bums on the pallets were positively glowing with health.

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Chapter One (2nd Draft, MrJames)

As corpses go, this one wasn't so bad. I'd seen worse. I'd made worse. I'd once stumbled into a den for a pack of rabid werewolves. The corpses I'd seen there, and the corpses I'd left there, had been the stuff of nightmares. Or so I'm told. My own nightmares tend along different lines.

I strolled around the body, my high heels clacking dully on the dusty tiles. By comparison, this was junior league material. The body was a man, middle fifties, full head of iron grey hair, with a seamed, jowly face. His vacant hazel eyes were staring up into the cobwebs on the ceiling. We were inside an abandoned 7-11. The windows were soaped and boarded over, and the racks were all gone, or smashed. The coolers were still there along one wall, but the doors were missing. Most of the clutter and debris that usually shows up in places like this had been swept over to one side, blocking the front entrance. It made room for the pentagram on the floor, with its stubby black candles and corpse front and center. I tilted my head. No, make that bottom and center. It was meant to be drawn upside down, of course. Same wannabe Satanic claptrap that you always find around Halloween. That kind of thing always aggravated me. Amateurs have no business farting around with the occult. Somebody ought to run an ad campaign. Friends Don't Let Friends Invoke? Don't Conjure Under the Influence of Dumb?

Not snappy enough. Probably never happen.

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http://JavaElemental.stumbleupon.com/review/27246413/

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:00:17 -0800

Chapter Eight (Part 1)

��"Who's this one, now?" Irish asked me as we headed back down to the first floor. We'd taken a look at the stairs to the third floor, and found them blocked off with most of the fourth floor.
��"Pardell." I glanced over. Irish had a flashlight now. He seemed pretty damn sure the building was empty.
��"Right. And who's he?" He glanced at me as we hit the first floor. "Or what is he?"
��"He's a who." I paused, found a cigarette, lit up. One thing we hadn't found was Dmitri's workspace. I couldn't imagine it was up those stairs, unless there was some hidden way to the third or fourth floor we hadn't spotted. I was betting on a basement. Irish hadn't come in the front door, so that meant either he climbed in one of the many broken windows, or there was a back entry somewhere. Maybe a back entry with stairs down to a basement. "You find a basement coming in?"
��"Aye. Back that way." He gestured down the hall with the flashlight beam. "The door was locked, though, an I heard yeh goin up the stairs, so I didn't bother with it."
��Right. He must've let me have the first apartment, and gone past to find the mess in the last one. Wait. Heard me going up the stairs? I'd been cloaked in darkness going up the stairs. He couldn't have heard me. I turned to ask him about it.
��"Pardell, yeh said?"
��I looked at him, and he met my eyes, and for just a moment, it was a wordless acknowledgment on both our parts. We both knew we were hiding something, we just didn't know what, yet. I wasn't entirely sure I cared for that.
��Read More >>

http://JavaElemental.stumbleupon.com/review/27021500/

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:22:41 -0700

�� Black Alice: Chapter Seven

"What's this fuckin noise?" He demanded, waving at the radio.
��I glanced at it, then at him, horrified. "You don't know?"
��Never heard such garbage."
��"It's Black Sabbath! War Pigs, man!" I turned it up. "Jesus, they let you into America not knowing this shit? Are you here legally?" He gave me the Look. It was the one that said I was not amusing, and I should just stop trying. I grinned.
��I was jack-assing around a bit to take my mind off my worries. Something my blonde assailant had said was preying on my mind, and it turned out Irish was a crappy conversationalist, so I couldn't get it out of my head. Blondie had told Gianna, "You have two hours."
��Two hours.
��What time was it? What time had it been when he'd called? I didn't have a clock on me because my phone was gone. That bothered me too, because he'd told Gianna they had me. I had no way to let her know I was free, and we'd screwed around long enough without me wasting time trying to find a pay phone so I could check in. Did she know me well enough to trust that I'd escape? Was she thinking clearly enough to let me play my hand?
��Irish didn't have a watch, either. I'd already asked.
��Two hours until what? They blew the city up with a nuclear bomb under Tiger Stadium? They released the hounds? They started killing the kids? Probably. I kept my eye on the pendulum tied to my rear view mirror while my nerves danced. Navigating by pendulum was great when you were water-witching out in the boondocks, but in the middle of Detroit, looking for a black magi's den of inequity? Made for some harrowing left turns from the far right lane, let me tell you. Good thing I drive like I have a death wish, anyway. I was used to this. Irish, on the other hand, had a look in his eyes like he was entirely too sober to enjoy my driving.
��Read More >>

http://JavaElemental.stumbleupon.com/review/26555661/

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:05:00 -0700

Chapter Six (pt 1)

��I avoid fights. I don't like them. They're never conveniently located - there's always witnesses. I'm almost always in over my head, and stuck with someone around who shouldn't see me whip out some abyssal power to even the odds. I prefer the quiet stalk, like a tiger, a quick chase, bring the prey down in a place of my choosing, dispense with them neat and easy, and nobody needs to catch me doing it.
��So, really, down the dark alley next to a bar gearing up for happy hour, twenty feet or so from a busy sidewalk and a busier street? With an Orderman for back-up, even this one? Not my first choice for a big gunfight with a bunch of Russian mobsters and an unknown mage. I knew the mage was out there, too, because as Irish shoved my assailant into the dark, I felt the roll of their power, lifting the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck, dancing on my tongue like the metallic ozone flavor that fills the air just after a lightning strike.
��I eyed the mouth of the alley, gun aimed in that general direction, then glanced back at Irish. "This could get messy." I said, thinking that a bunch of professional killers and a mage with any training whatsoever wouldn't possibly be dumb enough to charge the mouth of an alley. It was a perfect bottle neck. I mean, I sure the hell wouldn't do business that way, unless I was damn certain I had me out-gunned.
��I turned just in time to catch a quick burst of motion from Blondie, an escape attempt - he twisted and spun, hooking his arm under Irish's, meaning to throw the bigger man, I think, only he never made it. I blinked, and missed half the action, and Irish had the guy's arm twisted straight out behind his back, hand between Blondie's shoulder blades. Irish pushed, there was the sharp, solid snap of breaking bone, and all the fight went out of Blondie with a wheeze of pain. Irish caught him by the back of the head and bounced his skull off the wall. The man slumped to the ground like a sack of rags.
��Read more >>

