Haus of Rhi

With a story as short as my piece "Blood & Peyote," I don't really feel comfortable actually offering an excerpt. Even a small one offers up too large a chunk. I've seen a few readers comment that they don't want to spoil the surprise and pleasure of reading the anthology when it comes out. So I've devised a substitute. It offers a bit of the mood, tone, and flavor of the story and the characters without divulging anything of the actual narrative. Behold, I give you the soundtrack to "Blood & Peyote." Each song was chosen to coincide with a specific scene and section. The exception is the twelve-minute "Blackfoot Fire" which is included for the sole intention of conveying something of Apisi Howling's culture, as well as his weight in the story. In the event that Spotify doesn't work for you, I've created an abridged Blood & Peyote from rhi.e on 8tracks Radio as well. There are a couple songs missing from...

Perfect porch perch weather is perfect. It's something I have to do every time I start a new project. The right atmosphere to encourage the muses. The right music for white noise. Rarely does the same music work for more than one project. This time, I couldn't even stay in the same genre of music. Perhaps because this project is in a different realm than my most recent works. It strays back into the universe of the Doctrine and Alliance, political foes constantly at each others' throats, though its cast of characters is entirely removed. It has no name just yet, and it's shaping up to meld together a couple ideas that had been gestating on the back burner. One based on a dream I had decades ago about the reclamation of a military base by the indigenous locals, and an unrelated story about a genetically modified assassin whose xeno-genetics overload its psyche--the ensuing bloodbath of a killing spree lands it in a maximum security intergalactic prison. It seems ...

The wolf, it mocks me with its laughter. As a kid, I was a nerd. I loved learning, and the scholarly aspect of my formative education was far from a burden -- with the exception of that damned section on quantum mechanics during Physics 2AP my senior year. Anyway, I used to look forward to going back to school. It was a relief from the endless doldrums of summer, for one. Granted, I usually found plenty of time and energy to invest in writing, and going back to school sort of cramped that. And the actual interactions with my peers? No thanks, I could do without that. But all the school supplies. Notebooks, and pens, and erasers, and mechanical pencils...it was enough to make me drool. And yep, it's that time of year again. I really didn't intend to go buy anything. I seriously didn't. I'd splurged on a hoard of writing utensils earlier this spring, actually, and didn't need anything. Really. Plenty of space left in the notebooks I've got. I certainly d...