The site is designed with reader-modifiable typographic elements so that you can adjust the experience to suit your needs. Click the sliders to the right of the content to adjust.
If the sliders do not appear, be sure to “share” with a native browser or click the compass icon in WordPress Reader’s browser (which does not support the required JavaScript).
In case you missed the fanfare, I have created a heavily modified installation of WordPress to host my longer, serialized fiction instead of posting it here.
The site is part proof of concept, part hypothesis test, and mostly designed around giving the reader a better experience than normally available via standard themes and via community plug-ins.
I really encourage you to give it a spin, even if you don’t care for my brand of fiction. It is designed to give the reader some element of control over the reading experience itself (typography, paragraph spacing and layout, font size, line width, night/day appearances), and to test just how important it is (for me, at least) to receive immediate, conversational feedback via “likes” and interactive comments — or are those things a distraction from the reading/writing experience. On the backend, I have also focused on privacy-forward elements: removing stats and tracking cookies (that I can control), not maintaining a database of email addresses and comments (the guestbook should be one-and-done, no database entries other than, maybe, an IP address to put a cooldown on guestbook spam attacks; Cloudflare is part of the security and content delivery, but should not pose too many privacy issues). And it is zippy (rating >90 for mobile on speed tests, ~100 for desktop).
Anyway, I’ve done rambled enough. Come on by and let me know how it went for you.
After this episodic post for Vengeance, My Heart, the serial gothic western novel is migrating to a new home on the companion site at ravensweald.art. That site is designed for a distraction-free reading experience, with reader-focused improvements to enhance the reading experience with you, the reader, in mind. The series will read more like a book and less like it was shoehorned into a series of blog posts. In fact, this post is live over there as soon as you can see this one, and you might want to give it a gander for an improved experience. For best results, be sure to view it through your preferred browser. It will render just nicely in the mobile Jetpack browser, but you’ll miss out on the typographic modifications I’ve embedded in the site to let you read the fiction in a way that best suits your whims and preferences.
My boots needed resoling. I’d been telling myself that since Harrow’s Creek and had done nothing about it, which was either laziness or a quiet faith that the road would end before the leather did. Too bad the road was winning the battle.
Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The Dusk hit her like a hand — the perpetual bruised light of the wastes pressing against her eyes after the cave’s absolute dark. She blinked heavy eyes against the light and groaned as she lifted her head to look at who had spoken.
Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
Somewhere in the dark, what was about to happen — simply began.
All attentions shifted. Hers. The crow’s. The women’s voices, too, surrendered to sudden silence while the air in the cave grew both damp and heavy, weighing her down with a new emerging wrongness rising from within the darkness. The space turned in on itself and the fresh scent of water turned to sour and stagnation.
It did not arrive. It was simply present, the way the water had been present before she found it — already there, belonging to the space, waiting for her perception to catch up with what the space already knew. Across the spring. Near it. The bioluminescence on the cave walls throwing its faint cerulean into the dark between them, and in that dark, a familiar shape pouring forth from shadow.
Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The dark within was unsullied by Dusk. It stood apart from the twilight standing without.
The understanding was immediate and absolute. It came before her eyes drank in the faint bioluminescence rising from the stone walls beyond the entrance, casting a faint, ghostly cerulean into a dark that drank in light with a fullness. It came before the smell of water betrayed its location within the hollow space between the stone. The burden that rested on her neck since the shootout at the camp three or five days before, was simply absent. Not lifted. Gone — the yoke had never existed, never had been slung across her neck, never pushed her body to the ground.
It was in stillness that she stood just within the threshold dividing the entrance between the gloaming and this new, fresh darkness, letting the feeling wash over her in waves.
Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
It was with an explosive frantic fluttering that the quail broke from the scrub, barely registered before the gun’s thunder broke the twilight calm, before any thought of the bird came to the fore.
Only after the bird had dropped to the twisting shadows of the mesa, had the stranger known she had made a kill. There was no magic in the act, although it might have seemed so had anyone witnessed the event.
Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
As she made her way to where the crow perched, it was clear that Fallow was not the only equine casualty of the shootout. One other lay dead on the outrider’s side of the camp and the other two had panicked at the noise. The stranger could see the silhouette of one against the backdrop of the last of the failing light. It was looking back at camp, but seemed disinterested in returning. Of the other horse, there was no trace.
Dee was resting her back against the base of some mesquite once the stranger found her. She was pressing one hand firmly against her thigh, blood staining her fingers dark to match the growing shadows. Her other hand rested near the holster without quite reaching it. Her gun was not in the holster and it took the stranger a moment before she spotted the revolver in the gloaming, left almost under the wain.
Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
Dee turned to the stranger and nodded to the gun at her hip.
“That’s a fine bit of hardware you’re carrying around,” she said. “Old. The kind that means something. They don’t make them like that anymore.” She tilted her head and took a sip from her flask. “Lone woman on the road, carrying a piece like that around… Eventually somebody’s gonna make you an offer on it.”
She took another nod at the flask, spit into the fire and watched the whiskey flare up into a darkening twilight as it kissed the flame.
Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The man who had taken the hare from the stranger spit the carcass and seared it over the flames. The stranger noticed the woman who had poured the coffee was too close a resemblance to be anything but the man’s daughter and watched her cut up root vegetables and put them into a small kettle of boiling water. It would not amount to much, but it was luxurious fare for those used to the road and even a small tin cup of the stuff was better than hardtack and stale water sitting in a skin all day.
She was lean, but not a sinewy, spindly leanness. Her father did well enough doing whatever he did to keep her modestly fed.
A young man sat in the family’s wain, hat pulled low over his eyes, a long gun cradled in his arms. He seemed to be napping for a watch against the roaming desert nightgaunts that liked to nest near the mesas when true night decided to stop for a visit. Probably the older man’s son.
