Something Dark To End the Year On

Can an Angel fall in love?
What happens when Solomon gets his hands on the Book of Raziel?
Who is Raziel, anyway?
This one is dark and explicit.
And it's FREE! today.

"In the Beginning..."

The only Angel Created female...
What makes her so special?
Find out in "Lailah"... for FREE!

Also... the Fall of Lucifer.

Christmas Crazies?

Here you are just a few days from Christmas... Crazy yet?
Want to know what crazy really is? Pick up "Xantros" today for FREE! and find out.

Just another free Angel on your Christmas list to check off.
You are checking it twice, right?

"Angels we have heard..."

Hopefully, by this point, you've already picked up your copy of Christmas on the Corner for a mere $0.99. If not, you still have time! I think... Maybe you have time. It's one of those countdown deals, so the price is going to go up to $1.99 at some point as it steadily progresses back to its normal cost. $1.99 is still 33% off, though, so it's still a great deal! If you didn't get your copy, yet, rush right over and grab it now! And merry Christmas to you!

Whether you've picked up Christmas or not -- and, if not, I have to wonder what kind of Grinch you are (I mean, it's Christmas, man!) -- today you can capture your own Christmas Angel... for FREE!

Um... Wait a minute... Scratch that bit about "Christmas" Angel. I think that implies a certain... hmm... I'm not certain what that implies, other than something that my Angels are not. Except that "do not be afraid" part when the Angels appear to the shepherds and they all lose control of their bladders. But, then, my Angels, also, are not going to tell you to not be afraid. I think they'd tell you to be very afraid and not care that you were.

At any rate, "Barachiel" is free! today, so you should, you know, click the link and get your copy.
Just be prepared for lots of violence, some sex (what can I say, Lilith shows up), and something not very conventional.
But probably more true to actual Angel mythology.

Be on the lookout for more Angels to come your way during this holiday season.

And remember, reviews are always appreciated.

Clearly, It's MY Fault

As I mentioned many weeks ago, I've decided it's time to clean out my garage and sell off my old comics, most of them, and a lot of my old gaming stuff. Well, I probably didn't mention the gaming stuff, but I've been coming across things I don't want to store anymore, so a lot of that is going to go, too. Naturally, I turned to eBay as my platform for moving stuff out of my garage.

Okay, so maybe it's not "naturally" to other people, but it is to me. I haven't used eBay in a lot of years, but I was one of the early adopters... wow! That was back in the 90s! Yeah, I was using eBay all the way back in the 90s! So, yeah, it was natural for me to pick eBay back up and use it to start clearing things out.

One of the reasons I quit using eBay was the people. Using eBay as a seller is like working in customer service at Toys R Us, which I have done and is why I know that it's an apt comparison. Not everyone has a complaint, but no one is happy to be in Toys R Us. None of the adults are, anyway, which means that if someone is at customer service, you're already at two strikes. All of which leads me to believe that no one is happy to be on eBay, either.

Then there's the problem that a lot of people on eBay, mostly white dudes, are hoping/expecting to get stuff for nothing; like, if you're selling on eBay you must not want whatever it is anyway, so you should just hand it over to said white dude for free, but I'll get to more on that in a minute.

Also, there was the whole thing with constantly packaging things and long trips to the post office, but that's another beast entirely.

But, for the sake of garage clearing and possibly making some bucks off of my stuff, I was willing to venture back into the wilds of eBay again. Let me just say that things are worse there than ever before.

So I ran up a comic book auction. It wasn't really complicated, but it was non-conventional. I have a LOT of comics, and I don't want to try to run separate listings for each and every one of them, and you can't make any money selling them in bulk. For the amount of trouble that is in comparison to the lack of significant return, I might as well throw them in the trash. What I decided to do was to list a few hundred comics for the auction winners to choose from. The auction was clearly stated as being for ONE comic book only with the winner getting to choose the issue s/he wanted. A few of the issues had a minimum bid before they could be chosen. It's really quite simple.

