Keri Knutson

Keri Knutson is truly a juggler. She writes. She edits. She proofreads. She designs book covers. AND she's raising a whole slew of kids. Even with all that, she finds the time to participate in our twitter antics and help the less experienced writers with beta reads and mentor them. (I secretly believe she's actually three people.)

winter

Darker by Degree is part of a
Friday the 13th promotion (tomorrow,of course)!
Grab it while you can.

Silence
Brittle as dried grass
Under a burning frost,


We wait for the rifle-crack
Of breaking ice
As we go under.


Across the field
The vault of trees
Pulls the last light into shadow.


All is quiet,
All is cold,
Cold.


We are breath
And huddled warmth,
And I need the weight of you


To keep me from flying away.


Keri Knutson is a writer and editor currently living in New Orleans, author of the novels Darker By Degree, Director's Cut, Running Red, and the forthcoming Lost Things.

http://thespectralobelisk.blogspot.com
http://publishingyourself.blogspot.com
http://keriknutson.wordpress.com
twitter @KeriKnutson


[ed note: I apologize for the formatting, but I've been fighting with Blogger for an hour and I'm over it.]

Courtney Cantrell

Courtney is the pretty one, the cheerleader, the prom queen. I kid. Sort of. If the Kindle All-Stars were high school, she would be all those things, but she'd be the one everyone loves rather than the overly popular, Muffy Tepperman type. (To you younger readers, I say, "Google it.") She keeps us smiling with a positive attitude. She really is terrific for moral support and a voice of reason. Of course, she's also a mischievous little elf and we adore that side of her as well.

Courtney also writes the Demons of Saltmarch series and is quite the accomplished artist. I believe she painted the artwork for her book covers. And she's done quite a few for other authors. [ed. I was mistaken in that last bit. Courtney corrected me in the comments section below. Sorry kids!]

Colors of Deception, the first in the
Demons of Saltmarch series
can be found on Amazon for Kindle and in print

night sunshine


it's a hollow place
behind where cartilage attaches ribs to sternum
just a nudge to the right of my heart


i tell you, it's a hollow place
empty of tangible
my body curls protectively around it
shielding it
hiding it from prying eyes
and oh, it aches


if you cut me open
--no, listen!
if you cut me open there, 
you will find
a perfect sphere of translucent midnight
the darkness of what has slumbered too long


a latent, formless winter
in which rainstorms coalesce
and bear my passions to a far-off land
--like an embrace carried on thunder
and a kiss on the lightning


if you cut me open,
you will find this winter
dark and awakening
seamless and seemless


too definite to reject
too irresistible to ignore
and at its core burns
the evidence: night sunshine,


a miniature, incandescent star
nestled in the hollow place beside my heart
warmth spreads from my core
to my limbs
into my fingertips
waking me up
rising
giving life


night sunshine
unanticipated
irrevocable
welcome in everything it brings


if you cut me, you will see it:
night sunshine, 
seeping from my joyous wound
flashing brilliant and comforting
seemless winter banished
painful ache denied
resistance relinquished like a dull blade
--and gladly


if you cut me, it is yours--
that hollow place beside my heart
in which to make your home


and 
to mark your path,
the night sunshine
pointing the way
beckoning on
welcoming in


night sunshine
if you cut me,
i bleed ultraviolet.




Courtney Cantrell is a writer of high fantasy, low sci-fi, and medium horror. The making of things and the sharing of those things with others is her passion. She enjoys chocolate and coffee and tries to keep these from making her sentences unnecessarily complicated. http://courtcan.com

Tony Healey

Tony Healey's contribution to the Kindle All-Stars goes beyond his story, "Redd." At one point, when I was having Internet connectivity issues, and couldn't get certain things done for the cause, Tony picked up the slack and made things happen.

When I lost my Internet connection completely due to the uselessness of my ISP, Tony kept our fearless leader, Bernard Schaffer, from putting out an APB on me. I'm only joking a little, at the time Bernard was a police detective who had seen enough in the line of duty to be worried sick about me during those three blackout days.

