Category: fiction

I now have doom on offer. Pre-offer, yes, but offer.

Apocalypse Moi, a collection of eleven apocalypse-themed tales, will launch 1 August on Kickstarter. If you have any interest, I’d ask you to click on the “Notify Me On Launch” button. Kickstarter uses those pre-launch follows help decide if they will promote a project.

It contains two tales brand-new for this collection — the Prohibition Orcs story “Forbidden Taste” and the standalone techbro-nightmare-fantasy “Yesterday’s Girl”. It also collects “Drums with Delusions of Godhood,” “Waking Up Yesterday,” “Forced to Talk, Like, With Your Mouth,” “Moonlight’s Apples,” “Easing Final Fears,” “Wifi and Romex,” “Shoot Through The Heart,” “Calling Control,” “Easy, Step-by-Step Preparation,” and “Hero of Fire Life.” Some of these were published as chapbooks, which will go out-of-print once Apocalypse Moi escapes. Others appeared in anthologies.

Having them all in one single book will be convenient. It will also help fulfill one of my 2023 goals, “reduce administrative overhead.”

The cynical among you might think, “Did Lucas just cram all his old crap into one book for his convenience?” Absolutely not. That would be a disservice to my readers. I put a bunch of tales in a heap and sieved them until only the common theme remained. The common theme is DOOM.

Please encourage The Algorithm in my favor. Click “Notify me on launch.”

“Yellow-Eyed War” is available at my ebookstore.

Orcish Childhood: Not For The Weak

Oscar-Tai has counted to one thousand and fifty. He knew the Alphabet Chant, the Pledge of Allegiance, and can form each of the Twenty-Six Letters. He expected to take labor hauling cargo with his father, but instead humans offered to teach him and his brother to read. But Oscar has never seen a war like reading school. Desks built to fit orcs. One failure and the human teacher expels you. And how did that lone orcess earn a place?

Can he endure? Or will he fall to the docks and live marked with failure all his days?

This is the first short story I’ve put out since my decision to make shorts exclusive to my ebookstore, as part of my “reduce administrative overhead” project. While “having all the books in all the retailers” strategy is still wise for books that sell better, the maintenance overhead overwhelms the cash I make from the stories. Some folks would tell me to sell only on Amazon. My long term strategy is to lure folks into buying direct from me, however, so becoming exclusive to my store is the better choice. I’ve also updated the “All the Chapbooks” bundle to include this tale.

The bundle of “everything available from my store” also needed updating, but I’ve made some larger changes there. The “Absolutely Everything” branding was accurate, but did not spark joy. I’ve developed a different image for that bundle.

It might not increase sales, but it amuses me. And that’s what’s important.

In the late twenty-teens, I sold a story “Hero of Fire Life” to Pulphouse Magazine. They put it in their anthology “Snot-Nosed Aliens.”

And now, they’re giving the anthology away. They’re not asking for an email address or anything, it’s just free.

Don’t ask me why. I have no idea. I don’t know how long this will last. Grab it while you can.

If you’re an audio person, I read this story at Penguicon 2019. We recorded the talk. The whole story is on YouTube.

Or, you know, you can just grab the anthology.

Devotion and Corrosion is now out.

I had this cunning master plan. I was going to set everything up beforehand for Devotion and Corrosion’s release, so that on release day I wouldn’t have to run around like a maniac and hit buttons. Back in March I got Ingram ready so I could fulfill the Kickstarter, and planned to set up the other stores the next day. Instead, I chose to catch covid. (Zero stars, do not recommend.) It put me far enough behind that I completely forgot about releasing the book. Yesterday, I realized that Ingram had released the print book as scheduled. Oops! I ran around like a maniac hitting buttons.

I’m proud of this one. It’s some of my best work of the last decade, distilled into a single volume. ZZ Claybourne‘s delightful introduction does a better job of describing the book than I ever could. I want to declare “I defy anyone to read this foreword and not rush out to buy the book,” but y’all are a bunch of perverse buggers. You would devour the foreword, feel lust overwhelming for the book, and grit your teeth through the pain of denied need, all for the pleasure of proving me wrong.

Anyway, here’s ZZ. And check out the book. It contains a Lovecraftian tween, a brain implant, evil paint, the risk of destroying the universe, spite, and–of course–Sufficient Rat.

“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” From the Kenneth Branaugh movie adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

The insidious thing about love is we define it to suit us. There are people who think they’re so logical that no variety of something so basic as love sways them. A simple whisper or well-placed compliment flips their world. Artists will bring all their craft and time to bear on a project, then, for love of craft, never release it for fear it’s not good enough.

Would most of us do anything for love? In the same way there’s the erroneous envisioning of hope as some soft cloud of dreams, love is too often cast as a diaphanous thing ladling orgasms and picnics upon the world. Love is a Depression-era photo of a mother who’d snap the neck of God to make sure her children survive. Fortunately, humans come into the world slippery, hard to grasp, and weird, and generally stay that way. We’re all children or parents.

Invoking Shelley’s creature requires an understanding of the human condition. Invoking Ozzie Osborne requires honestly declaring how love eventually makes hypocrites of we angels.  We may think we wouldn’t do that for love, but then find ourselves doing it twice. Granted, maybe not the way we think “that” would play out. Maybe we wouldn’t put Bambi on train tracks for love, but we can see ourselves laying a haymaker on a doe if it got too close to a baby. We can see ourselves testifying against our addicted twin if it meant they’d be remanded to medical care. Sacrifice is love. Self-preservation is love. Construction is love. Destruction is love. Truth is love. Lies are love. We’ll burn a hole through the Earth for love of profit. We’ll plant a million trees for love of forests. Devotion. Corrosion.

