excerpts – Page 10 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

SW-VII: REPROACH coming out soon!

So I’ve been working hard at Star Wanderers: Reproach (Part VII) these past few days, and I’m happy to say that it will be coming out sooner than I’d expected! I finished a quick proofreading and touch up pass today, which mostly involved cutting some unnecessary paragraphs and rewording a few sentences here and there. I also wrote the author’s note and acknowledgments, so all it needs is another proofreading pass and it should be good to go!

This story wasn’t quite as difficult as Sacrifice, but it certainly was a challenge, and I’m surprisingly pleased with the result. Revisiting the Star Wanderers story from Mariya and Noemi’s points of view was a great experience, and I did my best to really get into their heads and show what they were thinking. The themes are a bit unusual for a science fiction story, but if you’ve followed the Star Wanderers this far, it should be another fun and interesting ride!

I suppose this is where I should include an excerpt or something. I’m not a fan of huge, unwieldy excerpts, so here’s a quickie:

The others laughed with her. As they returned to their work, however, a strange silence fell over them, as if some unspoken tension hung thick in the air. Mariya glanced nervously at her mother, making Noemi wonder if it was something between the two of them. But instead of speaking with Mariya, Salome turned to her.

“About Jerem-ahra,” she said. “He’s a good man, isn’t he?”

“Oh, yes,” said Noemi, slowing down a little as she folded the last of the clothes. “Why?”

“God knows there aren’t many good men where we’re going—the Far Outworlds, I mean.” Salome pulled the bed-sheet taught and tucked it expertly beneath the thin foam mattress. “Not many Deltans out there either. At Zarmina, we’ll be the only ones.”

Noemi frowned. She glanced at Mariya, who was watching her intently out of the corner of her eye. Something was going on here—she didn’t know what it was exactly, but it felt as if they were backing her into a corner.

“Really?” she asked, her arms growing tense. “Just the three of us?”

“And father too, of course,” Mariya interjected. “He wasn’t born Deltan, but he’s as good as one of us now.”

“And Jerem-ahra,” said Salome.

What are they trying to get at? Noemi wondered. Both of them were staring at her now, making her hands feel clammy. It was as if they expected an answer from her, but she didn’t even know what they were asking.

“J-Jeremahra hasn’t been baptized yet,” she said, her voice quavering. “I don’t know how to bring it up. We understand each other when it comes to little things, but—”

“I can talk with him!” Mariya said, smiling cheerily. “I can help translate almost anything for you. And even though he hasn’t been baptized yet, I’m sure he’ll come around eventually. When he married you, he practically married into it—just like daddy. For your sake, he’ll convert before too long.”

That’s odd, Noemi thought to herself. Back on Oriana Station, she did everything she could to avoid bringing up religion. It wasn’t like she’d stopped believing, though—just that she was nervous talking with people who didn’t share their faith. Considering all the anti-Deltan bigotry back on Oriana Station, Noemi didn’t blame her. But why was she so eager to see Jeremahra converted now?

“Let me put it this way,” said Salome. “Where we’re going, we need to stick together. And what’s a better way to do that than to become one family?”

Stars of Holy Earth, Noemi realized, they want Mariya to become his second wife. Her eyes widened, and an awful sinking feeling began to pull at her gut even as her legs turned to water.

I’m not sure whether to hire a proofreader or just proofread it myself. I doubt I’ll find someone who can turn it around before the end of the week, but who knows? The manuscript is pretty clean, though, so it shouldn’t take too much work to catch the last few typos–just a good eye.

In any case, I’ll leave you with the track I’m listening to right now. It’s a great track by Paul van Dyk, Arty, and Sue McLaren, remixed by Pedro Del Mar. Stuff like this really helps me to get in the zone.

Take care!

It’s all there (mostly), just out of order

So I picked up the rough draft of Star Wanderers: Benefactor (Part VI) this week and started making notes for the revision. It turns out that most of the scenes after the first chapter are jumbled and out of order.

This is good, because it means that I don’t have to toss it out and write it from scratch. All I have to do is figure out the right order, rework the transitions, and then maybe add a couple of scenes to smooth things over. Not too difficult, and it should turn this story around from something’s-broken-and-I-don’t-know-what to dang-this-is-awesomesauce.

It’s not so good, though, because it means I’m going to have a real struggle over the next couple of weeks to get at the core essence of this story and draw it out. That’s always tough, when I don’t get it on the first pass.