CHERRY TREE 

Burial is now available on Amazon (edited by yours truly)

Wind blows
Blossoms fall
A thousand delicate
White memories
That will never grow back 

Time is a dry sun
And memory is perishable
Destined to decay
Washed away by a
Winter shower 

Years gone by and
Only a handful left
Hanging half-remembered
From gnarled limbs
Snowdrops 

The forgotten dreams of
A young man
Of former glory
Spilt upon the ground
The lost promise of fruit 

When the last blossom has fallen
The tree, bare and old stands revealed
All memory has faded
Like distant moonlight
Time stands still
Ceases to be a hard road
Upon which the past has died 

The road leads toward
Tomorrow
And the silky white prospect
Of a thousand pale
Blossoms
Falling 

Adrift forever

Tony Healey is the author of The Honeycroft Series, The Stars My Redemption, and others including a collection called Double.


A bit about "Burial":
Fred Aniello committed the perfect murder... but just when he thought he'd gotten away with it, his new life was turned upside down. Because sometimes a killer's secrets won't stay buried...


Visit Tony's website:  www.fringescientist.com

Matt Posner

The Exploration Project CD
is available on Amazon

When I asked for participants, Matt sent me a copy of Vampire Poet, his book of poems, and told me to take my pick. I homed right in on this one. As a huge fan of Hamlet how could I not choose a piece that begins, "Now Polonius?"

Famous Fathers in Literature
By Matt Posner
For the Exploration Project
December 8, 2007
Short Version




Now Polonius, as you can see, was likely to give advice.
All his advice was very traditional and very honorable and in fact very silly.
His list of dos and don’ts was followed up by a ludicrous paradox as he declared,  
“And this above all, to thine own self be true.”
Do what you don’t want, don’t do what you do want, and be true to yourself.
Polonius followed his own advice and was true to himself
What was true to himself was that, in pursuit of political advantage, allied to a treacherous and morally vacant king, he used his daughter to increase his royal access.
What was true to himself is that he spied on Prince Hamlet, whom he would have liked to either add to his family or remove from the line of succession.
Ultimately Polonius got his whole family killed, himself due to hiding behind the arras, and Ophelia due to her bad singing and a swan-dive with flower-petals into a Danish tarn, and Laertes ventilated with his own poison blade when he took over his father’s job as the king’s do-boy.
Polonius:  Why day is day, night night, and time is time; Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.
The worms waste no day, night, or time gnawing upon you, Polonius, nor the rest of us neither.

Now William Tell is a hero among fathers.
Lake Lucerne’s Uri Canton hunter bowman master of arms.
He would not bow his head before the Austrian governor’s hat and risked having that proud head posted high penetrated by a pike.
This was a risk because Gessler the Governor was a black-hearted man, and like all tyrants and also teachers, maintained status by people fearing consequences.
Tell’s gesture of defiance to Gessler won him much admiration, but Gessler was having none of it, and so William Tell had to shoot an apple off his son’s head.
We don’t have the son’s name; doesn’t matter, he was a boy.
What matters is that William Tell, Uri Canton archer armsman, kept one more arrow in hand.
William Tell:  Gessler, this arrow was for your heart, if the boy was harmed.
Come now, heroic William, and Tell the truth:  do not all fathers harm their sons?

Now Abraham is the example of what I mean. Tested by Hashem, what was he to do?
He took Yitzchack – that’s Isaac to you – up onto Mount Moriah where an altar was.
He tied Yitzchack down to the altar, and the son all unprotesting.
The son submitted to the will of his father, and would not some of our fathers appreciate such submission?
A young man in prime of life readied for sacrificial slaughter at the hands of white-bearded patriarch Avram does not resist, chas ve sholem! And tears were in the eyes of both.
Came then an angel to halt the sacrifice, and a ram was found tangled in some brush and was put on the altar and was slain instead.
God, Hashem, the Father, told Abraham, Avram, the patriarch, to kill Isaac, Yitzchak, the son.
Instead a ram was slaughtered, another father perhaps, after a fashion.
Avram:  I don’t want to do this, but we must all submit to the will of Hashem.
I guess it was better for him when he thought he knew what the Father wanted?

