A Word Please

Pablo D’Stair uses words like an artist uses a paintbrush. He is gifted, driven, fascinating and either incredibly generous or a little crazy. I say this because he loves to give his work away to anyone and everyone who wants to read it. Pablo’s latest project is a literary novel written in serial form, with each completed section then being offered as a free ebook. Curious? Read on…

The following is an excerpt from VHS, a literary novel by Pablo D’Stair being released in various e-formats, absolutely free-of-charge (and in limited edition print-editions-by-part through giveaways). Information on the project, including links to what is currently available, can be found at www.vhsbook.wordpress.com.

I took a shower, the heat of the water doing nothing for my shoulder ache — I even tried to make the spray very very cold instead of very very hot, but it just did nothing, the same nothing.

Anyway, for whatever reason I remembered a bone I still had to pick a bit with certain mathematical properties — specifically the business of ratios — and stood there, whirling over some point in my mind. A girl I’d known called Annabelle had been really proud, on one occasion, of the fact that she could say that her lover was exactly three times as old as she was –he was sixty and a linguistics teacher at some community college (which really sounded dreadful to me, but she said it like he wore a badge and could enforce city ordinances) and she was twenty, had took a semester of his class and wound up his mistress, though it was evident she was quite smitten with him or at least infatuated with the whole situation because at times she would deeply, wistfully ruminate on how she really had so much power because she could utterly destroy this man’s family — to her way of thinking, at the time, this must have meant he really felt something for her, to risk such intimacy and blah blah blah, all manner of chop logical this and that.

I have no idea why, but the ratio of her-age to his-age stuck in my head and it one day occurred to me that this fact — the three times age difference — was only true fleetingly, that, in fact, by the time she was forty he would be eighty and so would only be twice as old as her.

It just seemed like a mistake had been made somewhere, mathematically — not in the math of their ages, but in something more fundamental. Nothing changed the fact that they would remain always forty years apart in age, so I just stood on principle that the ratio of their age should also stay the same. And I wouldn’t hear otherwise. I even looked up various dictionary definitions of “ratio”, searching for some loophole that would allow for such (as I felt it) a discrepancy, some language like “ratios are basically meaningless and should never be applied to any serious thing” but there was nothing like that — not in math books, either, math books just said what ratios “were” (or rather “are”) but ignored, probably very much on purpose considering things from their point-of-view, any intellectual debate on the “idiocy of their constitution”.

By the time Annabelle turned eighty, her lover (or former lover by then, perhaps) would be one hundred twenty and so only one third older than she and from there it got even more inane, like it was obvious the numbers were getting closer and closer even though they weren’t.

I toweled off and brushed my teeth, using my brother’s type of toothpaste on purpose, wondering, as always, where he’d even heard of the stuff, wondering if he gave time and thought to dental hygiene, because I sure didn’t, and if he did, what had prompted that, when had it started?

It was snowing outside when I got to the kitchen and the snow was already sticking to car doors — melting some and sticking some — and one of the neighbors was already out there on their walkway with a bag of sand, like this is something they’d had early information on, the snow, and had been waiting, waiting with a bag of sand. The neighbor lit up a cigarette when finished, littered the bag on purpose out in the middle of the parking lot and stood there defiantly, daring someone like me to tell them what was what, to call them out over their selfishness and just plain crude nature.

You can read more excerpts on the VHS website: www.vhsbook.wordpress.com
And you can download part one of VHS as a free ebook on Smashwords: www.smashwords.com/books/view/81745

You are also invited to sample and download Pablo’s Trevor English series free. Here’s the website: http://normancourt.wordpress.com
And to download these books free from Smashwords: www.smashwords.com/profile/view/PabloDStair

Here are some of his other books on Amazon:

I hope you’ll take the time to explore Pablo’s writing. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading.

Tags: free ebooks, Free Literary Fiction, free smashwords ebooks, indie authors, Indie Authors On Amazon, Indie Literary Authors, Literary Fiction, Novel Excerpts, Pablo D'Stair, Ratios, Serial Fiction, Trevor English series, VHS: A Novel