BOOK SAMPLE!!!

(We interrupt this program to show off a lil' bit. Blue Ghosts comes out in October 2012. Here's a sample for your reading pleasure)

           Dinner with an Elf. You don’t do that every day. Casey Winter straightened the skirt on her very best dress, which was about six hundred dollars too cheap for her surroundings, and tried not to worry about what her dinner date would wear. Corpus Christi, Texas, wasn’t exactly a cultural hub, but it did have several nice restaurants. Marco Creed, the elf in question, had invited her to the nicest.

           The Republic of Texas. By God, was it ritzy. Dark wood and burgundy trim glowed under expensive lighting. Cut crystal glasses full of aged scotch sat at elbows. Lush greenery curled around brass fixtures. Wait staff moved with the collective grace of cranes, and with the sharp eyes of hawks spying rodents in the grass. Empty glasses were filled, plates were whisked away the moment knife and fork hit four o’clock. Complicated telepathy kept questions to a minimum. Here’s a salad, a soda, the entrée, your scotch. Plate clink, silverware song, mummer of voices under soft, slow jazz. Casey felt six inches tall when she asked the hostess about Marco’s table. It wasn’t ready yet, they said, and handed her an expensive glass of champagne.

           Good God in heaven, girl. What am I getting into? She wondered. A whole bottle of this stuff probably equaled her next royalty check. No way Marco made this kind of money on a mechanic’s salary. Oh, I’m sorry. He’s a car modifier. He’s still not pulling this kind of cash. Unless he actually did. When your dinner date is immortal, nothing is guaranteed.

           She wasn’t waiting long. A throat cleared behind her, and when she turned her nerves—well, around this man, they definitely didn’t settle.

           Elves are handsome. Marco Creed was also hot. Every time she met his eyes she thought about Chippendale dancers and underwear models and the large number of games you can play with ice cubes. Peach skin, eyes in almost luminescent blue, long gold hair in a braid he pulled off about as well as a lion in a circus tutu. And—this made her feel so much better—his well muscled chest was hidden by a suit about fifty bucks cheaper than her dress.

           He took her hand and ran his thumb across her knuckles. Shivers raced up her spine. “Ms. Winter.” He kissed the back of her wrist, then turned the charm on the amused hostess. “Table for Creed.”

           “Right this way.” The Republic of Texas sat on top of the Omni Hotel, and the hostess carried two menus towards a small table near a window. It had a breathtaking view of the moonlit ocean. Small boats and buoys floated through silver currents. The American Bank towers rose to the right, sides hit by spotlights. Falcons nested on the window ledges, spreading wing to spiral down to the pavement below. Light Wednesday evening traffic motored through the streets. Marco pulled her chair out for her, then sat in his own chair with effortless grace and dignity.

           Which he promptly blew by scraping his chair up that extra half inch. Nobody looks dignified doing the scoot-and-jump boogie.

           A waiter arrived with a bottle of champagne, the same brand as her first glass of bubbly, and he poured it with the majesty of a ritualistic magician. Marco thanked him, and checked the label as soon as his back was turned. Air was sucked through clenched teeth. “Pricy?” Casey whispered.

           “Yep.” He jammed it back into the ice. “Thank God, I’m not paying the tab.”

           “You’re not?” Casey was perpetually broke and currently unemployed. So was she relieved Marco wasn’t blowing hard earned cash on her, or disappointed?

           “I intended to,” he said, quickly. “But I told Razeil about our plans, and she had the manager bill her. A reward, she said.” He rolled his eyes.

           “You don’t think so?” Casey picked up the menu. Oh, my god, orange glazed quail. Sounded like one hell of a reward to her.

           “Raziel’s gifts come with strings—no—steel cables with thousand-volt generators attached. She’s up to something, and it bothers me that she’s involved you.” He brushed stray hair out of his eyes, drawing her attention to something that should have been there, and wasn’t.

           “Your ears,” She said. They’d been pointed three days ago. Now they were human blunt. 

           “I’m splurging.” A shy kind of sheepishness spread across his features. “Magically, I mean. It takes relatively little power for me and Raziel to hide ourselves—especially for me, where there isn’t much to hide—but the others…not so much. I wind up donating most of my personal magic so they can have a normal life…or something like it.”

           “And it takes so much, you can’t hide your ears all the time?” She asked. The waiter returned, and Casey ordered the quail. Marco ordered steak and lobster, and waited for the waiter to retreat before he answered.

           “Baseball caps work just as well. I’d rather not waste the power. I’ve got a lot, mind, but I’m not Sidhe, or even Elestrin. The well, in my case, ain’t bottomless. And magic on Earth is limited. Back in Ambercross, we could draw power from the trees, from the sky, from the Earth herself.” He looked at the vase in the center of their table and touched a daisy. “Everything was so…alive.” Roots curled out of the flower stem, and sudden pea green shoots curled around Marco’s fingers. Three more daisies flowered while she watched. “Alive on a level that you can’t even imagine. It sang to us, colored our every waking moment. But here…” he took his hand away. The daisies tried to cling to him at first. Then they withered, petals falling, leaves turning brown and disintegrating onto the table cloth.

           “Our world is dead?” She asked, horrified.

           He shook his head. “Sleeping. And like a dragon with a sore tooth, it’s a good thing it sleeps. The undercurrents I can touch are…angry.

           “But its slumber affects us. The sources a Merrow would use to shape shift, for example, are closed to her, and they have no personal reserves of power. Raziel and I, however, we’ve got big resources. Finite, but profound. That’s why we’re the leaders. Piss one of us off…” he pointed at the withered daisy. “No magic for you.”

           Seinfeld fan. She thought. Aloud, she said, “I thought it was because you could hurt them if you had to. Elves and Elestrin are big time scary when they want to be.”

           “Well, yeah. But it’s more effective to lead with a carrot than a stick.” Their salads arrived, and Marco smiled politely until the waiter retreated again. He picked up the pepper and shook it over the lobster. “Okay, your turn.”

           “What?”

           “Tell me something about yourself that I don’t know.”

           She tried to wipe the deer-in-the-headlights look off her face. “Um…what is there to know? Between Facebook, Twitter, and that blog my agent makes me update once a blue moon, my life is an open book.”

           “In Ambercross you would be tortured to death for that pun. We’d shove wooden splinters under your fingernails until you relented.”

           “That’s kind of the point.” She grinned and took a bite of salad.

