Threat Quality Press

Writing content for the web is trickier than you might think. See, what might read great on a two- or three-page Word document comes off as interminably long when it comes to a web post. Just a formatting issue, but an important one.

We here at Threat Quality Press cope with this as best we can, given that we are Writers, and the words we type out are All Very Important. To keep things down to a managable level, sometimes we have to kill our babies. Sentences that are absolutely lovely and interesting have to get cut out if they don’t serve the immediate needs of the essay we’re writing.

(Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t. Moving on.)

This is a fine policy for our (more or less) daily columns, but we’re also long-form writers. Which means Fiction Friday can be a bit of a hassle. Try writing a worthwhile short story in one page or less. It’s not easy. It can be done, but it’s a difficult form to do well, and frankly…we like words.

So we’re splitting the difference, starting next week.

“Some Velvet Morning” is a fairly short story – five pages on Word. And I’d like to think it reads fairly quickly – in print. But on our site, it’d be long as all hell, comparatively speaking. Even with elegant pictures provided by Google Image Search to break it up a bit.

But “Some Velvet Morning” is a good story, worth reading. And, as luck (or possibly cunning writing skills) would have it, there are decent cliffhangers at the end of each page. So these five pages are going to be serialized, a page a day, next week. And I urge you to read, because it’s a story I’m quite proud of, mixing two of my favorite themes: Fear of the unknown, and desolate western isolation.

It’s a western horror yarn told by a lone man in a saloon, who’s trying to make sense of what he saw out on the range, and terrified of the moment he understands what happened to him. It’s a warning of things to come. Things we don’t have names for yet.

And it will be available, Monday to Friday, right here.

Stop by on Monday, and check in throughout the week. You’ll like it.

(This story has its roots in a psychedelic song by Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra. It’s a magic song. There are signs and signals in it. Hear it at your own risk. You can listen to it here. )

-jkh