To be honest, I’ve kind of been avoiding this story for the last couple of months. When I finished the rough draft and put it on the back burner, I had the sense that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. That’s always the worst. Now that I know, it’s just a matter of doing the work. But that’s also daunting, because it’s like I’m standing at the base of a mountain looking up. At least the climb itself is invigorating, so once I get started, it should be pretty straightforward.

Benefactor takes the Star Wanderers series in a bit of a different direction, focusing on Jakob (Mariya’s father) and his struggle to provide for his family when all he’s ever really been is a star wanderer. As an outworlder, he’s always had a certain amount of pride and independence, but as a starbound refugee with a family to look after, that only gets in the way. When he married Salome and settled down, it seemed like they had a bright future, but now he’s trapped in a life he never wanted, and the love he once shared with his wife has grown cold.

Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter, which probably won’t change much in the final draft:

Jakob never felt more bone-weary than when he came off of a twelve-hour shift at the Oriana Station dockyards. His feet ached and his back groaned with pain, even in the low gravity of the tram as it raced from the hub to the rimside habs. As usually, the narrow car was crammed like a vacuum pack, every seat occupied with the hot and sweaty bodies of the other workers. He glanced out the window to catch a glimpse of the stars, but an advertisement for a synthetic protein formula filled the holographic windowpane.

My life is a prison, he thought to himself—silently, as always. It’s a prison of my own making, but it’s a prison nonetheless.

The twelve hour shifts had started only a standard week ago, but already it felt like months. A Gaian Imperial battle group had just arrived from the Coreward Stars, panicking some and causing a lot more work for others. Jakob didn’t have much time to follow interstellar politics, but he knew it meant longer work shifts for the foreseeable future. Which really wasn’t so bad, except that the overtime pay would barely keep the family above water, without paying off any of their debts.

From the quadrant tram station, he took an elevator to the slums on the lowest level. This was always the worst part: getting used to the slightly heavier gravity, after spending so much time in null-gee at the hub. He shuffled down the rimside corridor, barely lifting his feet off the floor. The walls were drab and gray, but spotlessly clean. That was something to say about the immigrant community—they might be poor, but they weren’t dirty.

The pungent odor of Deltan cooking spices met his nose the moment the door hissed open. That would be his mother-in-law, fixing dinner. He stepped inside and dropped his work boots on the floormat, waking his sister-in-law’s baby in the living room. He cringed from the high-pitched wailing almost as much as he did from the tongue-lashing he expected to get for it. But what did it matter? Ignoring the baby’s cries, he trudged off toward the bathroom for a much needed shower.

“Oh, hi Dad!”

His daughter Mariya bounded down the hallway, her black hair bobbing with every step. The bright smile on her sixteen year old face cut through his dark mood, at least momentarily. She gave him a great big hug, and he returned it with a grunt.

“Guess what?” she said, her eyes lit with excitement. “I finally found someone to rent out the spare room to!”

Jakob raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Yeah! A couple from Delta Oriana—Megiddo Station, in fact. At least, the girl is from there. Her husband is out working on his ship—he’s a star wanderer, see—but she’s out in the living room right now, talking with Aunt Giuli. Do you want to meet her?”

Her words passed over him like a flurry of raw, unprocessed data. He focused on the important parts and disregarded the rest.

“How long are they going to stay?”

“Oh, not long. They just need a place to stay for a couple weeks until they’ve refitted their ship. Apparently, they—”

“How much are you going to charge them?”

So yeah, it’s a new direction from the previous books, but it’s got a lot of the same characters and ties in quite well with Fidelity, I think. Also, it expands the universe and shows some other aspects of what life is like for star wanderers and outworlders in general.

It’s going to be to be a lot of work making sure I get this one right, but it’s a short novella, so it shouldn’t take too long. Barring no unforeseen complications, I should still be able to get it out before the end of the month. The next two books, Reproach and Deliverance, should be ready soon after that.

In the meantime, I’d better get some shuteye so I can wake up early and work full steam on this book tomorrow. Gnight!

It’s finished! Now onto the next thing.

Well, over the weekend, I finished the first draft of Star Wanderers: Reproach (Part VII). Technically, I finished it at 4:30 am on Saturday, but I’m counting that for the Friday May 31st deadline that I set when I started the project. I was determined to finish the thing before I went to bed, and nearly pulled an all-nighter. Still recovering.