Let me preface what I'm about to say with this:
All of the six auction winners I've had so far were white dudes. Yes, I'm sure. All of them.

Of the six, five did NOT read the auction text. That means that only one of them contacted me with his requested issue along with his payment.

I had to send requests to each of the other five to find out which issue was wanted. All five requested issues which 1. were not listed in the auction or 2. was an issue that had a listed minimum bid requirement that was higher than their bid. So, even after it had been pointed out to the them that they needed to read the auction text, they FAILED to read the auction text adequately enough to make a valid choice.

After a second email about choosing a comic from the supplied list, only ONE guy came back with a valid choice. One guy, after much discussion, apologized profusely and asked if I would let him out of the auction (that's a longer story, but that's what it boils down to). Another guy sent me about six or seven requests for books that were more expensive than his bid or not included in the auction (naming the same issue numerous times) before he he landed on one that was available (my guess is that he was using a dart board for his decision making).

Which leaves two guys, 1/3 of the auction winners, which fits in with the greater demographics of asshole dudes in the United States. These two guys got so mad about their own failure to read the auction text and know what they were bidding on that they filed complaints against me to eBay. That is pretty much the definition of white dude entitlement.

One of these guys thought he had won the entire lot of 300+ comics for $2.50 with only a $4.00 shipping fee. Seriously, the shipping fee should have tipped him off. The cost of shipping that many comics all together is EXPENSIVE. Like in the triple digits expensive. Anyone with half a brain firing working at even half capacity would have realized something was up, but no... Not him. No, he accused me of changing the auction text AFTER he won the auction, something which isn't even possible to do. Once a bid has been entered, eBay doesn't allow auctions to be edited. But stupidity and entitlement never let facts get in the way.

The other one... Well, the other one literally thought he was going to get something for nothing. He wanted a comic on which I had placed a high minimum bid because the comic, for those of you who know what this means: a silver age book, is worth about $150. My minimum was less than half its value, though. So this guy had a bid of about $10 and demanded the silver age comic anyway. Here are the things he revealed to me during our email exchange:
1. He intended to re-sell the issue. On eBay. He felt like he could get at least $15 for it, which, as far as he was concerned, was all the issue was worth. [Just to be clear: This is not what he believed. This was his tactic to try to get me to believe that I was getting a good deal to just let him have the issue.]
2. He had a coupon from eBay which would reduce his effective payment to $0. He would literally be getting the issue for FREE, giving him 100% profit on the re-sell. [I know this because I asked him why he was willing to pay, after shipping, more for the issue than he believed he could sell it for, and he told me about the coupon which would allow him to get it for nothing. Something for nothing.]
3. He's a flipper, which is something I'll get into in another post.

You know, I can understand being disappointed in discovering that you had misunderstood something and that you're not getting what you thought you were getting, but I really don't understand the unwillingness to own up to your own mistake, especially when it's right there in front of you. I know that it happens and that a certain group of people do it all the time (roughly 30% of white males, for sure), but I really don't understand it. Both of these guys acted as if their lack of reading the auction text was MY fault, and both of them accused me of doing things to try to cheat them, cheat them out of what was rightfully theirs. They both felt they DESERVED, were ENTITLED, to have my stuff. For FREE.

Because they're white dudes, and that's what white a significant portion of white dudes believe. They believe they deserve to have their cushy life provided for them with no effort on their part. And, yet, they also believe that other people are freeloaders, people working much harder at making a life for themselves than they are. The alt-right is full of these guys.

And, no, I'm not saying these two guys are alt-right, because it's not JUST dudes on the alt-right who believe this kind of thing, but I couldn't get away from the percentages. It's too perfect an example of white male entitlement.

I don't know... If this is what I'm going to have to deal with on eBay, maybe I will toss the comics in the trash.

Day Five

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

There’s no school today. Not now, anyway.

