A human being wrote this article, and by reading and engaging with it, you are supporting LeDavid DeLouis’s lifelong writing pursuit. Thank you! 😁📚

Run From Grave Acres

by LeDavid DeLouis

The following is an exciting excerpt from the novella…

The door blasted open and off of its hinges as a large man burst into the bedroom shoulder-first. He was a tall, muscular but fat man with a hollowed face, grisly black beard, long hair swept back, and eyes and teeth of drunken yellow. His overalls were dirtied blue denim stained by arcs of blood, and he gripped a long, steely poleaxe with both hands, its dreadful hammer rod and sharp blade perched on the business end. He roared there in the middle of the room like a giant among us before swinging his axe down on the bed that Chris cowered behind, smashing it in half and sending a cascade of feathers from the mattress up into the air.

Chris fired shot after shot from his gilt airsoft pistol, peppering Mr. Graves’ predator face and eyes. The farmer swatted his hand out in front of him, groaned, and yanked his poleaxe out from where it had sunk through the bed frame and into the floorboards. “YOU GOD-DAMNED VARMINTS!”

Wispy shadows danced off and around Mr. Graves’ wretched head as the pellets struck. Emily slid past him, through the bedroom door and into the hall. From behind him, I swung my leg up, punting the groin of his overalls. My leg connected with him meatily, and yet again, shadows trailed from where I struck him. He only hunched slightly from the pain. Chris scampered past him—but Mr. Graves reached out, his thickly corded forearm taut, and snatched Chris by the back of his shirt. Chris lurched forward with his hands between his own neck and his collar, causing his shirt to tear into pieces against Mr. Graves’ vice-like grip. We all stumbled down the hall as he growled from behind us, his brutal poleaxe scraping the floor in a high whine…

Thank you for reading this excerpt of Run From Grave Acres, Dear Reader.

The entire horror novella is available for purchase on Amazon and for free on Kindle Unlimited!

Sincerely, your writer friend,
LeDavid DeLouis

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A human being wrote this article, and by reading and engaging with it, you are supporting LeDavid DeLouis’s lifelong writing pursuit. Thank you! 😁📚

Please enjoy the following short play, Lick vs Twiddle, which is featured in both my play collection PL4YS and the literary magazine Wilder Things Volume 8!

Lick vs Twiddle

by LeDavid DeLouis

Thank you for reading PL4YS thus far, Dear Reader.

The rest of my beloved play collection is available for purchase on Amazon and for free on Kindle Unlimited.

Sincerely, your writer friend,
LeDavid DeLouis

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Thank you for reading Monkey Business thus far, Dear Reader.

The rest of this truly incredible story—my debut novel—is available for purchase on Amazon and for free on Kindle Unlimited.

Sincerely, your writer friend,
LeDavid DeLouis

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My Last Sincerely

by LeDavid DeLouis

Dearest reader,

I know not whether I’m writing at times because it seems in the very act of sitting down to write, some part of me is forever writing afterward, the words I wrote taking on some duplicate essence of me that’s their own and can be conjured again and again at anyone’s whim, at any time and in any place. You need only see how right now, for example, the words I’ve written stand so faux-salutarily before you as a mere facsimile of me and my soul, or what was my soul at the time of my writing, as the words speak to you as though it’s really me that is speaking—though of course, it’s not, because I’m somewhere else doing something else, if not already lying dead, God rest my weary soul. What remains of my writing are only the words, with their act of me talking to you exactly as I might, as I genuinely wish to, but as I am certainly, most certainly am not.

When I published my first novel, I was met with an immense excitement to hold the final product, my dear newborn within my hands and to feel the weight of the pages bearing my words, to see my pseudonym across the front in tall letters and to dig up the picture of my ever younger face hidden in its back. But shortly thereafter when I was parading about my town, I found out what it actually felt like to have published a novel, which was cosmic disappointment upon hearing others who claimed to have already read it!

