That would be me, though it is a little bit of a lie. Since I have been hanging around here for seven years - five years on this account - I thought it would be appropriate to announce the ebook publication of my first big novel.
The lie part, I have been a professional writer since the 1980s. Due to around twenty years of caregiving, my career sorta-kinda crashed about ten years after takeoff. I did manage a little bit of authorial-seeming work during that time, but not much. Between my adjunct teaching gigs and my part-time caregiving for my mom and dad, and later 24/7 caregiving for my mom, there wasn't much time to pursue a career. Many, many stories were saved up in my head. Mom died in 2009. I was useless for a year. I started writing again in 2010. I've written four novels, two screenplays, and more than a dozen short stories. After following the traditional approach - I know, I'm a bonehead - which included an agent for my screenplays, thirty to fifty submissions to traditional agents and publishes, I had a re-think. My old mentor James Lee Burke had to send his first novel to a hundred agents and publishers before he was published. Frank Herbert...well...there's a reason why Chilton published Dune. Herbert sent the novel to just about every other publisher out there, and only a company that published car repair manuals would take a chance on him. Whereas today, with examples from E L James, the Fifty Shades of Grey woman, countless others who make a part-time or full-time living off of ebooks, at least a dozen others who have received publishing contracts based on their ebook work...fuck tradition. I'm all in.
So...Happy Halloween! Causality is out today. $4.25 for 140,000 words of science fictional goodness. It's a part of the In the Realm of the Gods series. The first short novel of the series, Essa, has been out for the last few months, five stars at Amazon, four stars at smashwords, available just about everywhere. Essa is free...for now.
That ain't the end of it. I'll have another Realm book out in December, around Christmas. Contravallation is even bigger, an even sweeter slice of science fictional tastiness.
In January, Rewire, a near-future love story/suspense novel.
I might pursue the traditional approach with my first Suzie crime novel...or not. If not, look for it in the spring.
Wish me luck. Here are all the links you need below. If this seems like a pimp, it is. However, as I've already pointed out, I've been a fixture here for years. Not to tell you what's going on would be rude. I'm anything but rude. That last sentence might be a little bit of a lie, too.
Causality:
The elites of our time discovered immortality - and kept it for themselves. Over the millennia, they bent nanotechnology and quantum physics to their will, becoming gods. Their power is undeniable, belief is mandatory. In a distant future, one in which humanity has spread itself out across the galaxy, the lesser gods war among themselves ceaselessly while the high gods glare down at them.
Of all the trillions they rule over, only one small group of mercenaries does not bend a knee. They are the apex predators of warfare, it is said that Victory is their friend. They are called the Hana. While the gods plot against each other and employ the Hana in their wars, the Hana secretly plot against the gods. At the end of days, the long knives of the Hana will strike out at the divine.
The Hana are not alone in their opposition. Out there, somewhere, beyond a stellar wilderness abandoned by the gods, are those few who stood and fought, the distant home of the Human Nations, the realm of non-belief. All the wars over that little sliver of choice, all the power and majesty of the gods, and yet they still exist.
The god Soleon plots war against them. He has begun a muster of his worlds and journeys to each in turn to raise the war cry. Debeb is one of his newly acquired worlds, taken from another of the gods. Soleon has hired the Hana for this war. A Hana division travels with him for the muster. Soleon thinks to raise himself up into the ranks of the high gods. Not everyone is pleased by this - not the people of Debeb, not the other gods, and especially not the secret protectors of the Human Nations.
It starts innocently enough, on what should be a day of celebration during Soleon's visit, but it turns into an open revolt. If the Hana cannot suppress this revolt, then the god will burn this world to ash. Nothing is ever easy for those of the long knives, their path beset by traitors and fools. Billions of lives depend on them, on one lone Hana soldier named Tremmel in pursuit of an assassin, of the last stand of small isolated units besieged by religious maniacs, one led by Tremmel's girlfriend Dram, another led by his uncle Erramm, and of one boy and a game called pankay. Victory and life, defeat and the death of a world, dependent upon their sharp knives.
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Essa:
Essa should be dead. But despite the god Lukshi's efforts, she is still alive. The gods enslaved humanity in the distant past. Essa lives on a planet several thousand light years from Earth, except no one knows about Earth anymore. The study of history has been banned by the gods. Essa's father was killed in a heretic bombing. Essa's mother was worked to death on the orders of Lukshi, their planet's god. Not that the god knew she existed, for the entire population of the planet is being worked to death, except for the elites. The priests never seem to suffer. Essa was ordered to the temple brothel for her family's debts. She ran away instead. Abused, hunted, she found a device from ancient times, from when humanity stood against the gods. A suit of flexarmor had been kept safe inside its stasis container, waiting for someone to put it on. Intelligent, self-aware, constructed with the same technology that enables the gods, it has bound itself to Essa. With it as her companion, she will seek vengeance upon the gods and their servants. Only one group stands in her way, the premiere warriors of the era, the ones the gods themselves turn to when violent problems need a solution: the Hana. Their name means "spear point" in one of the ancient languages, not that anyone other than the Hana would know that. They have served as mercenaries to the gods for two thousand years. They are very good at what they do. The rage in Essa's heart will be answered with the cool professionalism of the Hana. By their battles, nothing on Essa's world will ever be the same again.
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