Author: rmkeville@gmail.com

Bad News…and Good News!

Hey, all.

Sorry I had to take down the chapters of Dreams of the Boardwalk that I had posted.  It seems that Amazon doesn’t appreciate it when you try to sell something that’s available online for free, even if what’s online for free is a first draft that went on to be significantly revised.

But that brings us to the good news: Dreams of the Boardwalk is completed and going up this week!  Stay tuned – just a couple days until everything is ready, and then Dreams of the Boardwalk will be available on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback formats!

 

Neighborhood Witch Is Now Available on Amazon!

A new story up on Amazon for the first time in far too long! Here’s the Amazon blurb:

Celia Rivera is a well-respected citizen of the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. She runs her own little shop, and she’s respected by everyone from the old men playing dominoes on the corner to the young people who spend their days looking for trouble to get into. They respect her wisdom, her toughness…

Oh. And she’s a witch.

Celia Rivera’s shop sells more than candles and incense, and she keeps her little corner of the City safe for everyone. And when someone targets her family for magical retribution, it’s time for the kind of magical street fight that can only happen in the City.

Check out Neighborhood Witch’s page, or just go straight to Amazon and download a copy. And as always, while you’re there, check out the rest of the library!

Two Thoughts

Not Real America

It pisses me off when I hear people talking about New York City as if it’s not part of Real America.  Hell, lots of people actually use the name as shorthand for “Not Real America”: “Maybe they do things that way in New York City, but not around here.”

Here’s the thing: as of 2015, New York City had a population of 8,550,405 people.  As of 2016, the United States has a population of 323,127,513.  Do a quick calculation, and that gives you 2.65% of the total population of the United States.  In just that one city.  Nearly three out of every hundred Americans live in New York City, and those Americans are a true cross-section of this country.  Every race, creed, color, country of origin, gender and sexuality that calls America home lives in this City.  We are Real America.

 

Two Surprise Attacks

I have in mind two surprise attacks: Pearl Harbor and D-Day.

D-Day was just the first step in a larger plan.  On D-Day itself, many units had objectives to capture roads, bridges and towns that were instrumental to the overall invasion.  By the next day, the beachheads had become supply depots, moving troops, vehicles, fuel and materiel into the breach in Fortress Europe.

Pearl Harbor caused terrible damage (though less than it could have, by purest luck), but it had no plan for follow-up, and in the end it only enraged and mobilized the enemy: awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.

Trump and his cronies wanted their first few weeks in the White House to be D-Day.  But when you kick out the only guy who knows anything about actually running a government (however corrupt he might have been), refuse to attend briefings, issue proclamations as if the judicial and legislative branches (or even the affected departments) have no input as to whether or not your will be done, and generally fly by the seat of your Nazi Chief Adviser’s pants, you don’t get D-Day.  You get Pearl Harbor.

Guardian Angel

A little over two weeks ago, I wore this pin to the Women’s March on New York.

It wasn’t just a fancier variation on the iconic safety pin, though it was also that.

When I went to the Women’s March, I was worried there might be trouble: police crackdowns, counter protesters, provocateurs…who knows?  So I wore this pin for…luck isn’t the right word.  Not nearly strong enough.  This pin is the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to magic.

I bought this pin back in college when my then-girlfriend passed out for no reason we could discover while we were walking across one of the lawns.  I gave it to her to watch over her in my stead while she was in the hospital being examined.  Nothing was found, and she never had the problem again.

Some time later, we loaned the angel to a girl in our dorm whose brother back in Romania had been in a car accident, and all she could do was worry and weep.  We gave her the angel and told her that it was good luck.  A few days later, she gave it back, no longer worried and weeping.  Her brother would be all right.

Some time after that, a girl from our dorm was raped at a frat party.  We loaned her the pin, and…she slept a little better.  She said it felt like we were watching over her and it kept some of the nightmares away.  Sometimes even magic can only do so much.

There have been others.  And it always seemed to work.  So when I say that pin is magic, I mean that it’s a ward.  It’s protection.  And if this angel is a guardian angel, as it seems to be, then it seems to watch over women.

It worked again on the day of the March, though of course we were never in actual danger that I know of.  There are logical explanations for all of the other good things that happened, too.  I’m still going to wear this pin to every future protest I attend.  May the angel protect the women around me; their enemy is in power.

The Minor Annoyance That Destroys Other People’s Lives

I got a bit of a shock when I opened the mail yesterday: I was being charged a little over $1,000 for some tests that my doctor had ordered during my yearly physical a few weeks ago.