           Casey had been marginally successful writing about elves and magic and a world named Ambercross…and had been flabbergasted three days ago to learn that it was, more or less, a real place. Neighbor-world to Earth. The kind that borrows your lawnmower and never returns it. She had some bizarre, unconscious connection to it, something even Marco couldn’t explain. He didn’t understand it any better than she did. But he claimed that, more often than not, when she wrote about Ambercross she was describing something real.

           Earth had Faerie population, too. Exiles from Ambercross, they’d latched onto her books as if they were a direct line to home…which, she supposed, they were. Most of the Exiles were immortals born in Ambercross, but even the Earthborn liked to read tales of their grandparents’ world. As for the Faerie-born…they missed their home world passionately. They clung to Casey’s literary straw, hoping against hope it would turn into gold.

           And that was a lot of heavy to put on her shoulders.

           It could have gone straight to her head—hey, she was a magical newscaster!—but it hadn’t. Mostly because her only benefit so far had been books that barely sold and getting shot at when a Faerie twisted off. Marco had saved her life that time, first by taking a bullet for her, and then by tangling with a fully shifted Merrow whose great goal in life was murder. Not bad for somebody who should work for Calvin Klein.

           She owed him something for it, but, well…“You know every part of me, Marco. There’s nothing to share.”

           “Not every part.” He waggled his eyebrows seductively and she underhanded an ice-cube at his lap. He deflected it with one smooth hand. Then the watts in his smile dipped. “What about your marriage?”

           He might as well dump ice water over her head. She shrugged, super casual. “I was married, he was an ass, he broke my leg and I divorced him.”

           “If he was an ass, why’d you marry him?”

           She flicked hair out of her eyes and took the last bite of her salad. The waiter whisked her plate away. Damn it, he was watching her too expectantly. He could probably out-wait her, too. She sighed. “You’ve told me world-shattering secrets about yourself. I suppose it’s only fair.” Her entrée arrived and she picked half-heartedly at the quail. Marco poured them both champagne, and Casey downed her entire glass before she spoke again. “He wasn’t an ass when I met him. He wasn’t even abusive. Jack was…God. Jack was great.”

           Noises rose around them. Someone laughed, high and long, as the jazz gave over to a live pianist. Whoever it was had skill, she thought. It was one of those heartrending melodies guaranteed to put tears in your beer.

           “He was the artist for my book covers,” she said, at last. “And he flew down to Houston for a convention. We met at this Irish bar. The Mucky Duck.” She laughed a little bit. “He had long hair and he tied it back with a zip tie. There was red paint on every single part of his body. And he--” she stopped, her eyes distant and dreamy. The memory had barely faded. Smell of old cigarette smoke. Warm wood bar and tables and stools, neon beer signs advertising Harp and Guinness. A slender young man with sharp blue eyes and long black hair smiling over the lip of his beer. Within twenty four hours his warm lips would be exploring more than personal history. “He was perfect.”

           “Love at first sight?”

           She shrugged. “Lust, I think. The love came later, when he…” She dropped her head because her eyes were stinging. “Our second date, we go out dancing. After about an hour he spots this little girl in a corner, crying her eyes out. She’s sixteen, she had Downs Syndrome, she was crying her eyes out, her mom was trying to comfort her. I would have kept going and let them do whatever. But Jack…he went right over and asked what was wrong.

           “He asked her, you understand. Not her mother. He asked the little girl.

           “Turned out, the most popular boy in school had asked the girl out as a joke. She’d had her hopes raised and then shattered because he and his sick buddies thought it’d be funny. And you know what Jack did? He took that little girl out on the dance floor and danced with her. He’s bumping around on the dance floor, I don’t know what the hell he’s doing, the girl’s doing something completely different…Marco, her smile lit up the whole world. All her mom could say was thank you. ‘Thank you both.’” Casey sniffed. “That’s when I saw that he was beautiful.”

           “And then he hit you,” Marco said, dryly.

           Sharp intake of breath, like a punch to the gut. She closed her eyes and nodded. “He got sick. Brain cancer. Then he had a stroke, and when he recovered…” she trailed off. At some point she’d begun rubbing her right knee. The deep, ridged scars from her last surgery could be felt through her panty-hose. She put both hands on the table. “He didn’t know who I was. Who he was. Anything. I thought if I were good enough, if I did enough, if I worked hard enough, I could fix him. I could bring my Jack back.”

            “And what happened?” Marco asked.

           “I burned dinner, and he beat me with a rolling pin. Three times in the face,” hand on right cheek, where six surgical pins held the bone together, “then the shoulder,” right collarbone snapped in two, “chest,” two broken ribs that still ached in cold weather, “and then my right knee.” Her right little finger began tapping her water glass over. And over. And over. “They said the bone looked like marbles in a sack. When I woke up all the way, I asked to be moved so this new version of Jack couldn’t find me. If I had stayed another day, I think he would have killed me.”

           Marco was quiet while he tried his steak and she ate a bite of quail. It had a strong citrus flavor, and was dreamily tender.

           “So that’s why you were working at a convenience store?” he asked.

           She nodded. “Yeah. The medical bills are pretty big. Reconstructive surgery. Physical Therapy.”

           “Wouldn’t Jack have to pay for part of it, at least?” He sounded outraged.

           Casey shrugged, feeling like a microbe on a telescope. “Texas is a no-fault divorce state. It was easier not to fight. I just wanted him out of my life.” She paused, and then a little of the old vitriol came out. “It was nasty. I don’t get alimony, I couldn’t keep any of his paintings. In one year he went from being the best human being I ever knew, to being this…vindictive, dangerous child.”

           “And he broke you.” Marco said.

           “He did.” She looked away and took another bite of quail. Outside the window, the hawks were settling in for the night. She shivered.

           Marco’s beeper went off.

           “Jesus. Who even has those anymore?” she said.

           Marco sighed, extruding long-suffering from every pore. “Raziel got one in the nineties and fell in love with it. I’d buy her a cell phone, but she’d use it for target practice.” He studied the number, then pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I’m sorry—”       

           “—but you have to take it. I understand.” And she did. Something told her a relationship with Marco Creed would be a little bit like dating a cop. Nice to know her instincts worked at least some of the time.

           After two rings, Marco flinched. He didn’t identify himself either, just listened for several minutes. “Wait,” he said, “Wait a second. She’s not—” more time passed as words flew across land lines and the atmosphere. Then finally, he sighed. “Alright. I’m making no promises. And if you hurt her—fine. Fine.” He hung up. Storm clouds brooded in his eyes. Storm clouds, and a bone-deep fear that put shivers up Casey’s spine. He sighed, then stood and put his napkin on the table.

