I ask you, how could I pass up a challenge like that? I sent back to her “You’ll have it next week.” Not only did she have it next week, but she liked it, and she bought it. The result is this week’s Escape Pod episode, Chicken Noodle Gravity.

Read by Paul Haring, Chicken Noodle Gravity is the second of The Lombard Alchemist Tales, a series of short stories I kicked off earlier this year with At The Edge of Nowhere. The Lombard Alchemist Tales are stories of mystery, and darkness, and wonder. At the borders of society, around the next quarter, lurking in the shadows, all around us are dark and comic stories fit to unmake our darkest dreams. My job? Find them, bring them to you, and let you figure out how to survive them. Centered around a spooky pawn shop run by a devilish shopkeeper in a broken-down gambling boomtown where some people go there for salvation, some for curiosity, and some to scrape up a little bit of money to buy a few more cans of soup. And sometimes, they get more than they bargain for.

So, with that said, I hope you enjoy Chicken Noodle Gravity. Stay tuned for more fun news coming to this space in the days leading up to Christmas.

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The end isn’t near, it’s here.
Irene, recently widowed, knows the Earth is drowning, and all she wants is one last night to dance. The best band in the world is playing just up the road in a blues club at the edge of what little land remains, and there she encounters a stranger, and a clue that might unlock the mystery of her husband’s death.
This is the way the world ends: not with a whimper, but with the blues.

The story is now available from Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, and from Smashwords.

This title is intended for adult audiences.

—Story Sample Below the Cut—

Buried Alive In The Blues
By J. Daniel Sawyer

The sky is still bleeding. It hasn’t stopped for months. I can hear it crying, and the way the Earth groans underneath, battered and bruised like a man who welshed on a bet. Well, like when my man Juno welshed, anyway. His mouth kept writing checks his ass couldn’t cash, got himself beaten raw at least once a month.

I kept my property in my name. He was worth it.

Tender as cooked asparagus, my Juno. We’d made it work for years. Every night they weren’t broken, his fingers wiggled up inside of me or ran over my skin light like a ghost’s tongue.

The night the rains started he’d been out with his buddy Paris, but he crawled back home his own self, his arm bent the wrong way and breathing like a dump truck sat on his chest. He wouldn’t tell me what happened. He didn’t want a hospital, didn’t want my help, just wanted to go to bed. I should have known better, should have made him see a doctor, but it was late, and we had plans. I wasn’t going to let ‘em go for no money, even if I had to go alone.

But out on the road the clouds opened and jammed everything up, and I couldn’t get through. I came home to find him drowning from the rib stuck in his lungs.

That’s when the breath gone and left him. It was my fault. Juno always had more balls than brains, and I shouldn’t have listened to him. I didn’t know who took him from me, or why. I didn’t want to know. All there was, the whole world, was just a big hole around where Juno used to be.

I stayed there by him for days, until the sky’s bleeding finally broke the Earth.

Five months on, the water was coming in over the floor and standing four inches high in the streets. I’d not gone out but for food and to see him done with, except once after I couldn’t stand it being inside anymore.

I got taken by the flood. Took me two hours to get my truck out. After that, I didn’t try to go out again. Weren’t nothing out there but the rain. No life anywhere. Just rain.

The world was ending. On the news they didn’t think it was ever gonna stop. Thing is, I didn’t want it to stop. I prayed it’d keep coming down until the whole planet slid itself straight into hell and buried us all. And I never wanted to go out ever again.

But that night, I had to go. They were in town. Best band in the world. The one I missed the night Juno left me. I hadn’t heard them in years. I could afford it because I didn’t need cash—they’d let me in free at the door. I knew that for sure. They hadn’t been through in forever. For all I knew, they might trip the light fandango and never make it back.

Earth was dying. Drowning in grief. Her insides spilled out from the hills across the freeway. I had to drive the old four wheeler around the mountains of mud. Over some of them, too. My home soil, those lovely hills—left to collapse everywhere. I could see the land sliding, big chunks slipping in fits. There wasn’t anybody on the road, just the ground falling apart, crumble by crumble, until there was nothing left at all.

Their music sounded like that. It sounded like me, ever since Juno.

The rhythm of the rain on the roof and the windshield pounded out in syncopation to the music in my head, the craggy wipers flopping back and forth like the kick drum. My radio didn’t work for beans, but I could hear them from all the times before. Nick and the old Chicago boys, playing like they used to when there was a Chicago to play in. Playing like they did when Muddy Waters was on the stage with them.

Muddy Waters. I swear it was his ghost had the climate by the balls, making sure that anytime they played the streets would be ankle deep in it. Muddy waters, streaming out from under the hills, come back from hell to make sure they all remembered what they’d learned at the crossroads.

I could hear them doing sound checks from the parking lot. The water turned my silk dress into a second skin, the little fibers grated across my nipples when I moved.

They had me on the list, like they’d promised. “Irene Adler,” right up top by the A’s. The bouncer made me wait a good couple minutes while he “looked over the list”—I guess they’d started writing guest names in sharpie on my chest.

The room inside was filled with blues and smoke and the men on stage strumming and humming with voices bleeding deep blue like the sky. Nick could break your heart as soon as look at you, and he fingered the guitar like it was the last he had of the girl he’d never finished losing.

I didn’t get to find a seat. Three steps onto the dance floor and I was lost. With the back-beat snapping and the guitar screaming and Nick’s voice weaving low through ‘em, it sounded like the throbbing Juno’s fingers gave me, and the way he pulsed in mine.

