What Mad Man Is This?

Greetings.  Sorry for not keeping up to date.  I’ll try to be more diligent in the future (you can help by sending me Dr Pepper).  Following is a rough draft excerpt from Constable of Aqualline:

I'm not crazy, my eyes just tell me things!

“It can’t be stopped.  It will kill.  It will rend.  It will devour all.  We have sinned and are cursed.  Cursed.  Cursed!”

This close, the man looked haggard.  His eyes were rimmed with dark, as if he hadn’t slept in days, and his face had a sunken look under the growth of his beard.  He was wearing only one shoe, his other foot bare and dirty, leaving small smudge marks on the rotunda’s floor as he moved around.

“Malusilva comes,” the old man said.  “It comes and it will destroy all.  It will root up and tear down.  It will consume with teeth and with fire.  It will . . .”

Aubrey reached over to the apprentice, Leonie and grabbed his sleeve.

“That’s your druwis?” she asked the young man.

“Yes . . .” he hesitated, as if seeing Aubrey for the first time.  “Constable,” he finished.  “Please help.  Please.”  His face was pale and covered in a sheen of sweat and dirt.  His gaze darted from Aubrey to Sterben and back again.

Tiger's blood, anyone?

“How long has he been like this?” she asked.

Leonie looked to where Aubrey held his sleeve and then back up to her eyes.  He swallowed hard.

“I don’t . . . I’m not certain,” the apprentice said.  “He was . . . we were all . . . shaken by . . . when Moritz was killed.  Lorenz was very close to Moritz.”  His voice pitched higher with every word.  Seeing his master in this state, and having to answer a constable’s stern questions was enough to shake anyone, especially if they were young and hadn’t seen much of the world.  Aubrey let go of the young man’s sleeve, and gave his arm a reassuring pat.

“We’ll take care of him,” she said with more confidence than she felt.

“—death!  Blood!  Death!  Blood!  Death!—” Lorenz screamed over and over as he pointed to each member of the crowd.

The druwis turned to Aubrey next in the crowd and his eyes locked onto hers.  His mouth opened, but no sound came out.  His face went red and contorted with anger and rage.  Aubrey had never felt such obvious hatred from someone’s gaze before, not even as she charged against enemy lines in an effort to kill or be killed.

Say what again.

“You!” he screamed, and spit flew from his mouth.  “You!” he repeated.

His face contorted with rage and violence.  He closed his mouth but left his teeth barred and started toward her, his arm raised, finger pointed straight at her.

“You!” he said again, as he moved down the steps of the rotunda in her direction.

Aubrey could feel the crowd’s eyes turn on her, and take her in fully for the first time.  She took a firm grip on her cane, but not to draw the blade free.  Sterben glanced at her, but she didn’t take her eyes off the druwis.

“You!  You believe nothing,” the man raved at her.  “Nothing, do you hear me?  Believe nothing!”

Aubrey’s heart hammered in her chest, and she felt her palms go damp.  She hadn’t been this nervous since the charge up Bourgogne Hill.  The druwis stormed down the rotunda’s steps and came right at her, his finger held forward like a bayonet ready to drive into her chest.

“You believe nothing,” he screamed.  “Nothing!”

In Memoriam—Jersey Roberts

You look like you could throw a rock.

My first memory of Jersey, a Jack Russell terrier, was at the pet store.  She was a beautiful, black and white puppy and her tongue was too big for her mouth.  I was with my then-girlfriend, and we’d agreed to get a dog.  I don’t know why exactly, except that we both loved dogs, and when we saw this puppy, we both fell in love with her.  She was almost pure white, with a bit of black at her ears.  The neighborhood girls called her "Snowflake", although she was hardly a dainty dog.  in fact, she almost always looked scruffy.

Not knowing anything about cattle, we both thought that a Jersey cow was black and white, like our new puppy.  It turns out those are Holsteins, which is a silly name for a dog.  But Jersey was an excellent name, even if it was wrong.  So “Jersey” rode home in my lap, curled up and saying nothing.

Jersey at 16.

She had completely conned us.

Now, I should say at this point I knew nothing about puppy mills or the like.  I would learn about them shortly after, and partly because of Jersey.  She had kennel cough, a common ailment for puppy mills.  You shouldn’t buy from pet stores, as there are any number of perfectly good dogs at shelters all over the country.  Owning a purebred, although it sounds chic and cool, is actually a bad thing, for both you and the dog.  Purebreds almost always have some genetic issues which “mutts” tend to not pick up.

In Jersey’s case, it’s that she was nuts.

Jack Russells (JRs for the initiated) were bred to be working dogs, fox hunters.  They have, at an unscientific guess, three-thousand times the amount of energy of others dogs.  Jersey had about twice that much.  She needed to be played with, and played with, and then played with some more.  One of her favorite games was “role the rock”.  I kid you not, she would find a rock that weighed about as much as her, and push it to you with her nose (which was always rubbed a bit raw from the game).  Your job was to pick up the rock and throw it.  Jersey would chase it, pounce on it, and then roll it back to you.

She could play the game for days.

How Jersey should be remembered.

I have a deep and abiding love for dogs, and Jersey certainly sits near the top of the list.  Dogs return your love unconditionally and can be incredibly loyal.  I haven’t seen Jersey in ten years, but my feelings for her haven’t dimmed.  When I received the note that she was gone, I have no shame admitting that I cried.  Jersey was deserving of fond memories and tears and she has them from me.

Jersey passed away Monday, March 16^th, 2015 with her family at hand.  She will be missed by all who knew her.

Like for Like?

If not, will you at least buy my book?

I haven’t arrived at a decision on this, but I thought I’d throw it out to the interwebz and see what came back.  What cliché stuck to the wall.  See how high the ball bounced, as it were.

As an author, I have an author page on Facebook (please "like" me!).  This page only gets sporadic traffic at best, which is ok.  Some fans and friends comment about blog articles I’ve written, or ask me questions.  Good stuff.  The page does what it should.

Occasionally, like today, I get a “like for like” request from another author I've usually never heard of and never read.

It’s the latter that I’m interested in discussing.

“Like for like” requests, for the uninitiated, are reciprocal “likes” on author or book pages.  If you check out my page, you’ll see I have 667 “likes”.  On the face of it, this should mean that 667 people have sought me out and are following my page, hanging on my every word and wondering when my next book will be released.  The reality is that most of those who “like for like” turn off the “following” and thus defeat the whole purpose of liking an author’s page.  For the sheer volume, I've found myself doing the same, and essentially, I'm just padding out their numbers, and they're padding mine.  The true “followers” are a mere fraction (and you guys SO ROCK!).

Just because I "unfriend" you in Facebook
doesn't mean we're not friends in real life.

I don’t know this to be certain, but as I have 667 “likes” but have sold under 100 copies of my book, this seems logical (especially as the book is now on sale for a mere $2.99!).

So, I’m curious if you, good reader, have had the same experience.  Have you found these reciprocal likes to be beneficial?  I’m told Facebook looks at this number and uses it in one of those mystical, magical algorithms to feed suggestions to other users, but at a certain point, isn’t it just so much fluff?

Basically, should I continue “like for like” or should I adopt a “thanks, but no thanks” policy?

Maybe I’m just in a bad mood today.