Reviews, Recipes, and Random Slices of Life

Saturday
Went to Cahoots. Rejoiced in not having work this weekend. Indulged in a pot of tea.

Made editing changes to a super-old story that I'm trying to salvage--Health. I have this inability to ever throw away anything I've written. I always think I can make it better and sell it. I usually can make it better, but whether it's at all salable remains to be seen.

Made editing changes to chapter 1 of Vicesteed, deleting vast swaths and entirely redoing the first chapter. I don't know why I ever thought it was a good idea to open a book with an attempted-rape scene plus some weird fake-incest headfuck warping. So wrong. A brutal beating is much better! I really have No Idea what I was thinking. It isn't required for the plot, it's something that will immediately turn a number of readers off, and it's something that I, personally, have a great distaste for.

Finishing the edit of that chapter was a really wonderful thing. It was a ton easier than I'd feared. The fear of it has been keeping me from starting to edit Vicesteed for months and months. It was a huge roadblock that I wasn't getting past. I was practically euphoric when I finished it.

Night mist swirled around Valinda's boots as she walked through the empty street. She heard a faint buzzing, barely audible, as the neon signs that lined the street flickered, died, and were reborn. The only other sounds were her stiletto boot heels striking the asphalt and the splash when she stepped in a dank puddle.

She looked up. At night, the overcast sky glowed with the pollution-tainted yellow light of the city, and during the day, the sun filtered sullenly through gray clouds that never lifted.

Her maquillage mask was tuned to “vulnerable.” Dark pigments absorbed the scattered light around her eyes, sinking them into darkness. Her tear duct implant released a minute amount of opiate to dilate her pupils. Her pupils falsely promised arousal, fear, fight-or-flight reflexes keyed high. A nano-army in her circulatory system suppressed flushed capillaries, leaving her skin wan. Red-stained titanium dioxide glistened on her lips.

Epinephrine rushed through Valinda's veins, dilating her bronchioles and making her heart race, preparing her for the performance which was to come.

She paused, tossed her luxurious blonde hair over an artistically bared shoulder, and cast a frightened glance behind her. She clutched her purse to her side. She vainly attempted to tug down her short red skirt. The street was empty of traffic, but she knew she wasn't alone.

Skeins of wire traced her bones and threaded through her veins, feeding her actions and reactions to an unknown veinjockey at the other end of the transmission. The sensory input was all one way, and it only imitated the twitches of her nerves, the odor molecules that tickled her nose, the chemicals that ran in her veins, the sights the vidlenses in her eyes recorded. When blood flooded her mouth, the rider would share the copper tang of blood and some of the pain.

The next day, Valinda would be the only one with a bruise across her jaw.

Suddenly, the streetlights blinked off, leaving her in muggy darkness. She gave a small whimper; in her training, she'd gotten high marks in non-verbal communication. The lamps shuddered back on.

A bright flare of light blinded Valinda. She felt herself rising up out of the darkness, floating towards the end of the tunnel. A choir of angels sang around her. She felt their warm welcome. She sensed her family nearby. Part of her knew it was only a bad drug interaction, but she didn't care. She strained to see their faces through the glare of white light. Her brain struggled to access damaged memories.

Murdock’s nuclear family hypothesis posits that the nuclear family...is the standard or idealized familial structure. Variations include the polygamous family and the extended family model, her wisdom chip chimed in.

The only memories she had left were recent: continuous dark and starless nights; the sour taste of vomit in the back of her throat; the sharp ache of needles penetrating her veins; and the cuts opening on her fingers as she punched out glass windows, one after another.

Valinda's past was dead, minced into an unrecognizable jumble by a Lizzie Borden veinjockey's ax. They'd told her that when she woke up with no memories, a ridged scar on her scalp, and a wisdom chip implanted in her brain.

The heavenly light winked out. Valinda's eyes blurred for a second, from tears or from the aftereffects of the Tunnel-of-Light drug. She was overdue for a system flush, but she delayed purging as long as she could. After each viceride, she would go in to have the rider dismounted, but that was it.

When her veins were overloaded, ghosts of externally-imposed fantasies kept company with her, inducing a bizarrely twisted form of what the wisdom chip called hypermnesia. They were all she had.

Shaking off her daze, she started walking again. She clasped her arms as if she were cold, though her circulatory system had been reinforced to support the constant influx of affect-altering drugs.

She glanced around as if she were lost. She took a few halting, half-running steps.

A low chuckle floated out of the darkness. Valinda clasped her hands together and backed away.

A burly man stepped out of the alley in front of her.

"Going somewhere, ladybird?" he asked.

