Mindjack, Donald Melanson’s cool webzine, is running an excerpt from Eastern Standard Tribe, the novel I’m working on at the moment. I hit the 20,000 word mark this morning, and plan on finishing it by Christmas.

Art’s car was running low on lard after a week in the Benelux countries, where the residents were all high-net-worth cholesterol-conscious codgers who guarded their arteries from the depredations of the frytrap as jealously as they squirrelled their money away from the taxman. He was, therefore, thrilled and delighted to be back on British soil, Greenwich+0, where grease ran like water and his runabout could be kept easily and cheaply fuelled and the vodka could run down his gullet instead of into his tank.

He was in the Kensington High on a sleepy Sunday morning, GMT0300h — 2100h back in EDT — and the GPS was showing insufficient data-points to even gauge traffic between his geoloc and the Camden High where he kept his rooms. When the GPS can’t find enough peers on the relay network to color its maps with traffic data, you know you’ve hit a sweet spot in the city’s uber-circadian, a moment of grace where the roads are very nearly exclusively yours.

So he whistled a jaunty tune and swilled his coffium, a fad that had just made it to the UK, thanks to the loosening of rules governing the disposal of heavy water in the EU. The java just wouldn’t cool off, remaining hot enough to guarantee optimal caffeine osmosis right down to the last drop.

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