We were actually on the way to school when there were a bunch of explosions. I couldn’t tell where they were coming from at first, but then smoke clouds rose up in the direction of the air force base. There were sirens almost immediately and that loud air raid siren thing they always use in movies. I didn’t know that was a real thing. I stuck my head out of the window of the car so I could look for airplanes, but Mom yelled at me and started pulling on me and swerved all over the road. She didn’t like it when I yelled at her for trying to kill me.

Mom took me back home even though I didn’t want to go back home. Home is so boring, now, with no internet or TV that I WANTED to go to school! But it turned out that they closed school, anyway. Everyone thought we were under attack.

I think the radio is stupid. I mean the news on the radio is stupid. So, of course, Mom had to listen to the news all morning, not that she wasn’t already doing that, but she was more insistent about it because of the explosions and wouldn’t even let me talk. At all! She just kept shushing me!

But the radio is stupid because they just speculate all the time. It’s dumb! No one knew what had happened at the air force base, and it took a long time for anyone to find out. Hours. So they spent those hours talking about what might have happened. Were we being attacked? Should people go to bomb shelters? Was it the Chinese? If it was the Chinese, how did they get here?

Lots of people went to bomb shelters. The radio said they were all filling up. Mom wanted to go to a bomb shelter, but she wouldn’t go without Dad, and she couldn’t get through to Dad. All of the phones were jammed up with people using them. As it turned out, Dad was in a bomb shelter.

Mom was SO mad even though he didn’t have a choice. Everyone from Dad’s work was sent to the bomb shelter because everyone thought there was an attack. There was no way for him to call Mom about it, but she didn’t care. She was just mad at him and didn’t talk to him all night. Not after telling him that SHE COULD HAVE DIED while he was all safe and stuff and she was never going to wait for him again.

He said “good” and “fine” and, after a little while, once he figured out that she wasn’t going to talk to him anymore, he went off to… I don’t really know. I went to my room and stayed and am still here. Mom is still listening to the radio. I’ve been reading a little bit.

Oh, yeah, I got a book at school yesterday, Slaughterhouse-Five. I wanted Hunger Games, but she didn’t have any copies left, so I wanted Animal Farm, but she didn’t have any of those left, either. Slaughterhouse sounded like a cool title, though, and there wasn’t a lot to choose from, so I picked it.

I don’t understand it, though. I think it might be good, but I can’t figure out what it’s about. It’s the only book I have right now, though, since I couldn’t trade it for something different today. If I can’t figure out what it’s about by tomorrow, I’ll try to get a different book since reading is the only thing to do, right now. IF there’s even school tomorrow.

There will probably be school tomorrow since we weren’t under attack. Maybe. The radio said the base was sabotaged. It said they were going to send out planes to bomb somewhere on some secret mission but, as soon as the planes started getting ready to take off, they all blew up.

It wasn’t just here, either. It happened at bases all over the US. All the planes that were going to go on this secret mission all blew up. Well, not all of them, but a lot of them. Or most of them. Hundreds of them. I don’t know. They don’t give a lot of details on the radio, just a lot of talking about nothing.

And then they had Trump on talking about nothing, too, because he said it was a great attack on the sovereignty of the US by horrible, terrible enemies and terrorists and about all of the brave brave men who had died except they had already said on the radio, at least at our base, that no one had died. The explosions just crippled the planes and made them no good, but the explosions hadn’t killed anyone.

Trump also said they had a glorious success on the mission. It was beautiful. But he didn’t say what the mission was, only that there was a mission and that it was a success.

I don’t believe him.

Dad said it sounded like Yemen and Jalalabad and Mosul, but he wouldn’t tell me what he meant. Probably because Mom was mad at him. Nothing good, though.

So I think there will be school tomorrow, because, so far, everyone is trying to pretend that everything is okay. Everything is normal. But everything is NOT normal. I wish it was normal and that there was still the internet and I wasn’t stuck reading a book I don’t understand.

A Note from the author:
I hope you are enjoying this piece of FREE! serialized fiction. At least so far as it is fiction. For the moment. Who's to say what could be happening a year from now considering where we are at this moment in time.
Speaking of FREE!, because this is FREE!, it would be great, if are enjoying this story, if you could support the author by purchasing one of his other stories. Look, there are links all of the page and many different types of stories available.