Star Wanderers: Benefactor (Part VI) needs some work before I feel it’s ready to be published, but I’m not sure if that’s what I want to move on to next. From a business standpoint, that would appear to be the most prudent decision, since my Star Wanderers books are selling fairly well and expanding the series while the momentum is still good is probably the surest way to capitalize on that. However, from a creative standpoint, I think it might be better to give this draft some more time to mull around in the back of my head, like I did for Genesis Earth, Bringing Stella Home, and Desert Stars.

Also, I really want to finish the first draft of Lifewalker. All of my friends and family who have read bits and pieces of it are raving for me to finish it–literally, every time I talk with my Dad, he asks me when it’s going to be done. I really do enjoy the voice of the main character in that one, and I stopped it only to finish Reproach, not because it was giving me any troubles. If I go ahead with that now, I can probably finish it by the end of the month, with time to start work on another project (possibly Benefactor).

It’s difficult for me to talk meaningfully about a project that only I and a couple of other people have seen, so here are the first few paragraphs from the current draft, just to give you a taste of it:

My given name is Isaac Jameson, but most people know me as the Lifewalker. It is a fitting title. I am a stranger and a wanderer; death has cheated me not once, but thrice. For more than three generations, I have wandered the Earth, watching men and women spring up as wheat, bear seed, and pass away with the autumn frost. Yet with each passing generation, I alone remain—with each new crop of humanity, death refuses to harvest me. Some would see this as a blessing, but it is not. It is a curse worse than the fever that steals an infant from its mother, or the blight that takes the mother from her newborn child. It is hard enough to say goodbye to those you have known and loved—those who have shared everything in their lives with you, holding nothing back. But to say goodbye to everyone you have ever known—to find yourself a stranger in your own homeland, a man washed up on the shores of time while the world spins wildly beneath you—yes, that is a fate that can make death seem like a mercy. But I digress.

I suppose I should start this volume with a brief description of the land of my birth. Far to the west, beyond the lakes of the north and the great river of the plains, a series of great, craggy mountain ranges cross the land. In the heart of these mountains, almost a year’s journey by wagon from the eastern coast, lies a great salty sea. It is a desolate and lifeless place, and so far as I can tell, always has been. I only visited it once, but saw no signs of habitation along its briny beaches, ancient or otherwise. However, only a few short miles to the east, the ruins of a once-great city still stands. Its rusting skyscrapers are not as tall or as numerous as those in Boss-town or Old Neyark, but there are enough to show that it was once a place of some importance, before the years of the Blight.

South of these ruins, and beyond the numerous villages and communes that thrive in its shadows, lies a wide mountain valley with a freshwater lake at its center. The lake is extremely shallow, and the reeds grow thick along its southern coasts. It is a good place for catfish and mussels, as well as heron and other waterfowl. The mountains rise sharply all around it, but more especially to the east, though none of them are quite high enough to boast a peak that is snow-capped year round. A monument to the letter Y can still been seen on the face of one of the nearer foothills, though the coloring has long since faded. The northeast border of the valley is guarded by a mountain that looks like a young maiden, sleeping on her back with a hand on her pregnant belly. Some say that the child she carries is the hope of the new world. A narrow river runs just south of this mountain to the lake, through the heart of the land of Provorem.

Just for fun, I posted a longer version on the minecraft server where I currently play. It’s possible to make books inside of the game, and fill them with a couple thousand words of text. I’ll probably do a couple more minecraft books with bits and pieces of Lifewalker, and possibly a couple of other projects as well.

At the same time, I’ve got an idea for another project, one that has the potential to turn into a series of heroic fantasy novellas, along the lines of Star Wanderers. I talked it over with my brother-in-law over the weekend, and while the world and the characters still need fleshing out, I think the core idea is pretty solid. Part of me wants to drop everything and work on that right now, but the other part feels like a deer in the headlights with a semi full of story ideas bearing down on me…

All good problems to have. But don’t worry–if I don’t have anything new published before the end of this month, I’ll definitely have something by the end of July. That’s my unofficial goal now: at least one new published something every two months.

Gotta write. Later!

Post A to Z update

So, the A to Z challenge is over, and it’s back to things as usual. I hope you guys enjoyed it–I’ll probably compile the posts at some point, update them to add some more examples and references, and put it out as a $2.99 ebook. When I get around to it, that is. If that’s something that interests any of you, let me know and I’ll get it up sooner.

