#fridayflash: the parallel ghosts / September 12, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

"It's one of those things about living alone," Hank told his sister. "When you live with other people, if you find something not the way you left it, even if it's in your own bedroom or whatever, you figure someone else must have done it. When you live alone and that happens, you have to figure either you're forgetful or crazy."

The sister still lived at home, ostensibly to help out their ailing mother, but really because she could never be bothered to get her own place. So she nodded and asked what Hank thought the rain they'd got lately would do to this year's apple harvest. Hank always wanted to talk about odd, sensitive things. She didn't think it was very manly of him.

He extended the visit long enough to finish his coffee, praise the brownies his sister had made for dessert (though it was like eating chocolate-flavoured erasers), and help do the dishes. Then he gave his sister a quick hug, kissed his mother on the cheek, promised he'd come back soon, and caught the bus to go home.

He unlocked his apartment door, and noticed the smell was back again. Nail polish remover, the industrial-strength, old-school acetone kind, with an overlay of rose-scented perfume. By the time he'd closed and locked the door behind him, it had disappeared.

Agatha screamed, just a little, when she caught sight of him. The clothes... she'd always figured him to be the ghost of a workman, maybe one who helped build the apartment block, but the clothes weren't right. Denim trousers like a farmer or a construction worker, but this time she got a good look at him in the front hall mirror. He'd been wearing tennis shoes. Denim and tennis shoes and a bomber jacket and a collared shirt, with a tie on this time. She'd have wondered if he were a tramp, especially so unshaven, but all the clothes looked new, and in good repair.

She shook her head and went back to the washroom. She had to finish re-varnishing her nails before she went to bed.

Hank toed his shoes off and flopped onto the couch. He stretched an arm out for the remote control, turned the TV set on, and scrolled through the list for his PVR. He smiled when he saw that the game had been recorded after all — the PVR's behaviour when he wasn't home to keep an eye on it could be erratic. He hit the "play" button and settled back to watch.

The screen showed a gloriously gaudy animation of the sports channel's logo, and the bright colours reflected on the surface of the coffee table. Something on the table flashed a reflection of its own. Hank frowned and eased himself to a semi-sitting position. He picked up the object and twirled it around in his fingers before tossing it back onto the table.

"I thought I'd got all of them," he grumbled out loud. Another bobby pin.

Agatha exhaled a distinctly unladylike stream of curses. She had just one more curler to fix, but she couldn't find another bobby pin anywhere. With all the rations and the war effort they were almost impossible to buy. She let the loose section of hair flop over her left eye while she left the washroom and went to check her desk drawer. Maybe she could make do with a paper clip or something.

She checked the coffee table for dust as she passed by it, and noticed a shadow out of place in the cranberry-glass candy dish her aunt Sarah had given her. She stepped closer and peered in.

"How did you get here?" Agatha snatched up the errant bobby pin and trotted back to the washroom to finish rolling her hair.

Hank groaned out loud as the opposing team scored. He shivered and glanced in the direction of the washroom door. Weird. It felt like there was a draught. He pulled the blanket his mother had crocheted off the back of the couch and wrapped it over himself.

The TV set was displaying ads, but Hank felt too lazy to fast forward through them. He glanced down the hall, wondering if he was too full to have a beer after all, when he saw a shadow pass over the mirror on the washroom medicine cabinet.

He threw off the blanket and tiptoed down the hall, but when he peered into the washroom, no-one was there. He checked the bedroom too, just in case someone had somehow slipped in there while he was getting up from the couch.

Nothing. Just the faintest whiff of rose-scented perfume.

#fridayflash: vermin / September 4, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

The only way through the swamp was the road that passed over Invisible Hill, so called because to anyone walking west on it, the road appeared to be level, yet by the time they reached the peak at the edge of the swamp, they were winded from climbing, ever so slightly, the twenty minutes or so it took to get beyond the last stand of natron-cured oak. Usually a wanderer would spot the Waggoner house while they were trying to catch their breath.

Elsie Waggoner sat on her front porch, rifle held lightly across her lap. The house had been built at the top of a steeper, plainly visible hill, which let her see anyone on the road from about the mummified crocodile half a klick down from Invisible. The kitchen windows were an especially good vantage point, which was just as well since Elsie spent most of her waking hours standing over the sink. This particular afternoon she spotted a tall, dark, reedy figure struggling along the hard-packed clay even before the hill climb started. By the time the road joined with solid ground, they were nearly bent double with exhaustion, letting their long arms hang down as their shoulders heaved air into their lungs.

Elsie checked the position of the sun and risked a quick check with her field glasses. The hair was longer than one might expect, but as the figure straightened she observed a bleach-white throat with a prominent adam's-apple in the middle. A man, then.

A shape rushed up to the man and knocked him on the ground. Elsie quickly readjusted her view, and saw that it was a large black mastiff. At first Elsie thought the dog was wild, grown crazed from hunger as it crossed the natron swamp, but the man gently pushed it off and picked himself up.

Elsie patted her cardigan pocket for spare rifle shells, lips tightening into a humourless smile as her fingers confirmed she'd remembered to take some from the box on the windowsill on her way out.

The strangers came up Invisible Hill, stopped and rested, and then they always did one of two things. Either they rejoined the road (it disappeared into scrub grass for a while, but became clearly marked again a little to the north), or else they climbed the steep hill to the Waggoner house.

Sometimes they came claiming they needed directions, which was ridiculous since there was only one road.

Sometimes they came asking for food and shelter.

Sometimes they came to take whatever they could get.

Elsie didn't bother to find out which pretext a given stranger was using anymore. She set them all to work in the apple orchard, no questions asked. She'd lost her parents to one traveller, and her sister to another, and she wasn't going to bother waiting to find out if they were trying to gull her or not.

The man in black pulled his shoulders back and craned his neck. Then he hunched over and started up the Waggoner hill. The dog trailed after him.

Elsie stuffed the field glasses back into their battered leather case and brought the rifle up to her shoulder. She used to shout a warning, but that just made them run and zigzag, and she had neither the patience nor the spare shells to deal with the extra bother.

The man kept his head bowed the entire climb, anyhow. Elsie waited until his black-coated back made a suitable target before she pulled the trigger.

The rifle shot made a flock of lost seagulls leave the shore of the natron swamp and take to the air. The man dropped immediately. His body lay face-down, not moving. Elsie knew he might not quite be dead yet, but she was sure she'd hit, and that was good enough for the time being.

The dog had run off somewhere to the south. The sun was setting behind the house, making long shadows it was difficult to see into.

Elsie chewed the inside of one cheek for a few seconds. The weather had been cooling, and was supposed to stay that way for another week yet. She'd let the stranger start to mulch on the front lawn, and throw him in the wheelbarrow for the apple trees to use up tomorrow morning. With any luck the dog would be loyal enough to sit by the body of its former master, and she could take care of it then.

She turned and had one hand on the screen door when the moan came up from the hillside, wafting at the back of her neck like a bad smell. All right, so she hadn't killed him. That happened a lot with that kind of shot. She expected the shell had lodged in one lung. She'd done it before.

The next moan was louder, and included some half-panted curses. Elsie walked to the edge of the patio. She fished the spare shells out of her cardigan pocket and reloaded the gun. The man had fallen on the steepest part of the hill, rendering his legs invisible. Elsie could see he was raising an unsteady, shaking hand into the air, but she wasn't going to waste a shell on shooting that. She needed to hit some vitals.

She took one step off the patio, and the dog lunged out of nowhere, barking and growling. She immediately stepped back onto the porch, scuttled across to the door, and let herself in.

"Going to be a noisy night," she muttered as she locked the door behind her. She walked to the kitchen and checked how many shells she had left in the box before setting the rifle within easy reach of the door.

Over the dog's barks she could hear that the man's groans were ending with a short screech at the end. A glance out the kitchen window showed her he'd managed to alter his position.

Elsie quickly locked all the doors and windows downstairs, then hurried upstairs to do the same. If she was lucky the stranger might move to a position before darkness fell where she could shoot him from one of the second storey windows.

On the assumption that she wouldn't be lucky, she went to her father's den and got his revolver from the desk drawer.

The King's Blood review / September 1, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

Consider a book which is a medieval fantasy the same way Neverwhere and A Canticle for Leibowitz are medieval fantasies, which is to say it is both very much so and not at all. If you took those two books and added some generous dollops of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Christopher Moore before turning on the blender, you'd get a mixture close to The King's Blood.

The plot: a few free kingdoms stand independently against an ever-expanding Empire. In one of these, our hero, Ciara, works as a maid in the Royal castle. Her mother manages the cleaning staff; her father is one of the few competent members of the security force. The castle is invaded by soldiers of the Empire, and Ciara's father tasks her with bringing the now-assassinated king's youngest son, Aldrin, to a town a short distance away, where the royal armies can regroup and push back the Empire's forces.