It's always great to feel supported.
Thanks!

What Is the Flavor of Soul? (a FREE! book day)

For someone who grew up not really liking Halloween, I seem to write a lot of Halloween flavored stuff. There's the whole disastrous trick-or-treating escapade in The House on the Corner and, then, there's "Soul Cakes." Not to mention all kinds of other creepy stuff I've done or am doing.

But back to "Soul Cakes"!

If you pay attention to the cover for "What Time Is the Tea Kettle?", you'll notice that "Soul Cakes" is included. Yes, it's a pair of novelettes, and they are some of my favorite stories. In my mind, they're just fun. I won't lie, though, and try to say that some people haven't been unsettled by them.

Oh, well.

Anyway...

Just in time for Halloween, "What Time Is the Tea Kettle?" is FREE! And, hey, you can't beat FREE! Seriously, pick them up and give them a read.

And be ready for the man and his cat to be back very soon. Very.
And with an actual name.
Sort of.

What are you waiting for? Click the link and go get your FREE! book!
Creepy days are here, but they're almost over.

Creepy Days in the Garden (a FREE! book day!)

When people think of the Garden, they think of Peace. Calm. Perfection.
Eternal Life.
Then they remember the Serpent.
The Garden hadn't suffered the step of a human for millennia upon millennia...
...until Tib came.
It had become the place of the Undying.

Creepy days continue in the Garden, but don't follow Tiberius too closely.
You don't know what he might find.

Get "The Garden" today! For FREE!

The Creepy Days of the Man with No Eyes (a FREE! book day!)

He's been called many things during his days walking the Earth.
"Priest"
"Father"
"Padre"
"Master of Shadows"
"Shadow Walker"
"Soul Eater"
But the thing he is most often called is the Man with No Eyes.
For obvious reasons.

What happened to his eyes, you might ask?
Well, that is a tale for another time and one you might be sorry to have asked about once you've heard it. So that you understand:
"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. It is better for thee to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell..."

You won't find out what happened to his eyes today, but you can get "The Man with No Eyes" for FREE! today and tomorrow! Spread the word.
But don't trust the shadows.

The Creepy Days of Tiberius (a FREE! book day!)

It's October, and we all know what that means. We all do, right...?
It means the days are shorter and the shadows are longer. The shadows can reach farther and seem to never go away.
That's fine for most people, because the shadows don't care about most people. Most.
But there are those, those few, whom the shadows want, and when the shadows grow long and the veil grows thin, the shadows can act.
Tib has always known the shadows were after him, but he didn't always know he could fight back...

Get Shadow Spinner: Tiberius (Collection 1: Parts 1-5) today for FREE!
Seriously, go get it now! It's only FREE! for a limited time, so don't miss your chance.

And watch out for the shadows...

"Barachiel" Revised (or Done Or Raw)

I mentioned recently that I lost a computer. As in, it passed away. It gave up the ghost. Well, if computers have ghosts to give. It kicked the bucket. Or whatever passes for a bucket. It went to the light. I know, because it quit making any of its own. It gave its last gasp. Which I actually heard. It's in cold storage, now. Literally. The hard drive is. It's in my freezer, kind of like Walt Disney, waiting for a day when it can be resurrected. Or, at least, have its data carefully removed like donated organs. I just can't afford that transfer, right now, because all of the "normal" means of data retrieval didn't work.

But this post isn't about that. Go back and read the other post if you want to know more about all of that.

I spent most of July restoring documents from other sources. That's an adventure, let me tell you. [Okay, it's not, really. It's like the complete opposite of an adventure.] One of the things I could not just restore from another source was "Barachiel." I actually had to buy "Barachiel" and re-type it from my Kindle. Which is the point of all of this...

There's a reason authors (and other artist types, I would assume) declare things to be finished. It's not because they are finished, not necessarily, but because there's a point when you have to decide to quit working on something because you are no longer making any notable changes to the piece, whatever kind of thing that is, from a painting, mural, short story, or novel. As my wife would say, "Done or raw, do the chaw."

