It’s Out!
The Property of Blood is finally out on this auspicious date. Buy it on Amazon starting November 7th, or at any number of ebook retailers.
And Now… Excerpt from The Property of Blood
Finally, the upcoming novel! I made my last edits while on an Alaska cruise, “enjoying” COVID symptoms as I finished with the last scenes. Caught a lot of interesting glaciers, all in retreat or dissolution, helped in part by the ship’s massively polluting engines. I wasn’t going to walk from Texas to see it, so…it was the way to go.
A shout-out to Grammarly for giving my editor a run for his money on the ticklish grammar. (Robin comes out way ahead, given the tricky “Shmuley-speak” of the narrator’s sentence construction.) The last piece in the way is the dust jacket. For some reason, this one’s harder to get down than the first two. But I Shall Prevail. Still looking for a publish date in early October.
Buy A Day at the Zoo
Without further ado, here’s the excerpt:
The scene, from where I stood on the steps of the Followers of Faith Christian Church, looked like the petting zoo of a serial killer. As a Haredi—ultra-Orthodox Jew raised in a Yiddish-speaking neighborhood—this was like watching aliens land. But for an APD homicide detective, the overtime pay was enough to buy a whole week of food. So, keeping peace at a church event was something I would suffer. Hopefully, no one would give me work for mine real job: homicide detective.
On top of the church, at mine back, flew a flag, green and gold in four quarters on a shield, with three purple lambs going across it at a diagonal. Didn’t see this before in the church. You should have it on a flag or something. Like an American flag at a used car dealership it waved, so big it was. Like the church building itself big.
Families disgorged from cars at the far side of a long oval driveway, which circled a bright green grass lawn, each in clothing fancy, as if for services. Not Subsid clothing could I see in the mass.
People walked from there to a fenced pen. Dozens of baby sheep inside it wandered in a broken chorus, crying for their mothers. When not eating the lawn. Their last supper. The smell of manure came and went on the breeze. Already there must have been five thousand people. The event, as listed, said they expected ten. Where outside all those people would fit I wasn’t sure. Certainly not on the grass, which into quarters was split, with clear spaces between for ambulances or police vehicles to quickly get inside the crowd.
A main street ran beyond the driveway. All around the church were low, sooty cement Subsid apartments. All alike, except only with different graffiti on them. The bright spring morning only showed the buildings off with more squalor. Mine grandparents told us stories of before the Amendment, when the president was Nixon. When families could be as small as they wanted. Before being pregnant and not having a baby was murder. Before, when people had things to take or use so as not more babies to bring into the world. Before Subsid became living a life when not enough for people there were jobs. Before the Preborn Investigation Bureau—the PIB—and its investigations of what was in sewers to tell of pregnancy. Before GodMother inquisitions for miscarriage. PIBniks, fech.
The church was like an egg in a nest of sticks. A colossal bubble rising, with columns like Greek temple columns all around it. Below the flag, a cross bloomed at the dome’s crown. Fancier by far than the State Capitol building. Almost exactly like a British royal orb it looked. Only greenish, from the copper roof. And tinged with the soot that covered everything, eventually.
Many of the men in the in the crowded swirl were dressed in white, thin robes with a fabric strip to tie it shut. Exactly like our Jewish kittels. Only on some holidays we wore them—and were in them buried, instead of in a coffin.
I adjusted mine police hat, then tugged at mine service belt. A little tight on me it was. Tight enough to keep mine equipment from falling down. As a detective sergeant in APD’s homicide squad, this for me wasn’t mine usual dress.
“Bored, Shmuley?”
Lieutenant JJ Dawson above me towered by a foot. Mine uniform was just tight; his was custom for him fit. On his face a smile flickered. Dawson was for us detectives the mother hen. Also, our slave driver—and the backup we needed sometimes against the Austin Police Department’s bureaucracy.
“This uniform makes me itch,” I said. Thanks to the Religious Freedom Act, mine usual “uniform” was more traditional: black felt hat with a hatband (no feather, please), black jacket, pants, and shoes. And a white shirt, collar open. Under mine hat a black fabric yarmulke. And under mine shirt a fringed undershirt. Both reminders that we were, from other religions different and held to a high standard. “The penguin suit,” mine mostly charming squad mates called it.
“Welcome to my world.” Lieutenants wore mostly dress uniforms. For all their important meetings to go to. After a moment, down the steps he went to make a circuit. He, like me, was for overtime pay working, so it wasn’t like now he was mine boss.
