Actual Excerpt and a little about Kevin Shamel

Okay, gang...sorry, I meant to post this yesterday but was having a few problemos! Here's an excerpt from the first few pages. Enjoy...and talk amongst yourself.
Oh! And another title to pay attention to: Rotten Little Animals by Kevin Shamel. It comes out the same time. Rotten Little Animals is about a little boy captured by animals (cats, dogs, squirrels...zombie cats) and terrorized - with terrorist style videos, etc. You can find information at Kevin's website...www.shamelesscreations.com
Till we meet again...







1.


In the beginning there was…
…wait a sec! The god was surprised. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. There should be nothingness, a blank slab that would allow him to indulge in his creativity. Yet here he was, and here too were characters, animals, sweeping landscapes, and everything seemed drenched in epic proportions.
“Well shit,” said the god, blushing. It was no big deal to use colorful vernacular when you were speaking into the void. When there were already creations wandering the world it was considered unprofessional for a deity to use such language. You channeled that sort of behavior into the characters below, and filled them with guilt about it referring to them as sinners. “I suppose I’ll have to make do with what’s been handed to me.”
Disappointed as he was, he took the blow like a god should—never questioning, never complaining, and never thinking twice before acting.
He surveyed the world playing out beneath him. “Well, this is just tragic,” he said. Then he went to work.

2

There were hiding places and then there were hiding places. Sure there wasn’t much difference on the surface. The difference lay in the inflection. Thank gods for inflection.
Hiding places were the nooks and crannies that angsty teens oft hide themselves while looking at a naughty picture or succumbing to the whims of peer pressure. Hiding places were brought out of a little more desperation. A fugitive on the lam seeks the carcass of an expired deer to use as a hiding place. Or, a small Jewish girl who is forced to push her entire family into nothing more than a closet to hide from knot-zees—now that’s a hiding place. I wasn’t sure why the thought of goose-stepping knot-zees popped into my head. Horrible vision, that.
I’d chosen to hide the prince in a hiding place. After all, if you were looking to hide a member of the royal family (and perhaps a known fugitive) you needed a hiding place. A regular hiding place just wouldn’t do. Royals were always hiding dark secrets in any convenient nook or cranny in the castle. Lots of skeletons in the closets.
I’d chosen the barn because it was the last place anybody would seek out a prince. Princes had standards to uphold. It got worse the more princes there were. While the King may have stooped to being seen in such a rat hole, the Prince was forced to be far superior to his predecessor. And on, and on, and on.
The barn was perfect.
It was a shoddy little building that appeared to be put together by an individual of mental deficits. The building may have been a sturdy structure at one point, but now it was nothing more than a wooden skeleton. The breeze that blew over the countryside forced the barn to sway and creak, each creak sounding like a suicidal cry for help.
I composed myself. The Prince was…well, he was…needy. The fact that he was my college roommate aside, the Prince had changed into something…different. He’d treated me as nothing more than cow dung as I succumbed to his bidding. There was the belligerence in his mood. There was the abuse, both physical and verbal, that I’d never seen exhibited by my good prince. And of course, there was the over indulgence in drugs that had eaten craters throughout his brain.
The newest development—and the most disturbing by far—was that my lord, Prince Hamlet of Elsinore, had claimed he was turning into a cockroach. Metaphorically, yes, he was becoming an absolute vermin. But the prince meant the claim literally.