NaNoWriMo almost done!

Wow, no updates for a month. Blame that on my deep obsession with NaNoWriMo this year.

With a bit over a week to go I'm almost done, and should hit the 60,000 word mark by the end of November. Then it's back to editing Weathermen, and letting this new novel simmer for a while with Schneider helping out. If I get really lucky, I can get the first chapters of Weathermen in a fit state before uni begins again. Maybe. Maybe maybe.


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They sat in the house together, holding hands, and watched two spaniels worry at a corpse in the gutter through the living room window.

The older was Donnie, and he squeezed his brothers hand tight every time the dogs growled and tore a new strip free. “Is he okay?” he asked, sounding close to tears.

“He’s dead,” Terry replied, his eyes never wavering. “It doesn’t hurt.”

Soon, more dogs arrived, and in a few hours there was little left of the man at all.



They moved on after sunset, Terry’s pack heavy with what they had found in the larder. Three cans of peaches and a packet of corn chips, two soft drink bottles filled with water from the gutters after being boiled over a campfire and a dead rat. In his waistband was a pistol, cold and black and uncomfortable. It was not loaded – they had yet to find any ammunition. Donnie carried a baseball bat notched with his name so all would know to whom it belonged. They had bandannas tied tight over their noses, and every time Donnie reached up to tug his down Terry would slap at his hand. “Don’t you fucking dare,” he said, and Donnie would always draw back, eyes surly under his tangled mop.

They stayed in the shadows of the eaves of businesses with front windows shattered inwards over empty displays, all the televisions and wedding dresses long pilfered. The cars parked in the gutters had not moved in many months, a thick patina of dust settling over their windshields, dashboards cracked in the sun. There were eyes hiding in the darkness underneath. The neons proclaiming cheap haircuts or all night opening hours had been broken with stones or left to burn out. Trees along the median strip had been cut off at the knees by a station wagon that had come to rest against the wall of a video rental store. Once there had been music jaunting and jiving in every store to entice passers by, but now the air was still and silent.

A supermarket had been gutted, every shelf empty and the linoleum melted into gasoline swirls. Terry stepped over the threshold regardless, his fingers hovering near the butt of the pistol. “Stay,” he told his brother, who looked at him blankly. “Stay here for a bit. Right there. Get down behind that counter there.”

“Don’t want to. I don’t like this place.”

“You’ll stay the fuck down there or I’ll smack you one.” With that, Donnie curled into a ball behind the counter and stayed very still while Terry made his way down the aisles, his sneakers squeaking on the plastic. At the back end of the supermarket was a door marked STAFF, and behind it a staircase that led upwards to a staffroom, all white-walled with a table crammed into the middle so tight there was barely room to move. The fridge was empty, but in the cupboard overhead there was a small tin of coffee that Terry lay down in his pack. They had left nothing else.

When he returned to the front counter, Donnie had fallen asleep where he sat. Terry looked at him a while, and then crouched down beside him and cried behind his mask.

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