I've been trying to crack the pro writing markets off and on for about five years now. This past March, I sold my first novel. When I announced the sale at my local Romance Writers of America chapter (which I'd joined only a couple of months earlier), one person (a multi-published author with Harlequin and Mills and Boon) remarked, "Wow, that was fast!"

Not really. It took me two years to write the novel, and two years to get it published. But when I mentioned that to this particular author, she looked amazed and said, "But I thought getting e-published was easy!"

All night she dreamt of blood. The crackle and crunch of bones made her uneasy.

Morgan gasped and kicked until she was awake. Her head throbbed. She smelled like sweat and fear and there was something stuck between her teeth. She pried at it unsuccessfully with her fingernails. Frustrated, she threw the sheets aside and ran into the bathroom. She grabbed a bit of dental floss. The thin piece of white string slid back and forth. Morgan let out a sigh of relief when she felt whatever it was come loose.

She felt large piece of skin between her thumb and index finger. Only it had…ridges. She frowned.

That’s strange.

A disembodied voice of an unidentifiable gender demands the visitor’s identity.

‘At this moment,’ he lied, ‘I am Q’ab-El.’

Traversing the threshold of the first portal, visitor and disciples enter a hallucinatory extravaganza: simultaneously, a synthesised acceleration in the speed of light renders them invisible to its inhabitants.

He thinks He has me this time. As always, He underestimates me.

The happy couple never knew what befell them. One minute they dance to their joyous, ear-stabbing music, kissing their smiling families, the bride’s white gown billowing around her as she skips from groom to cake to groom to guest. The next, they cling to each other in delicious, unabashed horror as they are whisked from their festivities into the suddenly maddening sky.

The Toronto nuke blew about five minutes before the clowns came. This meant that Claudio and Mariah spied the red, yellow, and orange figures at the same time they heard the news.

"Toronto?" Mariah said. "Nuclear?" She'd been messaging on her comm unit.

Claudio looked at his daughter and clenched his teeth. On her arm he could see faint razor marks and her comm still bore the outline of the Dream Puke sticker he made her remove on a weekly basis. They were on the way back from her treatment session: recovery from DP was long and painful. He looked away from her. Long and painful for her: excruciating for everyone involved.

Marsha Bloom’s bosom heaved for the fourteenth time that morning. John was coming, at last. She so longed to see the object of her abject desire with every fiber of her being. She knew he was a profligate rake and a faithless rogue, but her quivering, craven achings quiesced whatever vibrant misgivings she might possess.

Wistfully she absorbed her unblemished bounty in the full length mirror for the last time. Her sapphire orbs gleamed with an iridescent glow, bottomless pools of torment peering out at her from under a teeming thatch of sanguine, salacious tresses. The low cut bodice showed her exquisite globes to jutting perfection. One more dab of glimmering gloss on her succulent lips and she knew she was ready. The doorbell rang.

On a planet much like ours – well, actually, technically, it was ours – there was once a great writer named Lori Lewis. Nobody knew that she was a great writer. For light-years she’d been sending her manuscript to publishers who were too stupid to see how good it was. All they ever sent her back were snippy little notes saying, "Thank you for your interest, but your story does not meet our needs at this time." One of them was even mean enough to mention that she’d said "their" where she meant to write "there." This made Lori cry so hard that the snot ran down her nose and landed on the letter, blurring its harsh words.

(With no apologies to Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.)

Prologue. Or, if you prefer, “prolog.” From the conclusion of Leftovers: Nick O’Ley, saving us the trouble of coming up with four new pages to kick off this volume in the series.

Truck Gilliams (that’s right, this guy’s name is “Truck,” now try and keep up) was filled with despair, sadness and ennui as he saw the daycare/youth sports league wing of the Christ Evangelical Faith Protestant Resurrection Church. Of course, being an American he was a couple of healthy miles from ennui and a lot closer to despair and sadness, but nowhere near self-pity. No siree bob. Not him.

"You are flesh of my flesh, and bone of my bone," the voice droned softly into her ear as she looked down at the endless line of laid out, bloodless flesh drying under the harsh lights of the supermarket store. A love song wilted in the air, stifled by the scent of day-old clams. The meat looked bitter and unpersuasive. She picked up a roast of beef; it was too stiff, too coarse, not marbled. She remembered the days of her childhood, and the rich scent of gravy, and the cows out in the pasture. Flesh had been something different then. Something mysterious and familiar. She put down the beef roast and impulsively grabbed a bag of halal chicken, as though the connection with a faintly mysterious, ancient-world religion would bring life back to pre-bagged meat.

“Using language may be compared to riding a horse;
much of one’s success depends upon an understanding
of what it can and will do.”
- Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric

My bass teacher, in an effort once to encourage me to learn how to read music, reminded me of my studies in English and creative writing.

“Imagine a writer without a true understanding of the rules of grammar of the language they write in; the difference between a musician who works, and a guy who maybe plays in a band but winds up paying to exercise his craft-- even if it’s just gas money to get to the gig-- is the ability to read music,” he said.