A Lone Star

An excerpt from my new Romantic SyFy story, now available in The Lone Star Collection (12 Texas Stories). All proceeds from the book support the Lonestar Lesfic Festival in Austin. If you buy the print book and bring it to the festival, I know a whole lot of authors who will sign it up good for you (including me).

A Lone Star

Bad ass. That was the first thought that came to Venn Jules’ mind as she looked over the Lone Starport’s new sheriff, Arnika Verne.  The sheriff stood on the deck of the hovercraft, eyeing the vast sea below, with one hand on her trim neoskene-armor clad hip and the other wrapped around a laser-arc spear like she knew exactly how to use it in a hurry. Which was very comforting, given that Venn herself was too stymied by the Great Orange Kraken’s tentacles, and now also too fatigued from wrestling with it, to keep the kraken from chewing on either her or the Starport’s tidal stream generator.

Operating a new near-equatorial launch facility on the shores of Austin came with more risks to manage than the Governor and his cronies cared to admit; but at least that ass-hat and his merry troupe of brown-nosers had finally seen fit to grant Venn’s appeal to hire some protective muscle. Sexy muscle too.

“Looks like you’re an ass-crack away from becoming Kraken snack,” the sheriff said with a sultry grin. Her accent dripped of Nor-easterner, someone used to the cold horror of the Arclantic ocean, and thus she probably knew fuck-diddle about the warm terrors of Venn’s Gulf of Mexico operations. Venn’s hopes of salvation diminished.  “No shit. Now shoot the bastard in his damn plate-sized eye.”

Black hair whipping in the wind, the sheriff sent an off-hand laser bolt into the Kraken’s beak just a foot shy of Venn’s head and then, in such quick succession that Venn never saw the sheriff move, fired two more bolts into the Kraken’s eyes.  Venn dropped from the Kraken’s failing grasp into the ocean like a stone.

Luckily, she hit the muddy red waves feet first, but the velocity of her fall still sunk her a dozen meters. She knew her immediate-personnel-locator-tags likely tripped on two seconds after being submerged, but they wouldn’t do the sheriff any good toward dragging her out of the water is she didn’t break surface in a hurry--before any of the Kraken’s sisters sensed her presence and dragged her to the blackest deep.  And it would be the Kraken’s sisters, Venn knew, because their males were mostly lame, much like the men of today’s United States of Oceania.

Venn kept kicking hard, but nearly laughed underwater as the words of her cynical birth mother sprung to mind. Men were only good for three things: sperm, hysterics, and a whole lot of indignant insinuating that some ancient artifacts indicated they were really the dominant gender a thousand years ago. “Yeah, and I bet the water and sky were clear back then too,” Venn thought and added broad desperate breast-strokes to her efforts. She spotted what could only be the snout of a monstrous Great White shark speeding through the murky redness in front of her. Another murderous sister hard on her heels. Just great...

Read the rest in the book, available now in print and eBook formats on AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Lone-Star-Collection-Carsen-Taite-ebook/dp/B079HWJCQS

Benefiting the Lonestar Lesfic Festival

Muses Never Die

Last August, the day after the Harvey flood hit my house in fact, I also lost a very dear friend and fellow warrior-of-the-written-word, Mr. Trey Garcia. Trey and I started trading poetry (and challenging each other to keep writing) in 6th grade. We avoided some arrests together in high school and wrote letters swapping poetry while I went to college and he served in the Navy. We challenged each other into writing a novel in a month for the last seven years or so too. He was my muse, and I miss him.

But I still hear him. I still have his poetry, and I still have the poems he challenged me to write. In celebration of this light that lives, I share one of his poems (one of my favorite) and one of mine (written in response to his challenge on the same theme).

The Paris Line by Trey Garcia

Trust no one but the pavement and the wind,
And never quite clear of the grey statues
As we lay in the river by the bend
A nightingale on a fig tree eats cashews
Taken from the pilgrim land just this Spring.

Can he not see that which will not be?

You and me and love. This is just a fling
Nothing more than a squirrel in a tree
Hiding acorns in a burrow made by
Ancient squirrels in hope for generations
Present and future. Now we start to fly
Above nature, above waves from stations
Playing our favorite songs as we dance
And kiss and feel and know
There is no chance.

What is the purpose of a pickup line exactly? by Lacey Schmidt

Some Egyptian-rule, obsidian cruel, 

icy social milieu 

where your eyes meet mine 

and suddenly complete some small space 

in time?

Something must be said...

to simultaneously let you know 

I think I just might love 

dipping my hands into your russet curls 

to pull your lips expectantly near mine 

while still enmeshed 

in the thoughts you’d share 

for thoughtful wear.

Something must be said...

to convince you our met stare

is more than a chance glance 

in a crowded room 

of social graces,
but I can only gulp 

and fret 

until you’re on the verge of turning 

toward some other day.

Anything should be said...

but will “your shoes are nice” really suffice?

Trey toasting our long-time limericks, with Laura, the night before my wedding.