I'm taking a break from working on /usr/bin/god, one of the novels I'm writing. Instead, I've been working on "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," another book, this one an urban fantast/magic-realist thing about community wireless networking. I cracked the 30,000-word mark this morning (target length is 120,000 words or so) and I thought I'd post a 6,000-word excerpt to celebrate.
Alan's father was a mountain, and his mother was a washing machine — he kept a roof over their heads and she kept their clothes clean. His brothers were: a dead man, a trio of nesting dolls, a fortune teller and a island. He only had two or three family portraits, but he treasured them, even if outsiders who saw them often mistook them for landscapes. There was one where his family stood on his father's slopes, mom out in the open for a rare exception, a long tail of extension cords snaking away from her to the cave and the diesel generator's three-prong outlet. He hung it over the mantle, using two hooks and a level to make sure that it came out perfectly even.