In the line of parishioners, the men in the families passed money or Subsid vouchers to a man in a white robe with on his head a flat, round, white hat, like a tambourine. A priest, maybe? The priest to the husband or oldest boy gave a small white box.
From the top of the steps I took a break and walked down to the front, near the animals. Nearby was Michael Midas, another Austin homicide detective. Aka, the Golden Boy. With blond hair, too.
He nodded at the zoo. “Do you have this ceremony at Jewish churches too, Myers?”
“We call them synagogues, actually,” I, with a smile, took the sting off the correction. “We ultra-Orthodox Jews, I mean. But no. This is new for me. Is this something your church does?”
His head he shook. “Nah, we just have prayer services a couple of times a week, and a big one on Sunday. Easter’s a longer service, at dawn. This is one of those churches that tries to do things the old biblical way, but for rich folks. Kind of fundamentalists.”
I didn’t know. Not mine biblical way, for sure.
“Although,” he continued, “I’m thinking maybe we won’t have lamb chops this year.”
A bleat came from the large, fenced pen. Three baby sheep got somehow their heads together and tangled in the fencing. A couple of the teenagers, their boots shmeared with animal dung, trotted over to save them from themselves.
Excerpt: A Day at the Zoo
This is the first of three excerpt posts for the Shmuley Myers books. Today, showcasing “A Day at the Zoo.” I’m presenting them first, as there’s a sale on both of my books during July!
The @Smashwords sale is part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale. Be sure to follow me for more updates and links to the promotion for my books and many more! #SWSale2023 #Smashwords
Buy A Day at the Zoo
Below is an excerpt from AD@tZ:
The image of a phone on mine desk slab glowed. I tapped it. “Homicide, Detective Myers.” The two weeks of progress reports on cases that, collectively, said “nothing new,” slid to the corner of the desktop vid. In the cube farm around me the day shift collectively oozed into the homicide squad room, coalescing from the cold, winter rain.
“New hat, Detective?” Inquisitor Jethro Waters of the Preborn Investigation Bureau smiled from the screen up at me. Red hair, green eyes. The first time we’d met, a leprechaun he’d said he was. I hadn’t known they so tall grew. “Everything’s bigger in Texas,” was what he’d said back.
“Yes. And thank you, Inquisitor.” I touched it. Black felt, of course, with the requisite black band, sans feather. Part of the uniform mine counterpart in the GodForce, now on-screen, quaintly called mine “eternal penguin outfit.” Mine religion demanded modesty, which was to wear black pants, a white shirt and undershirt, a tsitsis shirt with on its end fringes, a yarmulke, and a hat. To each a fashion burden of their own. “What can I do for the GodForce this morning?”
Jethro flatly looked at me. Usually a smile he plastered on his freckled face. It went well with the red hair and for getting perps to talk a charm it worked. “Not a social visit, I’m afraid. We caught a two-gen this morning at a zoo.”
A mother and a fetus. “Human, I gather?” “Funny,” he said dourly. He looked drained.
I made a mental note to ask Chaya mine wife to ask his wife if anything was wrong. Wrong beyond his job. “Where and when?”
“This morning. At the Cameron Zoo in Waco. You know, the one with the big kids’ zoo?” he added seeing mine puzzling over that. Side effect of not yet having kids: not knowing all the kid places.
“Waco?”
“Yeah. It’s a bit far from Austin. But our office is lead on the case, and you’re my liaison. Dallas and Fort Worth are all tied up, and Temple’s got their hands full with the food riots up in Killeen and the base.” I pulled up mine hat high enough for mine forehead to scratch.
Which was higher, mine youngest brother of the seven of us, informed me, than a year ago. “Okay. You picking me up?”
“I’ll be out front in ten minutes.”
“Should I have APD send a Forensics unit up as well?”
“Nah,” Jethro said. “The locals say they’ll handle all that. ‘Less y‘all got extra budget?”
“Gut,” I said. “Because we don’t.”
“‘Good,’ Shmuley, the word is ‘good.’ Your Yiddish is showing.”
I felt the blush add to the body heat from mine clothing layers. “Chaya and I were just out of town on a shabbaton. It’s like a religious retreat? I don’t know that I spoke a word even of English the whole time.”
“Well remember, you can always practice your American on me.” And with that, he faded from the desktop and mine virtual pile of paperwork reclaimed its space. I brushed it off into mine electronic filing cabinet and got up.