Now Victor Frankenstein was a Swiss who wanted to be like God.
This was in the eighteenth century or so when all the literati celebrated men’s spiritual nature.
Why couldn’t a man being so suffused with spirit create a life form full of vitality?
Women could do it easily enough, so why not a man? But Victor didn’t impregnate himself.
Instead, he combined some body parts in a big cauldron in Geneva and did alchemy and whatever and the result was an enormous ugly dude named Adam.
Adam Frankenstein, or the Frankenstein monster, was so smart that he taught himself to read by looking through a knot-hole in a cabin and poring over the works of Milton.
He then tracked down Victor who had utterly repudiated him the second he made him.
Then began a dance of death as Adam the monster killed what Victor the father loved and Victor the father chased Adam the monster around trying to off him until they wound up somewhere near the North Pole.
Victor:  How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
Seems like a lot of fathers feel that way, not just Victor.

Now Rabbi Isaac Saunders was known through his community as a tzaddik, a saint among men.
Accordingly, he never spoke to his son, Danny, except to ask him scriptural questions at public events.
Every day father saw son, and son father, but no small talk, no how are you, no events of the day.
What Reb Saunders asked, nu, Danny always knew the answer. And when Danny brought his less religious friend, Reuven Malter, HIM Reb Saunders talked to.
To his friend the father talks, but not to the son. Oy vey es mir, it’s meshugenah.
An explanation eventually became clear. The great man did indeed love his son and was indeed proud of him.
It’s only that Reb Saunders believe this way of raising a son would make that son also into a tzaddik, another saint walking upon the earth.
Instead, Danny quit being Chasidic and went off to study psychology at Columbia.
Danny Saunders:  “Quietness has nuances and meanings, almost as if the silence is speaking to me.”
And I am asking, can the son by his silence speak also to the father?

Now Mr. Bennet had the benefit of five daughters, three of whom were very silly because they came out of his very silly wife.
Men who marry very silly wives make very silly decisions and must at one time have been themselves very silly.
So with such silly sisters and two smart ones, Mr. Bennet had to decide how to solve the silly and sad situation.
He settled for sitting in his library smoking his pipe rolling his eyes and making clucking noises with wry glances and remarks to his favorite daughter Elizabeth.
It is no wonder that she loved this somewhat absent father, for the gifts of sense and humor are great gifts he bestowed upon her, and a father at the desk, pipe in mouth, with his newspaper spread out before him, is an appealing figure.
Indeed one so swiftly becomes sick of the silly sisters and the silly Mrs. Bennet who is the silliest and least socially skilled, that Mr. Bennet’s own sad-sack silliness is obscured.
Mr. Bennet:  “My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life. You know not what you are about.”
It would, I am sure, be comforting to a son to find his father always greater than himself.

Now O-konk-wo is from Um-u-o-fia in Nigeria. As he, a rough father, brutalized his sons,
So then the white father came from Europe to brutalize Nigeria,
And so the Holy Father came to protect the victims by changing their beliefs and ways entirely,
Which made O-konk-wo angry, who had beaten his son N-wo-ye for not being manly enough,
And who had sacrificed his adopted son, I-ke-me-fun-a, which maybe made N-wo-ye wonder at his character.
Your father kills your brother and then vaunts at you, and see whether you feel like planting yams all day.
O-konk-wo’s father was U-no-ka, a lazy layabout who was always borrowing money and playing a flute or something.
So O-konk-wo didn’t want to be like that, so he went the other way and became a proud, domineering rage-aholic,
So nervous by nature that, at a funeral, he accidentally shot and killed someone else’s son.
Okonkwo:  “When did you become a shivering old woman, you, who are known in all the nine villages for your valor in war? How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed.”
Yes, he beat and killed boys, but he was good at growing yams.

And there are other fathers of whom one might speak.
But Lear is the greatest of all fallen fathers, and thus to end with him.
Lear’s protestations, with a few tweaks, speak to all whose folk have betrayed them withal.

• Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
• You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
• Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
• You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
• Vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
• Singe my bare head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
• Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world.
• Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,
• That make ingrateful man!
• Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!
• Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are mine own kin.
• I tax you not, elements, with unkindness;
• I never gave you kingdom, called you lov’d.
• You owe me no subscription; then let fall
• Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
• A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d child:--
• O! O! ‘tis foul!

Originally from Miami, Florida, Matt Posner is a New York City based novelist and special educator. Matt is the Dean of School of the Ages, America's Greatest Magic School.  Matt's poetry, featured in this post, is part of his participation in The Exploration Project, New York's premiere avant-garde improvisational band. Talk to Matt at his facebook fan page "School of the Ages Series" and at his website http://schooloftheages.webs.com.

