Fabulous Beasts (a dark fantasy short story) [e-stories | writing]

(Edit 4/24/15: Updated buy links)

Fabulous BeastsReeling from a breakup with his girlfriend Jean, Paul Miller encounters Cyane, a wealthy model who wants to hire him to create disturbing paintings for nameless clients. But that work is only the start of what she wants from him. With her seductive song, she lures both he and Jean past desires for flesh, into a hallucinatory hunger for ecstasy and transcendence. To save Jean, himself, and his unborn child, he must learn who and what Cyane really is, and make a harrowing choice.

Here’s an excerpt of the start of the story:

The ropes that held me to the mast of the ship were loose. I found that as frightening as the dark shapes that thrashed just over the side. The men around me rowed on, ears stopped with wax, oblivious to the howls that rose above the roiling waters. I pitied them, for they wouldn’t know what they missed–voices sharp enough to cut thought and honeyed enough to clot the wound.

Though I could have easily freed myself, I remained still. In this place, I could hear the song. If I moved, it would dissolve into feral noise. My understanding of this grew with every change of the vast and beautiful voices that wove through the near-liquid air.

My ropes fell to the deck with the fading of the last octave. The men stopped rowing and stared with fearful eyes at the sea.

I walked toward the bow. The rush of her feathers came as a gasp of hungry breath that voided every other sound.

“Not this way.”

Her voice held a quiver from the song.

The wooden deck barked my knees when I slumped. She landed before me, dark brown wings in angelic spread, eyes locked with mine. Her human face could have been real, though my instincts whispered that it was not. Her sinuous body moved in ways more reptilian than avian. Her sharp red lips drew back into a grin.

Talons flashed. Blood ran down my neck.

“There is no easy way,” she said. “If you want it, it will hurt.”

(continued…)

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and a contributor to the dark fiction anthology Fading Light. His blog originates here. Fabulous Beasts cover art: Sergey Nivens/BigStock.com.

Reading/Panel at Nicola’s Books 5/7/12 / New Free Short Story to Newsletter Subscribers

Just to remind the locals following this blog, I’ll be doing my first ever public reading from Brutal Light at Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Monday 5/7 at 7 p.m (tomorrow). Also there doing readings that night will be Jim C. Hines, author of the popular Princess Novels fantasy series from DAW Books, Bethany Grenier, author of Sings with Stars, and Emmy Jackson, author of Empty Cradle: The Untimely Death of Corey Sanderson. Come on out and enjoy the multiple readings, signings, and lively discussion from four Michigan authors!

In other news, ever since I started up this newsletter, my horror short story The Body in Motion has been the free gift for subscribing. It’s about time it gets swapped out for something else… and that something is a dark fantasy story called Never Seen by Waking Eyes. In it, a woman with a connection to a strange power source is kidnapped, held hostage to obtain a certain rare book, and Nick Havelock must rescue her. Or must he?

If that sounds rather familiar, it should. Never Seen by Waking Eyes was a story I wrote about 8-9 years ago for an anthology that never saw publication, and became the seed for my dark fantasy novel Brutal Light. It was kind of fun for me to revisit the story and see what parts made it into the novel more-or-less intact (aside from being rewritten from first person to third), and what parts turned out to be very different. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it as well. Of course, the only way that’ll happen is if you subscribe (or if you’re already a subscriber)…

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.

Meanwhile, I’m over on Jake Elliot’s blog today, being interviewed re: BRUTAL LIGHT

I’m over on Jake Elliot’s blog today, being interviewed re: Brutal Light.

How the time/space continuum stayed intact is anyone’s guess… 🙂

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.

Penguicon 4/27/12 – 4/29/12

I’m going to be at the combination science fiction/tech geekery convention PenguiCon, in Dearborn, Michigan, today (Friday 4/27) through Sunday 4/29. I’m only scheduled for one panel, though, on Friday 4/27 at 6 pm: “Fantasy vs. Dark Fantasy vs. Horror: What Happened to the Boundaries?” Essentially its a look at how dark fantasy as a subgenre blurs the boundaries between fantasy and horror, and why its appeal is so strong. It looks like I’m gonna be running that panel solo, too, so whoever attends will be subjected to my eccentric views on all of this. I’ll be heavily caffeinated, so if nothing else, it’ll be entertaining!