Shakespeare and balladeers never told us love was the stark Coin Flip of motivations.

When I was a teenager, my suicidal brother went missing during the worst of a Michigan winter. He was a few years older than me. I’d never really liked him, could’ve hated him. He was mean, selfish, and had a putdown for anything anybody held up as an accomplishment. I didn’t know anything about depression then, but I knew his mind. I knew the note he’d left wasn’t for show. So I wrapped my feet in bags, slid them into my threadbare boots, and walked alleys hoping to find him. Not alive. Just hoping to find him. I got home nearly frostbitten. Never found him.

I loved my brother.

Love drills nails into our lobes if we hand it the right power tools.

As an adult, love had me comforting the guy whom the woman I loved cheated on me with, the revelation coming when I knocked on her apartment door and he answered wearing my bathrobe. Weeks later, at 3AM, she called me. Except it was him from her landline. Wondering why she didn’t really love him.

That was an hour conversation.

I’d do it again.

There are so few times in life when we’re not touched by a bit of this glorious insanity. Smart people might postulate glorious insanity as the only thing sticking humanity together; I’m willing to give them that. We might not have had Toni Morrison, Prince, Alice Coltrane, or Johnny Cash otherwise. Wondrous love for a billion lights in the sky drives us to be creative. Creativity drives us to be compassionate. This is why my only mantra is Despite everything, create. Love demands we build, that we bring healing into lives that forever reach for succor like a confused infant in the eye of a storm.

A line I wrote a long time ago: ‘We’re all the ones who know so little, and I’m the one you least need fear.’ Folks reading this foreword know fear is the mind killer. Even when there’s every reason to fear, love factors into everything. My latest books are love letters to perseverance, community, and every mysterious grace that keeps life interesting. The Brothers Jetstream: Leviathan is love for adventure. Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe? Love’s in every word of the title.

Sometimes love forces us to create in order to destroy. Devotion and corrosion.

Devotion and Corrosion, the collection: Each story is Hieronymus Bosch writing a love letter to Charlie Brown’s little red-haired girl now grown and so weary she aches. Can you grasp that? Can you grasp an Elmore Leonard Hallmark romance? Or H.P. Lovecraft exorcising his demons as a kid out of love for himself before they calcify his adult heart? Rat familial love amasses in the thousands, and always with ready teeth. What Lucas has done is present the xenomorph from ALIEN going in for a French kiss: burning things to the bone so that the unspoken underpinnings show through. It’d be one thing if our species remained simply insane, but there’s that “glorious” part. That glorious devotion. Love, per Chuck Tingle, is real. Love is also a product of the imagination. We feel what we believe.

The 11 surprising, inventively immersive stories in Devotion & Corrosion know you know that fact. They share a fierce belief at their core, a belief that love can make things—if not right—better. Love will find a way to dig through us to the other, safer side. During times of insane politicians, alternative facts, and people considering putting ultraviolet lights up their butts, that belief might be the only type of love that moves us through our days. Because any time lying, pride in ignorance, or putrescent bigotry feel like love to some? We can do better than that.

We are better than that.

We know love. Somehow, we do.

Otherwise all is corrosion.

Today, I shipped the physical rewards for the Devotion and Corrosion Kickstarter.

These books arrived at my house a couple days after I opened sponsorships on the mail book. Unfortunately, in those intervening days I caught covid. (Zero stars, recommend catching distemper or cercospora leaf rot instead.) I’m recovering, but this is my first effort at working since I fell ill.

Even with that interruption, fulfilling this Kickstarter went much better than fulfilling the Prohibition Orcs one. In the future, I will have fulfillment ready to fire as soon as Kickstarter’s payment hits my account. SO much less stress that way!

By the way:

While “Devotion and Corrosion” won’t be in bookstores for a few days yet, you can grab it today from my ebookstore.

Would I use release windowing to encourage people to buy direct from me instead of from Amazon? Oh, heck yes.

Me in 2014: “Okay, you’ve published post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels. Stay in that genre, don’t dilute your brand.”

Me in 2015: “Okay, you’ve published post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels and bright future sci-fi. That’s not bad.”

Me in 2016: “Okay, you’ve published post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels, bright future sci-fi, and crime thrillers. They’re all exciting stuff, but focus on the types of things you’ve published. You aren’t Iain M Banks, even if a W looks like an upside-down M.”

Me in 2017: “You do know that cozy mystery bears no resemblance to any of these other genres, right? How are people supposed to know which of your books they should try? You’re gonna add a freaking flowchart to your web site? Oh, that’ll be helpful. #facepalm”

Me in 2018: “Whew. Okay. You’ve stayed in your genres. Settle down there.”

Me in 2022: “Historical fantasy? With orcs? STOP IT.”

Me in 2023: “Urban fantasy? Dude, are you drunk? No? Maybe you should be. It might help.”

Anyway, I have a new short story out. Ebook is at most retailers, including my ebookstore, and a print chapbook should be available soonish.

The Kickstarter for my new collection, Devotion and Corrosion, is live. It funded in twenty minutes and broke the first stretch goal in two hours, which means I get to use ZZ Claybourne’s fantastic foreword.

When I write something, I have no idea if it works as I intended until it bounces off another person. ZZ’s foreword says that not only does the book work, it works as I hoped it would.

If you want signed copies of this book, this is how you get them.

If you’re looking deals on other books, the Fantasy Steampunk bundle is still kicking. Ten books for as little as $20, and a slice goes to AbleGamers.

Ideally I’d be spending today working on the email book, but instead I’m heading out for an apicoectomy. Because as you age, your medical procedures grow harder to spell.