            “Raziel wants to meet you.”

           “Trust me, Casey. This is not a good thing.” Marco turned his truck down Rod Field Road. The stereotype said Marco should have driven a pretty silver environmentally friendly Prius; this truck could have eaten five of them. The inside was pure white, not one scratch on the vinyl, not one smear on the dashboard. The outside was fire-engine red with metal flake and emblems from his home world airbrushed on the hood. He also liked heavy metal and the Black Eyed-Peas. She had yet to forgive him for the latter. He clicked his blinkers on and pulled into an apartment complex. Casey frowned.

           “She lives here?”

           “Yep.”

           “But…this is all student housing.” The apartment blocks were stark white and framed with palm trees and hibiscus, as if to argue that this was not some form of industrialized storage system disguised as living quarters. It didn’t really work.

           “It’s government supplied housing.” Marco paused a long time, then sighed. “She doesn’t work for a living.”

           “So she lives off the government?” Casey said, a definite edge to her voice. Though maybe she should reconsider. Being magical could be damn near crippling in this day and age, right? Elestrin were technically humanoid, the way unicorns were tangentially related to horses. Maybe government assistance was the best she could do.

           But Marco kept talking. “We pay her dues, and she keeps us out of trouble. Bails us out, keeps a separate apartment in case one of us needs to lay low for a few days. She’s not a bad person.” Marco said. It sounded more like he was convincing himself than Casey as he pulled into the main parking lot.

           Nighttime shrouded the buildings, turning soft yellow stucco to shallow off-blue. Cars occupied most of the spaces, including one incredibly shiny Jag with a Spectraflare paint job. It threw rainbows even in the moonlight. A lawn chair and board blocked off the space beside it. Marco stopped the car, got out, shoved the board and chair up onto the lawn, and then parked.

           “Raziel blocks this space off.”

           “Oh, so she’s one of those. Entitled to a parking space, so she takes one even though she doesn’t have a car.”

           “No. She has a car. Specifically, that one.” He pointed at the shiny monster parked beside them.

           No job, she lived off her charges, and she owned a Jag. Casey’s opinion of this woman was sinking fast. “You give her money for gas and insurance, too?” She said, climbing out of the car. “Or does she panhandle in her spare time?”

           “She does a lot of good things for us, Case. Exiles need a leader, and Raziel is better than most.”

           “Right. You know, David Koresh was awful nice to his cash cows, too.” They started up the stairs. “Is anyone else going to be here?”

           “Tim, maybe. Ero. Maybe everyone. I don’t know. The last time we introduced a human to our society she dragged people from Victoria down. She’s not predictable.”

           “And yet you’re expecting trouble,” Casey sighed.

           “Some things are more predictable than others.” He knocked on Raziel’s front door.

           The woman that answered the door was gray. Not the genteel tones of an old lady, but the deep steel of hurricane clouds. Her hair and skin were the same color, her eyes a slightly deeper oil smoke. She was tall like a lightning strike, narrow waist, almost flat-chested, and every seam of her perfect blue suit had been mathematically calculated to remind you that this was a razor blade masquerading as a person.

           “Marciaus.” The gray eyes tracked to her. “Winter. Karoline with a K. Come in.” She turned and walked back.

           Danger, Will Robinson. Casey thought. Danger. Danger. She walked into the house.

           You can tell a lot about a person by their house, and Razielara the Elestrin warrior-maiden had a front room straight out of Better Homes and Gardens. Gardenias in vases, sofa cushions in alternating shades of shale. Cutesy scrapbook dioramas. It felt like icing on a plastic cake, so Casey was relieved when Raziel lead her guests through the window dressing without pause. But the ruffles and gumdrops in cut crystal bowls left her very unprepared for the room they entered next.

           No frou-frou. No flowers. Almost no furniture at all. The heavy desk in one corner was almost a medieval throne. Its surface was mathematically neat, papers here, pens here, lamp emphatically there. And the centerpiece was a knife in a stand, the blade bare, razor sharp, and turned so that if you stumbled against her desk, you’d lose your hand. A starburst of swords, arrows and axes hung on the wall behind her chair, each blade rippling with skill and definitely sharp enough to kill. In one corner a full suit of armor, complete with a fox-shaped helm, stood guard over a display of six-shooters, each with their ammo lined beneath the barrel in a neat row. The bullets were polished, too.

           This was not an office. This was an armory run by a psychotic.

           Raziel sat behind the desk. There were no chairs for Casey or Marco. Her bad knee was aching already.

           “You have caused me a lot of trouble, Mrs. Winter,” Raziel said.

           “Ms. Please. I’m no longer married.”

           The tiny bit of good humor in those cold, gray eyes died. “You have killed a person who was under my protection.”

           Casey felt equally as cold. “I defended myself and Marco from a crazy woman and her boyfriend.”

           “You destroyed a creature of Faerie. This is not something that can pass without consequence.”

           Great. Casey was on the defensive in a room made of knives. Not the best place to be. “We didn’t have another option, ma’am. If you had been here—”

           “She would have gone quietly, and I would have another trophy. So not only did you destroy one of my people, you denied me the pleasure of a hunt.” Her smile was very dark.

           “What else should I have done?” Casey asked.

           Raziel laughed, beautifully, and nails on a chalkboard would be more calming. “You have made one disastrous assumption, Mrs. Winter, in coming here. You assumed that I care for the humans in this city. I don’t. You assumed that I would have protected you because you deserved it, or because you are famous, or because you can provide my people with a hope for return to Ambercross. I would not. What matters to me is that you have done something that cannot be undone. By our laws your life could be forfeit, and if I thought for a moment you could give me fair sport I would take it. A legal kill does not often come my way.”

           “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Casey said. Marco gave her a warning look.

           “But,” continued the gray woman, “You preserved the life of Marcaius as well as your own. And you are one that our people would listen to. And you have an extraordinary knowledge about us, thanks to your Gifting. You’ve potential to be a useful tool, and I don’t discard my tools without purpose.”

           “Raziel,” Marco interrupted, “No one holds to the old laws these days.”

           “The McHally family does. Lyrene was the daughter of their patriarch. They have already petitioned for your life, Marcaius. I have denied them the privilege as attacking your leader for sport is not a just kill. For now, they do not know about Mrs. Winter’s involvement, so they cannot petition her life. If this were to change, I would not give either her or you more than a few days. They would not go through me. By our laws, they do not have to.”