I’ll also be giving away a couple signed copies of my dark fantasy novel Brutal Light to panel attendees. So if you’re in the SW Michigan area, or even farther out, drop in and say hi! PenguiCon has become, in my opinion, the premier fan-run con in Michigan, and there’s always a lot going on. Even though I’m only on one panel, I’ll be bopping about through the whole convention.

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.

On The Speaking in The Public

It will not come as a shock to anyone who has met me in person that I am not a natural talker. I am comfortable in silence, or at least in staying silent while the world surrounds me with its endless noise. In conversations, I typically end up following the lead of a more talkative person, quite happy to listen while occasionally commenting, asking questions, making puns, or interjecting random sympathetic noises. When it is down to me to take the lead in conversing, I’m hesitant, sometimes stuttery, and often my sentences wander off when I realize I have no idea how they’re supposed to end.

So you’d think that there are certain aspects of self-promotion that would be more difficult for me–doing interviews and participating on panels at conventions, for instance. These do, in fact, elevate my anxiety levels, and I’m usually looking forward most to the experience being over, so that I can scuttle back to my silent comfort zone. But then the weirdest thing happens — I’m doing the interview or participating on the panel, and I find I’m enjoying it. I’m chattering away–still hesitant, stuttery, and sometimes meandering–but I don’t care because I’m talking about things that I love–the strange places I find ideas, my influences, and things I’m writing.

Take the interview I did with Greg Walker on A Cup of Coffee and a Good Book a couple days ago. Between a desire to be ‘on’ and sound like I actually had something to say, my usual pre-speaking anxieties, and a couple large mugs of coffee, I was dialed up toward the high end of my talking abilities. (It also helped that Greg’s a good conversationalist, keeping me going while keeping me from meandering too far afield from talking about Brutal Light. People like me are helped a lot by people like him.) We probably could have gone on for a lot longer than the half-hour of the show.

As for panels, the four I was on for ConClave helped ease my mind on the prospect of my clamming up in the presence of other writers who were better talkers who could gab at length. I was less caffeinated at these events, but was determined to put in my commentary and not be That Guy. To my surprise, I enjoyed the give-and-take, and had fun. (Though, being that they were ninety minute panels, as opposed to the usual sixty, I can’t say they would have gone on for a lot longer than the assigned time.)

The key for me in both situations was preparation. A couple of the panels–the ones on social media marketing and the future of publishing–I did some advance reading on, to give myself a better idea of what the issues and sub-issues were, and to get me thinking on things I’d only nebulously thought about before, if at all. For the interview, I went over the guest interviews and guest blogs I’d done for my virtual book tour, just to refresh myself on how I’d answered some questions and to get me in an expositional frame of mind. (One thing I added that was not in the blog tour–my relating of dark fantasy to noir films and fiction.) It’s a lot easier for me to be ‘on’ when I’m prepared to be ‘on.’

So… it turns out that The Public Speaking is not quite so vexing for me as I’d expected it to be. Of course, it still stirs anxiety, in roughly inverse proportion to the amount of time until I have to do it. But now I also feel like I’m looking forward to it as well… and that’s a good feeling.

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.

A Cup of Coffee and a Good Book — Tonight at 6:30 pm EST (3:30 pm PST)

I’m going to be on Jennifer Walker’s show on Blog Talk Radio, A Cup of Coffee and a Good Book, tonight, talking about Brutal Light, writing in general, dark fantasy, where I get my ideas, and other such things. It’ll run from 6:30 pm to 7:00 pm EST, and will be streaming live during that time. If, for some implausible reason, you fail to gain the urge to rearrange your life so as to hang on my every erratic, meandering word, it will be archived there for you to listen to in your own good time.

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Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and several previously published and forthcoming short stories. He can be found via his website, his blog A Taste of Strange, as @gwox on Twitter, and in many other far-flung places on the Internet.