Finished off one short story this morning, temporary title “In Our Minds, In Our Hearts”. Another dark sf one, 2800 words. I did a first cutting pass, which I’ll probably need to take up again, but in the meantime I put it up on OWW for crits (it’s for a market the submission deadline of which is fast approaching, so I’m going to have to move a little faster on this one…).

Here’s a snippet:

In her dreams, Jiaotan saw Father–hands outstretched, the flesh of the fingers fraying away to reveal the yellowed, tapering shapes of bones, the deepset eyes bulging in their orbits, pleading, begging her to take him away.

“You’re dead,” she whispered. “Rest in peace, with the Ancestors–watch over us from Heaven.”

But the Ancestors were bones and dried sinews, shambling upright from the wreck of their graves–anger shining in the hollows of their eye-sockets as they walked past the devastated gardens, the withered trees, the dried-out waterfalls and rivers. And clouds marched across Heaven, a billowing mass of sickly grey–spreading to cut the path of The Golden Orchid as it rose away from Earth…

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Jiaotan woke up with a start, instinctively bending over to cough out the fluid that blocked her lungs. But something held her–pressed against her as tightly as the embrace of Earth.

In other news, I finally got the website to display the navigation links below individual posts like this one, which involved some hacking of the php, accompanied by some forays into the WordPress documentation (in case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, it’s the small “Next Post/Previous Post” thingies below the frame of individual posts, which weren’t included in the standard free WordPress theme I based the website on).
Also updated the Servant of the Underworld page with information for preordering on Waterstone’s: this one felt weird, because Waterstone’s was the bookshop where I bought everything while in the UK, so being listed there is definitely peculiar…
I have no idea why Saturday mornings are the ones reserved for the website coding: you’d think that after coding all week I’d be bored with it, but apparently I’m a glutton for punishment…