           “You’re threatening me,” Casey said. And doing a damn good job of it. “What do you want?”

           Another cold, knife-edge smile. “I need a problem-solver who will keep my secrets without worrying about her own. Preferably, because she has none, save the ones I give her.” She looked down for a moment, then back up. “Marcaius has told you about our problem child, yes? The missing Phooka, Prix.”

           “Yes.” Casey nodded.

           “You are to find her and bring her to me.”

           Marco exploded. “Wait a minute. She’s human, Raziel. She can’t stand up to--”
                        Raziel waved a hand. That was all, just one motion. But Marco went silent as if he were choked. He turned an alarming shade of red while Raziel watched, amused. When he stopped fighting, she looked back at Casey. “A human, indeed, but with magical gifts.”

           “I don’t know how to use them.” Casey said.

           “And even if you could, Portal power is no kind of a defense.” Raziel nodded. “But tools prove their usefulness outside of their intended purpose. Consider it a test of your abilities. I expect you will have Marco’s help, which means you will have the aid of those loyal to him. You will have five days to find Prix and bring her back to me.”

           “I don’t even know where to start.” She said. “And why five days? Why such a big hurry?”

           Raziel folded her hands on her blotter. It did not seem very surprising that she was the type who had a blotter. She probably used it to catch the blood of her victims. “Four people have been injured on the Lexington. Two tourists, two workers. All injured either at night or during a black out, with no sign of how they were injured or why. One of our people visited the site, and claimed to have found the scent of magic and fear. The Phooka seems an obvious conclusion.”

           Not to Casey, it didn’t, but she decided not to argue the point. “You’re not worried because people are getting hurt. What’s the real problem?”

           The look in Raziel’s eyes could have blistered nail polish. “People think the Lex is haunted. A reality show wants to investigate. They’ll be here on Friday. There will be cameras, tape recorders and many people to witness Prix’s violence. Publicity of our kind must be avoided. If Prix, or any Faerie, were to appear on camera, the lives of all witnesses become lawful prey. Something you and Marcaius would want to avoid, yes?”

           “I’d think that’d be your idea of the perfect day,” Casey said. Marco actually hit her.

           Raziel smiled, looking more and more like a great white shark. “She’s spunky, Marcius. From what passed in the tabloids I expected a little mouse, and instead I get a spitfire. A hunt would be very interesting, Ms. Winter, very interesting indeed with you at its end. You and whomever Marcaius can pry out of hiding will pose as a second group of investigators. And you, you alone, will bring Prix in…or kill her. Succeed, we’ll call the books even and your future assistance will result in reward. Fail…” the gray woman smiled. “Well, you will probably be dead, so it won’t matter.”

           “And if I refuse to help at all?” Casey asked.

           “I will tell the MacHallys that you killed their daughter, and you will die.”

           Casey closed her eyes. Three days ago she had been shot at by a crazy mermaid, and the responding officer had been a hard-assed no nonsense bad boy. He’d retreated from Raziel’s business card like it were made of snakes and not card stock. Casey now found this a testament to the man’s nerves. Raziel favored mahogany lipstick and brown-gold eye shadow. She looked like a storm cloud inches from a tornado. “We have a ghost problem, Mrs. Winter. Who you gonna call?”

            “Somebody with better taste in movies.” She took the papers out of Raziel’s hands. “I’m in.”
(And if you liked that, check out my other books on Smashwords)

My life is just not that interesting

Last month I said that I would update this thing every day. and I have, excepting weekends when I just want to die (why did I say I would post book stuff on the first? HAVE I MADE IT CLEAR HOW SCARED I AM OF THE FIRST YET???!?!) and in doing so I have come to the following realization.

I? Am not an interesting person.

HOPEFULLY my books are interesting. But I know that if they are, it is because I have taken all my not interesting stuff and shoveled it all into things that don't exist. The other part of my not being interesting is...well...I don't go out much.

Why don't I go out much?

I live in South Texas. In a small town. And my options are: Go out with friends (who do not read) and get drunk at techno club; go out with friends-who-do-not-read and get drunk at a bar listening to god awful country music; get drunk at work (My boss would totally allow this as long as I am not actively on the clock OR on call); stay home and read sci-fi book that is six times more awesome than anything in the little theater right now; or go on adventure involving aliens and space ships and medical missions and Space Needles and fairies and ghosts and romance something that bears a more than passing resemblance to Jareth the Goblin King AKA write something.

Which is not a very interesting thing to write about.

So yes. On the surface I am boring.

That said, book cover artwork is mostly done. I think I just need to let it cool off a little, do basic resizing for the artwork ratios, and then it'll start appearing in Places. Also why I am boring: you can make cool stuff or you can have a cool time, but doing both at once requires somebody doubly awesome.

Names

I think the thing that creeps me out the most at work is when people use my name. Total strangers whom I have never known before. I know it's better than "hey you", but call it a pet peeve of mine. If I don't know you outside that building and/or you haven't been in there more than once? Don't call me by name. You're not my friend. You're my customer. I am not going to be buddy-buddy with you.

A lot of people ask about naming characters, too. They don't ask me, of course (You gotta have chops for that) but in the forums I visit inevitably they'll ask "What about names? How do you come up with those?" and the inevitable come up: Baby books, fancy names, remember what you like. Ect. Ect. Names are surprisingly important. Just not the way we think of names as being.

People are more likely to be successful if they have a normal name. Jane. Bob. John. Edward. Ana (my reading tastes suck sometimes. Yes. I read Fifty Shades of Gray. Yes. I LIKED Fifty Shades, and yes, eventually I will blog about that series. Someday.) (also, dear readers, never ever ever write a book where ENTIRE E-MAIL CHAINS are reproduced IN THEIR ENTIRETY. It does not work out) It gives us the impression of being solid...and kind of makes it easier for us to exchange our name for theirs.

My favorite book heroine who is not Honor Harrington (Because we can't all be Honor) is named Jane. The only slightly scary vamp in Twilight? Jane. The most snuggable character in Firefly? Jayne, which is one Y away from being a girl's name.