http://JavaElemental.stumbleupon.com/review/26307484/

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:42:22 -0700

Black Alice: Five

��Everyone likes to have a place to go, even me. I've been going to Bushie's for probably ten years, now. The place is a little hole-in-the-wall bar, the kind of bar where it's fifty-fifty if the bathrooms are safe to use, and if you're smart, you don't eat anything that didn't come out of the deep fryers. It's one big rectangular room, with a pool table, more because the guy who owns the place heard once that bars should have a pool table than because anyone uses it, and lots of little square tables, all different wood and Formica tops, with mismatched chairs. I expect the furniture all used to match at some time in the past, but you can count on at least one knock-down, drag-out, table-flipping, chair-throwing, beer-bottle-breaking fight a night, and the broken furniture had been replaced over the years with whatever was cheap and available. The white plaster walls had gone smoke-yellow and were hung with neon beer signs and ratty sports memorabilia, many hung over holes and cracks where people had hit the wall, or driven someone else's head into the wall. In street-fighting parlance, that's called "using the ambiance".
��The bar was on the left side of the rectangle, leading down to a teeny alley kitchen and then to the dubious bathrooms and the back door. The bar itself was nothing special, the wood nicked, scarred, and burned by careless cigarettes, and behind it, a mirrored wall covered up by shelves and shelves of liquor. Racks for fancy drink glasses hung over part of the bar, and I could never figure out why, because I don't think I've ever seen them used. Bushie's is a shot and beer kind of place. There was also a TV over the bar, usually showing sports or news with the sound off and the subtitles on, and the only music came from a battered juke box that held mostly country, a little classic rock, and one polka song, The Beer Barrel Polka. I don't know why it's on there, and I've never heard it played. I assume it's some kind of in-joke I'm not getting.
��The other thing that Bushie's has is Honey Mazelle, the regular bar tender. As far as I know, she lives here. I've never seen her outside the place. She's my age, but it sits a lot heavier on her than me, and she's a shorter, chunkier woman, not fat, just not anorexic like they build the girls these days. She has long bottle-blonde hair with magenta streaks, usually pulled up, and a lot of carefully applied make-up. She packs herself into tight clothes to show off her considerable assets, and if bouncing needs done, Honey does it. You've never seen anything until you've seen Honey quick-step a troublemaker out the front door by the balls, or, in the case of a woman, by the hair. As far as I know, Honey fears exactly no one. She's a pretty woman despite the mileage, heart-shaped face, full, pouty lips, and one honey-brown eye. I assume the other one used to match, but it's long gone, covered by an eye patch. Before Bushie's, Honey was a hooker, and the eye had been lost to some john or pimp. That was all of the story I knew. She didn't like to talk about it.
��Read More >>

http://JavaElemental.stumbleupon.com/review/26260933/

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:17:09 -0700

Coffee House Review:

Roy Zimmerman's I'll Pull Out

On the Republicans

700 Billion Dollars

700 Billion Dollars, Part 2

Internet Piracy

Site Announcements

VP Debate

Excuses, Excuses

I Got Nuthin'

Reality Check

http://JavaElemental.stumbleupon.com/review/25819108/

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 04:11:42 -0700

Black Alice: Four

�I stepped out of the shower, snagging my towel off the rack and drying off. I scrubbed my hair in the towel and armed the steam off the mirror. For a moment, I was looking myself in the face, pale, sharp-featured, green eyes dull with sleep deprivation, and then my reflection's eyes ran black. The reflection blinked - I didn't - and the blackness spilled over like tears, dribbling down her face and spreading like an oil slick. In the space of a couple of heart beats, I was staring at a black silhouette of myself, a shadowy twin.

I sighed. She could be so tiresome when she was face-to-face. And, I couldn't see to brush my hair out. "What?"
�
�Show me the sign again.

Her lips moved, but I heard her voice, like snake scales through dry sand, in my head. "You recognize it?" The unspeakable glyphs aren't an alphabet. They're more like calling cards, as far as I've ever been able to tell. Maybe ideograms, except they aren't always about words or concepts. Or at least, words and concepts that a human mind has any way to understand.

It does not call to me.

I paused to parse that out. The shadow had been sharing space with me for thirty-some years, but having a conversation with her had always been difficult. She was an alien thing, trying to use alien words to explain alien ideas. When she spoke, I always felt her picking through my brain, a woman's fingers with long, long nails, ice cold, flicking through a Rolodex. Her words came with pictures plucked out of my head, feelings borrowed from other memories. Sometimes it helped. Most of the time, it didn't. It was like trying to explain an automobile, and being shown pictures of kids playing marbles in a school yard. Not only did it not make sense, but you couldn't even figure out the train of thought that had led to those connotations.

In this case, she seemed to be indicating that if she had known the glyph, there would be some sort of resonance to it, some kind of echo she'd pick up on. It came with the ethereal feel of standing in a cloud of old magic, sensing it out to see if anyone I knew had cast it, and the vivid memory of following a pack of blood hounds through a Louisiana bayou.

"So why do you want to see it again?" I asked.

Read More.