The novella “Year of Miracles” reaches back four hundred years in the Old Races universe to tell another Janx and Daisani story, this time about Sarah Hopkins, the human woman they both loved in the year that London burned.

There is no minimum buy-in for this novella–pay whatever you feel is fair or can afford–but now through the end of July 2010 will be the only opportunity to order a copy: at the end of July, it goes off the market permanently until I find a traditional publisher for it.*

The novella will be delivered to you as a PDF on or before December 31, 2010. I’ll use your Paypal account email address as the one to send the story to unless otherwise directed, so direct me otherwise if necessary. Also, if you do subscribe to the story, please immediately add ce-murphy-patrons@googlegroups.com to your email address book so that when I send the story out it actually gets through to you.

I’d be grateful if people linked or pointed others to this and/or the original post, since I don’t know any other way to advertise!

A new excerpt from “Year of Miracles”:

“I can’t.” Sarah held back, breaking her grip on Eliseo’s hand. “I can’t.”

“Of course you can.” He stopped and turned back, a gentle brightness in his eyes. He gestured at himself, a motion that invited her to look at him as though she’d never seen him before. Dapper: that was a word she’d learned from the two extraordinary men in her life; from the slight and swarthy man before her and from beautiful, outrageous Janx.

And that was the trouble, whether Eliseo Daisani wanted to see it or not. He suited the fine clothes, the expensive shoes, the distant music and the wealthy crowd who attended such matters as balls and courts. He was not handsome, but his aspect, the part of him that was more–and less–than human, gave him a gravitas and a compulsion that drew people to him. He belonged where she did not. Even dressed in silks, even with the slaughterfields cultured from her voice, she was a daughter of blood and guts and gore.

“Sarah,” Daisani said, still gentle. “What do you see, when you look at me?”

“More than I should.” She couldn’t help it: not since the night a gleeful Janx had shed his human form, becoming the great red dragon who offered her a place on his back. She had flown so high that night, come so close to touching the winter moon, and when they landed, Eliseo Daisani, not to be outdone, was waiting for them with a waterfall of impossible flowers in his arms. The season was wrong, all wrong, and yet his arms overflowed with blooms. Daisies she knew, though the red ones were unfamiliar, but the others were thistle-purple and elongated.

“Amaranth,” Daisani said that night. “Love everlasting, and red daisies for beauty unknown.”

“Nothing lasts forever,” she had replied, and then he had offered her proof that she was wrong, never wincing as he parted the veins of his wrist and slow blood oozed out.

“Just two sips,” he warned. “The first for health. The second for life.”

“And if I take three?” she asked, playful with the wonder of Janx’s flight.

Daisani’s gaze darkened. “Do not. The third sip is death. That’s the price of a vampire’s gift.”

“More than I should,” Sarah repeated now, because she couldn’t forget, not ever, not looking at either of her men. “Always, more than I should.”

“And they see less.” He nodded toward the distant courtyard, and offered his arm once more. “They’ll see a woman of wealth and beauty, Sarah, no matter what you feel lies below.”

*I reserve the right to do a second run of sales if it turns into a novel, which is not impossible. Otherwise, though, this is it, your one and only chance.

I’m writing a new novella (in all likelihood, anyway, as given the subject it’s unlikely to be only a short story) of the Old Races.

This will be another commissioned story, available only to those who buy in. It’ll run differently from the last one in that there’s no minimum subscription rate/buy-in, but I’ll retain the exclucivity factor: anybody who buys in over the next six weeks will get a copy of the story, and then it’ll be permanently off the market until I sell it to a traditional publisher. No second chances, this time.

And so, an excerpt from “Year of Miracles”, the story of Janx, Daisani, Sarah Hopkins, and London burning:

“From whom would I buy two dozen cows, a dozen pigs and as many sheep, and, oh, a flock of chickens for dining on?” A man’s voice, cultured voice; too cultured even to be a servant, and they were the ones most often sent to the slaughterfields. Sarah wiped her hands on her skirt–useless gesture; the fabric was damp and black with blood, and her fingernails crusted with it–and answered as she turned.