Valinda gasped, her hand coming up to cover her mouth as she shrank back against the wall. Light glimmered over the liquid crystal surface of her nails. She began to plead with him to not harm her, while she tried to figure out who the other vicesteed was. Richard, she remembered. He was a new steed; he'd only been on a couple of other runs. He squatted down the street from her place.

Not all of her fear was acting. The phobia drugs they'd pumped into her for this ride were kicking in. Her skin felt like it was trying to crawl off of her, and the filaments of hair on the back of her neck stood straight up. Her heart began to race as she stumbled backwards down the street. There was a large chunk of concrete she'd noticed a few moments ago, perfect to trip over. When she fell, she let out a whimper and scrabbled away from Richard on her hands and knees. A part of her mind noted that she'd need to apply skin patches before she went to sleep tonight. Her palms and knees burned, and when she moved she felt the grit of silica inside the abrasions.

She gathered her skills and forced abject horror into her eyes. "Please," she begged, "please don't hurt me. I've got money." She fumbled towards her purse, which had landed a few feet away.

"I'm not interested in money." Richard leered and stomped on her hand. "Not when I've got you, luv."

That was neither necessary nor professional. This ride was supposed to be a simple mugging with a light beating. Richard seemed to have other ideas.

Valinda bit her lip, hoping it looked like she was frightened instead of trying to fight down anger. She heard the beat of her heart speeding and felt new energy flooding her veins. She wondered if she should try to run away. She eyed Richard. No, she'd better not. He wasn't as strong or as augmented as she was, and it would ruin her rider's illusion if she had to slow down to let him catch her.

Richard smiled, his lips twisting into a snarl. A glint in his eyes warned Valinda that his pleasure was not feigned. She wondered if he had volunteered to be a vicesteed simply because he liked it. She couldn't remember why she had.

She whimpered, trying to crawl away.

"And where do you think you're going?" Richard growled. She closed her eyes against the floating sparks of light invading her vision. Her brow furrowed as she tried to hold the drug bleedthrough at bay. This was not a good time.

"Closing your eyes isn't going to make me go away, luv," Richard said.

The bleedthrough heightened the truth that surrounded her: the rough grit of concrete beneath her palms; the cold air prickling her skin into goosebumps; the malice in the other vicesteed's smile; the damp kiss of the thick night fog against her face; and the fear that she knew was no longer drug-induced.

She tried to overcome the surges of adrenaline with sheer logic. This was scripted, this was expected, this was what she'd been told would happen.

She scrambled to her feet. She could outrun him easily.

The glare of the streetlights blinded her as she turned her head from side to side, trying to decide where she could run. There was no sanctuary for her on this street.

Richard wrenched her arm up behind her. While she hesitated, he'd closed the distance.

"Running won't do you any good," he murmured in her ear, his breath warm against her skin.

Valinda didn't move. Panic skittered through her. Her right arm was immobilized; she couldn't turn, and she couldn't escape.

Her shoulder joint throbbed. Even without added pressure, it pained her sometimes. After it had been dislocated, the nightingale had merely pushed it back into alignment, as her wisdom chip tried to respond.

She groaned, unforced tears coming to her eyes.

"Ah, you like that," Richard said.

He pushed her elbow up, forcing her arm into a more agonizing angle. All she could think of was the pain. Images cascaded through her mind as her wisdom chip tried to respond: a horse throwing a rider; a patient in traction, grinning at the camera; a diagram of the shoulder that muttered Latin incantations in her ear, Deltoideus, subscapularis, supraspinata, infraspinata; a short man with intense eyes standing on a scaffold, wearing a straightjacket.

Houdini smiled and took a bow. A chain was hooked to his legs and he was drawn into the air. He was the hanged man, and still he smiled. He writhed in midair, his body undergoing fantastic contortions, and then he was free. His grin looked forced. Smoke and mirrors. Magic. Scarves slid up sleeves and coins flipped across fingers and deftly palmed. Lock picks and amazing muscle control. Straightjackets and dislocated shoulders.

Tendrils of agony spread through Valinda's nerves when she tried to move her imprisoned arm. She shifted her weight and rammed her captured shoulder hard against Richard's chest.

The instant her shoulder became dislocated was trapped in time. She heard a popping sound and felt the grate of bone on bone as her shoulder left the socket. She turned to her right, floating queasily on endorphins. Richard looked shocked, as if her breaking the scenario was a worse offense than him nearly breaking her arm. He raised his hands, disclaiming responsibility. She couldn't let him get away with that. She threw a punch at him with all her strength. She felt the cartilage of his trachea give way beneath her hand. He let go of her arm. He clutched at his throat and fell to the ground, writhing on the dank cement.

