Been through the social media carousel and now you get to hear it as well! I placed in the top 16 finalists for the Gutsy Great Novelist Page One Prize! It’s a great honor to be selected among all the other finalists, and I’d like to extend a hearty congratulations to the top three winners, whose first pages are truly excellent. Check out those, mine, and all the rest at Gutsy’s Page One Prize page.

The novel that this first page comes from, Those Who Sleep In The Dust Of The Earth, is so close to being completed that it’s actually sort of immoral that I’m not finishing it right now. It will be done probably this week and then revisions will take as long as revisions usually take. It’ll go into the querying trenches all too soon.

Those Who Sleep In The Dust Of The Earth is, at it’s heart, a riff on the old tale of Bluebeard the pirate king, a French folktale that was collected originally in Histoires au contes du temp passé in 1697. Bluebeard, alternately a pirate king or some other form of rich and powerful noble, has been married six times before. Each time, his wife has mysteriously vanished. He marries for a seventh time and the young woman comes to live with him at his vast and opulent palace. The new wife is informed that she has the run of his estate, even while he is gone, and can go into any room in the place except for one. She is forbidden to ever set foot in that one room. Eventually, of course, curiosity overwhelms her, and she goes into the room to find the murdered, bloody corpses of the previous six wives.

In Dust Of The Earth, Bluebeard is a billionaire – near-trillionaire – who made his fortune building the logistics for the European Space Agency to reach for the stars. The wife is an indie folk star, Sasha Brown, who decamped from California to Kansas City to get some inspiration for a new direction for her music. What she found, unfortunately, was an intifada of extremists looking to carve out a fundamentalist homeland in Missouri during the slow collapse of the United States in the near future. She ran for weeks alongside her new girlfriend Mia, only to finally be found out and taken prisoner. For her alleged crimes against morality, she is executed.

And then comes to in the sprawling island estate of our billionaire, Aaron Flynn, who is, to put it mildly, something of a fan.

Are his motives pure? Of course they aren’t. Like Bluebeard’s new wife, though, Sasha is given the star treatment as a top guest at the Flynn Manor – except for any door marked with a certain symbol, which she cannot go into. What’s behind that door is intensely valuable, though, enough that people will pay vast sums of money to find the secrets out. Enough that Flynn would kill to keep it hidden.

Getting a nod for the first page of this book is a good sign!