Sunday on the Net with Eric

"Hey, everybody!"

Awesome

my nightmares look like this

his crime is being too sexy

little bastard made a mess of my backyard 

homoerotic monster tales are the best

Woo Dun (NSFW) is the artist; I want this guy to do a cover for me

just sayin'...

First Paragraph(s): "Honeysuckle Sycamore"

BLURB:

I don't think I've ever written a blurb for this piece, being that it's a novella in my anthology Slight Details & Random Events.The story takes place in the very same valley as The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles & Men and Azrael & The Light Bringer, and focuses on the Passions, spirits of the valley and the forest.

EXCERPT:

In certain places of the world Passions manifest themselves into physical form. These are the whispering places, the in-betweens. They are neither here nor there, neither truly seen nor unseen. The River Valley, as it was simply known, was one of these places. The folk who lived there knew of the valley's power and, for the most part, lived in harmony with it. For the Passions when given form were in the least playful diversions and at most mischievous jokers, using a pumpkin patch for a night’s sleep or stealing the clothes from a scarecrow.

            Once every so often, however, there came a Passion into existence that was so dire, so hateful and belligerent, that it would cause much pain and upheaval. To this point, many of the river folk would leave the valley to its battle. This is the story of one such battle. This is how a fairytale grows up.

            There was a young Passion of immeasurable beauty named Honeysuckle Sycamore. He was named this because he had been manifested under a honeysuckle-adorned sycamore tree while two young lovers consummated their adoration for one another beneath it. Born of their love, he was christened by the dew of the early morning. He stretched, yawned, and hopped to his feet as naked as a newborn. From his head hung a garland of honeysuckles and from his glittering skin came the scent of the sweet flower.

Available at Dreamspinner Press or Amazon, or any other place that's super terrific.

Sunday on the Net with Eric

Mmmm...nekkid barbarian in the snow

What I envision my ancestor Spicy Rose to have looked like

What I envision my animal spirit to look like

Fun times on Endor

Mae West loved her muscle men

Yo!

I think something extra was in that protein shake

First Paragraph(s): She's Come Undone (short story...NOT the Wally Lamb book)

BLURB:

Julie is a woman on the edge. The strain of raising a handicapped child and the pressures a small town rumor mill creates have taken their toll.

All her life she has been ridiculed or, even worse, ignored.

But that stops today.

EXCERPT:

Julie Morton had been wounded on the battlefield. Her reputation was gone. Shot out from beneath her. Most in the hill town of East Madison thought she was “absolute crazies.” She was certain that’s how the kids spoke these days. “Bonkers” and “crazies” and “nutzoid.”

That wasn’t always so, though. She wasn’t always fruit looped. She was once a teacher at the high school. Seventh and eighth grade English. (The junior high was connected to the high school by a large gymnasium that kind of bubbled up between them like a red brick tumor.) She had taught English for a good ten years before she was kicked to the curb. And before that, she had grown up here. She never thought to leave. Well, maybe once or twice, but that was hardly grounds for wanderlust.

It wasn’t until recently that she started to crack from the pressure of the rumors and the daily torments from the townsfolk. Her hair was turning white for it, and that did nothing to alleviate the jokes. And too, there was the difficulty of raising a handicapped – sorry…a differently-abled daughter, all by herself. Well, kind of by herself. Principal Noyle was always there monetarily, he being Betty Morton’s dad.

Aimee Jean, Betty Morton’s only friend, rode her bike to the Mortons every day that summer. The summer of the Fall. She had kept in touch with Betty through Julie while she was away at college. Because of her paralysis, Betty didn’t say a thing, but she could make herself understood just fine. There was a mean streak in that girl that smelled like rubber on asphalt. Betty became bitter early on in life. In fact, that was her nickname in school: Bitter Betty. She had been a very pretty young girl. It’s amazing what one wrong move on a monkey bar can do to you.

Available at UNTREED READS and AMAZON .

Yearbook: From There to Here

We start at GRL 2012....

...on to GRL 2013 AND THEN, VIRGINIA!

