Blowing Up
by Biff Mitchell
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GENRE: Speculative Short Stories
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BLURB:
Welcome to the World You Live In.
It’s a mess. It’s diseased, polluted,
over-populated and too close to the sun. But it’s all we have and we’re losing
it fast, so we may as well have a good laugh before the sun reaches out and
reclaims us.
In Blowing Up, Biff Mitchell shakes the foundations
of a world gone bad with outrageous dollops of inappropriate humor. Nothing is
sacred, nothing is spared. Nothing is safe in a world accumulating too much
ammunition for too few targets.
So welcome to Mitchell’s world of ghosts who have
to get the last word, ball-busting muses who torture for the hell of it, a
woman who sheds rabbits from her eyes instead of tears, an office of
petty-minded workers fused together in a nuclear holocaust and a world where
you write grammatically correct essays or starve to death.
But there will be laughter.
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Excerpt Two:
From Still Life with Sax and Muse
(Published in Rose & Thorn Literary Journal. 2014)
It was a quiet afternoon at Molly’s Cafe. Outside, gray rain sliced through the air like tiny hatchets. Behind us, a lone sax player ground out something bluesy with all the gravel and grit of a break-hardened heart. Across from me, Jo’s eyes, as usual, were green, a green that could feed forests.
She wore a black turtleneck with matching black tights divided by a red swatch of tartan skirt. I tried to keep my eyes on her eyes, but the green threatened to swallow my soul and toss me around in the tides of her green forever. I focused my eyes on a couple of dust motes arguing about semantics and existentialism somewhere in that distance between her green eyes and her long legs, those legs that flowed up into an unimaginable playground, into … I refocused my eyes on the dust motes.
“Do you like my sweater?” she said.
“Huh?” I said.
“Do you like my sweater? You haven’t taken your eyes off it. Are you thinking dirty thoughts again, you pathetic literary pig?”
Damn dust motes, arguing right in front of her breasts.
“Oh, uh … yeah. Nice sweater.” The plan was to be cool. “I’ve always liked large sweaters,” I said.
The plan wasn’t working.
The two dust motes were cooler than I was.
She smiled. “You’re blushing, pig.”
“Something caught in my eye.”
“And it’s cutting off your air supply, goat?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” I said. “Air supply.”
“How’s life … boar?” she said.
“I haven’t slept in three days,” I said. “I drink too much. I can’t write anything anymore. I dream about grabbing spoons and stabbing people. I found God rummaging through the bottles and boxes in my medicine cabinet. He looked hungry and confused. There’s a dead rat in my refrigerator. It sees everything. Its whiskers quiver. It asked me where I go.” I slumped my head.
“I don’t know where I go.” I looked up past Jo’s black sandals and black forever legs and dazzling tartan and past those damned pretentious motes and into the deep green seas of her eyes. “Other than that, I’m fine. And you?”
“I made love to John Lennon last night.”
I nodded. “Big night.”
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Biff Mitchell is a speculative fiction/humor writer living in Atlantic Canada. He’s managed to trick publishers and editors on three continents into publishing his novels and shorts stories. For ten years, he tortured aspiring writers with his Writing Hurts Like Hell workshop taught through the University of New Brunswick.
Website
https://www.facebook.com/BiffMitchellWriter
Blog
https://biffmitchell.wordpress.com/
@biffmitchell
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GIVEAWAY :
Biff Mitchell will be awarding an autographed copy of Murder by Burger to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
I love the cover and the excerpt.
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