A blog where Stephanie M. Belser test-drives her fictional stories.
Expect the occasional
"stall, spin, crash & burn".

Sunday, April 28, 2019

BRANDED!

Not this, by the way:


Being older than dirt, I remember when "brands" were names such as Hershey's, Levi's, Proctor & Gamble, Maytag and so on. But now, a "brand" is everything. The esteemed law firm of Boyd, Dewey, Cheatham & Howe is a brand. And so, it seems, am I.

The "experts" say that a brand should post frequently. I didn't post anything at all in 2018 and this is #3 for 2019.

So I guess I get an "F" for self-promotion. Which, in a way, suits me. I'm from both a time and an area of the country where self-promotion was deemed to be beneath an honest person. Self-promotion was the domain of used-car dealers and storefront loan joints.

Of all the things in life I'm not good at, I can take this one.

Monday, April 1, 2019

Chapter Seven of "The Jamokan Affair"

That's the title that I have settled on, for now.
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I followed Sheila Ellis out of Holmes’s office. Ellis was maybe 5’6” and appeared to be Asian. I don’t know the differences between the different nations of East Asia to be able to tell where she or her people were from. Didn’t much care.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Medical,” she said.

And Medical was where we went. They had a nearly-complete copy of my medical record already. I was inspected, injected, detected, infected and made to drink some pretty vile stuff. They ran me through some sort of whole-body scanner. Then it was off to dental, where they fixed two nascent cavities. The tech said that my teeth were discolored enough for the outer worlds, which didn’t sound like a compliment.