Posted on 02/28/2007 11:41:04 PM PST by Eleutheria5
At last I have cover art. It's better than I expected, worse than I hoped. But it'll serve.
Let's see if I can cut and paste it, shall we? Here goes...nothing. As soon as I've got the website built, I'll post a link or a URL, or whatever the Freep software allows. Mean time, here's an excerpt.
“Oh, just something I threw together,” Bill nodded proudly and replied. “Bacon and hard-boiled egg with L&T. That’s all. ’Twarn’t much ef—”
“Nooooooooooooo! I can’t believe you did this to me! You fed me burnt dead animal muscles?! Didn’t I tell you I was vegan? Oh, noooooooo! I ate a cute little pig! I can’t believe it! Aaaaaaah!” Stan opened his mouth wide, sticking his left index finger down his throat, trying without success to make himself puke.
Bill’s jaw dropped in astonishment, and his face turned crimson. He had never in his life encountered such hysterical rudeness, let alone from this…this strange visitor from another planet. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything, you no-’count shit-heel? You are in my house at my sufferance, sir! I’ll thank you not to abuse your welcome!” Bill shouted over the bizarre litany of gagging noises and screams. “Stop it! Stop it, I say!” he shouted, swatting Stan on the back of the head in desperation.
“Well, how would you feel if you ate your mother in a sandwich? I’m upset, dammit!”
“Say what? That pig was your mother? I knew it. You’re crazy. You wrote that letter yourself. Naw. Forget that. This is all part of some elaborate prank Perce is pulling on his war buddy. It’s a conspiracy, all right. I’ll tell you what kind of conspiracy: To play April Fool jokes on ol’ Bill here—in Febawary! That’s it! That’s what all this is about. You can’t be real. No such people as you exist. It’s an act. Shit. Almost had me. Now get up off your sorry ass, and leave my house!”
In the excitement, Stan had risen to a sitting position, and now stood, holding his ragged deck shoes in one hand. “I see you’re feeling better, thanks to my food,” Bill taunted.
“You’re just letting me go?” mouthed Stan incredulously.
“Damn straight. Tell Perce he had me going for a while, but the joke’s gotten old. Never mind. I’ll tell him myself. Git on outa here.” Bill bounded down the three steps into the kitchen and picked up the phone, dialed Fort Bragg, and asked for Major Sheffield. The switchboard operator patched him through to Percy’s encampment, where, after half an hour, the communications specialist put him through. “Perce. I don’t much appreciate your idea of a joke,” boomed Bill over the phone line.
“Joke? What joke?”
“Don’t pull that shit with me, Sheffield. I’ve known you too long. My name may be Billy, but ain’t no hills hereabout, and I ain’t—sorry, am not—so ignorant as you take me for. So what’s the idea?”
“Bill, would you just talk straight, already? You woke me from the first decent sleep I’ve had all week.”
“Let me tell you something, mister practical joker. I actually believed it for a while. You know that? You had me going, sending that queer over with the letter—”
“Letter? What letter?”
“The one saying you was eye-deep in some kind of conspiracy to hoard all the nukes and use ’em to take over the world! That letter!”
“Oh…right. Right…just thought I’d put a burr under your saddle. You know. For old times’ sake. Heh.”
“Yeah, and this queer you sent over sure had me going. I actually believed he was that secesh first mate you been looking for! What a hoot. But now I’m on to you.”
“What clued you in?”
“Why, the fact that, number one, it was written in plain English, ’stead of code, and number two, nobody, and I mean nobody, is as weird as this guy, even if they do come from New York.”
“Is my…uh…friend still there?”
“Good question, Perce. Now that you mention it, I don’t know where he went. But I tell ya what. You don’t get over here soon, I plan to find him and kick his bony ass. Then I’m coming over to kick yours, though it be covered with brass from cheek to cheek. ’Bye.”
After Bill slammed the phone, Percy stood with receiver in hand, listening to the dial tone. Giving it back to the specialist, he nodded his head thoughtfully, then turned on his heels and stormed about camp, issuing orders and rousing the sleeping troops for roll call.
Bill searched the whole house and found no sign of Stan. He quietly opened the kitchen door leading to the garage, and suddenly turned the light on, shouting “Ahaa!” in anticipation of discovery. But he found no one, and Boris tugged insistently at Bill’s leg as if he wanted out. Bill opened the garage door, walking out onto the driveway, taking in the silence along with the sweet smells that always permeate night air right after a heavy rain. Quiet ruled, though he heard the growl of many engines in the distance, probably a military convoy passing through. They often traveled by night, lest the grim sight of them unduly disturb civilians, miles and miles of trucks loaded with men on their way to death, destruction and mayhem. The ground vibrated beneath his feet. They had almost reached his door.
Bill nearly forgot why he came out. The night lay so peaceful until the noise of the convoy drowned out the calm, and his encounter with Stan seemed so other-worldish that Bill found it hard to focus on him, like a half-remembered dream. Bill strolled across his front lawn and circled back towards the rear lot, occasionally reminding himself to check for Stan behind odd clumps of shrubbery. No. Not the yard. The woods? Stan really left, he thought. That didn’t make much sense, unless he had overheard Bill’s threat to kick his bony ass. But then, how could he hide himself so quickly and so thoroughly, if he had been listening to Bill talk? What if this was no gag, it suddenly occurred to him. What if it was real?
Bill wheeled around, suddenly feeling vulnerable and exposed, just in time to watch in horror as his castle, on which he had paid a mortgage for nearly ten years, his flimsy bunch of sticks feebly clinging to a piece of the planet, his abode, every inch of which he had lovingly remodeled by hand, his home, where his babies were born and grew, where he had made love to his wife a thousand times, his ever-so-humble-but-noplace- like, his abode—HIS HOME!—burst into flame. Boris huddled close by his master’s feet, terrified. The sudden flash blinding him, Bill tripped over his best friend and fell flat right before the .50-caliber machine guns strafed the width and breadth of his property.
Goodbye. Audios. See you.
Spell checker is our friend.
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?tab=vb&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Febawary&hl=en&um=1&scoring=d
It would be great if we knew WTF you were talking about.
Oh, I see now (maybe).
You've been working on this story for awhile.
http://209.157.64.200/focus/user-posts?id=63244
OK. So how do you do it?
I push control V and nothing happens. I right click and push paste, and nothing happens.
Shoot, if somebody turned my mother into a human salad sandwich, I'd be a tad upset, too : )
"Spell checker is our friend."
Not when you're deliberately mis-spelling.
Oh, so you deliberately spelled February that way?
Interesting.
Have a good morning.
Might need to reinstall your OS if you haven't in a couple years.
I would make sure Java 2 is installed first. Then full scan-disk and defrag..
/Salute
"Oh, so you deliberately spelled February that way? "
Of course.
"Interesting."
If you say so.
All work and no play makes Eleutheria5 a bestselling writer
All work and no play makes Eleutheria5 a bestelling writer
That's my favorite picture, of the cat. I love it!
It may be early, but trying to read this was nearly impossible. How about an Executive Summary :)
What little I read was pretty interesting. I suppose it is some political what-if book? Anyway, good luck with your book.
BTW-After some of the stuff I just read in English class, I love the clarity of speech that your speaker has. Imagine trying to read an entire book in Ebonics. Not fun...
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