Needless to say, things don't go very smoothly.

The story takes place a very long time after the current day, in an unspecified part of the world which, I suspect, was once called the United States of America. In this neo-medieval society, bits and pieces of culture from our current era survive, albeit in a usually symbolic and almost certainly distorted form. Some of these are just quirks, but more often than not they're used satirically.

"Na's, we aint's got no's Floras or Faunas. Just lots of sharp things for slicing balls off." Brander and Gelder giggled together because what's the point of life if you can't find humour in your job?

"Very well, sirs," mister Guard continued. "I'll ask you to kindly step over here and remove your shoes."

Ciara sighed from her vantage point behind a set of mulberry bushes, still clinging stubbornly to their leaves in the face of winter. She watched this idiot do the identical song and dance with every farmer, peddler, and the set of kids chasing after their ball. Ask the same inane questions, pull them aside, make them remove their shoes and coats, and then wave a stick for awhile before letting them pass through.

The conflicts in the story are perfectly qualified to increase the tension and the danger the two main characters face. It was interesting from a thematic point of view how many of them are caused by prejudice. Ciara is a young black woman living in a society where black people are so rare, people often assume on sight she is a supernatural being. She's inherited her looks from her foreign-born father. Once men get past her features, she still has to convince them of her capabilities. The world she lives in does not expect a sixteen-year-old female to either own or be able to wield a dagger.

He chuckled again, a voice that echoed across the emptying ramparts, "You do ask much, don't you? If you ever met God, you'd ask him why he gave the peacocks such lovely feathers, yes?"

"If I ever met them, I'd probably ask the gods if I got the other bastard just as good," she grumbled, the cold winds buffeting her skirt and threatening to toss her body off the wall.

Aldrin, on the other hand, starts off as a quiet, studious, easily-frightened boy thrown into intrigue and danger, forced to trust his life to a servant he hardly noticed before. In a way his character arc is the more satisfying of the two. It felt like the story allowed Ciara to spread wings she already had, whereas Aldrin has to grow his before he can soar.

Their journey to rejoin the royal army and thwart the Empire's invasion is filled with well-rounded secondary characters, from monkish scholars to medically-adept witches. Despite the large cast, the secondary characters were easy to keep track of and greatly enriched the reader's understanding of the story world.

I have one major nit to pick with The King's Blood, which is that it really needed at least one more round of proofreading. It is far from the worst case I've seen, but there are a certain number of incorrectly used homonyms (boarder for border, eek for eke, role for roll, dolled for doled). There weren't so many as to make my disbelief come crashing down to ground, but enough that its suspension got a little shaky in parts.

Overall, if you like some fun and satiric commentary with your adventure, The King's Blood is well worth a read.

About the Author:

S.E. Zbasnik has published three fantasy books. Tin Hero and TerraFae follow a female heroine on a classic fantasy quest to mess with some elves and crack jokes along the way. Her most recent book is The King’s Blood. It’s got some magic, it’s got some witches, it’s got a black heroine in a medieval setting, and it has more puns per cubic meter than a clown car. Zbasnik has a Bachelors in Animal Science with a focus upon genetics, putting her one step closer to finishing that monktopi army. Learn more about her on her blog and at her Amazon Author Central page.

Blog: http://sezbasnik.blogspot.com/

The King's Blood on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JMPI9M0

Amazon Author Central page: http://www.amazon.com/Sabrina-Zbasnik/e/B005DBF28Q/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&linkCode=ur2&tag=indieunlim-20&linkId=37RB2JVAEWRYY4TO

#fridayflash: noisy one / August 28, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

It happened again the following Thursday. This time it was the hardware store.

What the security cameras showed was the normal afternoon rush — people swinging by after they'd done their time at one of the nearby office towers, picking up this or that for a repair or a project. Wood screws, glue guns, some tool they never thought they'd need until they did. The queues to the cash registers were five people deep for a solid half-hour, and then the place would be nearly dead until closing time.

A quarter to six, the rush was petering out, four people waiting at one checkout, three at the other, and then the vibrations started. And this was the interesting part: everyone who'd been there or seen the security footage all agreed to call it "vibrations", but what was actually shown in the recording was very different.

Behind the checkouts was a peg board, used to display wares which were small but expensive, too big a risk for shoplifting. They were either hung from metal pins, or stored on a shelf sitting on brackets.

What the security recording showed was items just falling off, as if someone were reaching through the peg board and flicking them to the floor, one by one. An invisible someone, or group of someones, since once things got going it was happening six or eight items at a time.

It was the customers who reacted first. One of the clerks only turned around when he saw a customer staring at the back of the counter, and the other one reacted when a smart phone docking station came off the shelf and smashed to the ground directly behind her.

The customers waiting in line all set down their merchandise and left. The clerks said most of them were saying things about earth tremors. Sure there were earth tremors in the area from time to time, but the thing was, only the items on the peg board were affected. Nothing else in the store had so much as rattled, including some precariously-displayed sample toilet seats.

No-one would have even known it wasn't the first time, except one of the hardware store clerks was friends with the girl who opened the coffee shop every morning. The coffee shop had been hit the previous Monday, when an open display bag of whole roasted beans had jumped, bean by bean, in a high arc into the nearest garbage can. While the hardware store's events were easily blamed on an earth tremor, some customers had joked the coffee beans had been mixed with Mexican jumping beans, and the shop had seen a sharp drop-off in customers buying half-kilo bags of beans to grind at home. Someone had called the health inspector on the shop, although the stern-looking man who came from the Board of Health admitted that if anything, the shop was cleaner than average.

The hardware store clerk and the coffee shop barrista told their managers, and the managers took it upon themselves to canvas the rest of the storefronts in the plaza. They found out about three more incidents from the past two weeks, all following the same pattern: a very busy part of the day, phenomena isolated to only one part of the store, and no good reason for any of it.

They made copies of their security recordings. They showed them to consultants. The consultants had nothing useful to offer, until one timidly mentioned that his sister's brother-in-law's cousin investigated such things for reasons of his own.

The cousin set up motion detectors, seismographs, digital thermometers, and infra red cameras, but in the two-week window he'd been allotted to do his work, none of the devices detected anything unusual.

The managers commandeered the coffee shop for a joint all-staff meeting, projecting the recordings on a back wall one more time. Staff present in the recordings called a play-by-play of what they could remember.

Then a man from the local deli said, "There's that woman again."

"What woman?" said his manager.

"That one," he said, pointing to someone in a pantsuit, her blonde bobbed hair sitting in place like a helmet. The camera angle made it difficult to see her face.

"Anyone know her?" the manager of the hardware store said.

* * *

She'd just have to shop on-line, that was all. Shop on-line, and work from home as much as she dared. Maybe, in the long-term, she could find a job where she could always work from home. No. This was temporary. It always went away eventually.

She sighed and adjusted her shoulders, trying to get comfortable on the living room carpet. She had the lights off and the stereo on, playing some light classical stuff a friend had suggested for de-stressing.

The norm was for it to happen only to adolescent girls. The girl gets agitated or worried about something, the vase in the next room over picks itself up and smashes against the wall. Well, she'd passed through adolescence over ten years ago, and it still happened every time she got stressed out. Things fell over. Things flew through the air as if they'd been thrown. But never less than two metres away from her.

She forced herself to breathe deeply and evenly. New job, new city, new life, as far away from her ex-boyfriend as she could get. She closed her eyes, blotting out the faint glow from the power indicator on the stereo. Maybe when the classical piece was finished she'd turn a lamp on and read for a bit. No TV. Nothing too stimulating.

She heard a kitchen cupboard swing open and smack against the wall, pots and pans clattering onto the tile floor, and forced another deep, slow breath. It would stop.

It had to stop.

Voices of the Sea review / August 18, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

Her whole body shivered with delight as she embraced the sounds of the sea and the harmony of her own voice. Ancient magic swelled within her, the ocean blessed her song, and a strong wind tousled her dark brown hair until it flowed wild behind her.

Voices of the Sea achieves something extraordinary in a very confident, accomplished manner: it seamlessly blends the two YA sub-genres of fantasy and amateur detective into a very enjoyable, readable story.

The action mostly follows Loralei Reines, nearly eighteen years old and a member of a clan of Sirens. The Sirens have learned to live incognito among humans, and moved from their traditional home in Greece to various seaside locations in America.

The Sirens have good reason for wanting to blend in, because a non-Siren clan called the Sons of Orpheus has sworn to kill them all.