As far as writing goes, I just went back to work on Lifewalker yesterday, and the story is coming along swimmingly. This is the post-apocalyptic story about a guy wandering down the ruins of I-15 with a copy of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. I checked with Peter and Brandon about that, and they said it’s okay. In fact, they think it’s hilarious. And it is, I suppose, though the book takes itself fairly seriously.

Just to give you an idea what I’m talking about, here’s an excerpt:

The first night, I stayed in a small village known as Sannakin. The people there were surprisingly friendly, though they assured me that they would have been more cautious if I had come from the south.

“What’s south of here?” I asked the village patriarch over dinner.

He shrugged. “Don’t know—never been that way. Get a lot of tinkers, though, and a merchant ever now and again. There’s people out there, that’s for sure—but it’s a wild and a dangerous country.”

I paid them for their hospitality by reading from Mistborn: The Final Empire. The story confused many of them, especially those who had never seen the ruins of a city. I explained to them that the forefathers used to live in great communes of thousands, or even tens of thousands of people. This sparked a vigorous discussion over how such a large community could possibly provide enough food for itself, and how it would handle the waste. Some people asked me if in the days before the Blight, ash covered the sky as it did in my book. I answered that it probably had, though doubtless the author had exaggerated it somewhat for the purposes of the story. This led to an even more vigorous discussion about the merits of fantasy stories in general, with most of the villagers forming a decidedly negative opinion of the genre. I strongly disagreed, of course, but held my tongue so as not to offend my hosts.

Today, I wrote a passage where the main character had to mediate an argument between two scholars over who was the primary god in the forefather’s pantheon: Batman or Superman. In a few chapters, he’ll rescue a girl from a band of bloodthirsty cannibal slavers infesting in the ruins of Las Vegas.

As you can tell, this book is a lot of fun. 🙂

As for the publishing side of things, I’m working with an illustrator to get the cover ready for the first Star Wanderers omnibus. It’s going to be for Parts I through IV, but don’t worry–if you’ve already bought the parts individually, there won’t be any new content except the author’s note. I’ll either publish that here or send my newspaper subscribers a link for where they can read it.

I’m not sure if anyone really reads the author’s notes at the ends of my books, but I enjoy telling the story behind the story, so I’ll keep doing them. Besides, I figure some of you have read them, since you’re signing up for my email newsletter and sending me an occasional fan emails. I really enjoy those, by the way, so thanks for sending them!

That’s just about it for things over here. In unrelated news, I recently discovered an excellent sci-fi webcomic. It’s called Freefall, and the archives stretch waaaaay back to 1998 (!!!). So yeah, I’m going to be busy for a while.

But don’t worry, I’ll still ~~find~~ make time for writing. I’m doing about 2k words per day right now, so at that rate, the first draft of Lifewalker should be finished before the end of May.

Aaand my roommate wants to sleep, so I’d better get off the computer now. Later!

SFR Brigade Presents STAR WANDERERS: OUTWORLDER

To my regular blog readers: I recently joined an online community for readers and writers of science fiction romance called Science Fiction Romance Brigade. Since a lot of my books fall under this sub-genre, I figured it would be good to connect with that community a little better. If you’ve enjoyed my Star Wanderers novellas, then check out some of the other authors in the SFR Brigade–they seem to be doing some similar stuff.

To any new visitors: welcome! I hope you enjoy your time here. I’m a self-published indie writer with thirteen ebooks out so far, and a lot more on the way. I’ve been writing ever since I read A Wrinkle In Time back in 2nd grade, and sf romance is definitely one of my favorite sandboxes to play in.

For this week’s SFR Brigade Presents feature, I’m sharing an excerpt from the first chapter of Star Wanderers: Outworlder, the first novelette in my Star Wanderers series. The setup: Jeremiah is a young single starship pilot who arrives at a space station on the Outworld frontier hoping to make some trades. The station master ushers Jeremiah into his family’s quarters, where he explains that a famine is ravaging the system and everyone on the station is probably going to die. He then claps his hands, and his five daughters line up on the other side of the room.

* * * * *

“Choose!” Master Korha bellowed. Apparently defeated, his wife collapsed to the floor in tears.

