Fiction: Page 2 …

Page 2 of Mongrel, Book 1 of the DOOMED? Series; Link to Page 1 https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/ritadeheer385131918.blog/194

Up again. Quick look around to see what there was to see. On the glassy water’s surface, his surfboard rose a finger-width. The swell? He counted seconds. Cooler water from the depths raised goose bumps on his skin. Twenty. The board lifted again. Yep. It’s the swell.

Grung grung grung grung grung grung.
A vibration? He sank to feel it better.
Rung grung. Rung grung. Rung grung.
Has to be a boat engine. A fisherman on his way home? Up again to the surface.

The swell increased noticeably in strength and height while Tardi trod water waiting for the boat to pass and the water to calm after the boat’s passage.

RUU-UU-UNG. GRUU-UU-UNG. RUU-UU-UNG. GRUU-UU-UNG!

The water trembled and he with it. The increasing swell with him in the trough between two wave crests hid the boat till the last moment. It was coming straight for him! His heart hammered at his ribs. Frantically he sculled back down. The boat crunched down on his surfboard. Displaced water punched him down, hard.

Oof!

He slid along the wreck then along the sharp coral. Toxins from the coral flamed through him like a fire front ahead of a storm wind. He breathed in water. His chest burned. Lungs bulged. He was drifting away. Fading out.

Wait! He had to live! He had to live for his little brother Steve. Up! Up! Up!

Slivers of skin and trails of blood rose and twirled alongside as he exploded through the water ceiling, coughing, snorting, sucking in air with rasping gasps. His blood clouded the surrounding water. How long before a shark came nosing by? Where was the damned boat?

A huge pink tongue slurped over his back, wiping off blood and threads from his clothes and … Was that something in his mind? The toxins were at work already? For a moment, he forgot how to swim. Then he remembered Steve and spat out bloodied seawater. He kicked hard and hauled seawater from in front.

MONGREL by Rita de Heer (2019) books2read.com
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Forthcoming Fungi Walk

Spent the morning strolling around #MaslenArboretum (tree collection) with some of the people who look after it and are constantly improving it.

They accompanied me on my pre pre fungi walk ahead of the pre fungi walk with the organiser of #BigScrubDay, which in its turn is ahead of the day when I will lead a #FungiWalk.

The biggest problem is no rain so no fruiting bodies to show off. I’ll probably have to call the walk something like Evidence of Fungi in the Arboretum.

The underside of a large Cymatoderma elegans

Foods I Can Eat

I’ve been on the low-FODMAP diet for nearly five years now and dragon fruit is one of the seven fruits I’m allowed to eat.

But it’s the only fruit on my list of can’t-be-bothered foods.

It’s beautiful to look at, I’ll grant you. I find it hard to eat past its perfume-like scent and its taste is little better than that vegetable beloved by many older Australians, the choko… it’s that bland.

Page 1 …

This is page 1 of Mongrel Part 1 of the Doomed? series. If you like what you read, hasten to your favorite ebook distributor, the 99c sale ends on 14 July.

1: Tardi

Tardi Malko dived down the water column to where the wrecked trawler lay on its side six meters below, the water as cool and smooth as satin bed-sheets. He stopped a meter above the wreck, sculling with his hands. He’d break the perfection of the display if he touched down, but now that he’d seen the silver coral, he definitely wanted to use it in the video clip he intended to submit for the Virtual Surfing job.

He smiled closed-mouthed to not let any water in. Oh yes! This little addition is going to swing the vote my way, he thought. He swam up for a breath, aiming for the dark torpedo shape of his surfboard floating above.

Out of habit, he checked for triangular fins when his head broke through the surface of the water. Not that he expected any of the really wild wildlife that passed through; not the season for it.

In the east it was still too bright to see much, with the rising sun seeming to hang only a couple of hand-widths above the horizon. He turned, scooping at the water with his hands and kicking with his feet. The Byron Shire coast was dark blue and rumpled with hills. The surface of the sea had the bronze tints of a Roman mirror, no wind and still no swell. His surfboard only moved because he’d troubled the water near it.

Deep breath.