Supposedly, that saying comes from Texas and passed down to her from her grandmother who grew up there. I, too, grew up in and around Texas, though, and I never heard that saying until my wife said it. I still think it's kind of weird. And, yes, Texas is a big place, and her grandmother grew up in a different part of Texas than I did. But I digress...

"Barachiel" is a good example of all of this, because, as soon as I started re-typing it, I started fiddling with it. Not that there was anything wrong with it, because there wasn't -- okay, actually, I caught two errors: one missing space (after a comma) and one missing letter (leaving only an "a," which can be a difficult error to catch, sometimes) -- but, now, even just a few months after writing it originally, there were phrases that, I suppose, I wouldn't say quite the same way. Evidently, that's true, because I changed some. And I added in a few things here and there. Why? Because I was looking at it again, and I couldn't help it!

That's why we declare projects finished and we don't go back to them!

Seriously, I couldn't help tweaking! [Tweaking! I said tweaking!]

It was right there in front of me, and it just happened.

If I picked it up two weeks from now, I'm sure it would be the same. And again two weeks after that.
Why?
Because we always change, and the phrases and words change, too.

So, no, there is nothing significantly different about the revised edition of "Barachiel," but, just because, I'm going to make it FREE! for a couple of days. If you've already read it, you can get the new version and compare and, if you haven't read it, here's your chance to get the ever so slightly improved version. For FREE!

So, yeah, go pick up your copy of "Barachiel" today!
And, as always, please leave a review!

Force Field (pictures I like) (Xantros)

Angel week!

Don't go crazy. Get "Xantros" for FREE! today!

Peek-a-boo (pictures I like) (Ornias)

Angel week!

"Ornias" is FREE! today! You better get him before Solomon does.

A Gathering (pictures I like) (Lailah)

Angel week!

"Lailah" is FREE! today! Go pick her up. Just don't run any of those cheesy angel lines by her.

It's Angel Week! (Asbeel)

So, yeah, I know we just had a whole month of Angels, but, you know, promotions and stuff. So, this week there will be FREE! Angel stories. Just because.

Today, "Asbeel" is FREE! Totally. Completely. Go get it.
Yes, now.
You don't even have to come back. Go read, instead.

Oh, and remember, it contains adult material.

Angels Unbound: Raziel (an a-to-z post)

Raziel
Raziel was one of the first Angels to step out of the Void and went immediately to the work of writing down all the words of God. He's kind of like the court stenographer. He is the only Angel privy to everything God says and does, closer to God than any other but the Word. He is the Keeper of Secrets and the Angel of Mysteries. He is chief among all the Erelim, the Valiant.

From before time, Raziel wrote down all the words of God and all that happened. He wrote down the War of Heaven and the rebellion of Lucifer. He wrote down when time began and the start of Creation. He wrote of the disobedience of Man... and, then, gave them the book he wrote for them, The Book of Raziel. It was the start of... everything.



Not long after I envisioned the whole a-to-z of Angels and Demons thing, I thought it would be cool to get some other authors involved so that, stylistically, the stories wouldn't all be the same. Getting people on board for a project like this, though, turned out to be more difficult than I imagined. In general, other than a few stories that I knew I wanted to write (because they specifically pertain to larger plot arcs), I was going to leave it up to the individual author to pick the story/Angel s/he wanted to write about. Except for one: I knew early on that I wanted Briane Pagel to write the story of Raziel. Fortunately, he was on board to do that, and he has given me a story that I would never have thought of, which is why I wanted him to do it in the first place.

"Raziel" is FREE! today! Make sure you pick up a copy!


Already released:

Angels Unbound: Ornias (an a-to-z post)

Ornias
No one wants to be known as the guy on the time who fumbled the ball at the five yard line on what could have been the game-winning touchdown or the guy who struck out with two outs, bases loaded, and one run down. No one. Well, that's Ornias. He wasn't the only Fallen captured by Solomon, but that's what he's known for. "Oh, yeah, there's Ornias. Solomon captured him once." He can also cause pain with just his touch, but who cares about that when he was caught by Solomon?