Jeremiah tugged at the collar of his jumpsuit, sweat forming at the back of his neck. “What? Choose?”

“Yes yes—choose quickly, you take, you go!”

“But this is crazy; how can I—”

“If not take, will die. Choose!”

Jeremiah turned back nervously to the girls. The three youngest ones stared at him in absolute terror. The two oldest ones weren’t quite so frightened, but avoided meeting his gaze directly. They wore their long hair down with glistening sequined headbands across their foreheads, and the innocent looks on their faces cried out to him.

Should I take them both? If they were going to die otherwise, it seemed like the right thing to do—but he didn’t know if he could afford to take even one extra passenger on his ship. And besides, the whole situation had an eerily awkward feel to it, as if he were trading in people, not goods.

“You like? You like?” Master Korha asked, ambling to his side. He pulled the two girls forward to give Jeremiah a better look.

* * * * *

If you want to read the rest, you can pick up a free ebook copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, or any of the other major ebook sites.

And if you’ve already read Outworlder, then I’m happy to say that Star Wanderers: Dreamweaver, the parallel novella from Noemi’s point of view, is currently on schedule to come out in the beginning of April! As always, newsletter subscribers will get a coupon code to download the book for free when it’s released. I’m just finishing up with the revisions now, and am really excited to get this story up!

That just about does it for now. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to see you again soon!

On the eve of publication

First, some housekeeping: I recently did an interview over on Slava Heretz’s blog, which you can find here. I talk a little bit about Desert Stars, as well as how traveling has influenced my writing and how I overcome writer’s block.

In other news, I got smacked upside the head with the flu yesterday and slept in today until 1pm. I feel marginally better, but I’ll probably do the same tonight. Productivity: shot in the face.

However, I did manage to run through the copy edits for Desert Stars and format it for publication. Finished the author’s note today, so as soon as I get the cover art, it’s good to go.

For the cover art, I’ve commissioned Hideyoshi again, the same artist who did the cover for Genesis Earth. He sent me the initial sketch the other day, and it looks good! It comes from a scene toward the beginning, when Jalil and Mira share an intimate moment while overlooking the planetary domes on the edge of the desert:

That night, Mira couldn’t sleep. The wind roared past the window in her room, making an eerie whistling noise as it shook the windowpanes. That wasn’t all, though. Perhaps it was the woody, foreign smell of the room, or the perfect straightness of the walls, or the uncomfortable softness of the bed. Whatever it was, she tossed and turned for what felt like hours, trying to find some firmness that would let her sleep. Eventually, she gave up and lay on her back, staring at the ceiling.

The stars, she thought to herself. If only I could see them, maybe I could forget how far I am from home.

She quietly rose from the bed and threw her cloak over her shift. The sound of the wind made her shiver, and she stepped carefully in the darkness, groping her way through the room until she came to the door. Once out, the stairwell was only a short distance down the hall. The night air was cold, the breeze stiff. The familiar stars and satellites stared down at her from the sky, though with all the light from the streetlamps, they were noticeably muted.

Wrapping her arms around herself for warmth, she made her way to the edge and stared out across the valley at the glass mountain—the world in a bottle. White and yellow lights shone through the glass, too fuzzy to make out with any clarity. It was a strange sight, and Mira stared at it for some time.

“You couldn’t sleep either?”

The sound of Jalil’s voice gave her a start. She turned quickly and saw him sitting on an old, weathered couch facing the valley. The upholstery was torn, and stuffing was falling out in places.

“Oh,” she said softly. “I—I didn’t see you.”

“That’s all right; I could use some company. Here, have a seat.”

He scooted over and made some room for her. When she sat down, the couch gave way underneath her until she was practically sitting on the ground. The wind picked up, and Mira shivered.

“Are you all right?” Jalil asked. “You look cold—here, take this blanket.”

He leaned forward and pulled off the blanket that he’d brought up from his bed.

“That’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to—”

“No, here,” he said. “You need it more than I do.”

Mira tried to protest, but Jalil draped the blanket over her shoulders without another word. She had to admit, the added warmth felt surprisingly good against the chill night air.

Man, I’m so looking forward to getting this book out! It’s been a long time in coming. I started the first draft back in 2008, but some elements of it have been bouncing around my head since 2005. More on that in the author’s note.

In any case, we’re definitely on schedule to get Desert Stars out before the end of the year, probably before Christmas. So keep an eye out for it!

