Excerpt from my next attempt at a novel: 

I Woke up Dead 

 Burning sky / Sinking Ship

Soon after we arrived on the bow, the Queen stood next to Starbuck and stared at the same thing we were looking at.  Her long, dark hair blowing in the wind made her look like an artwork by Frank Frazetta.  She raised her scepter as in defiance to the alarming site in front of us all. 

Starbuck then pointed to an arch of yellow light on the horizon, “There seems to be our destination.  We noticed it just before you came on board, and we appear to be sailing into it.”

I squinted at the odd light.  It seemed to be almost dancing in the water far away.  Starbuck handed me a pair of binoculars, “Here. These fancy optics can get your eyes quite close, indeed,” he paused then, “Just a warning, what you see may be agitating and extremely troubling.” 

I put them up to my eyes.  Agitating and extremely troubling, indeed!  My eyes beheld what looked to be a swirling mass of fire far up ahead on the horizon.  It was if someone made the sun proportionally smaller and so very much closer and hung sunk it on the far horizon.  It was a gigantic arch of fire. 

“Well, that’s just the sunset, right,” I hopefully asked. 

“No, the sun arises on the port side and sets on the starboard.  If this were truly earth, our direction would be due south.  More interestingly, have you ever seen a sunset which displaces so little light?” 

I looked through the field glasses again, and it was as the blackness of space entirely ate up the light from the fire.  It’s almost as if there was no physical light from the fire at all.  In any reasonable universe that would be impossible.  Yet the normal laws of physics do not seem to apply here.  That’s when I noticed something even more troubling, I could spot thousands of small dots aflame in my lower field of vision.  It made me realize those were multitudes of ships sailing right into the flaming abyss. 

Starbuck’s voice took on a strange, deeper timbre then, “Behold, the inferno!” 

“Achitoo!  Pattooe!  FRUCKERS,” exclaimed the Queen.  Yeah, I with you there, Queenie, baby.  FRUCKERS, indeed. 

Okay, amendment to the amendment:  I am stuck on a ship with professor muttonchops from the late eighteen hundreds and his boss Queen Nefertiti who looks like a cross between my ball-crusher literary agent and Jackie Brown, and now person non-grata me, and apparent pawn of a deity is sailing directly into perditions flame.  Well, okay then.  Yatzee, it is.