Progress

January 19th

I’ve been making progress with the short stories, but it’s taking longer than I would like. When I wrote Puppetry last July, I had the story fleshed out in one day and then reworked it the following day. This time it’s taking a hell of a lot longer.

That being said, Human Resources is going to be possibly three times longer. I’m almost finished part one of two, maybe three quarters, maybe three fifths.

I’ll try to get it up in the next week. Maybe the following week for the other story. Then I need to get back into the third of the Cyanide Blue novels.

#scifi #cyberpunk #fiction #writing #ion fyr

Excerpt (and subject to change):

The street was cold and hard. Autumn had set in early this year. The ocean wind from the west had blown most of the smog inland. Nosrit could only smell the local funk rising from the debris and detritus swept by countless footsteps into the corners and alleys of Londbridge.

She pulled the zipper of her jacket further up so that the collar was rubbing her chin, then pulled on of her dyed braids out from where the tip had gotten caught up at the base of her skull in the back, between the upper rim of the vat-leather and the bottom edge of her jack, just behind her ear.

Taxis and a handful of private cars wizzed by, narrowly avoiding contact and each other’s turbulence with semaphoric hand-shakes as they passed. 

Londbridge sucked in the winter. There were colder places and damper places, but no city she had ever been in combined the two qualities in such a shitty, painful way. Her bones were chilled.

Under the luminescent flickering of an ever-present food stall, a car settled to the ground, legs extending, supporting its quivering bulk within seconds. It was badly painted matte-black and had ugly, swapped-out Naskovich nacelles sticking up like four shifty eye-stalks. The door swiveled up. Nosrit slipped inside.

She smiled when he faced her.

Luc Eluskonios, blond hair and beard. Three skull jacks and a rampage of tattoos down his arms. There was a handgun on the seat next to him—not a driver’s seat, per se—the car didn’t need one as it was generally automated.

The door locked closed.

Somewhat anxiously she spoke: “So, you want me to hack something?”