Desert Stars 4.0 is finished!

And just in time; I start another job tomorrow. So anyhow, here are the stats:

words: 99,000
chapters: 22
ms pages: 465
start date: 3 Oct 2011
end date: 25 Oct 2011

And the word splash:

Can you tell who the main characters are? 🙂

This might sound kind of cheesy, but this book has a very special place in my heart. I started it immediately after the 2008 BYU Jordan study abroad program, though it took me until the summer of 2010 to finish it. Even though it’s shorter than Bringing Stella Home, I think it’s much more immersive, with the world itself playing a much larger role as one of the characters.

I’m very satisfied with this draft. I say this with everything I write, but I honestly believe that this is my best work to date. It’s surprising to see just how much my writing has changed between drafts. It seems to be getting better, though, so that’s very encouraging.

I haven’t launched the kickstarter campaign yet, but I hope to do that by the first of next month, so be sure to look out for that. In the meantime, I thought it might be fun to share the prologue, to give you an idea of what the story is about. Enjoy!

=============================================

Prologue

The boy felt scared, more scared than he had ever yet been in his young life. It was because of the strange noises in the bulkheads and the way the walls and floor shook, but mostly because everyone around him, even his parents, were scared, and he didn’t know why.

The lights in the hallway flickered as he wandered out of his cabin, and the whine of the engine rose higher and higher. It wasn’t especially loud, but didn’t sound right; the boy knew that much at least. On the other side of the ship, a door hissed as it slid open. The boy turned and saw his uncle and three of his cousins come running out of the bridge, eyes wide with fear.

“She’s gonna blow,” shouted his uncle. “Let’s move!”

The boy stood rooted to the spot, his legs frozen in terror. He watched as his cousins ran to the emergency escape chutes–the ones his parents had adamantly told him never to play in–and dove through.

A groaning noise came through the bulkheads–the terrible sound of metal on metal. He closed his eyes and covered his ears with his hands, and the floor itself dropped out from under him. For a frighteningly disorienting moment, gravity vanished, leaving him floating weightless in the corridor. The taste of vomit filled his mouth and he screamed in fright, but without gravity he could only kick his legs uselessly beneath him.

The moment passed, and he fell to the hard tile floor. Tears of terror clouded his vision, and his arms and legs shook so bad he hardly noticed that the floor was shaking. The ship lurched, sending him sprawling on his hands and knees.

Hands grabbed him underneath his arms, lifting him up and carrying him away. He glanced up and recognized the face of his mother, pulling him towards the escape chutes.

“Mommy,” he cried, “I’m scared.”

“I know, dear,” she told him. “Mommy needs you to be extra brave right now.”

The boy nodded. Though his mother tried to sooth him, he could tell that she was just as frightened as he was. That terrified him more than even the loss of gravity.

“Come on!” the boy’s father shouted, further down the corridor. “Any minute now, and–”

The lights flickered again, and an explosion sounded from deep within the bulkheads of the ship. A low hiss sounded behind them, and not from a door opening.

“Oh God,” the boy’s mother cried. “Is that–”

As if in answer, a mighty wind howled throughout the ship, filling the boy’s ears with its roar. It whipped at his hair and tugged at his clothes, sucking him away like a monster from the bottom of a giant drain. Somehow, he knew that in only a few moments, they would all be dead.

Hands grabbed him, lifting him up toward the escape chute. He screamed, but the roar of the wind was so loud he could barely hear his own voice. His mother slipped something around his neck, and suddenly he was falling through the chute, into darkness.

He came to a stop in a snug little space, closed in on all sides like a glove for his body. A holoscreen lay in front of his face, with a pair of flight sticks and a miniature control board. The boy gripped the flight sticks with his hands and stared dumbly at the screen, barely able to process anything that was happening.

A distant puffing noise sounded through the ultra-soft walls, and then he was falling again–only this time, he couldn’t move his arms or legs. He was locked into position, cushioned on all sides and only able to use his hands.

Fighting back panic, he watched as the holoscreen flickered and came to life. It showed an image of space, the stars spinning wildly as noiseless flashes of light burst into being before fading into after-image amid the blackness of space. He squeezed the dual flight sticks and moved them like he was playing a computer game, but it was no use–he couldn’t equalize.

Mommy, the boy cried inwardly. Panic swept over him, and his hands and arms began to shake. He screamed, but in the tightly enclosed space, there was no one to hear him.