Austin got cold, sometimes. Nothing like up north, but between the rain and the temperature, mine wool coat was a welcome weight on mine shoulders. I walked over to the lieutenant’s desk. Actually just another cube in the maze. “Heading out with Blessed Right Inquisitor Waters on a case in Waco.”
J.J. Dawson’s polished light brown dome glistened in the industrial light as he lifted his head up from some real-paper paperwork. Paper: sometimes it was like in the last century mine lieutenant was working in. “Bored in town?”
I shrugged. “GodForce liaison case.”
He grunted. “You do a lot of work for them. And you’ve got a case load we pay you for. Looking to transfer?”
I laughed. “No.” No one into GodForce voluntarily transferred. Only into it were drafted young Saved men or women. Sure, some fanatics signed up. Or hungry people. “APD gets paid by the PIB for my liaison services, you know.”
Another grunt. “Are you taking a car?” “No, Jethro’s picking me up.”
“Good,” he said. “Copy me on the report.”
I nodded and headed for the elevators. I used the buffed metal reflection to pull mine shirt cuffs from mine jacket, and then the jacket out from the coat, and arrange the four sets of tsitsis fringes coming out from under mine shirt so they wouldn’t in mine holster tangle. Meh, close enough to good.
In the hallway I waited for the elevator. After the 1970s constitutional amendment making citizens officially from conception, every woman was a potential murderer when their pregnancy didn’t turn into a baby. A year later, the FBI had an ugly stepbrother in the Preborn Investigation Bureau—usually called GodForce.
When to that added not letting women not get pregnant…well, for GodForce there always was business. Between every fetus as a real person treated like, and all the real people now the whole earth crowding, mine homicide detective career was busy.
I waded through a crowd of thin, pinched-looking people dressed in layers of Subsid-wear. They were either protesting an arrest or for food looking to rob someone. I kept to the sides of the ground floor atrium and went out the front doors.
Outside, the air was a wet, cold blanket. Mine wool coat quickly with mist-beaded, tiny glistening pearls. The GodForce cruiser sat by the curb. People a wide berth they gave it as they streamed in and out of police headquarters. Afraid of contamination. Maybe guilty a little feeling. I walked up to the open passenger door. A GodMother sat in the back, primly buckled up in the seat behind Jethro. I nodded to her and got in, putting mine hat in mine lap and flattening down mine kippah. Chaya joked that I was getting near bald enough to need a thumbtack to keep it in place, instead of bobby pins.
“Detective Myers, let me introduce you to our GodMother Inquisitor, Mary Elizabeth, a Sister of Raquel. She’s assigned to this case.”
“Call me Shmuley,” I said, at her nodding. “Detective,” she intoned.
Okay then. I smiled at her. “Any more info other than ‘dead woman in the zoo?’”
“An unborn and a mother, Detective,” the GodMother said. She was a middle-aged Hispanic woman whose wimple swallowed her head. “That is all that concerns me.”
“Vehicle, route for the Waco Zoo,” Jethro to the car said. “Lights and sirens in traffic.”
“Acknowledged,” the car said, and made its GodForce distinctive “bwip-bwip” noise pulling away from the curb. Traffic parted for us like a school of fish from a shark scattering.
Check in next week for the next excerpt!
TPoB Is Off to the Editor!
And the graphic artist. After one last set of comments (thanks, Victor!) and comments from the whole White Gold Wielders group, it’s finally off my desk. Until, of course, it returns with edits.
Coming next: an excerpt.
On Unintended Consequences and Proofs Thereof
I debated, both internally and with friends, about whether to write this. As someone who doomscrolls on this subject in this “alternate reality” America, each article on the progress of creating the reality of the Shmuley Myers universe is depressing. But, also, uplifting, given the strength of politics as regards to bodily agency.
We’re creeping, sometimes leaping, to the point where the Preborn Investigation Bureau is a state, if not federal, necessity. After all, if “personhood” starts at conception, then civil law suits as a trigger or response don’t make sense. One doesn’t use civil suits, for example, as the primary means of handling assault and battery, right?
The abortion issue aside, fetal personhood requires intrusion into personal lives that makes England’s forced boarding of soldiers as a Revolutionary War trigger look trivial. Just as the police patrol for lawbreakers, sewers and toilets would need to be surveilled to look for pregnancies or abortion signs.
