Tuesday, October 23, 2012

White Cat's New Mystery Magazine




White Cat. LLC. will be making announcements soon for upcoming new magazines including a fantasy magazine, science fiction magazine, and a mystery magazine.  I'm going to be editing the mystery magazine myself and leaving the others to the new editors we'll be announcing in the near future.

Keep your eye on White Cat Publications website to see what's coming up.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Insatiable is Now for Sale




Insatiable: the Magazine of Paranormal Desire is now available over at White Cat Publications.  It's loaded up with stories by Nicki Elson, Ellen Denton, Diane Arrelle, Gary McNully, Lillian Csernica, Timothy Friend, Alexis A. Hunter, Jude Marie-Green and E. Catherine Tobler. Book reviews by Erica Cassell and Christina Rundle. The Author Spotlight this issue includes an interview with Zoe Winters by our own Christina Rundle.

Head on over when you can and get a copy.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Starving Writers



A Little Donation Can Feed
A Lot of Kids


See that kid in the picture?

He's hungry.  Lots of kids are hungry these days and so are a lot of adults.  

Don't wait til the holidays to help out.

White Cat Publications, LLC. has partnered with Gleaners Community Food Banks.  Why?  Because writers and artists aren't the only people who starve.  Click on the picture of the kid and you'll go to the website we've set up together so you can make your donations.  It all goes to Gleaners.  And 96 cents goes to food and only 6 cents to overhead.  

So if you can help, click on the kid and done some bread.  No pun intended.  Well, maybe a little one.



Thursday, October 11, 2012

Insatiable





For the next 10 days we'll all be hustling to produce the first issue of Insatiable: the Magazine of Paranormal Desires.

The first issue has wonderful stories, book reviews and author interviews, which is why we ordered a pallet of coffee for the office and set up a line of credit with the local pizzeria.

Monday, October 08, 2012

Episode 32- The Kill List




Voices.

Voices filtered through dark cotton as I drifted back and forth between dreams and the beginnings of consciousness. Pervasive dread prowled my reveries;  hungry night wraiths growled and salivated as they hunted me.  I pressed hard against the veil between sleep and waking, but could not break through.

"How much do we tell him, Ian?"  said a rough-edged voice.

"It's dangerous to leave anything out,"  said someone else.

"He threw himself across Sissy to save her life,"  said another.  It was Mark, I knew that voice.  "I say we tell him whatever he wants to know."

"Hate to burst your bubble," said the first man, "but he landed on her after bouncing off the floor. That's why he was stretched out across her legs.  You ought to have figured that out, cousin."

Drifting, drifting.  Desperately trying to return.  Terrible phantasms slithered through my torpidity.

"People have to know what's happening," said the second voice.  "To defend themselves."

"With what?" said the first voice.  "Besides, the government will seal this place off in a heartbeat if they know what's under their feet.  They're running all over topside right now.  If they weren't so damned blind, there wouldn't be anything left to hide.  We're the ones doing the hiding from everyone.  For their own good."

They were quiet for a moment and I panicked.  I struggled toward consciousness.

"You know the drill, Enid," said Mark.  "Government would lock this place down so they could weaponize everything they find.  But what's down there needs to stay down there.  Messing with that is liking trying to pick the locks on the gates to hell."

"And you two think if this writer writes down everything that happened we can get it out to everyone without the government shutting it down?  You remember what happened in the Middle East?  Who do you think really controls the Internet?  Ebook, print book, it won't make any difference."

"Maybe," said the one named Ian.  "But we have to take the chance.  People have to know.  This guy writes it up, publishes it and then we see what we see."

"Why don't you do that yourself?" askd Enid.

I opened my eyes to a room filled with blurry lights and shapes just as the other gave his answer.

"Because," he said, "I'd like to stay alive. Whoever writes this up will be on a kill list from day one."


Saturday, October 06, 2012

White Cat Magazine Issue 6 is Available!