You know when I get annoyed with books? It is when someone starts getting fancy with names. I hated the names of everyone in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy except for Arthur Dent. I made it about three pages into Old Doc Methusulah before L. Ron Hubbard's idea of a good name made my eyes cross, and we are not going to get into what Mission Earth did to me (actually, we will. Very soon. Jesus Christ was that a bad book. I can almost forgive LRH for Scientology. I can't forgive him ever for Jettero Heller)

There are books with non-normal names that I do like. The Belgariad, for example (FYI that stands for every David Eddings novel ever written. They are all the Belgariad, just with the names changed). But he hit on a naming game that kind of eases you into it. Garion is Garion, which looks close enough to normal, Belgarath is Mr. Wolf when you meet him, Polgara is Aunt Pol, Silk is Silk...and in all his other books it doesn't matter because you recognise that Serephrena/Aphrael/Emmy/Mother Goddess Person from Elder Gods is Polgara in a new hat. (I think that he gave up after The Belgariad and didn't bother recycling Garion. Sparhawk/Althalus is Belgarath) BUT! he plays games with the names, gives you something kind of normal (Pol, Wolf, Silk, Errand) to hang your hat on so when the real stuff shows up (Polgara, Belgarath, Kheldar) you're already in love with the character.

Point? There isn't really one. Just a nice rambling for your evening pleasure.

Kitty wars and pickle juice

At this point Chloe has made three incursions into Sofa territory. We have managed to turn her back each time, but our resolve is waning. It's all in those big eyes of hers. This war is doooooomed.

I am having so much freaking fun with this sci-fi story it is unbelievable. Originally I intended to keep it as a once off, but there are a lot of places I could take this. I kind of love this stuff, you know. Yes, dear friends, I am totally obsessed. ETA is still set for the first two weeks of September. Title and sample will be posted here and on DA 9/1.

I spent most of the last two days doing family stuff. I love my family, but sometimes the drama gets to be a little much. Jamming writing time in between work and family the last couple of weeks has felt a little bit like stuffing pages into a dam to keep it from bursting. I guess it's like that for everybody. Except I've noticed most of my friends and family tend to go dancing or party or something, whereas I spend an evening working out imaginary political problems and trying to balance a character's past with their current (traumatizing) events. Which is fun, but it usually means my outward life is boring. People ask "What did you do this weekend" and I can't exactly say, "fight dragons with other dragons, a cannon and a highschooler's understanding of physics" without looking like I've gone completely cracked. So I say "write" and they invite me to go to a dive and get drunk on whiskey sours that taste like pickle juice (Note to all bars everywhere: DO NOT KEEP YOUR SWEET AND SOUR NEXT TO PICKLE JUICE. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, ANGELS AND BAR FLIES DO NOT DO THIS THING. THIS TASTES TERRIBLE. YOU HAVE NO IDEA.) And I have to think up a way to bow out without looking boring because Lowest Common Denominator DJs cannot compete with dragons, and I have better sweet and sour at home.


Also: this is 2012. AC/DC is great and all, but if I hear "All my exes live in Texas" one more time I will begin to scream and never stop. My city needs a pool hall. Not a bar with a shitty coin fed pool table that tilts due south.

State of the CW+Book stuff and SAMPLE!!!

The war of attrition with Chloe continues. She has not made another foray into the house today, but I think she's decided that victory needs time to settle. She did, however, spend a great deal of time on my lap earlier. You know it's hard to make decisive choices when your opponent purrs.

Thomas has not gone toad licking lately. I think because the rats have reproduced, Chloe has eaten all his real food, and it hasn't rained in three weeks, so the frogs are not coming out to be eaten. And my own baby-doll, Abbot, is sleeping on my face every night. Cat politics are fun.

Also, my goal of late has been to update this thing every day. So far, it's worked pretty well. :D

Summer is winding down. The summer people are going home. It feels rather nice to start getting our town back. And I am about one third of the way through a second draft of the next short. Though it's a really long short. More novellette, really. I have several potential titles, finally, and I'll shoot for release in the first week in September, though if something comes up it may get pushed back to the second. I'll post the title when things are a little more firm. Until then, it is The Sci Fi Novelette of Mystery. SFNM.


Now, because these things require a little priming, I am going to give you all a little taste of the SFNM. Not properly edited, of course, but one of the better passages so far. Consider what's after the cut your mid-month bonus:

Ideas--dime a bushel basket

So this one day I was on the bus, because, you know, no car, and I was trying to write. This was a couple years ago, so I had my nightshift damn-I-want-to-sleep hangover on, and there wasn't much I could do about it. This woman notices me, and starts talking.

First off, guys and girls? I don't want to meet you on a bus. and if you see me in public with headphones in? It means i don't want to talk. I want to listen to music.

So anyway, I was dumber back then, and I mentioned that I was working on a book.

The floodgates. fucking. open.

See she had this idea involving bigfoot. An idea that I think I read in a Frank Peretti book (there are two kinds of people who read Frank Peretti. Christians, and Fundamentalist crazies) with a couple of extra twists. And it was BORING and I just wanted to go HOME, and the thing that struck me the most? Was how when we started she was like, "Well, I guess you can steal this idea because God knows, I'll never do anything with it."

My former--THANK GOD!--stepfather was the same way. He was all like, "you need to stop working on that silly fairy shit and start WRITING STORIES FOR JESUS" and then he would lay out his Da Vinci Code rip off that also involved the antichrist and human cloning. So specifically, he wanted me to stop working on MY story and start working on HIS. Because his is something he actually wants to read.

Kids, a story is not an idea. An idea is not a story. An idea is the sperm it takes to get a story started. When it does its job, it goes away, and there are a lot of other little wriggly ideas that don't ever go anywhere. And an idea is easy to get. How easy?

"Angel Tractor". Go write a story involving those two words. Now. If you stare at a screen long enough, eventually you'll get an idea. Are you stuck? Here's two more words. "Glorious Pumpkin". Go back to writing.

If I were to go through the list of idea kernals in Silver Bullet, it would be: watching a true crime show about a sniper, a word prompt I got off Janet Reid's blog, a HORRIBLE horror movie that may or may not have had Kevin "I drink my own piss" Cosner in it, a boat named "No Compromise" sitting behind the restaurant that owns my life, and a chunk of my dead-yet-soon-to-be-ressurected novel, so "Winterlord" doesn't really count yet. Of those five stories, one, Silver Bullet, was written specifically to go into the collection, and it was the only one where I spent time desperate for ideas. And by "time" I mean half an hour. And I'm not saying there is anything special about my brain. Because there isn't. I just didn't waste time over thinking things.

