Boosting the Signal: Underground, by the Northwest Independent Writers Association

This is another out-of-band Boosting the Signal post, which I’m doing mostly to support the 2014 NIWA anthology, and because I can! So y’all remember I’m in NIWA, right? There’s an anthology coming out TODAY! It’s called Underground, and one of the participating authors, Roslyn McFarland, sent me in a piece called “Soldier Boy”, which is a prologue to her piece in the anthology. Enjoy!

Underground

Soldier Boy

Prologue

How long has it been?

Swords rose and fell accompanied by a cacophony of sound: the clashing of steel, the thudding impact of a weapon meeting its mark, the screams and moans of the dying. As a soldier of Scotland, ’twas my duty to play the part as directed by my superiors. This primarily involved the bloodying of my hands, an occupation in which I did not revel despite my unusual—let’s say, aptitude.

Then came the change.

Years? Decades? Centuries? So long since I’ve even bothered to keep track, I have no idea.

The pervasive harmonies of trauma and war stilled as soldiers returned to their homes or were committed to the grave. I stand alone amid the echoes of their memory. I don’t know why. Why me? Why this trail, this path, this lake? Mine is not to know, only to protect. I assume that’s what I am, what I do. A protector. Any who come upon me shouldering the mantle of darkness or bearing a soul full of anger and fight, soon meets the specter I cannot. Death will come to call within a fortnight, claiming yet another soul not my own.

Therein lies the crux of the situation. Though neither food nor drink pass my lips, rest also purely optional despite my ceaseless wanderings, I do not die. I live. Alone. Endlessly alone. Human contact is as surreal a concept in my waking days as the possibility of an endless sleep claiming me in the night. It doesn’t happen. It can’t happen.

It is my destiny. My curse.

I walk through the mists and weeds along green shores, forsaken, the burden of the souls lost by my hand weighing down each step.

Then she came.

The lass with the bright eyes and fiery spirit, who either doesn’t know my tale or doesn’t care. Whose odd accent and stranger clothes, products of a new era, do nothing to disguise the strength of a soul bearing its own heavy burdens. Whose touch, soft skin, cocky yet kind smile, blow warmth through the husk of what I am, relighting embers I thought long since withered away, buried by the ash of time and death.

How long has it been, since I felt the warmth of human touch?

How long before my curse takes her?

Anthology Blurb

What does “underground” mean to you?

This anthology from the Northwest Independent Writers Association presents fourteen “underground” stories, each with a different interpretation of the titular theme. In these pages, you will visit a murderer’s hideout, walk the road to the afterlife, plunder a dragon’s lair, uncover a mysterious archaeological artifact, glimpse human existence after an environmental apocalypse, and delve deep into dark secrets, crime syndicates, forbidden worlds, sacrifice, and the human psyche.

Featuring stories by:

Mike Chinakos • Amber Michelle Cook • Pamela Cowan • Jake Elliot • Jonathan Ems • T.L. Kleinberg • Jason LaPier • Maggie Lynch • Roslyn McFarland • Cody Newton • Dey Rivers • Steven L. Shrewsbury • Dale Ivan Smith • Laurel Standley • Jennifer Willis

The Northwest Independent Writers Association (NIWA) supports indie and hybrid authors and promotes professional standards in independent writing, publishing, and marketing.

Buy the Book: Amazon (print) | Amazon (Kindle) | Barnes & Noble (Nook) | Kobo

Follow NIWA On: Official NIWA Site | Twitter | Facebook

Follow Roslyn McFarland On: Facebook |

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Spotted on Dear Author today: to DNF or not to DNF

Dear Author pointed at this article today, in which the article writer admonishes people who bail on a book before finishing it. I do not agree with the article, though I’ll give its author props for a cogently written argument.

As you all know, Internets, I am a voracious reader–voracious enough that I’ve started reading books in a whole extra language, for fuck’s sake. I read on the bus. I read at lunch. I read while waiting in lines for stuff. I read print. I read ebooks. I read on my phone. I read on ereaders. If there’s a newspaper lying around and I have nothing else to read, I’ll read that. Hell, if there’s something suitably interesting on it, I’ll read the back of a cereal box.

So trust me when I tell you that 999 times out of a thousand, if I commit to starting a book, chances are very high that I will finish it. If I pick up a book in the first place, I’ve already done my due diligence–I’ve read reviews of it, I’ve checked out its ratings, I’ve probably even read sample chapters. Something about the book has piqued my interest and made me think, okay yeah, this is possibly a book with which I will be happy to entertain myself for a few hours.

But every so often, I will DNF a book. (That’s Did Not Finish, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the acronym.)

And when I do, it’s typically because something in it has actively pissed me off. Crappy writing isn’t usually enough by itself to make me do that–though I’ve found that if I have too many reactions of “no no no YOU’RE WRITING IT WRONG”, I’ll bail. More often than not, though, it’s because something in the storyline has pissed me off. Usually, a character that does something that makes me want to climb into the book and punch them out of irritation.

As the article I link to points out, sure, it’s possible that a book that does that to me will eventually hand me something awesome that makes up for it pissing me off. But I can think of exactly one example of a book where the writing was compelling enough to make me stick around, despite the fact that I actively loathed every character in the book. And the book in question did not in fact redeem itself in my experience.

So I don’t honestly see the point of sticking around to finish a book that irritates me. That’s tantamount to saying “gosh, hitting myself on the head with this hammer really hurts! But maybe if I keep at it long enough, it’ll start feeling better!”

Seriously, who has time for that?

What about the rest of you? What makes you bail on reading a book?

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Bye Firefox, it was nice knowing you

Those of you who follow Dara, either via her Crime and the Forces of Evil blog, her LJ or Dreamwidth mirrors, or her social networks, will have already seen her post Mozilla and Firefox Careen into a Ditch, in which she recounts going into it a bit with Mozilla’s OpenStandards Twitter account–about why in gods’ names they chose to show some support for Gamergate.

Since Dara put that post up, the Daily Dot picked up on it, and y’all may note–some of Dara’s tweets are in fact cited in that article.

The Mary Sue’s picked up on the story as well, right over here.

It shouldn’t take any of you all much of a stretch of the imagination to guess that I’m with Dara on this. The whole Gamergate debacle is something many, many other people besides me have decried, so I’m not going to get into that here–I have nothing new to contribute to that that y’all haven’t probably already read.

What I will say is that Mozilla has disappointed me here. While I cannot bail entirely on using Firefox, due to having to keep it around for purposes of day job testing, I can and have decided to make Safari and Chrome my primary browsers for personal use. Firefox had already irritated me with its constant memory leaks on OS X, as well as its breaking of Disqus-based comments on several sites I regularly visit (like the Mary Sue, Kevin and Kell, and Ensign Sue). Way back when, when it first launched its system of fast updates, it also made my life difficult at work since Selenium had trouble keeping up with its rapid-fire changes. Which is a pain in the ass when much of your job depends upon automated browser testing.

On the other hand, I liked Firefox’s smart bookmarks, which was a handy way for me to hit RSS feeds of a couple of sites like the BBC and the Seattle Times, whenever I wanted to read news–I could pick and choose which articles I wanted to read. And I had been planning to switch my primary browser on my laptop back to Firefox if I saw any sign that they’d fixed the Disqus problem, despite the memory leaks being annoying enough that I’d had to install a plugin whose express purpose was to alert me to restart Firefox once it passed a certain level of memory consumption.

(Pro tip: if your damn browser needs its user community to write a plugin to fix an ongoing problem FOR YOU, you’re doing your development wrong.)

But now? I’m done. Safari gets to be my permanent main browser now.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.