Tag: Writing

Read This First

Here’s the deal — you might want to read The Illusion of Gravity first because it’s the first volume of a series.

Alternatively, you can start with one of the other books and backtrack later to find out what you missed. There’s no penalty.

Literary Science Fiction, focused on story, not just space ships and ray guns. Entertaining. Immersive. Ambitious. Value-positive. Fun. Written for grown-ups. Suitable for young adults. The opposite of dark, smutty, ugly, pessimistic.

Amazon makes it easy to find out if a book is something you want to read. Go to the Kindle listing. Click below the cover art on the ‘Read Sample’ button. Give it a few pages. You’ll know soon enough.

The Illusion of Gravity can be found here. Discover my catalog here. Check out my blog for other essays. Thanks for reading. We need you.

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Self-Referencing

Not intentionally. It just happened. Another teaser from Maroli Tango.

Chasm City, Anchor Freehold, Eeka

Chasm City was named for a deep rift in the planet’s mantle, beyond which lay a torn-up wasteland, thought by experts to have suffered a natural calamity in the distant past, dismissing an ancient oral history describing laser bombardment from outer space

A third of the city was built upon an impossibly massive bridge spanning the chasm, promoted by the architect as a platform for an airborne community, someday, when anti-gravity was invented.

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Evocative

Or at least, that's what I intend. An inflection point in the current WIP, Maroli Tango, hot off the author's desktop.

Blustery weather conditions over the South Atlantic had moved across Ruksa Zila’s course an hour after sunrise. By midmorning, gusts were strong enough to bend trees.

At the owner’s residence, top of the hill above RZ’s hospitality village, cloudy skies loomed, great room patio doors shook. Five hundred meters below, turbulent seas churned.

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Podcast!

Another teaser from Maroli Tango. Third editing pass. A lot of revision and shuffling around of narrative threads. The writing's getting better, I hope.

Nashville, Tennessee

Conservative pro-wholesome-values commentator Mark Washburn sat at a dining table in what might have been his home.

He said, “There’s a new sheriff in town; a Zirna Zapha NGO that goes by the name of Osadhi, in recent weeks beating up on organized crime in an effort, they say, to choke off the money and muscle that keeps Earth’s most toxic powerbrokers in business.

Our guest pilots the spaceboat Sthiti Osadhi on raids. He describes himself as a bus driver, roadside mechanic, locker room attendant and more recently, publicist. This week, Mason Fowlkes launched a new streaming service, Classic Cosmic TV, delivering vintage content from the planets Vidura and Jivada.”

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Space War!

Yet another teaser from Maroli Tango. Enjoy!

The first chapter of a story is always the hardest to finish, even when last words have been written.

Anuraga Media’s first installment of Unseen was burdened by an elephant in the room, a twist if you will, motivation to rush the backstory with documentary footage, the void of space, the glitter of stars, a giant spaceship firing lasers, subtitled communications chatter.

Visceral. Trust the audience to get the idea. Jump right in.

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Maroli Tango — The Front Nine

Appended herein are the first nine chapters of a first-draft, first-master-edit novel-in-progress, which I anticipate publishing around July 2024.

Writing is an activity, something I do for fun. Promoting the work is a grind. It takes a lot of effort. It’s expensive, rarely productive, and I don’t have to do it, so I won’t. This little bit I’m doing here is writing. It’s fun.

If you’re an avid reader, or a writer, or someone thinking about becoming a writer, or curious about process, carry on. Nobody exposes this kind of material. It’s in rough shape, potentially embarrassing. I shouldn’t even let Beta readers see this stuff, and yet here we are.

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Space Soap Opera!

I'm STILL not serializing this book.

White House Marine Guard commander Daryl Price appeared in time to witness Colonel Clarke’s wife Lorretta arriving in an aircar on the Oval Office patio.

Lorretta’s on-call CH Banks bodyguard pulled Brandon and Captain Price into a pow-wow on the topics of anticipated threat level, distribution of fighting drone assets, and whether to eat lunch now or later.

Captain Price told Brandon, “I don’t mind tagging along for the party, but I thought you were functioning as the President’s shadow.”

Brandon said, “I’ll be right there, and that was my intention, but I’ll leave it up to you. She and I are on a date.”

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Maroli Tango

A possible final title for the novel. On the cover, I'm thinking we dress Pascal in a sash and do-rag, holding a long-stem rose in his tertiary tentacles.

On Tuesday, Secretary of the Treasury Norbert Donaldson denounced President Carmen Benequista as a “Reckless tyrant, having no understanding of fundamental economics, willing to wreck the world financial system to settle her petty grievances.”

Angela Moss, Carmen’s Chief of Staff, said, “You should go ahead and dump him in the ocean.”

Carmen loitered in an Anodyne corridor, natural body lying comatose on her bed, speaking with her friend virtually, from the Virtuality. “He obviously didn’t believe I’d do it.”

“It’d be nice if we had intel about his situation.” Angela arranged papers on her desk. “Who do you think’s leaning on him? CIA? East coast mob?”

“Enforcing policy for central banks? Has to be the CIA.”

A door at the end of the hallway changed color from red to seafoam green. On the other side of the door, an oval opening waited, the sort of thing one might find on the back of a gorilla costume.

Carmen took three steps into an abrupt scene change. Angela Moss snapped into clear focus, in Super 3D Ultra-Vision, delivered by her maroli valet’s high-resolution sense array.

The aroma of lavender filled her nostrils. She said, “Pascal; did you take a shower in my quarters?”

Pascal replied, “This one has never felt so fresh.”

Angela said, “You guys are creeping me out.”

Carmen bounced on phantom legs, feet barely connecting with the floor. She wiggled a tentacle. “Give me a pen.”

With a few delicate strokes, the Treasury Secretary was fired.

Angela grumbled. “Let’s not tell anyone we’re signing documents this way.”

Carmen pedaled her legs, invoking flight mode, soaring to the ceiling. She said, “I won’t if you won’t.”

Her chief-of-staff retreated to a corner. “You could swoop down on Norb Donaldson in his back yard. Nobody would see it.”

Hovering in front of a mirror, Carmen attempted a shrug. A maroli has no shoulders. It didn’t translate. “I could, couldn’t I?”

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Name this book!

Seriously. I’m at 43,000 words and I don’t have a title. Here’s a teaser from Chapter 109.

The White House, Washington DC

It was four miles from the White House to a bar and grille in Arlington, where an Ivy League educated economist had been ensconced for the past hour-and-a half.

Carmen boarded the same housekeeping maroli she’d used twice, once earlier in the day, for the purpose of signing documents in her own hand. The machine was off-duty, in a dark closet, sipping nutrition through a straw out of a crushable plastic box.

She wiggled her avatar into the maroli’s form factor, arms operating two large tentacles on the top row, saying, “Hello again. Are you finished with supper?”

It tossed the box into a waste bin. “This device has eaten.”

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