Carefully, using his thick blade, Ortho carved a large, jagged "O" in the woman's chest — after he removed the vocal chords from her delicate neck.

The book begins with the murder of a Siren belonging to Loralei's clan. One of the most effective — and scary — narrative choices was to convey all of the chapters detailing killings from the murderer's point of view, while the main narrative is always told from Loralei's point of view.

The Sirens feel — justifiably — that they can't tell the police how the murders are connected. Much of the story deals with the Sirens trying to protect themselves, while Loralei and her friends try to discover the killer.

The plot is fairly traditional in that sense, but a steadily rising body count and a number of surprise character revelations keep things fast-paced and suspenseful. It doesn't hurt that two major characters fall in love, in both the best and the worst possible way.

The only thing that really jarred for me was one character revelation, late in the story, which felt a bit deus ex machina. I did glance back, and I don't think I missed anything, but it would have been advantageous to at least have a hint that this character had supernatural powers. Still, his presence and his powers make sense, so it doesn't drop the reader out of the story.

Voices of the Sea is recommended to anyone interested in a blend of supernatural and thriller with a generous dash of romance.

Title: Voices of the Sea

Genre: YA Paranormal

Publisher: WiDo Publishing

Publication Date: July 22, 2014

Paperback: 285 pages

About the Author:

Bethany Masone Harar graduated with a Bachelor's degree in English from James Madison University and a Masters in Secondary English Education from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has enjoyed teaching high school English ever since. As a teacher, Bethany is able to connect with the very audience for whom she writes, and this connection gives her insight into their interests. As a writer, she wants to make her readers gasp out loud, sigh with longing and identify with her characters. Bethany also enjoys posting on her blog, bethsbemusings.blogspot.com, is a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, and is an avid follower of literary-driven social media. She resides in Northern Virginia with her husband, two beautiful children, and her miniature poodle, Annie.

Author's Links:
Website: www.bethanymasoneharar.com

Blog: bethsbemusings.blogspot.com

Twitter: @bethhararwrites

guest post: making your setting a character / August 12, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

Today's guest post is by Bethany Harar, whose new novel Voices of the Sea is available now! See below the post for details.

When I told my mother I was going to write a post about making your setting a character in your novel, my mom looked at me like I was crazy. “What does that mean,” she asked. “How can a setting be a character? It isn’t alive.” But that’s the beauty of fiction. We can do whatever we want!

I think that giving voice and character to your setting is very important because whether we realize it or not, we are emotionally moved by the world around us every day, and that emotional involvement can give new life to our writing. When our characters look beyond themselves, when they realize that this universe is much bigger than their world, from wherever they matriculate, it adds to our story. And to allow that “universe” to have its own personality helps it comes to life for the reader.

For example, when I started writing Voices of the Sea, I never meant for the ocean to become one of my characters; but, as I wrote, I realized that it had developed a life of its own. It had feelings, it connected to my protagonist and, eventually, I let it speak to her, to express its own emotions in its own way. Without intending to, I made it a character.

People were made to interact with their surroundings. Houses can be haunted, or full of sad memories which torment the protagonist; or a house can be a happy place which lends to new experiences. A simple field can inspire, alienate or hide from the protagonist. A storm can be a more formidable foe than the serial killer who lurks in the basement. Don’t be afraid to take personification to the fullest extreme – make it a consistent, reliable voice in your writing – allow it to develop its own personality - and I think you’ll find that your writing has more meaning, more excitement and more depth.

Title: Voices of the Sea

Genre: YA Paranormal

Publisher: WiDo Publishing

Publication Date: July 22, 2014

Paperback: 285 pages

Synopsis:

The Sirens of Pacific Grove, California are being exterminated, and seventeen-year-old Loralei Reines is their next target. Lora may look like a normal teenager, but her voice has the power to enchant and hypnotize men. Like the other Sirens in her clan, however, she keeps her true identity a secret to protect their species.

Lora's birthright as the next clan leader seems far off, until the Sons of Orpheus, a vicious cult determined to kill all Sirens on Earth, begin exterminating her people. When an unexpected tragedy occurs, Lora must take her place as Guardian of the Clan.

Lora is determined to gain control of her skills to help her clan, but they are developing too slowly, until she meets Ryan, a human boy. When Ryan is near, Lora's abilities strengthen. She knows she shouldn't be with a human. Yet, she can't resist her attraction to him, or the surge in power she feels whenever they're together.

And the Sirens are running out of time. If Lora can't unlock the secret to defeat the Sons of Orpheus, she, along with everyone she loves, will be annihilated.

About the Author:

Author's Links:
Website: www.bethanymasoneharar.com

Blog: bethsbemusings.blogspot.com

Twitter: @bethhararwrites

#fridayflash: cabbages and kings / August 7, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

Sylvester King stepped into the office of King Widgets at exactly 9:05am, as was his habit. He liked to scan the floor and check that all of his staff were in their desks working, and quietly kept notes on those who were not. King believed in details, and he believed in diligence. He often told the employees so during staff meetings.

This particular morning, less than half the cubicles were occupied by workers. At first King thought there was a meeting he didn't know about, or an emergency on the factory floor, but the meeting rooms were all empty, and the view of the factory floor from his office window only showed workers in blue overalls producing widgets at the regular rate.

A glance out of his other office window confirmed what he remembered from his drive in to work: it was a beautiful day, and, yes, his calendar confirmed it, a Friday.

Well, thought King. Only one thing to do about that.

He turned to his computer and dashed off a quick e-mail reminding everyone in the office about the importance of punctuality. Then he walked to the kitchenette to collect his morning coffee.

The route to the kitchenette pulled him further into the office, and he noticed a damp, stale odour. He frowned, and made a mental note to post reminders about not leaving old lunches in the refrigerator.

Coffee in hand, he made his way back to his office, stopping at an occupied desk bordering the corridor to the kitchenette. He was grateful once more that he'd chosen to put both the first and last names of the staff on the cubicle ID plates.

"Good morning, Pina," he said with his warmest smile. "Glad to see you got in on time."

Pina barely glanced up from her computer screen. "I've already got a summer cold," she said. "I think that's why it's not affecting me as much."

King frowned. "I'm sorry?"

Pina entered a series of keyboard shortcuts before responding. "A lot of people started getting headaches yesterday. From the smell in the carpet."

"Oh." King looked down at the carpet, which had the same appearance it always did.

"The air conditioning isn't keeping up with the weather," said Pina.

"I'm sure the air conditioning will handle it just fine," said King.

"Okay," said Pina. "Since Freida's away, do you want me to send the month end directly to you?"

King paused. He hadn't yet noticed that Freida was away. "Yes, of course. But CC Freida."

Pina nodded and hunched over her keyboard.

When King returned to his desk, he saw that his e-mail about punctuality had been auto-replied to by no fewer than eight out-of-office notices.

A few people came in late, looking grey and tired.

King refilled his coffee cup around eleven-thirty. The route to the kitchenette now had a sour, sulphurous smell. Pina was standing with her purse over her shoulder when he headed back to his office.

"It smells like someone hid rotten cabbage leaves under the carpet," she said. "I can smell it even through the cold."

"We do have a cleaning service, Pina," said King. "A rather expensive one."

"They never vacuum," said Pina. "Sorry, Mr. K, but I gotta go home. All the month-end stuff is done."

"I understand," said Mr. King, although he didn't. "Have a good weekend."

Pina wrinkled her nose. "That depends on whether or not these symptoms leave when I do. See ya."

King spent most of the afternoon visiting a client. On the way back to the office, he took a detour to the factory foreman's desk, tucked away in a quiet corner of the production floor. The foreman assured him that no-one was off sick. King thanked him and left without explaining why he was asking.

Although it was only three-thirty when he returned to the office floor, there was no-one there. There was, however, a pale green fog floating everywhere, nearly opaque from the top of the carpet to about knee height, and dissipating entirely at waist height. King called out, but no-one responded.

How do you like that, he said as he hurried to his desk. You leave for one afternoon, and everyone takes off. So unprofessional.

The rotten cabbage smell was thicker, more oppressive. King noticed as he sat in his office chair that there were pale green specks of dust adhering to his shoes.

He sighed. He knew Pina was telling the truth about the cleaning service not vacuuming — he'd told them not to so as to reduce their fees. His eyes were watering a bit from the smell, but he blinked the excess moisture away and finished responding to his e-mails.

Forty-five minutes later, he was done, and his feet felt very itchy. He wasn't sure, but it looked like the green dust blots on his shoes had grown larger since he'd returned to his desk.