The glowing orb of a planet came into view, filling the screen with its brilliant light. The boy squinted as the display adjusted, showing a brown and yellow landscape framed by a curved horizon. It danced with the spinning stars, moving so quickly that everything was a blur.

A red light started blinking in the corner of the screen, and words flashed across the display. The boy didn’t know how to read, but he knew it was something bad. He tried again with the flight sticks, but that only sent him spinning in a new direction.

Without warning, the screen switched off, and the entire capsule filled with thick, pink foam. The boy gasped and tried to shield himself with his hands, but before he could cover his face it hardened around his body, freezing him into position.

The foam covered his mouth and face, but was just porous enough to allow him to breath–in short bursts, however, because his stomach was severely pinched. The spinning grew worse, until he wanted to throw up. As if from a great distance, he heard a muffled roar through the bulkheads. Everything around him grew increasingly warm, until he began to sweat. He tried to open his mouth to cry out, but his jaw was locked too tightly in place–he couldn’t move anything, not even a finger.

Mommy! he mentally screamed. Where are you?

As if in answer, something popped behind him. Inertia threw him forward, but the foam held him in place, so that all he felt was a tremor through his body. Gravity returned, so that he felt as if he were dangling upside down from his feet. Blood rushed to his head, and he swooned, redness clouding his vision.

Then, like a punch to his face, the shock of impact hit him, causing his bones to shudder. He spun even faster than before, but the foam still held him. It felt as if someone had turned him inside out, though–as if his stomach had swollen and turned to mush.

As the spinning gradually came to a stop, tears streamed from the boy’s eyes. The roaring had died down, leaving him encased in near-absolute silence. That frightened him almost more than the noise.

A sharp hiss filled his ears as the foam grew sticky and porous all around him. He thrashed against it, pulling his hands and arms free as it turned into a sticky, foul-smelling soup. Behind him, a hatch opened, and he struggled toward it, spitting to get the nasty taste out of his mouth.

He crawled out and rose to his feet, blinking in the harsh light of a foreign sun. The hot wind bit him as it blew in his face, stinging his face with sand. He raised a hand to his eye and looked around him at the alien landscape.

A lonely, rust-red desert extended in all directions, with nothing but sand and rock and distant craggy peaks to meet his eye. The sky shone a hazy yellow, completely unlike the clean white light of his family’s ship. A new fear passed through the boy–the fear of being alone.

As he stared at the land around him, he reached down to see what his mother had slipped around his neck. It was a pendant with a little black case at the end. He felt it between his fingers and knew somehow that he would never see her again.

Tears clouded his eyes, and he screamed and wailed for someone, anyone–but in the harsh desert waste, there was none to hear him.

=============================================

Good stuff. I can hardly wait to get it published!

Another excerpt from Genesis Earth

I made a lot of progress on the latest draft of my novel Genesis Earth last week, and figured it was time to post another excerpt. This one comes from chapter 4, when Michael and Terra arrive at the star system they’ve been sent to explore.

A slightly truncated version of this excerpt won first place in the 2009 Mayhew short story contest at BYU. I’ve made a few minor edits since then, mostly for clarification, but nothing too major. Enjoy!

They say that cryofreeze is the closest thing to death short of actually dying. I believe it.

First, you strip off your clothes and lower yourself down into the coffin-shaped cryo chamber. The glass seals shut above you, and a cold, green mist fills the narrow space, penetrating your naked skin. The mist contains chemicals that freeze your cells properly, so that they don’t crack or break when you thaw out–but it has a nauseous smell to it, and makes you feel sticky. Your skin starts to change from pink to white to light blue, slow enough not to notice right away, but quick enough to catch if you know what to look for.

As the chemicals continue their work, you start to shiver. Just before the cold becomes unbearable, sleeping gas seeps in through the top valves of the chamber. You pass out, too stiff to peacefully fall asleep. The rapid freezing process–where your heart and lungs cease their natural functions–happens while you’re unconscious.

They say that you don’t dream when you’re in cryo, but that’s a lie–they just don’t know how to explain it. Neither do I, but I can say something about the experience. The lines between the senses and your own thoughts blur together, until reality itself becomes utterly unrecognizable. Imperceptible images flash across your awareness, beyond your ability to process them.