Cosmic disappointment that made my soul itself heavy and sore as if battered because I’d come to realize it wasn’t me speaking to my audience, and that I had no way of knowing who my audience even was, or what they looked like, nor what they thought of what I’d painstakingly laid before them. No clapping, nor boos nor grunts, but instead, just endless, deathly silence as people far in both time and space quietly read what I’d said. I was suddenly endreadened by the very reality that someone could be reading my work just behind my back, and I wouldn’t even know it, nor sense it! Not at all! Instead, I realized that only the inanimate, lifeless words printed onto the dead pages and bounded and sent merrily away had all of the joy of doing that, and that I, their true originator and the spirit of their seeming liveliness, I was left far off and alone! Left and further encouraged to manufacture more, more and more of the words like some enslaved, downtrodden sower bearing children I’ll never get to meet, or like a peasantly reaper who does all the work of cutting down tall stalks of golden grain but never receives even a copper coin, nor a taste of the bread I’ve sweated so much to create! And worse, my words will continue long after me, mocking me in my impermanence, entertaining and enlightening future generations for what could be millennia, nay, endless eternities for all I know that will come and pass without me. The words will remain and pretend to be me in a way that only I can manifest, and there’s nothing I can do to change their fated course, for there is no way my true being can do what the words do without me sending off tendrils of myself, puppet copies whose strings will eventually be cut away, that must be because I am a man of a present that they are not—because I am a conscious being stuck clinging to my merely mortal coil!

I am a mountain, and my words are a raging river that can only be formed by me and my way of being—but then immediately after I’ve written, my river splits against the further land, the rest of time and space, into irrecognizable creeks seeping out and into everything without any of me really, my true being or my vigor. I am a mountain that’ll eventually be worn to no more than small, unimpressive heaps of sand, and people will see the few things that yet remain such as my words, and they’ll say, “Look, here he is now, just as he was. This is him,” without ever truly experiencing me for what I am—the person I am who lives and breathes and laughs and weeps and wishes to be there, yes—there! Wherever you are and wherever the words find themselves so that I can introduce myself or at least, at least witness the words doing what they do! So I can know who I reach, who hears what I decide to say, how they feel—whether they love or despise it, and whether they read one letter or they read it all over again and again every single night, I’d die, really I would die! I would, without an ounce of hesitation I swear, I would plunge through my right eye and into my fragile mind the most serrated of my kitchen knives, right now, this moment, just so that I might know! Because to be there at that point of conception between me and my audience, I’d buy even at the cost of any, of any pain!

But alas… I am not the words, I cannot be the words, nor can the words be me, and I cannot know where they go nor whose mind they enter nor any effect there they may have be it good or bad or null… I cannot and I shall not ever know—and that realization is something I think needs to be stated on the metaphorical contract all writers sign when they eventually decide, “Yes, I shall write,” whether they write a letter or volumes! Because once they’ve written, just as I have, it is already far, much far too late! All my word-filled pages bounded by countless covers proudly displaying my phantom name are out there across the world, and they’re speaking to my audience exactly as I desire to, pretending to be me in a way that precisely no thing ever can be but me, because nothing but my body and my mind and my soul altogether are truly me. Nothing except my flesh wet with the blood that fuels my thoughts under God’s consent within this infinitesimal present moment!

I write these words now and deliver them to you only to pathetically, paradoxically, hypocritically denounce all the words that have come before and to further announce no more will come hereafter, from now until the end of our eternity, as I’ve decided to reach my audience as myself and myself only, my soul forever after ridden free of these countless ghasts—these parasitizing epistles that pretend to do as I myself hereafter shall! From now on, if you or someone wants to be reached by me, or you or they wish to hear the tales I tell, you or they must come to me, or I shall come to you or them, and I shall introduce myself and my work, and I shall be there! I shall experience you and them too, and I shall at last have righted my writing erring and live the dream I dreamed when I first set out to write!

I’ve already spent far too much of my short life hunched over my desk, scribbling together steep stacks of reams to hold these horrid, hoary words… but now, rather than write any more “writings of me”—the writing only I, only I shall be!

My last sincerely,
The Writtener

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I’m LeDavid DeLouis, and this is the opening of my latest story, The Dead Weight, now available for free on Kindle Unlimited and for purchase on Amazon! Enjoy! =)

The Dead Weight by LeDavid DeLouis

Early July of the year 2167, shortly after the spaceship fleet of the Confederate Americas Space Corporation (CASC) passed the mid-way point on its journey from Earth to Mars.

