Last Bender

Death Panel The Death Panel of Tompkins County will convene before the Tompkins County Courthouse in Ithaca, NY. Please haul your useless old people and crippled, misaligned, infirm, retarded, birth defected, enfeebled, ignorant, withered, dyspeptic young before this panel to have your final fate arbitrarily decided. Please do bring sufficient ID as well as your [...]

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT           Beneath the heads sat Stronghole, in a glass chair at a glass table, reading a book. He had his usual military bearing; that had not relaxed since coming to the dome. But it had only been a day. Perhaps with time he would become like the others. These heads looked very serious. [...]

FW 614:             “Forget!           Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tatradomational gazebocroticon (the “Mamma Lujah” known to every schoolboy scandaller, be  he  Matty, Marky, Lukey or John-aDonk), autokinatonetically preprovided with a clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process, (for the farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch can) receives through [...]

  When I’m working on a book I don’t usually read fiction. For one, it’s a distraction. I usually read fiction analytically: how did he or she do it? Sentence length, level of detail, use of adjectives, point of view, showing and telling, story structure, how the thing moves through time, how to make survival [...]

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN           I lowered the gun. His eyes made me do it. They were sunken and dark, but very clear. In their light I felt ashamed. A middle-aged man clipping grass with a little silver scissors is hardly a threat. He had a basket on his arm. In it were mushrooms, bundles of the [...]