The best thing you can do for yourself as a writer is to write. Not gather ideas, but rather force yourself into a position where you have to write, a lot, every day, for hours. If you do this long enough, eventually you'll learn how to make the ends of your brain rub together to create sparks. The next best thing, of course, is to edit what you've written into some form of coherance, of course, but to do that you need to have stuff to work with.

Do you have an idea? A little kernal of an idea that may or may not become a story?

Stop talking about it.

Stop outlining.

Stop researching.

Stop designing your alien race's anatomy.

And Go.

Fucking.

Write.

That is all.

Restaurant 'fo

Work has been...interesting the last couple of weeks. And by interesting I mean chinese curse, stick-your-finger-in-a-light-socket level interesting.

First off, let me identify the day NO ONE EVER GOES TO A RESTAURANT: Monday. If you have ever had a Monday off (and I don't mean Memorial Day Monday. We're open then) and you've had to find someplace to eat, you've probably noticed that your options are McDonalds and That Cheesy Diner Nobody Eats At Because God, It Sucks. The nice places? Closed. Why are they closed? Well, in a lot of cases, those nice places are staffed by the owner, the owner's family, and the handful of good help they managed to scrape out of all the other Good Places. FYI, good waitressing is hard. And I am not a good waitress. I am an okay waitress. I manage to get drink refills, shrimp ends and sugar packets off the table, and plates cleared in a reasonable amount of time, but if you screw up my pattern you will probably have to ask me for a couple extra lemons.

And NO ONE EATS OUT ON A MONDAY. So if you don't have the staff (or income flow) to stay open seven days a week? You're closed Monday. I remember reading my favorite book, Sunshine, and wondering why a coffee shop/restaurant would be closed on a Monday. Now I know! NOBODY EATS OUT ON A MONDAY.

But lately we've had Random Mondays. As in Tuesday I get called in when we have two other people on the floor because we got slammed. Wednesday I am the only person on the floor and it is DEAD. Today probably went well. Friday and Saturday we will want to kill ourselves because shit, we DO make the best Margaurita in town AND THAT IS NOT BRAGGING ON OUR PART, it's just a shit town if you want something complicated. (Marguarita is not complicated. One part tequila, half part triple sec, one part sweet&sour, which is a fancy way to say Lemon/lime syrup. Why is this so hard? WHY CAN NO ONE ELSE MAKE A GOOD MARGURITA IN THIS TOWN?) so the tourists and such show up on our doorstep and wonder why we don't let them decide how they want the Salmon cooked. (Because we are not your personal chef. If you want a medium rare Salmon, please hire the chef for your own household.) (No, really. Get her out of our hair)

And then we have Those People. They are the ones that THINK they know the owner. They don't know the owner, but they THINK they do. So they THINK that on a busy night, telling me "Oh, (the boss) can pick something for me" is a good idea. THIS MEANS I HAVE TO GO ASK THE BOSS WHAT TO FEED HER CUSTOMERS. Just in case the all caps screaming isn't a hint, THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING. Do you see the menu? Do you see the entry that is fish in blue cheese? Do you realize this is her default for when people come in and ask that? I have FIVE OTHER TABLES, dude. Pick out your food, pick out your wine, and stop being a patrionizing asshole because, for the love of GOD mister, you are not the center of the freaking universe. It's bad enough you want me to do a side substitution that is totally and utterly inapproprete for the food your wife is ordering. And by the way? let your wife order her own fucking food. 

And don't ask me if the wine is good. I hate wine (Unless it is Italian Bubbles, or a really high end Malbec). I will lie to your face because it means I get you to order something faster. Don't ask me if the food is good, either. The answer is yes. I am paid to tell you yes. I will sell you on my least favorite dish because, if you look like you want it, it means i get to go do refills on all my other tables. And yes, the fucking cabernet is from fucking California and I know there are other countries on this fucking planet but DO! YOU! NOT! REALIZE! That I am POOR! And will never get to SEE those countries? And you are wasting my time telling me about things that I cannot change, BECAUSE I DIDN'T WRITE THE FUCKING WINE LIST?!?!

 *sigh* Here's your lemon.

Guys and girls, the person deciding whether or not the salad dressing/cheese/puree for your drinks is spoiled is the same person you're lecturing on why Talapia Is A Bad Fish To Serve. Please adjust your behavior accordingly. The next person might not be nice.

Okay. BOOK STUFF:

I have finished the next Exiles story (Silver Bullet sequel. You know, the one with Casey Winter and Marco Creed. There's going to be a series of them and every series needs a name, right?) so I have begun editing the sci-fi story (tentative September release date...sometime) which puts the next Exiles story either LATE September or early October. Note that neither of these dates includes artwork and (cringe) ebook coding.

There will also be another story to pick up where Winterlord left off. So the plan for the next three months, or so, is as follows:

September: Untitled Sci-Fi story

October: Exiles story

November-December: Winterlord story.

Mark calendars and make plans accordingly.

F**king bugs.

So one thing we always had as kids were praying mantis. es. (Plural form of mantis?) I mean...there is not a cooler bug in the universe. They look like cats designed by aliens, act like cats (ever watched one clean itself?) and eat other bugs that we human things generally don't like. And the other day we found one. "We" being my brother's awesome if slightly ADD girlfriend. And then I found another one. We've never had more than one mantis at a time, so I figured hey, why not, you know? And as having two we-eat-everything-we-see-moving kind of creatures in the same container usually results in one eating the other, we separated them. Number one is as every mantis ought to be. See bug. Eat bug. But the other one... He just kind of ... sat there.

See, the fun of owning a mantis is care and feeding. Emphasis on "feeding". Yes. I am a mean and cold-hearted bitch. But it is cool. And when the mantis won't eat...you get kind of bored. And when you have two mantis...es...is...s...(seriously. Why have autocorrect if it won't spit out the damn word?) And you're bored, you decide to put them together to see what they'll do.

My brother's slightly ADD girlfriend? Put them together about ten minutes ago. As for what they'd do with each other...well...

...yeah.

Movie Bitch: Black Swan

So my brother and father sat down one evening to watch The Big Lebowski (or however you spell it). I have never seen it. I want to. I just, you know, never found the time. Anyway, at one point my brother turned to my Dad and said "Holy shit. This is the inside of your head."

Black Swan is the inside of mine.

Seriously. It's as if someone sat down, made a list of all the things I wanted, dreamed about and was afraid of and put them into a movie. A beautifully scored, wonderfully costumed, well acted, holy shit did that just happen kind of movie. Everything that has ever been important to me, with the notable exception of religion, appears in it. I was in tears when it ended. I'm not entirely sure why. Probably because it opened a couple of very old wounds along the way.