However, that’s just the start.
There would need to exist, even on a state-level “personhood” concept, an equivalent of the NCIC, to track people when they’re pregnant, and their “crimes” of abortion. Just like bank robbers. After all, if abortion=murder, we’d need those mechanisms in place.
Now add the kinds of protections afforded to born children: Child Protective Services would be called on a parent who took their kids into a bar to drink. Ditto for having a child hang out while the parent works dangerous tasks, such as working on an oil rig, or being a cop. A woman in this reality would be under the aegis of such a bureaucracy.
The non-birth parent would also need to be under scrutiny. What if they smoke at home? Do drugs? Abuse the birth parent in a way that might endanger the fetus? Use carbon tetrachloride to clean down a greasy bike? Keep unsecured weapons in the house?
And what of punishment, or recidivism? Can a person with a history of fetal personhood termination be allowed contact with their children? Courts have been removing children from dangerous homes for decades.
Either people have agency or not. Cognitive dissonance does not work in a legal framework. If we take away privacy, add Soviet-style snooping, and add data collection, we have created the ultimate “nanny state” in terms of privacy intrusion. We also add a huge financial burden to the economy for no economic benefit.
In a society today where fetuses are coveted no matter the mother’s religion or circumstances, but children are abandoned if they’re beyond the current safety net, we’re doing no one any good. And there, perhaps, is a good place to invest in outrage and remediation.
There’ll be an ongoing set of posts when particularly obtuse news comes out relating to the 13th Amendment.
What do you think?
Launch!
Shmuley Myers, an Austin homicide detective, is back! A Question of Allegiance joins A Day at the Zoo and is ready for ebook preorder as well as for ordering in paperback.
Limits of Privacy and Intrusion
The consequences of deciding what people can do with their bodies are just starting to cascade The slippery slope of how intrusive the state governments will be is just starting to reveal itself. spoiler alert: the slope turns into a vertical wall fairly quickly.
Looks like A Question of Allegiance will be released towards the end of the year. subscribe to the mailing list for a very few emails a month.
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And the consequences begin
I’m not going to make this site yet another unheard voice with a political bent. Detective Sergeant Shmuley Myers has too many real-world situations in my books to deal with for me to get distr—ooh, squirrel!
My ex-brother-in-law is a constitutional law scholar, who’s been involved in several of the pivotal cases put before the formerly sane Supreme Court. Y’all can read or not his article, co-authored, here.
The biological pachinko of complications and odds that is fertilization, implantation, pregnancy, and birth is beginning to unfold. In five years, if there’s no return to sanity in the political machine, we’ll see the swell of children that, now born, are no longer of interest to people who’s goal is to control women.
A Question of Allegiance is getting close, to final typesetting. I still need the back blurb, the right ISBN, etc. Gudrun from Yote Design did an amazing job with the last one, so I’m looking forward to a clean layout to match the great cover.
Robin Seavell did a great job editing the manuscript. Difficult because, as he put it, the manuscript’s “alternative word order.” (Love that phrase.) I’m working on putting his edits in, as well as last-minute tweaks.
I’m still looking at a fall launch. Need to get a publicist, or someone who can execute on a marketing plan, but The Book Comes First.
Publishing In a Milieu Resembling My Fiction
A Day at the Zoo focuses on the subject of the unintended consequences of violating the barrier between church and state. It was intended to show the absurdity of trying to assign citizen to non-living tissue. (If this sounds like “pro-life” or “anti-abortion” flag waving, it’s not: it’s a point of view from someone who doesn’t share the same viewpoint. Also, I have the point of view of someone who, by virtue of his genetic makeup, shouldn’t be telling women one way or another how to deal with their lives.
At any rate, the leak of the deliberations of the Supreme Court has given those looking forward to a Puritanical state a huge jump in energy. Energy that quickly impinges on the rights of others. Other citizens, to be clear.
This has made editing The Property of Blood (Book #3) and writing A Measure of Mercy (#4) akin to climbing a mountain free-style. Added to figuring out how to publicize the existing A Day at the Zoo, and the forthcoming A Question of Allegiance, and I’m stuck in Sisyphussian space.
Fortunately, I’m doing a “learn about publishing” (instead of writing) retreat this weekend, at their house strategically located in the middle of nowhere (actually, beyond it). Starlink and power. And no looking at social media, no matter how hard it tries to stoke my outrage.
Here’s to becoming a marketing guru.