This Old Flying House

Previously: Blendered. Ship in a Bottle. Run, robot, run. Also, if you REALLY want to get into backstory, buy the book! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSR3SDFT

But today, I have a real estate problem!

Yes, I can see foliage poking through walls and windows. It’s been fixed. My point is: Loyal House is 122 meters long, 27 meters wide overall, 45 meters wide in the sanctuary, center section ceiling height 35 meters.

Draw an imaginary line bridging tops of columns — a new floor deck will be installed, making part of the layout two-story. However, the issue of scaling an interior to fit available volume will not be solved by this tactic alone.

But look at how cool it is.

Loyal House fly-through
Yep. There's a lot of work to do. Does anyone want to draw up floor plans?
Where do you think elevator(s) should go? Shall I publish the WIP on Epic Games for all to see? Tell us in the comments.

Essayed!

The assignment was entitled: Shepherd’s template for “5 great books centered around a topic, theme, or mood.”

The abstract was 11 pages long. Every aspect of the task, right down to the whys and wherefores, with examples. And then the admin critiqued my work, thoughtfully, inciting a rewrite — which turned out objectively a lot better than the draft.

Here’s what I delivered: https://shepherd.com/best-books/speculative-fiction-books-for-mainstream-readers

Enjoy!

An alternative to Goodreads

Are you looking for something worth reading — and if so, did you fall for the headline, the featured image, perform a keyword search, scroll and stop? Whichever, this is a rare moment, even rarer if you’re here on account of having read one of my novels.

Which is unlikely. According to The 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing, 2021 saw 3 million titles published in the United States. That’s a lot of blurbs to plow through for the sake of a quiet evening with a Kindle in your lap. If you’re reading this (you are), I’m grateful.

And I will not abuse the privilege — the payoff is right here. Click image to follow the link.

Shepherd is not a publisher’s site, nor book blog, nor book review aggregator (per se). Here you will find, among other enticements, essays by authors, sharing what’s on their reading lists, and why.

That’s a clever angle. Authors may be counted upon to have streetwise standards for literature. The potential, especially for a reader looking to change up the bookshelf, cannot be overstated.

I have an essay scheduled for January 13. Look for it.

In the meantime, try the site. Please tell us what you think in the comments.

Folksy!

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!”

Preview!

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!”

The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd

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”

📝 Manuscript Assessment Criteria ☑️

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!

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