"Ornias" is FREE! today! Make sure you pick up your copy!


Already available (just click the image):

Angels Unbound: Israfil (an a-to-z post)

Israfil
If you thought being covered in eyes was weird (see Dumah), try being covered in mouths. And that's not the weird part, he's also covered in body hair, as in hirsute. I suppose it's a good thing Angels don't need to eat, because he'd always have hair in his food.

At one time, Israfil used his mouths to sing praises to the Father in all the languages of the world. At once. But, now, he only wails and weeps at the suffering in the Pit, both for the Demons and the humans who have earned their places there. His wailing is continuous.

He is the Angel who stands in readiness to blow the trumpet for the Day of Resurrection, the trumpet always poised and ready.


Available for FREE! today:

Also available:

Angels Unbound: Gadreel (an a-to-z post)

Gadreel
Gadreel is a bit of a paradox. He's the "wall of God," but he's also the Angel who brought the teachings of war to man. I suppose he's a believer in "the best defense is a strong offense."

And that's about all I'm going to tell you about him because to go on would get all spoilery, not just in his story but in the overall story arc that he's in. However, I can tell you some things that aren't about him:

After doing all of my research and deciding on my cast and some loose story arcs, "Gadreel" was the story I wrote first. The story of the seduction of an Angel seemed... well, it just seemed interesting. I mean, why would an Angel be interested in humans at all? As a human, how would you get one to pay the slightest bit of attention to you? I mean, if an ant was trying to flag you down on the sidewalk, what would it need to do to get you to notice it?

Probably a lot more than Na'amah had to do but, then, ants are much smaller, and you're not walking around with the ants pretending to be one. [That's Na'amah on the cover, by the way. Or, at least, someone who evokes Na'amah in my mind.]

There's actually a bit more about this stuff -- stuff about the Fallen and Demons -- in the Author's Note after the story so, if you pick it up, and it's FREE! today, you'll have that, too, but, since I already wrote it there, I'm not going to write it here, too.

Anyway...

Go get "Gadreel"! It's FREE!


Already released (just click the images):

Angels Unbound: Asbeel (an a-to-z post)

So... Here we are at A-to-Z 2016. As with every year that I've done this, I'm behind schedule, and that was after taking last year off so that I would be ready for this year! Well, you know about plans and life and everything that means, I'm sure.

My general tendency would be to explain all about the genesis of all of this -- and I want to! -- but, honestly, I just don't have time, right now, to do that. Maybe I'll get to it later in the month? Or, more likely, it will end up in an author's note somewhere. Anyway...

Here's a summary just so you'll know what you're getting:

Angels Unbound is a sequence of short stories about -- you guessed it! -- Angels.There's an Angel for each letter of the alphabet, and each story is self-contained, meaning that it can be read on its own. However, as with everything I do, it's more complicated than that. There are some plot lines that run through multiple stories. Because I am presenting them alphabetically, they are not being told linearly, so, if you read them all, expect there to be some hopping around. But, then, that's why each story is self-contained.

The catch is that not all of the stories are written, yet. In fact, most of them aren't written yet. On those days, I will have a short character blurb for the Angel whose story has not yet been told. On days like today, when there is a story, there will be a link to that story, and, yea!, it will be FREE! If I feel inspired, there might be some blurb about that Angel's character, too, but not today. It's too spoilery. No, I can't even tell you what Asbeel's name means without giving something away.

Oh, before I give you the link, these stories, many of them, at any rate, probably most, today's for sure, are very adult in nature. Seriously. There's sex. Explicit. I'm just warning you, okay. This is not one to get for your kids. I'm saying that because my other stuff (House, Spinner, Tea Kettle) has all been stuff you could give to the kids. Not this.

Okay, are we clear on that? Good.

With that said, go pick up "Asbeel"! As I said, today, it's FREE! You can't really beat FREE!