He dived, squeezing his eyebrows together to adjust the goggles for magnification. On the way down, he flicked the side of the goggles near his left temple to switch to the cam function. With the goggles videoing, he swept his gaze back and forth over the silvery clumps for a background sequence of the squared pattern. There were ten rows of the clumps on the near-horizontal side of the wreck. To create a pattern like this the coral must have been seeded.

Up for a breath, and down again.

The early sunlight trembled through the turquoise water and reflected off what looked like barbs, the coral’s hair-like structures. The sun’s rays glancing over the hairs must cause the shimmering effect people had told him about. Good score, Tar-boy. All my problems solved.

MONGREL by Rita de Heer (2019) books2read.com
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Read Doomed? 1: Mongrel

Mongrel … the fellow in the banner … is available for just 99 cents from 30 June to July 14 … click on Universal Book Link: https://books2read.com/u/bW9Pgq for your favorite ebookshop

The first installment of a series set in The Eleven Islands, Mongrel tells the beginning of the story of Tardi Malko, a 22nd century surfer and trucker.

He needs a second job. While videoing his application to work at Virtual Surfing, he’s thrown against some alien coral. The Moogerah Monster, an alien entity, instantly invades Tardi’s mind and starts to force Tardi to help it break out of its prison.

Tardi begins his resistance by intending to stay himself. His ex-girlfriend signs him up for a job with her, and his drowned brother wants to stay dead next time his CPU freezes. Then the Stormies, a mysterious underclass, claim him as their own. Tamer, they call him. They expect him to control the alien monster, to use it for the good of all Stormy kind.

How will he stay human?

Wordsmithing

The excerpt below is written in a fictional, grammar-based dialect. It has one word I made up … skanzy … and some that are used in different ways than you might be accustomed to.

Watercolor painting of what one of the characters described might look like. — A typical skanzy is hard to see when you’re
trying too hard.

“A skanzy by kind and a skanzy with aptitude is what I am, though I’m quite long-winded as well. The bottom falling out of the bio-engineering market left a lot of us product scrabbling for a living. Cities wouldn’t have us, or anywhere you live. You who are not mis-made.

“Down to the rivers is where we drifted, and where we now live in permanent river-camps, despite floods and melting floes. The some of us what hold down jobs support us all. The jobs never notice there’s an unending succession of us—seen one, you say, seen us all—so when one of us is too sick to get out of bed, injured, or arthritic of a morning—someone else will turn up.

“We can’t afford to lose any of the jobs so we have a rota and a job school in every camp where we all learn all the jobs.

I’d love it if you leave a comment on how well you can understand it, and would maybe like to read more by this character?

Writing is Gardening

Gardening is like a hands-in-the-dirt kind of writing. That’s the thought I had about them both while I pulled out weeds this morning.

What I was doing there–with that thinking–was trying to construct a metaphor. You will have noticed, though, that I had doubts and inserted a ‘like’. The two things that I was trying to relate to each other at that moment felt like they are too different from each other and I settled for making a simile.

But what is there about gardening and writing that I thought I could bring them together in a metaphor? Thinking thinking thinking. I guess it is more about the ways that I engage in each process.

Gardening, you pull your garden gloves on, walk into the backyard and start weeding. For example. When you’ve picked all the dandelion flowers due to set seed and put them in the organic refuse bin, you’ll see that the newly planted pansy plants are looking a bit limp. Without having to wonder what you’ll do next, you’ll get a watering can, fill it and give the pansies a drink. Next, you’ll notice that the excess thyme plants you ripped out last week, are looking nicely dried. You’ll give them a good shake above the vegetable patch to release all those little dry leaves, where they’ll add to the mulch. Every little bit helps. And so on.

Writing, you’ll open the software you’re using, open the files you’re working on, and start adding into or subtracting from the section you last worked on. Soon you’ll discover that if you add this action to a character’s arc here, you’ll need to seed that character earlier in the piece, and you work on that for a while. While you are getting your lunch, you think of a nice metaphor with which to explain one of your most recalcitrant plot points, and so when you get back into it, you shift your attention to that part of the arena. And so on.

See the similarities?

Gardening is a hands-in-the-dirt kind of writing and writing is gardening with words.