White Cat Magazine Issue is available for purchase as a pdf with print and mobi/epub versions to follow soon.
Our Fall issue presents stories by John Shirley, John Claude Smith, Christie Maurer, Jamie Mason, and Charles P. Zaglanis, Ferrel D. Moore
Interviews featuring Jason Sizemore and Tom Piccirilli
Reviews by Blu Gilliand and George Beremov
Cover art by William Roberts
Brought to you by White Cat Publications, LLC.
www.whitecatpublications.com





Tuesday, October 02, 2012

Episode 31- The Door to Hell



In my unconscious state, I dreamed uneasy dreams.  I dreamed a door of stretched alien skin.  It permeated the air with the smell of burnt sulfur and bubbling green blood.

Whisperings.

Strange whisperings crawled up my back and into my brain. 

In my fever, I walked through that door as though it were not there.  Sissy was terrified of what waited deep below the tunnels and caves of Townsend Mountain.  It was an instinctive fear magnified by a dark, subconscious knowledge.  I felt it too as my wandering consciousness stepped through that membranous door.  Something disturbingly alien lay hidden behind it.

I stepped into a giant cavern where the air itself was alive with a pale neon blue light.  I saw rows and rows of automatons topped with the glass domes Sissy had described.  Red brass mechanical men stiff and upright with arms veined by cables and jointed fingers that shone like infrared fire.  They were connected by a network of glassine tubes that pulsed with an eerie white energy.  They stood at attention, connected by these tubules to a monstrosity that hung at the sheer rock face at the back of the cavern.  It was suspended twenty feet in the air like a giant spider between two metal pylons by the web of glassine tubules that were affixed to each soldier.

There was no defense against my inner compulsion to comprehend this mystery.  I had to see it.  Had to stare into the face of madness itself.

The air in the cavern, though itself alive with energy that fluoresced the vast empty space with light, seemed undisturbed by any presence for a very long time.  There was no noise in the room save for a soft electrical buzz.  Suddenly the back wall began to glow faintly with a viridian light, which quickly darkened into a purple-black incarnadine emittance so repulsive I felt the desire to turn and bolt for my life.

But my body lay unconscious on the rock floor of a dark tunnel somewhere else.

In my inchoate dream, I instead moved forward, walking through the rows of hulking automatonic soldiers, too anxious to look upward to see the dead souls twisting beneath their crystal domes. The sheer number of these mechanisms filled me with trepidation.  The unreasoning fear that one of them might come to life and recognize me as an intruder, then wake the others.

I kept my eyes on their metal feet, walking up the rows, getting closer to the thing in the center of this evil architecture.  I could not think of who built this army.  The age of their construction was indeterminate.  The fact of these hideous mechanical soldiers was chilling.  But it was the strange creature in the web of tubular light that pushed me too close to the edge of sanity.

Closer.

A moment of weakness.

I looked up at an automaton.  Saw the crystal dome and the fluid wisps that moved beneath it like lost aethyric spirits searching for surcease.  A translucent face, then another writhing within the domes as though twisted by invisible fingers.  Eyes glazed in gauzy effulgence peering back at me.

I screamed.  I ran.

I felt the floor tremor.  Saw the back wall flash raging scarlet  then subside.

I stopped and looked up.  I was only twenty feet from the suspended monstrosity.

It was a lifeless man with a ragged beard down to his chest and wild, frayed hair that hung past his shoulder.   He wore a disintegrating Confederate Civil War uniform of rock washed gray.

His head lolled to one side.  His eyelids closed as though he had been forever asleep.

To my horror, I saw that his legs had been cut off at the knees and both his arms severed at the elbows.  The pulsing glassine tubules attached  to these stumps as though his suspended form was the hideous heart of this network of glassine arteries and veins connecting the mechanical soldiers.

How long his mutilated body had hung there I cannot say.  Who had done this to him and how long ago they had so savagely murdered him I would never know.

I could not imagine his agonizing death, but hoped for his sake it had been mercilessly quick.

My nerves had reached their limit.  It was time to leave.

At just that moment his eyelids popped open and I saw that his eyes were silver slits of bright metal, as though someone long ago had dug them out and replaced them with platinum silver crescents.

He opened his mouth and screamed shattering fusillades of fury.