I just formatted the prologue and first three chapters of Desert Stars in epub, mobi, pdf, etc. You can download them for free with the following links:
The samples are taken from the current manuscript, so the editing might be a little rough in spots. The novel is finished, however, and has been through several rounds of revisions; all I need is to run it by my editor and commission cover art.
The basic premise is a little bit like The Jungle Book meets Dune. The main character, Jalil Najmi, crash landed on Gaia Nova as a boy and was raised by desert tribesmen. All he wants is to find out who he is and where he’s from, but the sheikh, his adopted father, wants to keep Jalil from leaving because he has no other sons to inherit the camp.
Jalil’s only connection with his birth family is a datachip from his mother, and he believes the only way to unlock it is to go to the Temple of a Thousand Suns, the ancient shrine on the other side of the planet dedicated to the memory of Earth. When he sets out for the pilgrimage, however, his father conspires to send one of his daughters with Jalil with orders to seduce him. Since Jalil has a deep sense of honor, his father knows that he’ll return and marry her out of shame.
The only trouble is that Mira, the sheikh’s daughter, actually has feelings for Jalil and doesn’t want to hurt him. At the same time, she can’t bear the thought of leaving home, and her parents have threatened to disown her if she doesn’t convince Jalil to return. Thus the pilgrimage becomes a race against time, even as they travel through the strange cultures and ancient domed arcologies of humanity’s oldest world.
That’s the basic storyline. The short pitch, so far as I’ve worked it out, is this:
A tale of adventure and romance on the fringes of an interstellar empire that has forgotten its holiest legend: the story of Earth.
I sincerely believe that this novel represents my best work yet. I started it in 2008 and have been working on it off and on ever since. It was heavily inspired by the time I spent in the Middle East as part of the 2008 BYU-Jordan study abroad, and represents a fusion of Middle Eastern culture and science fiction, a little like Dune.
My goal is to publish it before Christmas, and to do that I’ll need to raise the money by the end of November. So if any of this sounds at all interesting, please download the sample chapters, visit the project’s kickstarter page, and tell a friend about it.
Thanks so much!
Sounds exciting!
Thanks! Check out the chapters, and if you like them, please help spread the word!