King toured the office floor, checking every cubicle. Absolutely no-one was left. By the time he was done and back at his own desk, his feet felt like they were burning, his eyes were watering so much he could barely see, and the cabbage stench was making his nose run. It was hard to tell because of his eyes, but it seemed the green fog was now reaching to chin height, assuming a person was standing. It would have completely engulfed anyone sitting in a cubicle.

He checked the factory floor window. The workers still ran the widget machines, just like always. No-one looked up at his office window. No-one ever did.

King shrugged, took his jacket off the coat stand he kept in his office, and left. It was summer, he was caught up on work, and he was feeling poorly. Enough.

He headed for the elevator lobby.

Near Pina's cubicle, a narrow strip of carpeting acting as a baseboard lifted away from the bottom of the wall. It just looked as if the glue had melted and lost adhesion, until it started to gently undulate.

what was the question? / August 5, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

Important note: the purpose of this is not to point fingers at any traditional publishers, including the traditional publisher I took this screen shot from. The purpose is to open up the floor to discuss what are important distinctions for preferences, and how these distinctions intersect.

Now that I have that out of the way, consider this:

What the screen shot above is showing is the e-mail newsletter preferences page for Simon & Schuster. The only edits I did to the screen shot were to crop it, and to delete my personal e-mail address from the top right of the page.

The idea is that the newsletter subscriber is supposed to check off all the items shown above which interest them. They will then receive newsletters tailored to those topics.

Sounds great, until you check out the topics. New Releases (which I only checked to show what a checked item looked like) is on the same level as Cooking, is on the same level as Romance, is on the same level as Audiobooks and eBooks. Now, maybe I'm missing out, but the last time I checked, the first item measured all books against publication date, the second and third were genres, and the last pairing were formats.

And perhaps I'm missing out even more, but it seems to me those are not all equivalent preferences. They overlap and intersect with each other.

So, for example, what if I like to listen to audiobook biographies, but prefer my romances in ebook format? Meanwhile, I like my histories in paper format to accommodate all the lovely maps and charts that genre tends to include, but I'm only interested in new releases for cooking, and never in ebook or audiobook format for those (do they even have audiobook cookbooks?). If I select Biography and romance and ebook and audiobook and cooking, are those preferences going to show through?

I'd say they aren't. I'd say all you'd really learn about my preferences is that I don't read Christian, teen, book club newsletters, pop culture, or science fiction. In other words, you've thrown away a perfectly simple opportunity to do some drilling down and learn some positive things about your audience, instead of just negative, absence-of-preferences.

What I'm proposing wouldn't even be much more difficult from either a web design or database structure perspective. The web form would need to have some sort of cascading, enabling controls so that Paper/Ebook/Audiobook choices would appear/enable when you selected a genre. New Releases Only could be another, separate sub-choice, as a checkbox. You could still store all the data in a flat file like this preference data probably is, but you could also normalise a little into multiple tables for ease of querying. Without sketching it out, I'd guess two tables would do it: one for genres, and one for format/age.

That's my first-blush reaction. What do you think? Are Simon & Schuster going to get useful marketing info from this form, or should they recalibrate? Is this not quite ready for a high-level survey of customers, or am I letting the day job seep into the rest of my life too much? The comments are open.

The Fourth Wall review / August 3, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

Every death is different, and so is every mourning. The impact can be as subtle as realising the man you always said hello to at the coffee shop hasn't been there for a while, or as dramatic as the toppling a government.

For Marin, the teenage protagonist of The Fourth Wall, the impact is close and life-changing. Her mother's death has meant new responsibilities, a nearly-catatonic baby brother, and a father exhausted by grief and by trying to hold what's left of his family together.

Marin has one escape: the lucid dreams she experiences every night. Her challenge is to solve the mystery of why the better she handles her grief during waking hours, the more her dreams become nightmares.

This is a novel set in reality with some fantasy elements. The writing style reminded me of Nora Roberts, with strong and specific attention paid to details. The fantasy scenes, while important to the plot, did not consume the story — most events happen in the fictional real world. A reader who prefers realistic fiction would enjoy this novel, as the dreams aim to find psychological truth, not an alternative universe.

The only detracting element for me was how some of the procedures at Marin's school were handled. As someone who both lost a parent at thirteen and worked as a high school teacher for six years, I spent some time muttering, "They'd need parent or guardian permission for that" as I read. However, the story elements I had reservations about were resolved quickly and plausibly, and I doubt anyone less familiar with educational bureaucracy would even notice them.

The Fourth Wall is a tale of moving from darkness to light, from the wound of loss to healing and adjustment to the "new normal." Anyone who enjoys YA books centred on character development would do well to give it a read.

About the Author:

Elizabeth grew up writing short stories and bad poetry before escaping the cold winters of Wyoming and settling in the Sonoran Desert. She lives in Tempe, Arizona with her husband and two children, Abigail and Gabriel . She still loves to write, but fortunately gave up on poetry. The Fourth Wall is her first novel.

Elizabeth’s creative nonfiction has appeared in Brain, Child, Phoenix New Times, Literary Mama and Babble.com, and is forthcoming in Brevity. Elizabeth is also an award-winning fiction writer; her short stories have been published in The Portland Review, Hospital Drive, SLAB Literary Magazine, and Bartleby Snopes. Links to her work and information on classes/critiques can be found at http://www.elizabethmarianaranjo.com/.

#fridayflash: signal / August 1, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

Don't get me wrong. It's a clever mechanism. I just never figured out why they made it to automatically turn off instead of on. You'd think it would be the other way 'round.

It's all powered by the sun. Those windows on the sides? They're not windows. They're special frames of dark glass that soak up the sun and convert the light to electricity. It powers the lights in the storage rooms, powers the heater in the winter, powers the fence, powers everything. The sun charges up that disk glued to the back wall, too, but not with electricity. When the sun goes down, the disk glows in the dark. When it's so dark the disk is the only thing I can see inside the room, I throw the switch, and that turns on the signal plume.

I know what you're thinking after reading that last bit. Same thing I thought: why didn't they just train a dog? But you see, the whole point of the signal plume is to let the ship know there are still people alive here. Or at least one person. Or, at least... me.

There's an alarm clock, and I can set it to whatever time I want. Whoever was here before me had it going off right before sunset, but I like to wake up in the afternoon. I get to see some daylight, walk around in the field behind the tower a bit, then when the sky turns red I head inside and climb up to the observation room.

On a clear night, if I open the window and lean right out, I can see another signal plume, off to the northwest. They're very distinctive, the plumes — long blue-green feathers of photons caught from the sun during the day. Back when I lived in town, someone told me they were made that way so the people on the ship would know they meant people were living here, and it wasn't just a dead town with the lights left on.

The other tower looks like it's built in a clump of trees. I wonder if I knew the person who got put in that tower.

A month ago, last full moon, it finally occurred to me that the tower isn't high enough to improve my view by that much. On bright nights I've taken to walking the field at night, making sure I keep a good watch on the ocean.

No going out today — it's raining. I've hated the rain for as long as I can remember. I can still hear the warning siren from the tower. It's easy to imagine everyone scurrying for safety.

The rain coats the sides of the tower. The tower doesn't seem to dissolve in it the way the buildings in town gradually do, but I always go down to the empty storage room and stay there. It doesn't have any windows, so it feels safer. Every once in a while I check the alarm clock for the time, because it's so dark out the disk is glowing already, even though it's probably way too early.

They didn't say whether to watch for ships when it rains. I just always figured they wouldn't be able to go out in it.

The second storage room is still mostly full of food and bottled water. I'm not sure what happens when I run out. I'm not the first signaler, so they must fill up the storage rooms again. Don't they?

Even through the tower walls I can hear the thunder tonight. I don't like it.

And then there's another sound, low and strong like the thunder, but sustained, like a horn. So I run upstairs to look out the only window.

It's too dark and the rain is too thick to see anything, but the sound comes again, and it's coming from the ocean.

It's too early, and it's the middle of a rainstorm, and I'm not supposed to throw the switch until sundown....

But I throw the switch anyhow, and the window frame reflects blue-green.

#fridayflash: the rules / July 24, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

Very Important Note: None of these apply to you. No-one has ever said these things to you. This is not about you.