“Anyone along here, m’lord. Slaughtered and dressed and brought to yer table, m’lord.” She was self-conscious, as she was not with servants, of the differences in their accents: of the broadness of hers, and the refinement of his. Worse when she shaded her eyes, taking the sun’s glare down enough to see the man. Tall, slim, red-haired and green eyed, with a cloak only a fop would wear, its colors garish and bright in the sunlight. Layer after layer of fine cloth, reds and golds in no fashion she’d seen before, and the vest beneath it of cloth softer than she would ever touch.

His eyes widened with mock dismay. “Slaughtered and dressed and brought to my table? Now why would I want that, when it’s so much more fun to make the kill myself?”

She rubbed a finger in her ear, squinting at him. “My lord? You’ll want a farmer for that, if it’s for hunting them yourself…” Hunting boar: the wealthy did that, she knew. But hunting cows and pigs was an oddness, even for the rich, and this man was.

“Oh no.” He kicked a foot up, displaying a boot of dark red leather, rich and beautiful and covered in the worst a slaughterfield could offer. “Hunt cows? And ruin these boots?”

She stared at the muck and offal ruining the fine leather, then lifted an incomprehending gaze to the bright-eyed man displaying the boot. “M’lord?”

“Your name,” he said gently. “What is your name, slaughterfield’s daughter?”

“Sarah,” she said after a moment. “Sarah Hopkins, m’lord.”

“Sarah.” He cut a bow, deeper than she imagined a man would give even the queen, and when he straightened again it was with a wicked grin. “All I wanted, Sarah Hopkins, was an excuse to speak to you. My name is Janx.”

Because I am not (completely) insane, the delivery date for this story will be on or before December 31, 2010.

Please note: I’ll use your paypal account email address as the one to send the story to unless otherwise directed, so direct me otherwise if necessary. Also, if you do subscribe to the story, please immediately add ce-murphy-patrons@googlegroups.com to your email address book so that when I send the story out it actually gets through to you!

“Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” was and is an experiment in direct-market story sales and sustainable income models for writers. Commissioned in June 2009 by some fifty contributors, the planned 7500 word short story grew to a 23,000 word novella centered around Janx and Daisani, two of the most popular characters from my Negotiator Trilogy. It’s also a sequel to the online short story Five Card Draw, and part of a longer sequence of planned short stories and novellas.

For a minimum $10 buy-in, patrons received exclusive access to the novella in September 2009. A second opportunity to become a patron for the same minimum $10 buy-in is now available through the month of February, 2010. At the end of February, “Hot Time” will be off the market until such a time as it finds a traditional publisher.

Cover art by Lanny Liu.

February 28, 2010:: “Hot Time” is no longer for sale. Thanks to all who bought it!

an excerpt from “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”:

    She was too young, even for a man with no age, but she caught his eye. Slim, dark-haired, with long fingers caught in the skirt of a shapeless dress, she was clearly not a child of wealth. She no doubt belonged to the riverboat upon which she stood, a shabby thing that had seen better days. Even so, in the fire’s light they both bent toward beauty.

    It was her gaze, fixed on the sky, which arrested him. Others watched the fire, drawn in by its glow and movement, but she looked upward as though she could see what soared above the smoke. That was quite impossible: even knowing who danced there, Daisani could barely see them himself, but the girl watched as if she knew. Such seeing eyes were enough that he might have gone to her then, despite her youth, but tonight; tonight Chicago was burning.

New York, 1923
    Flame trembled, danced, then fell into darkness. Vanessa murmured a sound of impatience and rose to find matches. Her lush speakeasy refuge had electric lighting, but she preferred the warmth of fire. She had since childhood, though there’d been no electricity then to weigh it against. Then, she had loved its power, even when it destroyed, even when it haunted her dreams; now, she loved its gentleness on her eyes, on the lines of her face, though she, of all women, had little cause to worry in that regard. Still, she read and played chess and cards by candle-light, and the flame that had died left the room just that much too dim.

    A spark; a scent of sulfur; and an idle thought that the guttering candle would have been better served with the living flame from another rather than the recalcitrant matches. A second strike woke a second spark, but no blaze caught. “For pity’s sake.”

    “Allow me.” A man’s voice where there’d been no one a moment before, first startling and then waking a whole new level of impatience. He stood behind her, close enough to be a lover, and folded long cool fingers over hers, as though he’d strike a new match himself. He didn’t: a scrape of his thumbnail against his fingerpad brought flame to life, and the candle’s glow warmed the cup of her palm as he guided her hand to light it. “There,” he said with evident satisfaction. “Much better, isn’t it?”