I didn’t panic.  For one thing, I knew it had to be a mistake.  I’ve never been charged for tests associated with my yearly physical before.  For another, well, if it turned out that my insurance coverage really had changed that much when I the company re-negotiated this year, I could cover it.

Fortunately, that turned out to not be the case.  I made a few phone calls, and it turned out that the doctor’s office had made an ever-so-tiny mistake with the billing.  A box not checked, a form not filed, something like that.  The insurance company got in touch, the situation got resolved, and no more thousand dollar bill.

It was an enormous relief, but in my relief, I got to thinking: what about the people who don’t know how to navigate the system, even to the rudimentary degree I did?  What about people who aren’t taken seriously, or who can’t speak the language well enough to make their problem understood?  Why, they’d be stuck with the thousand dollar bill.  This is how the poor get poorer.

And of course, that’s leaving out the people who don’t have insurance at all.  Chances are good that they wouldn’t have gone to the doctor in the first place.  That’s how the poor get dead.

Field Hospital is Now Available on Amazon and Free to Download!

A brand new story, this one in honor of my sister Meaghan, is up for sale on Amazon, and free to download now through Thursday 12/15!  Here is the Amazon blurb:

On an Air Force base in the middle of the desert, Captain Eileen Brennan waits to treat the casualties of a war that everyone back home thinks is over. But today, she will treat the wounded of a war far greater than the one she thought she was fighting.

Check out Field Hospital’s home page, or just go straight to Amazon and download yourself a free copy!  And as always, while you’re there, check out the rest of the library!

I’m Back

Hey, all.  Sorry for the long radio silence.  Part of it was for personal reasons: while I was incommunicado, Red Molly and I got married and went on our honeymoon.  If you ever have the opportunity to vacation at Sandals Montego Bay, I highly recommend it.  The ocean is like bathwater, and the food and drinks are delicious.  There are dozens of activities, but you can just as easily do nothing.  Watch out for the incidentals, though – you might not believe your eyes when you look at the form for their laundry service, but it really does cost a couple bucks per garment.

Anyway, now that I’m back, I need to announce some changes.  You see, I’ve spent a great deal of this year trying to work out what the balance should be between this site and my old blog.  Most of the time, I’ve been actively trying to leave Dreams of the Shining Horizon behind.  But now that dynamic’s going to change a little.

You see, I was recently invited to become a contributor at My Trending Stories, a site that aims to “give the power back to the creatives”.  This looks like a big opportunity to get wider exposure, and it’s my writing at Dreams that got it for me.

On a more pragmatic level, Dreams continues to have more followers and pageviews than this site, despite all my neglect.

So here’s what’s going to happen going forward: Dreams of the Shining Horizon is going to be my “premiere theatre”.  Reviews, articles, first drafts of fiction…all of that will appear there first (with that in mind, it seems like the place could use a bit of renovating.  Anyway…).  My Trending Stories will be the “second-run theatre” or “syndication”, if you will.  They explicitly stated in their invitation that I could use reprints from my blog, so that’s what I’m going to do.  Finally, my this site will be my archive and my bookstore.  The blog will be for announcing new releases, and there will be pages containing my reviews, writing theory essays, and other things I think should be saved permanently.

Glad to be back – hope y’all are still with me.

An Excerpt from Hometown – #1

HOMETOWN-createspace-edit

Hey, all.

As promised, here is the first of the excerpts from my longest work, the horror novel Hometown:

It’s the Fall of 1994 in the small milltown of Belford, New York. The leaves are turning, the kids are going back to school, and the heat of Summer is giving way to a cool, misty season. It happens every Fall.

Only this Fall, people are disappearing into that mist. Some people are found torn apart, some people are found dead for no reason, and some people aren’t found at all. Other people see strange things in the mist: ghosts and campfire stories.

There’s something out there in that mist. Something old. Something that has slept for a long time, but has now woken up hungry. Maybe the people of Belford could resist it, but as the terrible Fall wears on, more and more of them start…changing. Acting bizarre and violent. In the end, only a small group of teenage defenders are left to make their stand.

That’s the cover blurb.  You’ll probably see it again.  Meanwhile, the plan here is to keep giving you excerpts at the rate of one or two per week, until you’ve seen everything that’s publicly available from Amazon, then give you a few previews from later in the book.  With that in mind, check below the fold (it’s a touch NSFW) for the opening scene to Hometown.

Continue reading “An Excerpt from Hometown – #1″