The month of June is earmarked for my writing of the novella Forty Hands of Night, the second half of Fruit of The Deceiver, my ‘crusader zombie apocalypse’ yarn set in 1201 in Cairo Egypt. Putting pressure on myself to complete this project by the end of the month will curtail free serial postings. As I look on the back end of the site I see that we have 2-400 reads per week on the fiction page.

I would like to keep those readers coming back, and, have come to see little sense in holding back most of the content for a book slated for print publication. I am happy with posting 90% of Fruit of The Deceiver for free in HTML and then making the entire work available in print and PDF. Henceforth when you see a serial start up on this site, or read the latest installment in one of the half-dozen that are ongoing, read it with the knowledge that you should be able to get everything but the ending, and perhaps a prologue and epilogue, for free. If you really like it you will be able to purchase it later in a complete, and more permanent, format.

Today I woke up late after a night of narrative discussions with a fellow author over beer at two local bars. He was interested in the process of writing a novella—or at least my version of the process. So, with his queries in mind, and the hand of the microbrewer yet grabbing me by the shorthairs, I have decided to write and post Forty Hands of Night, one bookmark at a time, in the order that they are written, as installments in our Fruit of The Deceiver serial. As about 100 of our readers are aspiring writers themselves I thought they might enjoy watching me twist in the wind on the horns of a brutally linear narrative dilemma. I will hold back bookmarks that might spoil the ending for readers of the first volume, and will not publish the two final chapters and epilogue as free site content.

So, when you read of Little Ibrahm’s adventure along the first leg of the Harvester’s Sickle Road, keep in mind that his hangover and this fatally late start on his master’s errand, came courtesy of the Dog Fish Head brewery…

I will be ‘slapping’ Forty Hands up on the site as a self-proofed first draft, so do apologize in advance for any typos that the half-blind ghost of my dear departed English teacher might have missed. Feel free to leave typo head’s ups for me in the comment section. So, here it goes, LaFond hanging his literary ass from the window of the uncoupled speeding caboose that constitute the deathly dreams that have been waking him before dawn on those nights he actually sleeps to once again try and read and write between the lines of Abd al-Latif’s deadpan account of the most horrific human feast in history.