There are no rules.
Just be yourself.
You don't get to know why. (there may not be a reason)
You do get to talk (or at least, you ought to).
You do get to listen (or at least, you ought to).
You cannot understand this by writing out rules for it.
Don't shut them down.
Do express yourself.
Don't open up too much.
Do open up a little.
As we were saying, just be yourself.... except for that. Don't do that, not on a first introduction especially. Actually, if you could stop doing that altogether, that would be nice. But we're not judging!
And stop acting like a neurotic freak.
Don't get nervous or uptight.
Relax.
Don't talk about anything too personal at first.
Be open and friendly.
Don't get self-conscious.
Think about how exactly you're presenting yourself.
Just be yourself!
Don't talk about sex until it's clear they're comfortable with the topic.
If they talk about sex right away, it means they're not good relationship material. Move on!
Don't make assumptions.
Things don't always happen right away.
You can tell by the end of the first date.
Don't analyse everything to death.
Don't put friends in the middle.
Remember who your friends are.
You don't need rules. You need to just be yourself.
There are no rules.
Except for that.

what the hell was that? / July 21, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

The week ending Friday 10 January was my first full week back at work after winter vacation. Maybe that's why I was feeling completely emptied of ideas. I know the winter was starting to get to me (it always does). Mostly I just felt like flaking out on the couch and watching movies until my brain got back in gear, probably when the spring thaw arrived.

Friday Flash nearly got skipped, but then I thought, all right, I'll write about being a spy as if "ho-hum, it's a living," and planned out a task for a couple of characters. A short serial, three weeks, beginning, middle, end, and hopefully by mid-February I'd have some more ideas and could move on to other stories.

At the end of Part 3, it was just obvious that of course Pepper would be followed, because it's a spy story, isn't it? And it could have ended there, ho-hum, getting followed is just part of the job, but since I'd written about her getting followed, I thought I better wrap that up.

All right, one more episode to close that off, and then one more to wrap up the whole thing. Five parts. Very nice. Then on to other things.

Except that while Pepper shook off her tail in Part 4, in Part 5 it only made sense that the minor, forgettable character I'd introduced back in Part 2 (Geoffrey) turned out to be a spook too, and not just a very nervous businessman as I'd originally thought. And of course being one of the good guys, he'd want to tell Pepper and Cinnamon things were horribly wrong and that they shouldn't hand over the data.

So then I figured I'd be done in ten parts.

Then fifteen.

Then I really couldn't see it going more than twenty parts, twenty-two tops.

I'm writing this a few minutes after scheduling Part 28 to post on Thursday 17 July. Somehow this little three-parter, just-until-my-seasonal-depression-clears story has stretched to half the year. The posts alone, with no editing, come to slightly over 24,000 words.

The funny thing about this story is that, unlike other longer work I've done, I've never felt that stressed about it. Even when I totally painted myself into a corner with the plot line and had to figure out how to get out. It's felt a bit weird, really.

Like any decent wrap-up party, a big thank-you goes out to everyone who stuck it through and read the whole thing, and especially to everyone who generously took the time to leave comments. Reading a weekly serial this long is not easy, I know — hence the plans for the original three-parter!

Thank you all again, and I hope you stick around for whatever I'm going to write this week. Right now I haven't a clue.

Shout-outs to all of the regular commenters, in no particular order:

#fridayflash: balancing / July 17, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26, and Part 27.

The current Mrs. Selwyn McCormick of Des Moines, Iowa, was feeling flustered. She didn't like it.

"You were the one who said I should be friends with her," she said to her husband over dinner. "I asked her to go shopping, and the way she looked at me was like... oh." She choked back what she had planned to say next while the maid set their meals on the table: kale juice for her, steak and potato for her husband.

The clink of the juice glass against the marble tabletop reminded her of the very look she'd received. Not just cold, but.... judging. Mrs. McCormick could never picture Ellie in her head as she was. Instead she always remembered a Renaissance painting of a Venetian noblewoman she'd seen when her husband had taken her to Florence.

Mr. McCormick sliced through the steak, letting the juices ooze under his potato. He set his knife and fork down with deliberate care, and raised his wine glass halfway to his lips. He paused while his wife reached for her glass of kale juice, waited until she had her fingers around the glass.

"Janine."

Mrs. McCormick let go of the juice glass. "I don't know what you want me to do."

"I want you to goddamn think." Mr. McCormick sipped his wine. "Did you ask what she's doing down here? Did you ask how things have been lately?"

"I —"

Mr. McCormick slammed the table with the flat of his hand, making the cutlery jump and causing some of the kale juice to leap from the top of the glass and escape down the side. "'Cos I asked Geoff, and I got pretty far. She lost her niece in a house fire four months back. She would have died too, but she jumped out of a goddamned second storey window. That's why she's got the limp. Geoff was out, never knew a thing until the police called." Mr. McCormick mashed his potato into the meat juices with purpose. "So Geoff decides she needs a change of scene, they marina-hop all the way down here to the goddamn islands, fresh air and sunshine, and you think she wants to go shopping?"

"Just to walk arou— oh," said Mrs. McCormick. Her lip was quivering.

Mr. McCormick shot her a look over the top of his wine glass. "The limp. Right. And you'd think a clothes horse like you would notice, but all of her clothes are new. Because she lost everything in the fire." He slammed the table again. This time the juice glass jumped, came down awkwardly next to a teaspoon, and toppled over. "But it doesn't goddamn matter, you know why?"

Mrs. McCormick pushed her chair away to avoid the rivulets of kale juice making their way to the table's edge. She was crying now, so she only shook her head "no."

"Because they're leaving tomorrow morning at six AM. The one couple on this island we could have used for an alibi, the only ones who don't know what happened last month, and we haven't networked with them at all. Because you didn't think." Mr. McCormick went to set his wine glass down, only to discover all the convenient spots had been invaded by kale juice. "Maria! My wife spilled her dinner! Mop this up, will ya?" He speared a piece of steak with his fork and chewed it vigorously. "I have one more chance to talk them into staying if I can catch up with Geoff tomorrow when he goes on his run. Otherwise we're screwed."

* * *

They both preferred to get up early. Geoffrey would rise first and go for his run, then he'd return to the boat and they'd do calisthenics together. Pepper's leg still wasn't completely healed, so he'd spot her for some of the exercises. Pepper usually made breakfast and lunch, Geoffrey dinner. Sometimes they'd swim in the afternoon. Sometimes, if Pepper's leg was up to it, they'd take a short walk along the beach, whatever beach the boat happened to be moored next to that fortnight.

They were moving on early this time. An American couple from Iowa had been... cloying. Last night the husband had bought them drinks at the bar of the one hotel at this end of the beach, said he was going to catch up with Geoffrey on his run so they could talk. Geoffrey had joked afterwards that it would help him set a new personal speed record.

It all suited Pepper just fine. It saved her a few steps.

This morning, Pepper was crouched just behind the skipper's seat. It was easiest to find Geoffrey first through the rifle scope, then track back until McCormick was in sight, two hundred and fifty metres behind, but closing.

Pepper waited until McCormick had to slow down to descend the stairs to the beach. The shot was clean, the silencer worked, and she had Todd on the phone before she had the rifle disassembled.

"It's done," she said. She rolled her eyes as she put the silencer into the canvas bag, opened her mouth to speak, then pressed her lips together as she pulled off the plastic gloves she'd been wearing. "No, I didn't tell him. He would have wanted to help." She detached the sight and looked through it. "He's heading for the boat. I have to make sure I'm ready."

She frowned as she tossed the rifle scope into the bag. "He's the one who saved your ass in Sarajevo, you know. I just did some of the legwork." She shifted the phone to her other ear as she worked off the nylon anorak she'd worn for the shooting, turned it inside out to avoid contact with any gunpowder residue, and dropped it in the bag. "But we're even now, right?" She made a face. "Well, thanks for the early retirement benefits. Geoff's here. You too. Bye." She turned the phone off, hesitated a moment, then pulled the back cover off. She was pulling parts out of it and tossing them into the bag as Geoffrey climbed into the boat.

He didn't ask her directly, just lifted an eyebrow at the sight of the bag. "I thought I heard a shot this morning," he said.

"That's why you're back early," said Pepper. "You ran faster."

Geoffrey lifted the tail of his t-shirt and mopped the sweat from his face. "Was it personal?"

"Just making sure I don't owe Todd any favours. He said we're back to even now."

Geoffrey stiffened, the t-shirt still bunched in his hands. "I thought you weren't in contact with him. And I thought we were even with him."

"You were. I wasn't. Now I am." Pepper bit her lip. "I'll explain when we're on the ocean. Anything you want to know. Cross my heart." She glanced at the beach. "This time of day, it'll only be about thirty minutes before someone finds him."

"If it's not on camera already," Geoffrey grumbled.

"No cameras along that stretch. I checked."

Geoffrey sighed out the tension and leaned over to kiss the top of her head. "'Course you did." He stepped towards the ladder. "I better cast us off."

THE END

#fridayflash: 400 / July 11, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

Highway 400 flows out of Toronto, meandering northwards until it peters out soon after Parry Sound. Until then, it curves its way through the history of the province, rocketing and reversing over the timeline with a violence that belies its long hills and slow-trending landscape.

