09/28/2012 Fantastic Friday!

Hello everyone and welcome back. I'm glad you made it here today and I hope you've all had a great week. I'm looking forward to a full weekend, and hope to have lots of fun through it all. For now though, let's get right to work!

Today I bring you 'Dead Birds' by Chad Inglis. Now because you get on my case like PETA or something, this story is not about how to kill birds. That would be awful and I would be sick to my stomach. Instead this story is about a city in a universe that's cracked and broken, and a homeless man named Holister sees to be the only one who notices the pigeons appearing without heads. He takes it upon himself to figure out why they're dying and what it means for everyone else.

Holister's been on the streets for several years, and finding the dead birds is the strangest thing he's seen so far. He The first one he thought was just an act of animal cruelty, but when he finds more, and then starts finding strange rings painted in their blood on the walls, he knows he's onto something more. Eventually another homeless man tells him to talk to an old woman named Maria and she shows him just how broken their world is.

I picked this story because it's about a man who would know the city better than anyone else seeing something wrong when no one else does. He takes it upon himself to solve the mystery, and there's a bit of hope that it inspires him to clean up his life and stop the one who's putting up the rings. This story feels like a small piece of a much bigger picture, so if this is a prequel I wouldn't be surprised. I also think the old woman is supposed to be the author's take on the Babba Yagga, so that was a nice surprise.

'Dead Birds' is available on Smashwords for Free and is relatively short, so I recommend picking it up on a lunch or coffee break. A word of note though, as of right now, their online reading/HTML format has something buggy going on with it now. In order to read this story I had to download a PDF. I'm sure they're aware of the issue and are working on it now, but I wanted to give a heads up before people started getting frustrated.

Thanks everyone for stopping by again. My hope is that next week I will be able to do a promotional special thing for 'The Light Rises' since by then it should be ready to be tossed back out into the world. At least that's the hope, we'll see what reality believes in. Other than that, I hope everyone has a great weekend and I'll see you back here on Monday!