Love Bytes says welcome to author George Seaton visiting today to share some info about his release “Whispers of Old Winds”.
My short story, “Whispers of Old Winds,” appeared in the Dreamspinner Press 2015 Advent Calendar. I expanded the short story to novel length, providing a more thorough view of the main characters, Sam Daly and his husband Michael Bellomo, and the secrets of Pine County, Colorado—a place where magic exists with quiet impunity.
Release date: December 16, 2016
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Here’s the blurb: Sheriff Sam Daly, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and his husband, Michael Bellomo, have made a life for themselves in sparsely populated Pine County, in the Colorado mountains. Sam oversees the small sheriff’s department, and Michael sells his paintings and tourist items out of his shop, Needful Things. From the beginning, Sam had known Michael possessed gifts: the ability to see and hear things Sam cannot.
When a report of a body in a massive snow-filled depression up a mountainside sends Sam and his deputy, Digger, to investigate, Sam struggles to reconcile the existence of skinwalkers in Pine County with the world he’s familiar with. Michael, though, deals with this reality through his art, and through the mysticism he’s been gifted. Sam’s effort to discover what is happening cause him to examine his life with Michael from the time they first met. The inevitable conclusion might be that he’ll never understand the mysteries of the mountains, but for the sake of Michael and their love, he’ll have to embrace them.
When I reach town, I pass by Michael’s store and glance at the sign above the door. He asked me what I thought he ought to name the store, and I told him I didn’t know but that the name ought to reflect what he had inside of it.
“Okay,” he said.
Two days before he opened the store, he dragged me from the office, and we walked across the street. “What do you think?” he said, pulling off the paper covering from the sign he’d put above the door.
“Oh, Michael…. Needful Things? You really think…?” I’d then looked at his face and saw his smile and nodded. “Okay. Kind of a gimmick?”
“No.” He’d shaken his head. “Yeah, I borrowed it from Stephen King, but…. That’s what I have in there, Sam—needful things. They’re… necessary things. Better than Michael’s Curios. Or better yet, Pretty Things by Michael.”
“Oh, I like that one—Pretty Things….”
Now, as I pass Michael’s store, I notice the Closed sign on the door. He hasn’t returned to work since the incident up the mountain. It’s been a week, but he’s been so quiet, so creepily quiet since then that I’ve avoided discussing it with him. The night of our party, after everyone left and we went bed, he lay with his back to me, my arms around his chest. We spoke about what was on his mind, namely the picture he’d painted that presaged what had happened to Digger and me at the bowl.
“It scares me, Sam,” he said, and I felt his body jerk slightly when he said it. “I mean…. What if the other paintings I do that come from my imagination and not from a photo have some…? What if they’re just representations of things that are actually going to happen sometime in the future?”
“No, no,” I whispered, kissing his neck. “It was all just coincidence. It was—”
“It was more than that. And I think you know it.”
I thought about what he said for a moment and couldn’t find an adequate response. Of course it was more than just coincidence. The picture had been too right, too accurate to be just some fluke.
“I guess I do know that.”
“What if I sell a painting to somebody and something bad happens to them just like what happened to you and Digger? What if—”
“Michael, how many paintings have you done that show something bad happening?”
“A few I guess.”
“But even the one you did of Digger and me could be interpreted a number of ways. The painting itself, unless someone knows exactly what it depicts, could be seen as just two guys being intimate.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not what I painted. That’s… I’ve got to think about all this. I’m not going to open the shop for a while.”
“Okay,” I said. “No tourists hanging around anyway. Take your time.”
“I need time, Sam.”
“I know it.”
We didn’t make love that night. I thought it would have been wrong to even suggest it.
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About George
George Seaton’s short stories, novellas, and novels capture contemporary life mostly set in the American west—Colorado and Wyoming in particular. He and his husband, David, along with their Alaskan malamute, Kuma, live in the Colorado foothills just southwest of Denver.
Website: http://www.gmseatonauthor.com/
Facebook: facebook.com/george.seaton
Twitter: @GeorgeSeaton