I have done no writing this week. My gig as BSDCan con chair sucked up my time. Next week, I’ll be going through Run Your Own Mail Server tech edits. I can probably find a snippet of new text then.
These weeks happen.
Rather than skip the podcast, I chose to read something already published. My goal for this silly thing is to learn to read casually, after all. So here’s a chunk from Forbidden Taste, a Prohibition Orcs tale available exclusively in the collection Apocalypse Moi.
If the humans took offense, Uruk would wake without her. Her boys would return from school to find a dead stove and empty pot. Her clan would never know what happened to her.
She could return to the tenement. Let curiosity gnaw all her days. Her heart thudded against her ribs like an angered sow protecting fresh piglets, making her vision throb.
Or she could choose this war.
Vara took a deep breath and unbuttoned her coat.
January sliced deep, cutting through her canvas pants and both burlap shirts and digging for bone. Vara’s sweat burst into steam, instantly ripped away. She held her coat open, offering January her warmth even as the ache settled into her ribs and thighbones. “I choose this war.” Shivs scraped up her sleeves. January might not be as rapacious as October, but if Vara denied the Dead Month its due, January would claim it another way. “This war is for blood.” She commanded her shivering fingers to still themselves. “This war is for life.”
Yes I’m a full-time writer, and I do my best to stick to the pulp tradition, but I do have non-writing weeks. Sometimes there’s a non-writing month. I’d like to ask all four of my listeners if they mind me falling back to published works in those weeks, or if you would prefer I skip the podcast? Comment below to let me know.
You chose correctly! I’d buy the audio book.