Geoffrey waited until he was certain the lane wasn't going to transform into an off-ramp before allowing himself a glance at Pepper. She was staring out the window, eyes obscured by large round sunglasses. Her makeup hid the lingering bruises well.

Car dealerships and light industrial businesses rolled past, while most of the road signs concerned themselves with instructions on how to get to the Vaughan Mills mega-mall. The twisted rails of a roller coaster peaked in the distance, announcing they were close to the Canada's Wonderland amusement park. The buildings got bigger, while the highway widened to eight lanes. Geoffrey spotted a gas station, and winced a little at the listed prices. The car-centric future promised by this land of the giants was already turning to myth.

"Are you sure the new clothes are okay?" said Geoffrey. He'd gone to the safe house Pepper had been living in, tried to get things ready for her for when she left hospital. Even as a career spook, he was shocked by how few personal effects she'd had. All of her clothes were leftover requisitions from old jobs. No furniture that wasn't owned by the agency, no books, no photographs. That had bothered him. Everyone had some photographs.

"They're fine." Pepper stretched, gasping when her still-injured leg twinged. "Thank you. You did a great procurement job."

The highway narrowed and the big box stores ended as they reached the green belt. Most of the cars disappeared as the suburbs transformed into countryside proper. The exit signs announced towns which had all been created in the first half of the nineteenth century, settled by British army officers granted free land and a pension during a lull in the Empire's maintenance.

"Deer," said Pepper as they passed a stubbled corn field.

Geoffrey looked despite himself, but they'd already driven past. "Funny it's so close to the road this far south."

"Yeah. Hard winter."

"Yeah."

Geoffrey pulled off at the last service centre before Barrie, refilling the gas tank and buying coffees at the Tim Horton's. Pepper held her cup as if she wasn't entirely aware it was there, only sipping at it when Geoffrey asked her if he'd ordered it right. He put her cup in the passenger-side holder for her before she worked her way back into the car. She would let him help her with things, but not herself. He knew that from when they'd both been in the field together, so he didn't ask.

He put the keys in the ignition and hesitated. "I really am sorry about Sheila," he said. "I was the senior staff there. I should have —"

"You didn't have a chance to co-ordinate," said Pepper, with the same level of passion someone would use for discussing a pizza order mix-up. "The only thing I'd be worried about is getting back at the assholes that did it, and you took care of that right away."

She gave him a hard look. It made Geoffrey want to leave the car, but at the same time he was glad for it, because it meant she hadn't completely turned off.

"But they are dead?" she said.

"Head shots, all three of them," said Geoffrey. He'd already answered this several times. "The two hired hands didn't have enough cranium left to survive, and DeBussy was between the eyes."

"Good," said Pepper.

He started the car and got back on the highway.

There were more light industrial businesses lining the road again, but the focus was different. Boat trailers. Jet skis. Services to winterise cottages.

They crested another big hill, and the road bent left, to the west. The city of Barrie lay in the lowland on either side of the highway. Geoffrey directed the car through it, noticing all the signs about new condo developments.

The highway and the city followed the curve of Lake Simcoe together, until Highway 400 left Barrie behind and continued north. Geoffrey took the exit by Waubaushene and drove west on County Road 12 towards Victoria Harbour.

"And the boat's just sitting there?" said Pepper.

"My brother said it was supposed to be, and Todd had someone on his staff confirm it," said Geoffrey.

"That's your contact. Todd."

He couldn't tell if she was asking or confirming. "You've met him," he said. "He's the one we had to go in and retrieve when we were in Sarajevo. That's why he's been okay with me calling in all these favours at once."

"Todd." Pepper startled so abruptly Geoffrey thought something new had happened to her leg. "You mean Branko? Branko's really a Todd?"

"Yeah," said Geoffrey, slowing to check if the side road they were approaching was the right turnoff for the marina. "Sorry, I thought you knew his real name."

"He didn't look like a Todd."

"His mother's Croatian and his dad is Scots Canadian or something," said Geoffrey. "But yeah, he's a Todd." He found the right road and turned onto it.

"He told you all that?"

"We went to school together," said Geoffrey. "He's one of the people who got me into the business." He slowed the car down, looking for the parking lot entrance. "He's gone legit now, strictly management stuff. Sort of like what I was doing."

"Legit like RCMP, or CSIS..."

"Well, not that legit." Geoffrey turned into the lot and found an empty parking spot. "Legit enough the Minister of Defence knows the acronym of his outfit, anyhow." He turned off the engine. "There's a pay phone by the pier. Last chance to say good-bye to someone before we leave."

"There's no-one to call," said Pepper. She'd said the same thing during her entire stay in the hospital; Geoffrey had been her only visitor.

"Okay then. Let's do this," said Geoffrey, and pressed the button to open the trunk.

#fridayflash: reality crash / July 4, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

Geoffrey tapped the Enter key on the laptop. "No," he said. "I mean yeah. I mean it's consistent." He turned to Pepper, who was lying in a stiff pose on the bed. "It's legit, Ellie. They've put us out to pasture."

"Show me," said Pepper. The last of the hospital painkillers had worn off about half an hour ago. Pepper's voice had ebbed from almost-normal to a faint growl as the chemicals had left her bloodstream.

Geoffrey disconnected the laptop from its power supply and held the machine so the screen was in Pepper's line of sight. He watched her one open eye scan the display.

"All right," she whispered. She waited until Geoffrey brought the laptop back to the desk and reconnected it before adding, "What are you going to do now?"

Geoffrey sat in the hotel room's armchair so she could see him without having to move a lot. "Probably get the hell out of the country, at least for a little bit," he said. "Spend some time on water. Get some use out of that boat my brother handed down to me."

Pepper didn't say anything. Her face was so distorted from injuries he couldn't read her expression.

"What about you?" he said at last, caving in to the silence. "Once you heal up."

Pepper mumbled something he couldn't quite make out, but it ended with "don't know."

Geoffrey touched the side of her neck, found a pulse, frowned. "You need to go back to the hospital, Ellie."

"Can't."

"You know I'd take care of you if I could, but you're too banged up."

"Can't." Pepper took a deep breath with some effort. "A lot of staff will want to press charges against me."

Geoffrey took out his phone. "Let me call my contact. Maybe he can get you into a different hospital."

"Don't."

"I'm going to stay with you. Unless you don't want me to." Geoffrey found Todd's contact entry on his phone and paused, finger over the dial button.

"Okay. Stay. But..."

"Hm?"

Ellie held up her retirement letter. "We have barely enough service for this. Sheila's just starting out. Did they take care of her too? And who's going after DeBussy?"

Geoffrey set his phone down on the nightstand and covered Pepper's good hand with his own. "That seems like it's two separate questions, but it's not really," he said.

Guest Post by Nina Amir: How to Evaluate Your Book for Marketability / June 30, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

How to Evaluate Your Book for Marketability

I talk and write a lot about business plans for books. The reason for this is simple. Publishing is the business of selling books. Indie publishers are entrepreneurs. Traditional publishers seek viable products to bring to market. No matter how you publish, you have to produce a marketable book.

I’ve never much liked writing book proposals, but I wanted to get one (or more) of my books published by a publisher. For that, I needed to write a fabulous book proposal.

I write nonfiction, and nonfiction is sold off of a proposal, which serves as a business plan for a book. A nonfiction book proposal contains just a few sample chapters, not the whole manuscript. Fiction proposals tend to be requested after submission of the whole manuscript, although these days more and more agents ask for a fiction proposal with sample chapters as well.

I also have self-published a number of books. These days, however, I write a business plan—a proposal—for my self-published works as well.

Every Book Needs a Business Plan

Actually, I believe every book needs a business plan, which is why I wrote The Author Training Manual: Develop Marketable Ideas, Craft Books That Sell, Become the Author Publishers Want, and Self-Publish Effectively. The process of writing quite a few book proposals sparked the idea for this book, which is my second traditionally published book. I noticed that each time I completed the process, I experienced a moment when I knew I had created a great book idea. By that, I mean a marketable idea, or one that would sell to readers if I could get it to market. Also, at that moment I felt ready, excited about and confident to write the book.

Experience Precious Moments

I call that my “precious moment.” However, there are many smaller precious moments that happen as you write a book proposal or business plan for a book. You experience them when you analyze the market, for instance, and discover that you could angle your book a bit differently to target a larger number of readers. You might experience one when you analyze the competition and realize that another author has left out some information in his book and you could include it in yours. Or you might have a precious moment when you discover your book is a bit too close in subject matter to a few already published titles, which requires you to retool a bit but sparks a new idea and makes your book more unique and beneficial to readers.

