If life hands you spam, make spam-ade

Found Poetry Constructed from Spam Comments on my Blog

Seriously a few moments.
Plenty of adventures
Are usually now being formed.
Your daughter’s virginity disappear.
Meals left out during the open
Can turn out to be the ideal nesting internet site
For spring pests.
Until you have young, get a secure broken relationship.
Chance to go somewhere for you was really very much required
To get these adolescent girls who’ve got a great deal of likely,
Wouldn’t have the infant
In an exceedingly Denver habitation.
Sizzling out of this scenario is the two of us.
To have initiative —
Also trust around the would-be with this marriage.
Just pay for the music.
Possess a moment.

 

The English is better in this book, which was one of five general fiction semifinalists for the 2014 (and apparently last) Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award:

Cover for The Awful Mess: A Love Story

More excerpts from The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire

The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire -- showing a (dressed) teenage girl on a bed, looking rather pensive.(Which is still coming out December 9 and can be pre-ordered here. Outside the US, try this. I’m still waiting for a link to the paperback edition.)

Foul language warning on this one!

Her shelves were filling up again with other books, like those John Jakes Bicentennial paperbacks in which people experienced all the important events of American history between simultaneous orgasms. There was also Anne Frank’s diary and a bunch of depressing Holocaust novels. Sometimes she wondered if she liked to read those because no matter how difficult her life got, she could always think well, at least I’m not in a concentration camp.


The crash was still his downfall. As he’d explained to his psychiatrist, if the plane was a black box in which he might or might not have done all that he could to save his family, all those realities had existed at the same time until the moment someone found him lying unconscious in a field of shade tobacco. He had to live with the version of reality in which they were dead and, at the very least, he was the one who’d put them in that box to begin with. Schrodinger had designed his experiment specifically to either kill the cat or not, and luckily for him it wasn’t a real cat, because if it had been, he’d probably be the most notorious man in the history of physics. But David’s family had been real.

“I’m sorry, what?” the doctor had said. “I’m not following you at all.”

“It’s theoretical physics,” David had said. “Schrodinger’s cat? Very basic stuff I’d expect any college graduate to know. But never mind.”

“Is this level of arrogance normal for you?” the doctor had asked. “If so, I believe you may really be improving.”


“What I don’t understand about this holiday is the football part of it. Not that what you lot play is what I would consider football.”

Colin had already said some variation on this to him at least once a week since he’d met him. “Are you watching the game?” he asked hopefully. He had no actual interest in the day’s games, but having a television on would reduce the pressure to have conversation.

“Good Lord, no,” Colin said. “I did watch some of that parade, though. A bizarre tribal custom if I ever saw one. Huge inflated totems, dizzying drumbeats, virgins displayed like offerings to appease the gods!”

“So where’s Molly?” he asked Cassandra, who looked as if she’d had just about enough of Colin.


MOLLY WISHED Farrah Fawcett would stop smiling. She was clearly out of touch with what was going on in this room. Or maybe she wasn’t – her smile had a kind of gritting-her-teeth quality to it, as if the actress was just possibly being forced to hold that smile under the threat of death. It reminded Molly of the huge, helpless grin on the skeleton in her biology class; she could practically see the white, bleached skull waiting to be revealed under all that perfect hair and skin. But she didn’t want to think about that, anymore than she wanted to be where she was.


If she really insisted on going through with this, it was going to be like making love to a pill bug. One touch in the wrong spot, and she’d curl up into a little ball. Hell, he might, too. How did two pill bugs ever mate? He guessed they had to possess a basic level of pill bug trust, or just be too fucking horny to care.


I think that’s it for free excerpts, except that I might do a couple of future posts with locations and paintings that show up in the book. If you’re on my mailing list, you already got Chapter 3, and you’ll get Chapter 4 and then 5 soon. Also, you’ll get a prequel chapter from The Awful Mess sometime early next month. If you tried to join and didn’t get anything, try again and remember to confirm your subscription.


