Gev Sweeney: Stories & Stuff

Now that the "Burnable Cities" promo is over, I hope you'll take a gander at some of my other work. I'm not a genre writer, telling the same tale over and over. I "see" a story and I tell it. Sometimes a story will be my answer to a challenge to do something different to a trend. For instance, "Salutaris" came about after I was challenged to take on the vampire genre. And "The Prodigal's Psalm" was the result of a dare to write something hotter than "Fifty Shades of Grey," but not as graphic and with a surprise ending. "Acquaintance," a Regency, was comic relief after my first book, "The Scattered Proud," a coming-of-age historical set in post-Revolutionary France. "Acquaintance" is also a novella. So are "Ferial Day" and "Master Warrick," two ventures into alternative history that have surprise endings. I like the shorter form, which compels a writer to say more within a s

Thank you to everyone who downloaded "For the Burnable Cities" during the free promo yesterday! That story was a labor of love. I hope you like it!

The Herald’s new home consists of one long room with heavy, roll-top desks for the editor, writers and proofreaders toward the front, and compositor tables and presses behind. The desks and tables were already on the premises, moved from storage in cellars around the works property. The presses are taking shape. Workers tighten screws and check levels as they add piece after piece. Their work shirts and hair cling to them in a paste of sweat and bodily oils. They blink their eyes and arch their brows and shake their heads in an attempt to rid their eyes and minds of the sensory mold of exhaustion. Not even Salton is all here. Despite his rest and sense of responsibility, he too is fuzzy. It hurts to think. He’s irritated by one man’s insistence on examining every single part of the presses again and again “just to be sure.” His rising impatience may account for his response to the sight of a man and woman stepping through the door. FitzRobert, the works’ head clerk, shows a young woman

   Silas leaves dissent up to others who try their luck—unmarried workers who are willing to be cast out. Word is they think they can do more to help the Christian cause as outlaws, hiding by day and sneaking from place to place by night, preaching in places known only to Christians on the run. But those who left early in the revolt were never heard from again. Nobody knows what became of them. Word is they were captured and placed into the dormitories in the city. But word also is that the dormitories are being demolished; The Seat is shipping unpermitables to other parts of the country. But without the means to know what is happening elsewhere, word lapses into supposition—the guesses that are lies in the absence of truth. The feeling is one of despair. “What kind of nation have we become?” Ralph Pearson asks one night over coffee and cake. “This didn’t happen overnight. People used to be able to discuss things in the open: politics, differences in religion, different approaches to r

THE AIRY slap of bare feet upon a marble floor, the gentle clap of a hand upon naked flesh, the sigh of a gardener’s trowel impaling the earth: all say to me, “Ioannes.” He’d been the talk of Alexandria long before I knew him. People yawned when the governor of Aegyptus hosted games for victories over minor enemies in obscure parts of the Roman Empire, but they all went mad for the briefest glimpse of Ioannes. I had no idea why. He was a dancer, and I had no interest in dancing. I was a slave—an embroiderer and flax spinner for the wife of an advocatus, a counselor of law, in the Greek Quarter. My concerns, my indulgences, my interests were invested in the desires and needs of those who, at their whim, could get rid of me as quickly as they had bought me. But Ioannes noticed me, and I became the first of many he would call away from lives which, like mine, were renderings of incarceration, with an inventive mess of colors and designs more befitting the tomb of an ancient pharaoh

IN the spring of 1797, Papa brought me to Philadelphia for what would be my last visit to our house. As we sat over dinner in the garden, he revealed the Church was opening a mission for expatriates in Paris. Because the French government at that time banned Christian denominations, the mission would be discreetly centered at an orphan asylum, which the presiding bishop himself had asked Papa to administer. For the second time in four years, my father was separating himself from me with what I perceived as a passion that approached willful neglect of his only child. I regarded him as if he had just jumped from a hot-air balloon without a parachute. “Papa, this is your home! This is my home! How can you leave it? How can you leave me?” Slowly, he cut his meat into tiny pieces. “Sweetie, I’d like you to understand that we who have decided upon this mission are neither pious men who wish to put on a show of devotion to God, nor cowards who wish to run from the city. Remember what

R ICHARD ironed his nostrils with the back of his hand. All eyes around his desk looked elsewhere. You didn’t correct Richard’s less sociable antics. Not if you wanted to find your tires still stiff and plump when it was time to go home. The New Guy, who didn’t know better, acted like all the other New Guys on their first day at the collection agency: Solicitous. Brainlessly solicitous. “Jeez, Dick, I’ve got some Benadryl tablets on me, if you want to shut off that tap.” The New Guy yelped and spun around as the stapler bounced off his forehead. “Call me that again, and I’ll give you a dick up your ass. Sheila, you got a mirror in your cosmetics case? I want him to see the hole in his head. He looks like a teacher’s aide punctured by toddler demon seeds. You’re supposed to intimidate a client into paying their bills, not make them laugh their scrotums off. Who was I sending you to?” New Guy swore as Richard yanked the paper from between his fingers, leaving a skinny red st