I danced off the months of rain until my dress got as dry as my throat. I’d been so long always being soaked and never being wet. My hips danced round with all the ghosts that filled the hall. Ella and Leadbelly and Etta and Billie. Time went liquid, their words washed over me, wave after wave, until the band broke at the end of the first set. It was perfect—as perfect as life could be with Juno gone.

At the bar between sets I found some nut-dark beer, poured it over my tongue, and looked around for the first time. Lots of old familiars. The dead weren’t the only ghosts here tonight.

“Give me a Jack and Coke, light on the Coke.” A gruff, raspy-sounding bear-man rapped on the bar. I couldn’t see his face without looking, and I didn’t want to look, but his hands looked like they’d been built up working on engines. Thick calluses, grease under his nails. Might’ve been a biker once. He set down next to me and stared straight ahead. “It’s a special night here, you know.” There wasn’t no mirror behind the bar, so he just studied the bottles on the rack. I didn’t say a thing, but I didn’t want to get up, neither. I was gonna dance myself to death when they come on the stage next, and no way I’d leave just to let him have the bar. It was my night. Maybe the last one I’d ever get. I wasn’t gonna waste it getting picked up by white trash.

End of Sample. End of sample. ©2009 J. Daniel Sawyer, All Rights Reserved

Read the rest on your Kindle, from Nook, or other ebook reader.

Don’t delay — read for yourself the story of the woman who loved the Blues so much that, when the world ended, it was the only thing she still wanted.

Me? I think I’m going to go celebrate. Where is that Leadbelly album?

It’s scared me since I was 12, when I read Writer’s Digest religiously at the library every day (which, in retrospect, was my first mistake). To my twelve year old mind, it described a world full of arcane rituals, secret handshakes, nepotism, and strange protocols – and a game at which nobody made a dime to boot.

Of course, I’ve learned better in the meantime, but the terror never quite went away. For years I’ve coped by doing other things I needed to do anyway in order to go pro – focusing on craft, learning to network at cons, podcasting and learning about how to interact with an audience, building my platform, and romancing the occasional agent, but I’ve hit the point in my career where I’ve got a hell of a backlist piling up (at least, for someone at my point in their career), and a handful of fiction sales that prove that my terror (which is largely born of the sense that I don’t understand a goddamn thing about the fiction publishing culture) is well past the point of being about 75% bullshit.

So, this summer, in addition to bringing you Free Will and working on the other projects I talked about at Balticon, I’m sending everything out that is not currently under contract — and I do mean *everything.* And I’ve got a pile of treatments in front of me to keep the pipeline full once all the existing stuff is in the mail.

I was going to just do this quietly and wear my glory or shame quietly, but after some conversations at Balticon and then reading Mur’s blog post this morning, I’ve realized I’m not the only person in this boat.

I’m getting off my ass. And I’ll put up ten bucks against anyone who wants to race me. Let’s make this a proper horse race. Here’s what I’ve got in mind:

We’ll go from now till the end of the year (or perhaps we should go to next Balticon?). Everyone bets $10. Every story we submit gets 3 points. Every novel proposal we send in gets 4 points. Every nonfiction submission/query gets 1 point. Every sale – of any fiction – gets 8 points. Every sale of nonfiction gets 3 points. Any sale that pays money and has a contract counts. Non-paying and/or clickthru and/or under-the-table markets do not count.

At the end of the year, the person with the most points wins the pool (which will operate on the honor system – those of us that lose will paypal our $10 to the winner).

We can keep a running tally for this and a forum at ANMAP. We prove our submissions and sales by posting photos/scans of the query and acceptance letters.

Thoughts? Should I formalize this, start a forum dedicated to it, and get this rolling? Any ideas for how to make it better/more useful? Chime in in the comments!

—Edit—
We have a few participants, so I’ve officially opened things. You can find the rules and competition forum here.

I can’t sit here. There’s thousands of miles and hopefully countless vistas to hit before I run out of steam. Even today, I’ve got a few thousand words and a recording session to plow through. But waiting at my door this morning was my first ever author’s copy of a fiction publication – which somehow feels far different from authors copies for a non-fiction publication. Tonight, if I make my word count, I’m going to make up a shelf devoted just to my publications – seems like a good way to celebrate.

Thanks to all of you who read this blog, send feedback to the podcasts, buy LinuxJournal and the new anthology, and have stopped by to help me with a friendly kick upside the head in the last few years. It’s been glorious – and I daresay that after another fair amount of sweat and blood, it will be even more glorious.

It’s a handsome trade paperback with pretty cover-art, and will sit handsomely on your bookshelf or coffee table. Hours of entertainment – and, in my case, new and improved versions of stories you love, now available to enjoy at your own pace instead of at mine.

Share and Enjoy!

Buried Alive In The Blues is the story of Irene, a widow who finds herself trapped by a months-long rainstorm that’s drowning the world, but she doesn’t care, because she’s got a pass to see the best blues band in the world play at an old speakeasy in the neighboring town. But when the bass starts thumping and the lights hit the stage, she realizes she may get more than she bargained for – but that’s okay, because the blues are worth it.

If you haven’t heard the story and would like to, you can find it here. Definitely not work safe, it contains explicit sexual situations and a heavy dollop of the blues, Buried Alive is a southern gothic romance that will keep you guessing right up to the end.

I’ll keep you all posted on publication dates for the anthology!