The Awful Mess ebook will be on sale Oct. 28 – Nov. 4. It’s that title’s first time out through BookBub with the newer cover, and also the first time promoting to multiple retailers rather than just Amazon. I’m very curious to see how it does …  and hopeful it might goose pre-orders on this one.

 

Short excerpts from The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire (Part 1)

I need to build a page of these for the site, so I figure I’ll try to pique your curiosity over the next couple of weeks at the same time. If you want to read Chapters 1 and 2, you can begin here. To peek at Chapters 3, 4, and 5, sign up for my email list here.

EXCERPTS

As with the book, there’s a “bad language and adult themes” warning. There’s nothing explicit here, though.


Molly was not always enthusiastic about her father’s new life, but at least she was part of it. This was more than many kids with divorced parents could say. Besides, she blamed her mother for everything, although she was not above despising her stepmother for things like loving The Six Million Dollar Man and wanting all her bathroom accessories to match.


He watched the hemlock boughs sway overhead and flicked the occasional ant away from his thighs. Would there be grief in the ant hill tonight? Or would the ants just keep doing their ant business, oblivious to their losses? Did ants ever try to lay guilt trips on each other: Hey, asshole, I took a hell of a lot better care of the Queen than you ever did!


Molly gulped down the rest of her punch. She liked the peculiar sensation of warmth it was giving her, the odd little swoop of something like going over a bump in the road and becoming airborne.


“It’s okay to use the phone here, isn’t it?” She had decided it was time to call her dad and bail out of this situation.

“No need, we’re moving on, too,” Kim said. “Gina’s going to take us back, right, Gina?”

“Sure,” Gina said.

“How soon?”

“Soon as we finish Gina’s face. Hey, let’s do yours, too!”

“No, that’s all right,” Molly said quickly. Kim was even less judicious with make-up than she was with criticism of her parents. Gina’s heavily-penciled eyes made her look like a raccoon on the make.


She handed him his mug and sat down next to him.

“Decided to give it a try?” he asked.

She nodded and took a tentative sip – and screwed up her face in disgust. It was so much worse than she’d expected! How could something that smelled so good taste so bad? Still, she took another sip. It wasn’t quite as bad when she knew what to expect.

“A lot of people take it with cream and sugar.”

Why even bother with it in the first place, she wondered? But perhaps it was one of those things adults were just expected to develop a taste for, like Brussels sprouts and oral sex.


David stared at his knees, trying to come up with something that might sound a little more plausible. “My housekeeper has the most wonderful ass,” he blurted, then thought oh fuck. He certainly hadn’t meant to say that.

The other patients sat up, suddenly interested.

“Your housekeeper?” Rob’s eyes glittered.

His face was burning, which wasn’t going to help at all. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Oh yes you did,” Rob said. “Tell us about this housekeeper.”

“There was nothing to tell. I didn’t mean it. She’s only sixteen, for God’s sake.”

Breaths got sucked in all around the circle. “Fucking A,” Arnold said, clearly approving.

“How’d you end up with a sixteen-year-old housekeeper?” another guy from across the circle asked. He sounded envious. “You use a service or something?”

“She was my daughter’s babysitter.”

“Holy crap,” Arnold said. “You want to fuck your dead daughter’s babysitter?”

“I do not! Shut the fuck up!”

Arnold gave him a toothy grin. “Hey, I’m not blaming ya, buddy.”

Timothy sniffed. “You can get thrown in jail for that kind of thing.”

“I would never lay a finger on her,” David said.

“Yet her ass makes life worth living,” Rob said.


Pre-order the book for only $2.99!

A note to friends and fans: If you’re planning to order it someday, your pre-order is absolutely the best way to give this book a good shot at success. All those pre-orders are counted on the day of release, which gives the book a shot at real visibility on Amazon. On the other hand, with purchases trickling in after release, the general public will never know it’s there.

(Also, I will probably increase the price to $3.99 after a time. And this one I don’t dare offer for free, so don’t hold out any hope for that. I’d get too many indignant condemnations from people who download every free book without reading the warnings in the product description.)

For those of you who only read paper, I should have a pre-ordering link up in the next few weeks.