RJ Astruc

RJ lives half way around the world. In fact, as I write this, it's already tomorrow where she lives. Her contribution to Resistance Front is a short called "Ghosts of Los Hellas" based on her Harmonica + Gig book series.

Harmonica & Gig is available
on Amazon.com now!

Five Stars

The neighbour’s new car

was a dream in chrome.

I saw it first in motion,

this bright blade of sunlight slicing through suburbia,

our dullness,

our indolence,

our dreary lives,

reflected and refracted in its mirrored grill.

At once I knew I wanted my own,

needed it, craved it,

but it was too expensive,

prohibitively so;

in the catalogues they called the car

the machine of millionaires

and quoted its worth in six-zero instalments.

So I printed my own,

downloading the design,

and feeding it into the copier

piece by piece,

first the wheels

then the chassis

then the fat plugs and ports of the engine.

For the finish I used enamel paints.

My model was so convincing -

you could hardly tell which was

the copy and which the copied,

the print versus the printed –

that I gave the torrent site five stars

and praised the quality in a short comment.

RJ Astruc is the author of Harmonica + Gig, A Festival of Skeletons, and an independent release, Clockworld. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Year's Best Australian Fantasy & Horror, Abyss & Apex, Daily Science Fiction, and many other magazines. She lives in New Zealand.

Visit R.J.'s website:  www.rachelastruc.com

Miles Cressman

If you follow enough of the KAS members on twitter, you already know we're an odd group. We occasionally go into some zany banter and Miles ends up in the middle of all of it. I envision him as a neighbor who always seems to walk into a Three Stooges or Marx Brothers skit just as pies begin to fly through the air.

His Resistance Front contribution is called "Deconstruct" and it's a fun read, particularly if you're a grammar nut.

Miles' first novel, The Dream Metropolis,
is currently available on Amazon

Niche in the Canyon

Twisted, wavy seascapes
Painted, sculpted out of rock
I'm at the ocean
even though it's so far away.

In tranquility I find
One single parcel of light
Found its way through this fortress of solitude
Made shelter.

Flakes of rock fall off and –
The sand basin fills, like a perpetual hourglass
But the light never changes.
It still occupies the same space, it never moves.
As if the world spun around it

I made a home and yet I'm
“Is this where you've been hiding?”
180 spin and radiant eyes
Inquisitive and penetrating

“They can't find me here.”

Who? The voice asks:
The eyes are gone and the body vanished
So there's no point for quotation marks.

“People.”

But you are a person.

“I'm the light in this cave. And I'm the sand. And I'm the ocean on these rocks.”

Do you breathe?

“Only here.”

Only here.

Miles is a 22 year old recent graduate of the University of Oregon with a Bachelor's in English. He is currently going back for his postbac degree in Education, but in his spare time he writes novels. Currently he is at work on a four-part science fiction series called A Paean to Dreams.

Visit Miles website:  http://paeantodreams.wordpress.com/

Welcome to National Poetry Month

Last April I celebrated National Poetry Month here on the blog by posting a couple of my own poems and a few of my favorites. Goodness knows why, but I was actually thinking about that back in December of 2011 and was hit with a great idea for this year's celebration. Soooo... 

Last December I sent a group email to my pals who make up the Kindle All-Stars community. I made one simple request:  Send me a poem or two. I made it clear that participation was voluntary and that I would not alter the pieces in any way. The next thing I knew, my inbox was full of poems and requests for clarification or more details. 

My goal was to gather enough poems to cover each of the five Sundays in April. Instead, I've received enough to have a virtual poetry slam and shower April with posts. Please join my colleagues and me throughout the month to celebrate talent that goes beyond prose, beyond fiction, beyond their kind hearts and camaraderie.

Volcano Watch is Toni's most recent novel
and is currently available on Amazon for Kindle

Normally, I don't play favorites with this group, but I do have two for this project that I will point out. One is today's selection. Toni Dwiggins is the author of several books. The two most recent are from her Forensic Geology Series.

Her poetry speaks for itself:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

A poet I'm not,

So I'll spare you .  :)

I thought it appropriate for April Fool's Day.

Enjoy the rest of the month.