First Paragraph(s): Azrael & The Light Bringer

BLURB: 

Welcome to the Valley, a liminal landscape that lies somewhere in the fringes of the world; a place with such secret magic that only the very observant can see it. Into this world comes the Lone family. To them, the magic of the Valley is not at first apparent, at least not to all. But the youngest son Lucifer is the most open to the river’s pulse. He converses with the trees and an angel named Azrael, all the while being taught by the midwife Mother True to hone his talents. Meanwhile, Lucifer’s older brother Uriel rejects the valley altogether and, with the help of his lover—a raft boy named Roman—flees the place only to be caught up in the corrupt big city world of a madame named Ute Dragal.

And so begins a tale of wonder and danger, filled with a cast of characters ranging from the strong to the stoic to the sinister, in a place where a dark power awaits them all. Venture again to the Valley in this prequel to Eric Arvin’s acclaimed epic The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men.


EXCERPT: 

Lucifer woke to the daylight in a depression of soft earth, sided at every angle by swollen, moss-grown roots from the surrounding trees. The roots tangled in a ballet of need, of sustenance and assurance. They made a natural bed for the young boy and, he thought, quite a comfortable one.

Lucifer lay still for a while, listening to the birds in the limbs, feeling a presence of soul, feeling at once loved and comforted by the breezes and guarded over and shaded by the mighty arbors themselves. He didn’t remember falling asleep in the bed of roots, but then, one never remembers the precise moment that sleep sets in and the soul begins to wander. He recognized where he was, though. He knew the place well. It was the dense woods by the river, the orchard as some mistakenly called it, ever the watchful opponent to Lone Place. It was too copious a forest, and the trees too tall and round to be any kind of useful or profitable orchard. There might have been fruit trees there at one time, but no more. These were stalwart trees, only a few having any kind of affectation or ornamental guise such as flowers, and most of those were on the outer orchard fringes that opposed the big house. The trees of the orchard stretched downriver, though none could say how far. Certainly Lucifer had never been able to exact their acreage and he had played in them, walked in them, whispered with them, for all his young, curious life.

The little boy rose to his feet and stretched with a contented morning’s welcome sigh. He looked around him with boyish uncertainty. He had been walking the orchard forever, it seemed, yet he didn’t look to be making any progress in any particular direction. He tried to remember why he was in the orchard at all.

“I’m not much of a runaway, huh?” he questioned the trees around him. “I cain’t even find the way out of my own front yard.”

AVAILABLE AT WILDE CITY PRESS OR AMAZON 

Sunday on the Net with Eric

Ha!

We're gonna need a bigger pool.

One of the oldest known photographs

Writer Eric the Arvin gets his drink on

Horny bastard

First Paragraph(s): The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles & Men

 Who can truly say what the river valley looked like? Its appearance changed depending on one’s perspective, for every soul sees the world differently. A patch of tree moss so apparent to one person might go completely unnoticed by another. The agreed-upons lay few and far between. The essential topography of the valley could be seen from a few specific locations: high on the barren rock of Beggar’s Hill, or from the heights of the Lone Tower, at the foot of which rested an ancient orchard. These and a few other strategic plateaus looked out over the vast waterway to the first rising hills of the Otherside—that land across the great river where very few ventured—where the land fell ever-steeped in a thick, heavy fog.

Alongside the river, sometimes too close to its edge, homes of the valley folk clustered beneath the calm twin siblings of blue water and sky. Past these houses, when the hills did not rise immediately from the beach as they were prone to do, the hinterland spread in long acres of field and fancy—fancy having more than a little power in the valley—stretching out like yawning earth. A couple of lapzine fields had been left to struggle, having survived a swelling of the river; few people remained to tend their blue-tinged flowers or harvest their gel-like resin for lamplight.

Beyond the initial hills and inclines rose greater cliffs, at points almost completely hiding the river valley from the view or acknowledgement of the outside world, such was their height. And finally, before anything “modern” could be reckoned, there spread the Farlands. Still considered of the valley proper by most aside from the college, those of the outside world ignored them as wilderness. Things were changing, though. A new organism called ‘Industry’ was starting to take notice of certain regions of the Farlands. And Industry began to wander about this seemingly unused land, wondering how it might be used for its own industrious progress. This new attention made a few of the valley’s unseen inhabitants very uneasy.

AVAILABLE AT WILDE CITY PRESS, AMAZON, OR ANY OTHER FINE ONLINE RETAILER.