It's THE FUTURE! (And a teaser for Break and Enter)

Break and Enter, you say? Yes, that's the official-for-now name of the M/M cyberpunk novella co-written by me and Aleksandr Voinov that I was talking about in my last post. Complete at 25K words in four days. Mostly the right words, too, and more or less in the right order. Not even bad sex gets finished that fast. I'm still not sure how it happened, but I blame Aleks. If he suddenly goes missing, nobody look in my basement. I would never, ever kidnap him and make him help me crank out a novella a week. Seriously, what kind of person do you think I am?

Oh . . . Right.

Today is editing. By tomorrow we'll have the query letter and synopsis (whose writing I'm currently avoiding by doing this blog post). Six days from conception to submission to our first choice publisher. Not sure we'll be their first choice though. "I can just see the rejection letter now," said Aleks: "You made two editors throw up."

But honest, it's a love story. I promise. In THE FUTURE!

As for THE FUTURE!, it's become my new answer to everything. "Where's the cat, honey?" "In THE FUTURE!" "What's for dinner?" "THE FUTURE!" (As you can see, sometimes it works better than others.) One of the many wonderful and joyous things about co-writing is the discussions that come up in the process. Aleks and I were working on Break and Enter in Google Docs, which meant we could both edit the same document at the same time. When he was writing a passage, I could sit back and watch the smexins appear on the page like magic. And comment on them relentlessly in the document's chat box. Toward the climax (of the story, you pervs!), Aleks wrote a line about our hero getting to break our villain's expensive flat-screen TV. I immediately changed this to holo-screen, and reminded Aleks (say it with me now), "It's THE FUTURE!" Since then, it's sorta stuck.

So, yeah. I'm sure you cared about that much more than this teaser I've delayed posting so I could share our story with you. But just in case you didn't, here's the teaser below the jump:

Bear spent his evenings working on Cyke’s system, trying to make it as reliable and maintenance-free as possible. Cyke would lie on his belly on Bear’s bed, resting on his elbows, cable connecting from his skull jack to Bear’s terminal. Most times, Bear would clean up lines of scrambled code, but some parts of Cyke’s system were so far above his head he could only explore them, try to figure them out.

Tonight was the clot-bots, a familiar if deeply complex bit of ‘ware. He edited the last line of communication code between the bots and Cyke’s platform chip, and then, satisfied with his progress for the night, decided to indulge his curiosity. He pulled up a mystery function he’d been wondering about for a while.

“Shit,” Cyke muttered from the bed, and let his head hang, breathing harshly through his nose.

“You okay?” They’d agreed that Cyke would warn him if he did something painful or obviously wrong, but he wasn’t sure he could trust the mule-headed bastard to remember or admit it.

“. . . yeah.”

That groan wasn’t pain, not with that expression on his face. Bear sent in another ping, and this time Cyke gasped.

. . . Okay. This was interesting.

He tried approaching it from another angle, but the result was the same. Cyke gasped again, fisted his hands and gritted out, “Stop.”

“Am I hurting you?” Bear asked, knowing damn well he wasn’t.

So yeah, okay, sometimes he could be a real first-class bastard.

Cyke glared at him over his shoulder. “Just leave it alone,” he said. Bear swore he heard a hint of question, a hint of pleading in those words. And maybe something else, too.

“Only if you tell me why they’d do this to you.”

Cyke was silent a long moment, cheeks flushing with embarrassment, or perhaps anger.

Finally, he said, “Focus.”

It took Bear a second to realize that wasn’t an order, but the answer to his question.

“No room for ‘urges’ on the battlefield,” Cyke added with clear disdain. And damn if that wasn’t the most Cyke had said about himself in the whole five days he’d been here.

Bear looked at him. Looked at the code block, simple, so easy to excise. Back to Cyke again. Said, “You’re not on the battlefield anymore.”

He deleted the code.

The next bit's boring--just some wildly hot sex. Aren't you glad I saved you the bother by stopping where I did? :-)

That's it for today, but before I go, indulge my curiosity if you would. Who here has read some hot M/M cyberpunk? Who hasn't but would love to? Got any recommendations? Writing B&E has really whet my appetite for some smokin' cyber-lovin' goodness!