    “It might have been, if your arrival hadn’t blown it out in the first place.” Vanessa turned in his arms and put her fingertips against his chest, pushing him away. He fell back one step, expression all jade-eyed injury, and was obliged to step backward again as Vanessa returned to her chair.

    Well: not obliged, perhaps. She had known the red-haired man more than thirty years, and if obligation had ever sat on his shoulders at all, it had done so lightly indeed. Book in hand, seat re-taken, she turned a deliberately piqued gaze on him. “What on earth do you want, Janx? Eliseo isn’t here.”

    “My dear Miss Grey.” Janx cut a more extravagant bow than usual, then fell into the chaise lounge across from her and cocked a knee up, fingers spread wide in supplication. “It’s not Eliseo I want at all. Surely you know that by now.”

    It wouldn’t do to laugh; it would never do to laugh at Janx’s theatrics. He had everything Eliseo Daisani lacked: fire, vitality, humor; a face which would see him beloved in the moving pictures, if he were fool enough to take vanity that far. He was not, though, a fool. A fop, yes; a showman, without question. But never a fool, and Vanessa dragged her gaze from him to the surrounding walls, the better to remind herself of who and what else he was.

    No one else–no one else human, at least–had ever seen the tapestries from whence the speakeasy’s abstract glass windows came. Curved to fit into subway walls, as they stood they were beautiful rushes of color, lit from behind because this room was buried, a secret meeting place for a handful of men who were not human at all.

    Men who had, as it happened, lost its ownership to Vanessa herself, and who now came and went from it only at her whim. Largely, at least; Janx was ever disinclined to follow someone else’s strictures. Truthfully, she was surprised any of them obliged her winnings and her privacy as much as they did. She was only human, and a clever bit of card-play could hardly stop them if they chose to make this place their own again. But Eliseo and Janx admired cleverness, and what they deigned to accept, the others tended to follow.

    Unless the chosen object was a thing one of them had chosen to accept, and by doing so left the other to want it. “You don’t want me, Janx. You only want what Eliseo has.”

    “And are the two not one and the same?”

    “Not,” Vanessa said with a faint smile, “from where I’m sitting. I doubt you came down here alone to try to seduce me. Half your entertainment comes from doing that in front of Eliseo. So what do you want?”

    “I want to know how you won this place.” Janx spread his arms, encompassing the room’s curved walls, the rich carpets and heavy, warm furnishings. “I want to know how you managed to cheat us. Oh, I don’t care, I’m not going to eat you.” Fluttering hands made light of the way her heart lurched. “It’s simply curiosity, my dear, and I’m so much like a cat. My curiosity shall kill me.”

    “My concern is that it shan’t kill me.”

    He gave her a smile, candle-light never dim enough to hide the too-long curvature of his canines, or their too-sharp points. “Of course not. Not if it finds an answer.”

    She doubted he would do it. Not for any love he had for her, but because of the delicate dance between himself and Eliseo. If she were to die here, in the speakeasy she’d won as her own, Eliseo would have no doubt as to her murderer. It would lack subtlety, and Janx was too much a master of their game for that.

    And yet it wasn’t a bluff to call. Not so obviously, at least, as by refusing him. Vanessa set her book aside, studying the lanky red-head across from her. The firelight was good to him, making his skin gold, bringing life to his reposed form. Living shadow danced where light would not fall and brought with it memories so long occluded she could only half believe they were real. No: more than half, now, and for a long time since, but there were questions she had never dared lay at the feet of the men she’d come to know.

    Questions which now, unexpectedly, had an opportunity to be asked. “A curiosity for a curiosity, Janx. I’ll tell you for a price.”

    He sat up in an explosion of movement, interest brightening his jade eyes. “You surprise me, my dear. Name your price, and we shall see if I’ll play your game.”

    “No.” She knew better: neither Janx nor Daisani, nor any of the others she’d met, were men with whom to settle the details of a bet after the fact. “This is the game. One of your curiosities satisfied in exchange for one of mine, or we both go away unsatisfied.”

    The impulse for low-brow humor scampered across his face, but she’d been right, before: it was only in Eliseo’s presence that Janx truly enjoyed flirting with her. His humor was replaced by petulance and he waved a hand sullenly. “Oh, very well. What do you want to know?”