Beyond the reinforced glass of the cockpit, stars dim and bright shone like pinpricks in a great sable veil. Their small assembly of diverse CASC ships traversed toward it, a colony of lost ants crossing a dark forest.

The sight of that boundless, cold dark beyond often made Captain Jack Harker miss those summer days with blue skies back on Earth. How the clouds looked like islands of Heaven above, and how you could wear the sunshine like a jacket. Like memories of another life, he thought. There’s never a warm, sunny day in space.

He was lying reclined in his space taxi’s leather cockpit seat, re-reading an old paperback copy of A True Story by Lucian of Samosata. The book had been one of his father’s favorites only a few years ago, and the cover displayed calm tribal men with handmade spears and shields, surrounded by giant lunar spiders and their webs. He stroked his short, wiry beard as he read.

Behind him, a doorway slid open, and a droid named “RI-8” entered the cockpit and sat in the leather seat next to Captain Jack’s. The robotic intelligence’s mechanical hands trembled slightly, and his antenna still tickled from the alert it had received from their sTaxi’s communication system.

“I hate to interrupt you, Captain, but HeadVessel is relaying a request to speak with you.”

“What’s he want this time?” Jack sighed. He continued reading, but his eyes glazed over, and any enjoyment that he was having dissipated like smoke in a gust of wind.

“Commander simply said that it is urgent, this time.”

Jack wanted to slam his book down on the control console before him. Instead, he calmly grabbed his bookmark: a photograph of his aged father in uniform, smiling and standing next to the wheel of his ocean cargo ship. Young boy Jack stood at his dad’s side and gazed up at him appreciatively.

Black ink on the back of the photo smeared Jack’s thumb as he handled it. Handwritten ink that read, “I’ll see you soon, son.” He placed the beloved photo back in his book, carefully closed it, and set it aside.

“Let’s hear ‘im then, Eight.”

The droid put his mechanical hand in a tray next to his seat, and an interfacing cable extended out from his wrist and into a port in the tray. A gruff voice spoke from their speakers overhead.

“HV to CJ, ya there?”

“Like always!” replied Jack with feigned enthusiasm.

“Fantastic. Ya’ll being the rats trailing the pack, I need ya to turn around, check out Argo-2, and re-establish comms on their behalf. Someone’s dicking around there.”

“But Argo-2 isn’t mine to ferry. That’s sTaxi Harry’s ship.”

“Don’t care. The Argo’s already Gone-Donnie-Darko, reversed thrust and cut power to its comms, and we don’t know why. There was a small breach to the res. module wall some minutes before, but nothing they can’t fix.”

“No offense, Commander, but I need to stay in position to do my job in case my ships need me. Harry should’ve docked once his Argo started to fall back.”

“He tried, Jack-off! And Harry’s a hell of a lot better at maneuvering than ya on any spaceday, so I don’t wanna hear it. Argo-2 ignored his attempt to dock, but now… now it’s maintaining its thrust a bit behind us all, so it’s your shot, Hottentot.”

“Fine,” Jack said.

“‘Uh, yuh, fine,’” the Commander mocked. “Jesus, Jack, do you even know what’s on that Argo?”

“No. Not my ship, sir.”

“Of course not… the terraformers, Jack. Y’know, only the terraformers! Turn your ass around, dock, then we’ll talk, or you’re spending the next few months in a goddamn Defender gaol!” The speakers went silent. Eight deported from the ship’s interface and wrung his hands.

“Power-tripping fuckhole!” Jack spat. “Why’s he sending us and not a Defender to check it out, anyway?!”

Eight bobbed his head, considering this. “We’ll reach the ship much sooner than the nearest Defender, and Commander seems confident that we only need to re-establish comms on the Argo’s behalf. I don’t disagree with your assessment of the Commander, Cap, but I think it’d be wise to obey our HeadVessel.”

“Obey?” Jack asked, looking at Eight’s steely face and camera eyes. “We’re not dogs,” said Captain Jack…

Thank you for reading! Any feedback left in the comments is greatly appreciated.

You can find the rest of the story via this Amazon link.

I also have a limited number of free review copies available for readers who are willing to provide honest feedback and/or a review, so if you'd like to help me improve the quality of my future releases, please leave a comment or send me a DM that says “I’ll review!” =)