Books Worth Reading
Back in 1928, off-planet operators were still booking lemur folk into the historic Wild West for steak dinners and trail rides, but the proposition was on shaky ground.
America’s first interstate highway had been routed straight through the Dakotas. The Lazy L Ranch, 20 miles north of Black Rock, was not as discreet a place to land spacecraft as it used to be.
Continue reading “Folksy!”
A wave of Italian emigration to Mexico in the late 1800s had left its mark on the village, particularly at the center. The church and courthouse, on opposite sides of the square, were Spanish. Everything else was Italianate except the band shelter — aluminum poles, sandbags, nylon ripstop roof, circa big-box warehouse store.
The sun descended below mountaintops, throwing shadows into valleys. Streetlamps blinked on. Shops lit signs. The town square came alive with hanging lights and illuminated fountains.
A gypsy jazz band from Hungary filed onstage; guitar, upright bass, clarinet, and a gym-bag percussionist equipped with snare drum, high-hat, washboard, block and cowbell.
Continue reading “Preview!”
Kind of. You be the judge.
I’ve been fooling around with an AI video generator. That’s the long and short of it. Enjoy!
One thing you can always count on seeing in a Sci-Fi action show is flying objects. Architecture is no exception, and why would it be? The day after anti-gravity is developed, somebody will start building a flying house.
I built my first one in The Illusion of Gravity. According to the story’s hero Rivan Saraf, “The only large shapes Iron Arrow could form in those days were cylinders and spheres. So that’s what you got when you ordered a flying house — a flattened tube fused to a flattened sphere.”
Continue reading “The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd”
Notes and Treats As a printable tabulated form or checklist, the Manuscript Assessment Criteria presented by SoundEagle🦅 below can assist writers in evaluating and inspecting their own works (either by themselves or with a group of readers) before submitting their manuscripts to publishers, and also during successive edits after the previous submission(s) and before the […]
📝 Manuscript Assessment Criteria ☑️
Reblogged from SoundEagle. Insightful!
Our first import to Unreal Engine 5.4 from Blender 4.1.
Small steps. You get that, right?
On October 16, an unknown person registered an Internet domain associated with a business I once owned, activated an obsolete email address, and used the credential to destroy my Facebook accounts.
What a shock that was and, as you can imagine, Facebook doesn’t seem to care.
So, I’m off Facebook, perhaps permanently.
Just for fun, imagining a world in which you cared about what I’m up to on a daily basis, where would you like to find a record of that? Instagram? TikTok? YouTube? Elsewhere?
In the meantime, find me on X at @johndyerwrites
Image by MV Studio MV from Pixabay
It’s anyone’s guess how far this project will go. It could turn out to be a task better left uncompleted, at which point a loss of interest will be prudent. But, in the meantime, construction of my Loyal House 3D model is entering its third year and progress is being made.
I have not had my nose to the grindstone. The Blender file has languished since production of cover art for Ghosts of Ancient Vidura.
But, with an unfinished novel advancing toward publication, an author’s thoughts naturally turn to matters of self-promotion. One-minute video clips. Drama. Suspense. Spectacle. Better, perhaps, than the last time I tried it.
Continue reading “Ship in a Bottle”
A first draft book description for Maroli Tango. Comments welcome.
Sometimes, no matter what’s going on, you have to make it about you.
Earth, 2026 — an alien civilization’s backwater territory; an epicenter of impending catastrophe. In fifteen years, a solar event will scorch the planet. Coming up after that, an ice age looms. Two million light years away, the Unseen have demonstrated the means to settle a grudge.
United States President Carmen Benequista is tired of dealing with it. Embattled, worn out, she is visited in a dream. Her deceased husband says, “Find someone to share your life while it can still make a difference.”
It’s not a rocket science proposition. Her steady companion, Space Mafia kingpin Brandon Lopez, 15 years her junior, is waiting for a signal.
Meanwhile, first-contact survivor Mason Fowlkes, soon to be 16, is growing up fast as an apprentice Ship’s Mechanic aboard the Anye migration vessel Anuraga. The work life is great; the home life not so much.
French Air Force lieutenant Marie Jourdaine is on the rebound after a brief stint as the world’s youngest female fighter pilot. Things are kind of working out, and kind of not.
Right there in the middle is a legion of consciousness-elevated maroli labor appliances, a product of ancient Anye technology, monstrous in appearance, sweet of disposition, intent on discovering their place in the universe.
It’s been a bumpy ride, fraught with challenges. Maybe it’s time for our heroes to take care of themselves.
John Dyer Writes 
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