I also am very glad that when my Dad and I were planning on seeing it, we dodged into Tron: Legacy instead. I love it, but I do not think I could have watched it with my father.

First off, the film is marketed as a dance story, which it is, and as a fatal-attraction, Single White Female sort of story, which it is not. I expected to see Nina and Lily have a catfight halfway through the movie over who got the lead role, lots of backbiting and name caling, mean pranks and some dangerous, deadly finale during the opening night preformance. Which I got. Sort of. In reality, Black Swan is the story of someone haunted by themselves. It's also a story about Self Injury. Consider this your official trigger warning. Which, BTW, they ought to put on the DVD cover.

WTF Christian ramblings AHOY!!!

(Yeah. If you're a non-religious type I recommend putting on a hard hat. I don't usually let the Christian drive but today I want to.)


    Can God make a rock he can’t lift?

    The answer from the Christian perspective (given the flavor in which I was raised) is of course, yes. Which immediately makes your brain throw cogs. It’s a kind of double negative. Can God, who can do everything and in whom all things may be done, make something that he cannot then do anything with? I remember having a debate with an atheist (this was the ‘net and the kid was a troll, but it technically counts as a debate with an atheist) where they brought up this question, and that wasn’t the last time, either. It seems to be a proof of the inherent idiotcy of belief in an omnipotent being of infinite power, the rock that can’t be lifted. If it is infinite, it should be able to make the rock, but also, if it is infinite, it ought to be able to lift it.  A chicken-or-the-egg kind of question, intended to make the recipient realize their belief system is not true due to the failure of logic.

    Well, there’s a lot of assumptions one has to make about God before the question both disproves His existence (and/or nature) and becomes anything other than utter nonsense, and when asked in the spirit of “Then how can God exist?” every one of these assumptions are made. I have sorted them into three major points:

    -That the perception of a celestial or higher being are identical to the perceptions of a human, and that the infinite is, therefore, like a human only bigger.
    -That the limitations of such a being would be imposed by something outside of itself
    -That God has never done anything of the sort before.

    We’ll start with the first one. And I will probably give a physicist conniption fits, so please forgive me if I completely mangle hyperspacial theory. There’s a thought exercise intended to help a layperson understand what a fourth-dimensional square would look like. Take the surface of a table or a piece of paper, and imagine that there is an entire civilization living in it. Not the whole table or the whole piece of paper, but the mathematical two dimensional plane of its surface. It has leingth, and it has width. If you want to think of it in terms of direction, it has forward, back, right and left. It has no up or down. Any creature living in this two dimensional world would not only not have access to up, it would have no concept of the direction up. If you were to insert a cube into Flatland and drop it all the way through, a Flatlander would only see a single, unchanging square. If you dropped a pyramid, it would see a slowly shrinking square. To a Flatlander a pyramid is a square that shrinks. Because we have access to the third dimension—not merely perception of it but the ability to move in it and manipulate objects in it—we understand what a pyramid is, and by the same measure, cannot fully undersand what it is to not understand, to not know what up is.

    It stands to reason, then, that if there are other dimensions, and I believe time is more or less our limited perception of the fourth dimension—it occurred to me that if you were to pick up Flatland and move it through the third dimension, the Flatlanders would probably perceive something changing in their world, but would be unable to identify it past its two dimensional effects—that we cannot see what their nature is. If a Flatlander can see all of a square but not all of a cube, then we can see all of a cube but perhaps not all of a tesseract, the fourth dimensional cube. We can unfold a model of a tesseract into three dimensional terms, just as a cube can be unfolded into its component squares and become a two dimensional shape, but we can’t perceive what that tesseract would really look like because we cannot perceive the fourth dimension’s directions, just as the Flatlander has no concept of up. Perhaps things we identify in life, like light and gravity and time, perhaps even sin, are in reality extradimensional movements or actions that we can only identify by their effects on our three dimensional world.

    For example, if I were to insert a cube into Flatland and move it up and down, but never so far up or so far down as to make it actually leave Flatland, by a Flatlander’s perspective it wouldn’t be moving. And if I were then to have a physical presence in Flatland—say a plane of my body where it intersects with Flatland—it would probably look as if there were a cube that I were unable to shift right or left. If I were to have a shape with infinite height, but a perfectly square profile, it would be a square I could never properly remove from Flatland, and from the Flatlander’s perspective, something immobile. So if God were to create a rock, fixed in three dimensions, movable yet infinite in a fourth, fifth, sixth or some other dimension as yet undiscovered and undiscribed, it would fit the literal definition of our immovable rock, by our perspective.

    But perhaps you want a rock that can’t be moved by any definition, even God’s, which brings us to the second assumption people make when they ask that question: that any such limit must come from an outside source. That it may not and cannot not be self-imposed. And this is where the question breaks down into total nonsense and we need to examine not the nature of God or what is possible, but the nature of the infinite and of limitations.

    First, let’s assume that the rock is a physical thing, that God is infinite (otherwise the question is again, nonsense) that what we’re talking about is physical streingth, and that God has no self-imposed limitations on what he may or may not do. Thus, he could lift infinitely more material than there is in all of creation. Thus the rock would have to be infinitely more than infinite, and unless you can divide by zero, this is where logic breaks down.

    Let me put it this way. You have a mathematically infinite line, and are told that at the end of it, there is another line and you are to find it. This line has no end. You cannot have two simultaneous unlimited infinities. There is no way to get to the end of the first line in order to find the second. This second line might as well not exist. It is part of the infinite. It is part of that first line. The only way for two mathematically infinite lines to exist is side by side, paralelle to each other.

    To put it another way, by saying that this is a line, a one dimensional construct, we have put limitations on it and have given something else, the second line, a place to exist. If we were talking about two infinite planes, we’d have the same problem until we moved into the third dimension and put the two planes paralelle to each other. If it is infinite in the third dimension, we have to move up into the fourth dimension, and then keep going until we find the dimension in which our object (now indescribable in human terms) finally has a limitation. You may have one infinite thing in a defined space, but you cannot have two. They will swallow each other up and become one thing again. The only way for two things to exist is to put limitations on them, and then place them so that they interact within the confines of their limits. You could almost say that individual objects, or even individuals themselves, can only exist so long as there are limitations to protect them.

