Heh. So long as the folks at Tor - I'm acquainted with a few of them - check Coben's editing, I could care less. Because, well.

Hmmm. Hmmmm.

Bev, I need to be careful about too many elements; the dark erotica in Wish You Were Here is probably too much, and the fact that there's also a scifi element to it, while probably pleasing Tor, would likely scatter what they want.

Eh, I'll mull this over and see what I can come up. 3500 words is a day's work when I'm on a roll, so if something suggests itself, and I actually get on said roll, I'll be begging for betas.

Right here if you need me. I'll bow to your knowledge on Wish You Were Here. I'd just like it to see wide readership because I think it's dark and dangerous and tremendously well written and I'd like it to give somebody else the heebies it gives me.

Oh, I agree - scary shit. But it's a horror story essentially, and this one is through membership in the Mystery Writers of America.

Still, dark, ghosty, supernatural, attachment. Something in me is in one majorly weirdo headspace, since my brain went to a double haunting, killer and prey, with a protagonist/detective dangerously inclined to Stockholm Syndrome...

Well.

ANother for the Bells challenge. The quoted language is from Joni Mitchell.

Distant Mirror

Again and again the same situation for so many years...

I sit, and I wonder. I'm looking at my own history, and wondering at myself. Apparently, there was a point at which I wanted to be alone with one particular man so badly, I made myself invisible to the rest of the world.

Tethered to a ringing telephone in a room full of mirrors...

Something falls on the back of my hand: tears, cheap and hard, fixing nothing.

In the far distance, my youth rings like cathedral bells. I wonder what is left of me. I wonder what I need.

I've been reading mystery anthologies a bit recently, and the stories are often very divergent from the "standard" mystery format.

I have now had two people tell me the following sentences are unclear to them:

The stable-turned-hospital was small and half-empty. They had seen little action of late, and the dry heat of summer, though uncomfortable, offered a respite from the contagion that often followed the army.

To me, as long as you've read the two pages before it and know that the viewpoint character is in an army, it's completely 100% obvious what I'm trying to say. The second sentence explains, as plain as day, why there aren't many patients in the hospital. What am I missing here?

Uh, I hadn't read any pages and I got it. There was a stable, and it was like a hospital, and there weren't a lot of people being shot and in the hospital, and the summer was hot, and somehow the heat kept disease from spreading and thus people weren't sick and in the hospital.

I think my confusion would be wondering how the heat prevented disease from spreading. There's a little vagueness with the "They" at the start of the second sentence, but I'm assuming that when it's in context, it's not unclear at all.

Yeah -- it would be the cause and effect of heat and no contagion that would be my suspicion of unclearness.

Okay, I'm glad ita didn't get it either. I thought that was something I should have known about, but yeah, if you assume the reader understands that, you're, uh, wrong.

Hmm. Maybe I should change it to something like, "The army had seen little action lately, and summer rarely was as sickly a season as the cold, wet winters, so the stable-turned-hospital was half empty."