How to Succeed as an Author

My precious moments made me realized that every author needs to have this experience to produce the best possible book—a book with the potential of selling the most copies. So I wrote a book that explains how to write a business plan for your book and use it as a tool to evaluate the marketability of your idea as well as your own ability to help your book succeed in the marketplace. In The Author Training Manual I explain exactly what needs to go into each section of the business plan and how to see that information through the same lens use by agents and acquisitions editors, who see book ideas as “products” as well as creative ventures and know how to determine if they are viable. The book even includes sample plans reviewed by agents and editors, which allows you to train yourself to see through their eyes and “training exercises.” When you put all of this together—the business plan, the sample plans with reviews, and the training exercise, you get a manual that takes you through the necessary steps to train to become a successful author and to write a successful book.

Self-Published Authors Need a Plan

While those who want to traditionally publish must go through the process of creating a business plan for their books, it is all the more important to do so if a writer wants to self-publish. Indie authors don’t have agents or acquisitions editors to offer feedback on the marketability or viability of their “products.” Instead, as publishers, they must make that evaluation themselves. The only way to do so is with a business plan and the ability to see their own work through the same lens used by publishing professionals.

So, like it or not, taking the time to produce a business plan provides the means to that precious moment when you know you’ve created a marketable book idea. And it provides you with the opportunity to write a book that sells, which means gets read.

About the Author

Nina Amir, author of How to Blog a Book: Write, Publish, and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time and The Author Training Manual: Develop Marketable Ideas, Craft Books That Sell, Become the Author Publishers Want, and Self-Publish Effectively, transforms writers into inspired, successful authors, authorpreneurs and blogpreneurs. Known as the Inspiration to Creation Coach, she moves her clients from ideas to finished books as well as to careers as authors by helping them combine their passion and purpose so they create products that positively and meaningfully impact the world. A sought-after author, book, blog-to-book, and results coach, some of Nina’s clients have sold 300,000+ copies of their books, landed deals with major publishing houses and created thriving businesses around their books. She writes four blogs, self-published 12 books and founded National Nonfiction Writing Month, aka the Write Nonfiction in November Challenge.

Author’s Websites:

Nina Amir’s website:
http://ninaamir.com/

Nina Amir’s blog:
http://ninaamir.com/blogs-and-columns/

Nina Amir’s Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/InspirationToCreation

Twitter: @NinaAmir

#fridayflash: exited / June 26, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

Geoffrey took another pull at the bottle of beer, holding the cold liquid in his mouth for a beat before swallowing. He set the bottle down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, wincing as his still-unshaven beard cut tiny scratches into the skin below his knuckles.

His new laptop only showed it was 46% done the data crawl he had instructed it to do, so he took another pull from the beer bottle and leaned back. The progress bar updated to 49% while he wondered why every single desk chair in every hotel room he could remember being in had to be so uncomfortable.

It was only when he glanced around the room, looking for where he'd set down Carson's envelope, that he realised most of the illumination was coming from the laptop screen. He sighed, got up, and closed the curtains before turning on the lights. There had been a lot of delays, from the overly-helpful clerk in the electronics shop he'd got the laptop in, to taking longer than he'd expected to load the "hacker's kit on a thumb drive" that Pepper had made for him and which he kept on his keyring. The computer itself had come pre-loaded with all sorts of spammy nonsense claiming to be "helpful productivity tools". Some nightmare concocted by the three witches of marketing, legal, and the anti-piracy lobby, he was sure. Just getting to the BIOS long enough to tell the machine to boot from USB had been a much bigger pain than necessary. Pepper would have lost patience and grabbed the gear from him after the first two tries, had she been there.

He spotted the envelope on the bed and flopped beside it onto the mattress. The weariness held him down like a physical force. He'd have to be careful not to fall asleep.

At least he was reasonably certain he knew where she was now — in one of the wards on the hospital strip on University Avenue, and not in intensive care as he'd feared. He didn't know all of the medical shorthand and Ministry of Health billing codes he'd seen in the file, but he'd made out enough to know that while the list of injuries was distressingly long, none of them were in and of themselves likely to be fatal. No brain bleed, nothing ruptured that couldn't heal. She'd have to stay in maybe a week, he figured, remembering past hospital visits of other colleagues. In for a week and then another three or four weeks of having to take it easy. They weren't allowing visitors, probably because she was listed as an assault victim, but the data crawl would tell him how to get around that.

Now that he was sitting still for so long, his own injuries were flaring up. Nothing that bad — bruises, scrapes, and it felt like he'd torn one of the long muscles over his ribs.

Geoffrey shook his head and willed himself back into paying attention. He sat upright, snatched the envelope up, and slid one thumb under the flap to force the seal open.

The glue hadn't adhered completely, and the flap lifted up with a slight crackling noise.

Geoffrey didn't bother reading the text first. Instead, he flipped the letter so the blank back of the paper was facing him, and held it up to the light. He raised his eyebrows. The watermark was there after all, and the paper seemed to be of the right weight and texture.

He flipped the paper right-side up and scanned the letter. They'd used his middle name, which had been buried for ID purposes for so long it felt strange even to him to read it. The letter repeated what Carson had told him, and included some details about how to check his pension details on-line. He snorted, and supposed it would be useful for completing verification at least.

His body protested when he made himself get up from the bed, but he didn't want to fall asleep until the data crawl was finished and he could gather the rest of the details he needed.

The progress bar had jumped ahead a little bit, but still only said 67%.

Geoffrey sat down heavily in the uncomfortable desk chair. He would have loved to do something, anything, on the computer to keep himself awake, but he didn't want to waste bandwidth while the crawl was in progress, and he worried that even a solitaire game would steal enough CPU time and RAM to slow things down.

He propped his elbows on the desk and held his head up with his hands, trying to think of what else he could get done while he waited. He'd already emptied the strongbox from the apartment of all the ID he could possibly need.

Someone was pounding on the door. Geoffrey lifted his head from his hands with a start. Sunlight was escaping past the edges of the curtains, and the computer's screen announced the data crawl was at a solid 100% completion.

He swore under his breath, jumped up from the desk chair, and opened the door just as he realised he should have checked the peephole first to see who it was.

The creature in the doorway had a red, raw, lopsided face, and glared at him wetly out of its less-swollen eye. It leaned heavily on a crutch held in place by its unbandaged hand, and even just standing still was enough of a strain to make it tremble with effort.

Geoffrey just gaped.

"You look like shit," the creature said with Pepper's voice. It reached into the pocket of the doctor's coat it was wearing and pulled out an envelope just like the one Geoffrey had inspected earlier. "You gonna let me in and tell me what the hell this is, or do I have to kick the door down?"

To be continued...

stretch! more guest posts and book reviews on the way / June 25, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

I've always wanted to have more guest posts and more book reviews here on the blog, but of course wanting and doing are not the same. That's why, when a few days ago Wow! Women on Writing put a call out on Twitter for bloggers interested in both those things, I contacted them. There are now four posts and/or reviews scheduled to to be posted, about one per month. The first one will be posted on 1 July.

Now, of course, just because I've made one contact for this doesn't mean I can't have others. If you've got a blog tour planned, are looking for book reviews, and you think your material would be a good fit with the rest of the content on this blog, please feel free to drop me a line from the contact info on my About Me page and let me know.

comment conclusions / June 24, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

The second incarnation of this blog was started on Blogger on April Fool's Day, 2008. It spent the first several days with all the privacy settings I could throw at it turned on, being vetted by (and only visible to) trusted in-real-life friends. They left enough encouraging comments that I threw the doors open to the general public by the end of the first month, but truthfully until I joined Friday Flash it was vanishingly rare for me to receive comments from anyone I hadn't met in person first.

I made a decision very early on that I wasn't going to write for the comments (ie: no clickbait), but at the same time, be grateful for everyone who did leave a comment (with obvious exceptions for trolls and spammers). Over the years, the general level of comments has built up, to the point that when I started considering getting a web domain name under, well, my name, I wasn't going to move the blogs unless I could take the historical comments and posts with me.

In April, Icy Sedgwick wrote a thoughtful post called "Should you close comments on your blog?", which considers comments on blogs and some alternatives, and ultimately comes out for keeping the comments option on. Earlier this month, David G. Schrock responded with the post "Comments Closed" on his blog. He followed up his conclusion that social media was a better forum by turning comments off on his own blog.

As both bloggers pointed out, one is never limited to discussing a blog post in the comments section of the post itself. Discussion of blog posts and other like articles can and does move to Twitter, Google+, and elsewhere.