    But God, as we have established, is infinite, and that includes in all aspects and dimensions. An infinite rock would swallowed up, or else He would be swallowed up by the rock, if this is not too heretical a thing to think. If the creation of the rock insists on an infinite series of infintes there really is no point to it because it wouldn’t exist at all. God and the Rock would swallow up each other. There has to be a limit for the rock to exist as a rock.

    Which means that to create the rock that can’t be moved, God must first put a limit, not on the rock, but upon God. And that’s when the rock that can’t be moved becomes a possibility.

    Suppose that God says to himself, “I shall only be able to move this much of creation. And so I shall create a rock that is this much more than this much of creation, and I shall put it here, and it shall then not be moved.” and so he makes the rock.

    This supposes a purely physical limitation. Suppose instead that God says, “I shall make a rock no bigger than a grain of sand and I shall place it on a beach, and once it is there I may not and cannot move it again.” And so he makes the rock, a rock that a child could move, or a wave, but a rock that God cannot move because he said he cannot move it. It is a limitation of will.

    Which brings us to the third assumption: That God has never done such a thing before.

    Remember what I said about the infinite line. Suppose that there was a finite line—a line with ends—somewhere in that infinite line. Could you find it? There’s only one dimension and while there may be two lines, one has no end. How could you find the other one without first moving both into the second dimension? Suppose Flatland were swallowed by an infinite plane? Would the Flatlanders still exist? Wouldn’t you have to move them into the third dimension, where they are limited, before you could separate the flatlanders from the plane?

     In God we have an infinite Presence, infinite Substance, infinite Power and infinite Being. How could anything exist within that eternity without becoming a part of it? In our modern world a fetus, encompassed by its mother, is considered part of the mother, like a limb or a heart, and is only its own person when removed from the womb and forced to breathe and survive on its own. The only individual for whom existence does not require limitations is God, because He is the Infinite. For the rest of us, we need limitations, not only of ourselves but also of God himself. Otherwise we are a part of God, attached by some umbilical of twisting eternity, encased in a womb that continues forever, and this is not what God wants.

    Let’s play out a scenario of Creation, how it might be if the Infinite were to say, I am lonely. Oh, think of that for just a moment. One of the rules of love is that you may only feel it yourself, truly, when it is felt for someone else. Love requires an object. Demands it. It is not a sensation like sweetness or happiness, but an action, and you need something to do it to. And the Eternal, the Indivisable, the forever God, Infinite Love says to himself, I am lonely. And perhaps He decides to make something equal to Himself and divides, and the Trinity is born. But you can’t sort the eternally present from the eternally present, and while there might be three personages somewhere, there is still only one God there. Creation still has not happened.

    And then God says, “For there to be a true Object, there must first be a place where I am not. So then, let there be a place where I am not.” And a thing which has never before been has been created. Not by a twisting or a sharing or a shaping, but by a limitation. Here is a place where the Eternal ends, and where something else may be. And all else, the cosmos, earth, mankind, grows out of this first moment, when the Eternal created a place where the Eternal would end.

    Another aspect of the Rock which Can’t be Moved is its uniqueness. In all the cosmos there are rocks aplenty, but here is a new thing, a special thing. A rock that God can’t move. And I would think that God would like to look at this rock and visit it, because it is unique among all the rocks. And if he were to remove his self-imposed limitations, sure, he could move the rock and prove his eternal power by doing so, but he would also be unmaking the rock, robbing it of its special qualities and also, robbing himself of this wonderful, special thing. It’s not the Rock that Can’t be Moved anymore. It’s merely a rock, and there are rocks aplenty in cosmos.

    God limits himself and creates a place where he is not. And then he puts things into it, and I don’t pretend to understand angelology and demonology and the kinds of creatures that God might make for His joy and pleasure, but eventually one of them was Man, and in Man he decided to do a special thing and say, “Let us make Man in Our own image.” Well, God did not precisely mean identical copies of the Eternal, because that would turn everything into sameness, into Godness, and this is something God does not want, because he isn’t making more of himself. He wants things like, similar, but not same as. So he meant something else, and I and a lot of other people believe that the thing he made in Man that was like but not same as was Free Will. For Free Will to exist, God again has to say, “Here is a place where I am not.” Here is a place where His will is not, so that our will might exist.

    This might need to exist to give unconditional love a chance to truly be unconditional. As long as the loved object remains agreeable, love is not truly unconditional. It’s never had to prove it’s nature. It’s never been measured. But if there is a chance the loved object may become undesirable, then there is a chance that the love itself might prove unconditional. And of all the aspects of God that may or may not be limited by His will, His love has never been restricted.

    But for this to happen there must be a will that God, in all his might and power, cannot shift. God, who must by his very nature enter true relationships only with his inferior, wants objects that can also love in return, that can adore and worship and return to Him that which He feels for them… but this love is meaningless without the choice not to love. Without the choice, the love is bland, boring, unspirited, like oatmeal without even salt to taste. With it, though, it becomes a drama. A play. A story worth reading. It is the chance of loss, the danger of losing, the threat of irrevocable severing, that gives any story its heart and savor. When we choose to love God, having the option to choose not to, it is a thing worth having, a thing unique in all Cosmos. Love given to the Eternal by the free will of the giving soul.

    And the price of this great thing? The pain and suffering, the horrors and agonies, the very insipid nature of humanity. War, rape, genocide. We are guilty of it all, because it is by our choice that we do it, and the concequences of those actions rightly fall on our heads…but there is meat to the argument that it is God’s choice to give us choice, that he is at fault for creating a world where suffering is possible.

    He could choose to take that free will away from us, make us all behave and do the things that are right and good not because we choose to do them but because they are right and good. Take away the road, in other words, lay down railroad tracks and tie us into them forever. But to do so would be to remove our specialness. There are creatures in Cosmos aplenty who can do good, angels to sing praises, seraphim to worship. But it is we, lowly mortals, who may choose to do so, and who also may choose not to. We alone, by His will, may choose to be beautiful or ugly, which makes our beauty all the greater and our ugliness all the more terrible. It is we who may rise to Heaven or fall to Hell, and magnify the rise or fall by its triumph or tragety. It is we who may be wooed and won or lost, depending not only on what God wills but by what we will as well. The submission and surrender of one child is greater than that of all the angels in all of Cosmos, because it is the submission of choice and of will, freely received and freely given, something that no other creature can say. We are the Bride of Christ not merely because God chose us to be so, but because we could have said No, and by our natures had to be won rather than taken.

    In essence, We are the answer to the question. We are the Rock Which Can’t be Moved.