The pain from Valinda's shoulder swamped her. She fell to her knees next to the choking vicesteed, holding her shoulder with her left hand. Richard's eyes were locked on hers as his face slowly turned red. She forced herself to stand. She looked around. The street was empty of anyone save herself and the man at her feet.

She turned and ran.

I'm still planning on expanding the fight scene a little to add more drama, but that needs to percolate a little first. And one of my big questions for the whole book is whether I'm going to keep the conceit of the wisdom chip or delete it entirely.

The new chapter is three pages long. The new "deleted scenes" file? Six pages long.


Deleted for being unnecessary, pretentious, and occasionally quite vulgar:

She wished she could see the stars. She was on her way to an appointment that she did not want to keep, a rather unpleasant appointment. She had no choice but to go, but she thought that if she could see the stars it would help her to bear it. In her squat, she kept a few found treasures under the molding mattress she slept on. Among them were three plastic stars covered with silver glitter. It was not the same, but she sometimes held them up to the fogged sky and pretended that she could see the stars.

Valinda tilted her head up to the night sky as she walked, staring, hunting for any glimmer of light. She stumbled, swore, and vowed to keep her mind on the job.

Her stride was constrained by a tight red skirt cut so high she could whistle Dixie with two sets of lips if the wind blew right. Sometimes Valinda did whistle, loud and off-key or tentatively brave, for that special lonely feeling when her rider needed it. The echo always lingered plaintively in the pollution-fogged air, listened to by thirty-one different flavors of nastiness. Pick yer poison; genuine swamp-water guaranteed.

Deleted because it distracts from the main narrative and doesn't add anything that isn't covered elsewhere:

Shuffling footsteps from the shadows of the alley nearby made her turn quickly. She sank into a half-crouch, breathing deeply. Her weakness was discarded like the tallith from a dead man's shroud; her fingers curled into relaxed fists and her strong legs shifted to evenly balance her weight. She spared a moment to curse the painfully high heels of the boots she wore.

A vagrant stepped into the dim light, his arms dangling at his sides. His stench hit her while he still shambled forward. He moved like a marionette with only nine strings. His eyes were burning coals of envy that focused only on her. He completely ignored the festering wounds on his hands and body.

Valinda's nose twitched, offended by the rancid odor of sweat and rotting flesh, even as she struggled to ignore the new input. She thrust out her hand. "Hold!" she said firmly. She spoke with the confidence that only complete security provides, but she did not ease from her defensive stance. Although she knew her contract owner did not allow harm to come to its stable, there was always some risk.

The course Valinda was set on tonight would force her to lose control, whether she relinquished it willingly or not. This, though, was not the planned program.

"Damn snobs," the bum swore. He stared at Valinda, his eyes probing past her epidermis to the skein of wire tracing her bones, threading her veins.

"You couldn't afford this ride." She stood confidently, watching him. The soles of his sneakers flapped like hungry mouths as he shuffled a few steps closer. The cuffs of his corduroy pants hung in tatters around his ankles. Despite the only mild chill in the air, he wore an old army coat. His back was hunched like an old woman, vertebrae collapsing into each other from malnutrition and self-neglect. He was what she might become. He was broken to the saddle.

Valinda told herself that she would never sink that low, would never become someone fit for nothing but the lowest vicerides. There was a hierarchy of sorts, and vagrant rides were at the bottom. They were fit for nothing else. She promised herself that she would never sink that low, even though she knew she might not be able to keep the promise.

"A penny plain or twopence colored," the bum's chapped lips muttered. She felt his eyes follow her, the vidlenses in his eyes shiny like plague-glazed beads. She heard the scratching of broken nails on diseased flesh as he turned and collapsed back against the alley wall.

Deleted for being a digression, no matter how pretty-sounding:

Conrad of Marpurg himself, blessing the red-hot iron of the inquisition, could not have seemed more prayerful than Valinda, but instead of contemplating salvation and damnation, Valinda was looking forward to sleep. She'd been woken up early that morning by another vicesteed screaming as his head was forced into a mirror.

He'd laughed when she talked with him later, joking that his new face would be much more handsome.

She might have fallen back asleep after that. Instead she'd decided that if she stayed awake, the fatigue settling into her bones would add a grace note to her performance tonight. Now, she wished she had taken what rest she could.

Sunday
Due to various delightful diversions and social engagements, I didn't actually get much done. Le shrug.
penthius freewriting - "Under the Temple: Science Fiction"
Updated markets spreadsheet from Critters note.
Submitted "Serenade of Blood & Silver" queries to agents--another project I have been neglecting shamefully, also against my principles of "first do that which must wait on others."