Ultimately I agree with both Icy's and David's points, but come down on the side of leaving comments on. My reasoning goes like this:

Leaving social media open as the only discussion forum essentially forces people to comment without the option of doing so anonymously. I know a lot of people are against anonymous comments because it's believed to make trolling and spamming easier, but I have one (okay, more than one, but one who's vocal about it) real-life friend who will not comment unless she can use an anonymous option. She uses a nickname she's told me face-to-face so I know when it's her. The reason why she does this — and it's the same reason I actively avoided using my real name on my old Eyrea blog for years — is because she doesn't want to drop too many clues on the net about her physical whereabouts or ways she can be reached by third parties. People often fail to realise a space without privacy is an unsafe space for a lot of people, effectively silencing them, no matter how benign the topic at hand is. They try to minimise how "out" they are in the world for very good reasons, including their own safety and security.
E-mailing the blogger is another alternative, especially for when one doesn't want one's response to be visible at all on-line. Having comments open doesn't remove this option, though — the blogger just has to have an e-mail address to use listed on their web site.
I restarted my blog in 2008 as part of a decision to leave Facebook. I deleted my account in 2010. Devices getting onto the net through my home wifi can't even access Facebook, because I have its domain blocked at the router level. (By the bye, this is a simple way to make web pages load more quickly!) So if a forum only allows commenting on their Facebook page, or via Facebook login... I can't comment. If they direct all discussions to Facebook... I can't comment. The same is true for people not on Google+, or not on Twitter, or not on whatever. Along with the anonymous option, it's one reason why I make sure you don't need to be logged onto anything to post a comment on my blog. It's also why I hate comment systems like Disqus that never seem to remember my credentials right, and mix and match bits of the different social media accounts I've told it in moments of weakness. The main purpose is to comment, not increase the hits on some third-party social media web site I don't even have shares in.
Commenting on the blog keeps the comments with the source material at hand. Moving the comments elsewhere reminds me of when I went to hear Neil Gaiman read from The Ocean at the End of the Lane at The Danforth Music Hall. We went to a pub across the road from the hall afterwards for a drink, and a couple who were having a drink a few seats from us came over and asked if we would mind telling them what the event was. They'd seen the crowds leaving the hall, and they'd seen us cross the street and come into the pub, but from the bits they'd overheard of us talking, they knew it couldn't be a band we'd gone to hear. They couldn't figure out what the event was, though. As it turned out, they were very well-read people, and we wound up having a great conversation about books and authors. On the net, that would have been the difference between stumbling across some tweets and thinking, "okay, I'll click on the link" and stumbling across a Google+ post which made no sense unless you had already read the post. Context is important.

David made the good point in his post that not all comments are made with the sincere desire to add one's one thoughts to the source material. He gave the examples of people leaving comments for SEO linking, or back-slapping community support. I agree with him that people often do exactly this, but have a different conclusion about them. SEO linking, as selfish as it may be, can lead to community-building. As for any back-slapping... hey, I'll take it. Unlike some other writers, I don't have any family or spouse cheering me on with my writing. If an on-line acquaintance wants to say something nice, I'm very grateful for it. For my own part I try to leave comments which are on-point and (hopefully) thoughtful.

In the end, I think it's one of those cases where whatever you're doing is probably right, at least until you want to change it. If there were real consensus on comments versus no comments, blog editors would have stopped offering so many options to manage them long ago. On this blog I can turn comments on or off entirely for the whole blog, or for selected posts. I can keep comments on indefinitely, or disallow them after a certain date. That's a lot of functionality for something that could be considered a by-the-way feature.

What do you think? The comments are open.

#fridayflash: unburnt / June 19, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

"So that's it," the woman said. She hadn't introduced herself, but Geoffrey noted it said "Carson" on the tag sewn above her shirt pocket. He checked again for insignia to indicate her rank, but couldn't see anything.

"I'm glad you'll find the recording useful," he said, glancing at the man sitting beside her. The man looked quite a bit older than Carson, which made Geoffrey wonder if he didn't outrank her, but he wore neither name tag nor insignia, and he hadn't said a word the entire session. Geoffrey couldn't decide if he was security or a mentor sitting in and not wanting to pull rank.

Carson nodded. "We reviewed the room recording before we met with you, and the audio you brought in proves pre-meditation. The case is basically closed."

"This is to be considered a hand-off, then," said Geoffrey, refusing to take the hint.

The man opened a drawer in the desk he and Carson were sitting behind and pulled out two envelopes.

"More than that," said Carson, taking the envelopes and sliding them across the desk towards Geoffrey. "Um... Happy retirement. With full honours, of course," she added, as Geoffrey opened his mouth to protest. "For both you and your partner."

"I don't have a partner," Geoffrey said. "I was mostly management, with the odd field gig when I fit the required physical type."

"But you're, I mean your..." Carson thumbed up both envelopes and pulled one back. "My mistake."

The unnamed man stared straight ahead.

"How the hell did I get retired in the space of hours, anyhow?" said Geoffrey. "Todd told me some of us were getting transferred and the rest burned."

"Perhaps you misunderstood," said Carson. "It's more like some were getting burn notices and some weren't. Just because you're not getting burned doesn't mean you're getting transferred." She tapped the envelope left on the table and brightened. "With honours! That means your pension will be excellent. You don't need to worry about it from a financial point of view at all."

"I wasn't," Geoffrey muttered, resigning himself to picking up the envelope. "Am I dismissed then?"

"Yes," said Carson, standing and extending her hand. The unnamed man stood half a beat after she did. "Thank you for all your years of service, and all the best. Enjoy yourself."

Geoffrey hesitated just long enough to let her know he still wasn't happy, then shook her hand. "I'm looking for a colleague," he said. "The one who was held and beaten. I was told she was in the hospital, but not which one."

Carson smiled politely and sat down again as if he had already left. The unnamed man stepped around the desk with unexpected swiftness and took Geoffrey firmly by the arm.

Since it was clear there was no extracting the information from them, Geoffrey let himself be led to the door and shoved out. The door shut behind him. He shook himself, checked he still had the envelope in his hand, and headed outside.

No-one would have known several floors of the Metro Hall complex were being raided from the outside. There were some black SUVs parked on the lawn behind the building, but it wasn't unusual for special events staff to abuse the pedestrian spaces in that way.

Geoffrey sat on the stone bench by the fountain and rubbed a hand over his face. Kicking him out wasn't going to change that he had to find Pepper, and if they knew enough to know he was clean, they had to know "retiring" wasn't going to stop him from doing that.

He scratched his chin and tried to remember the last time he'd shaved. Probably the afternoon before he'd met DeBussy for dinner. He sighed and headed to the shopping mall level underground. He bought a disposable razor and some shaving gel at the pharmacy, paying by cash. Paying for the toiletries reminded him that he wouldn't be able to use his work credit cards anymore.

He walked to a condo highrise two blocks east. The outer door had the option of either holding up a keycard to a reader, or entering a numeric combination. Geoffrey paused at the lock and pinched the bridge of his nose, willing the numbers to come back to him. He pictured the last time he'd had to use this bolt-hole, and winced when he realised how many months it had been.

A series of numbers came to him, but he wasn't sure about the last two digits. He tried one combination that failed, but the second version worked.

The twelfth floor only had two units. Geoffrey went to the door at the southern end of the corridor and held his thumb over the rubbery pad installed into the wall. There was a soft beep, and the red LED in the base of the electronic lock turned green. He opened the door when he heard the lock click open, relieved that his security hadn't been entirely revoked yet.

There wasn't anyone inside, to his great relief. He really didn't want to explain to any colleagues. Former colleagues, he reminded himself.

The kitchen, washroom, and bedroom were all furnished in a minimal but standard way. The living room had a table and chairs in it, but all the walls had rows of safety deposit boxes locked into metal frames. Geoffrey found his, unlocked it with his thumbprint, and pulled the box out of the frame. He put the platinum credit card with his real name on it in his wallet. Then he re-locked the deposit box, undid the folding handle, and carried it out of the building.

Fortunately this was part of the financial district, so he wouldn't look that odd carrying a strongbox around. He briefly considered going home, but decided against it since he knew Todd wouldn't be done yet.

If he remembered right, there was a shop that sold laptops back in Metro Hall. He'd found Pepper once using a computer this week. He could do it again.

Katherine Hajer

notions, fiction, needlework

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what the hell was that? / July 21, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

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Guest Post by Nina Amir: How to Evaluate Your Book for Marketability / June 30, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

How to Evaluate Your Book for Marketability

Every Book Needs a Business Plan

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About the Author

Author’s Websites:

#fridayflash: exited / June 26, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

stretch! more guest posts and book reviews on the way / June 25, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

comment conclusions / June 24, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

#fridayflash: unburnt / June 19, 2014 by Katherine Hajer

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