    Triumph spattered through her. “Tell me what happened in Chicago.”

    Janx’s silence was so complete, so still, that it seemed the candle-light had died. That Vanessa was alone in the dark, with no companion but her heartbeat, and then he said, oh so softly, “Her name was Susannah, and like the best of you, she was only human.”

From Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight

]]> http://cemurphy.net/archives/369/feed 10 http://cemurphy.net/archives/164 http://cemurphy.net/archives/164#comments Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:45:57 +0000 ce_murphy http://cemurphy.net/?p=164 Today is the official release day for WALKING DEAD, book four of the Walker Papers! As far as I can tell, everybody I know bought it two weeks ago, but still, today is the official release day!

Seattle’s a great place to live…if it weren’t for the undead.

For once, Joanne Walker’s not out to save the world. She’s come to terms with the host of shamanic powers she’s been given, her job as a police detective has been relatively calm, and she’s got a love life for the first time in memory. Not bad for a woman who started out the year mostly dead.

But it’s Halloween, and the undead have just crashed Joanne’s party. Now she has to figure out how to break the spell that lets ghosts, zombies and even the Wild Hunt come back. Unfortunately, there’s no shamanic handbook explaining how to deal with the walking dead.

And if they have anything to say about it–which they do–

No one’s getting out of there alive.

To go along with WALKING DEAD’s release, my web guru, Laura Denson, recently did a recording of “Rabbit Tricks”, the Walker Papers short story that fits chronologically between COYOTE DREAMS and WALKING DEAD.

My longtime friend and writing partner Sarah Palmero did a two-minute voice recording from THE QUEEN’S BASTARD. I think both of these are pretty damned cool (if utterly bizarre, because wow, really weird to hear someone else reading my words!), and would like to thank them both profusely for doing these and letting me post them publicly!

Fifth, I’m terribly smug to show off the (tiny–if you want to see it full sized you’ll have to buy the story) cover for “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”, which was painted by manga artist Lanny Liu.

Along those same lines, “Hot Time” has debuted amongst its patrons today. (I wasn’t thinking, when I changed its due date to September 1st, that that was also the release date for WALKING DEAD. Oh well, everybody got WD early anyway, so “Hot Time” still gets to be a little bit special.) For those who didn’t join the fundable commission the first time through, the novella will be available to purchase in February 2010, after which it’ll go off the market permanently until it finds a traditional publisher.

And I just noticed several of my books have been nominated as contenders for 101 Best Fantasy novels. I have to admit that given some of the company (which ranges from Lloyd Alexander to Diana Wynne Jones with all points between), I feel my presence there is a bit ludicrous, but also quite wonderful and I wouldn’t mind making it onto somebody’s top 100 list, so if you wanted, you could go vote. :) And my thanks to whomever nominated me, how cool of you. :)

]]> http://cemurphy.net/archives/164/feed 27 http://cemurphy.net/archives/145 http://cemurphy.net/archives/145#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:46:07 +0000 ce_murphy http://cemurphy.net/?p=145

She was too young, even for a man with no age, but she caught his eye. Slim, dark-haired, with long fingers caught in the skirt of a shapeless dress, she was clearly not a child of wealth. She no doubt belonged to the riverboat upon which she stood, a shabby thing that had seen better days. Even so, in the fire’s light they both bent toward beauty.

It was her gaze, fixed on the sky, which arrested him. Others watched the fire, drawn in by its glow and movement, but she looked upward as though she could see what soared above the smoke. That was quite impossible: even knowing who danced there, Daisani could barely see them himself, but the girl watched as if she knew. Such seeing eyes were enough that he might have gone to her then, despite her youth, but tonight; tonight Chicago was burning.

Want more? This short story is up for commission through fundable.com. Fundable is a site which takes pledges for financing a project. If the project reaches its financing goal–in this case a base of $750 with paypal fees included, so a total of $826–then fundable accepts the pledges and the project goes forward. If the goal isn’t reached within 25 days of the first donation, then the project is canceled and no one pays anything. There’s a $10 minimum donation fee, which is fundable.com’s idea, not mine; I’d have probably set it at $5. Sorry about that.

“Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” will be a 7500 word Janx and Daisani story. Contributors will have exclusive access to the story for at least three months before it’s produced anywhere else.

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