Maybe that’s what nothing itself feels like; after all, is it really possible to comprehend non-existence without thinking of it in terms of space and time? I don’t know–I just know that I don’t want to go back there.

By the time you regain consciousness, the thawing process has already run most of its course. The flashes and images become brighter and more perceptible. You have a sort of falling sensation, during which you become aware of your body.

Painfully aware.

When you open your eyes, you’ve got a splitting headache and a nauseous stomach. Every time you move, another muscle cramps up on you. If you aren’t careful, you empty your bowels right there in the chamber.

The glass hisses open, the chamber tilts up to a forty five degree angle, and your limp body slides down the cold metal back until you find yourself sitting on your ankles. Your breath feels like fire in your lungs, and even though steam envelopes your body from all sides, you feel deathly cold. Too weak to stand up, you fall forward onto your hands and knees instead.

The vomiting is the worst. Forty year old bile splatters cold across the floor, followed by a good ten minutes of dry heaving. Each convulsion is so painful, it makes you feel as if you’re coughing up your own stomach. After you’re finished, you want to do nothing but lie on the ground–in your vomit or to the side, it doesn’t really matter–and cry.

But all that passes with time. After lying on the floor for what seems like hours, your body starts to take strength. The headaches die down, and the cramps slowly diminish. When you open your eyes again, the stars fade away like some kind of ebbing soda fizz, revealing the unfamiliar room in which you have awakened. You bend your fingers, lift your arms, and slowly drag yourself away from that god-awful place.

After that, what is there to do? Wash up, get dressed in your vacuum wrapped forty year old clothes, and clean up the mess.

My stomach throbbed as I walked onto the bridge, but I ignored the pain. My aching body could wait; I had more important things to do.

The instruments showed that we had arrived nearly thirty light hours out from the central star, just outside the orbit of the fourth planet in the system. An unfamiliar starfield shone through the windows, dimmed somewhat by the presence of EB-175 even though the star was still far away. A quick review of the automated ship’s log showed that no significant objects had come anywhere close to the ship in the last two months. Nothing had been sent to intercept us.

I blinked and reread the log, just to make sure. If there was intelligent alien life, maybe they were waiting, watching us from a distance. Or maybe the log was wrong.

My bodily needs eventually overcame my scientific obsession, however. I stood up from my seat on the bridge and made my way to the ship’s tiny mess hall where I could find something to satisfy my cramping stomach.

I felt sick and disoriented for nearly an hour. In that time, I ate some meal and fruit drink, but not much else. It felt eerie to be alone on the ship, but I didn’t want to thaw Terra until I had recovered my strength.

After an hour, I was ready. At least, I thought I was.

Terra didn’t look human–she looked like a giant doll, a pale, lifeless marionette. Her skin was a whitish-blue, while her other features–fingernails, toenails, lips, nipples–stood out in high contrast shades of black and purple. Her hair was darker than I remembered, as if the cryofreeze had sucked the color out of that, too. The glass of the chamber was cold to the touch, and the expansion of her frozen bodily fluids made her body look slightly bloated. I felt like a voyeur staring at her, but the sight was so morbidly fascinating that I could hardly turn away.

Eventually, however, I got myself together and started the thawing process. A hissing sound came from within the chamber, and a greenish mist washed over her. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, redness and color began to return to her skin. Her body deflated as the temperature in the chamber rose and her bodily fluids began to melt. A robotic arm with two suction cups fastened onto her chest and twitched as a series of quick electric shocks restarted her heart.

I periodically glanced down at the control screen, monitoring the various measures of her status. My legs felt stiff, and my hands trembled–I’d never run through this procedure before, and I barely knew what I was doing. The process was supposed to be fully automated, but cryonics is an imperfect science, and problems frequently arise.

About ten minutes in, I noticed something unusual. Little blue splotches were forming on Terra’s skin at the extremities on her hands and feet. After half a minute, they started showing up on her thighs and torso. I frowned; that didn’t seem right. I adjusted the heating pattern inside the chamber, but the blotches didn’t go away. Instead, the bleeping from the computer that marked her heartbeat started drifting into an unpredictable pattern.

With sweaty palms, I accelerated the thawing process. The uneven heating was probably causing blockages in her veins and arteries. I’d need to break those up soon, if her heart, brain, and lungs were to fully revive their functions. She could only last so long on the machine–

Without warning, the bleeping turned into a constant monotone.

I glanced down and cried out in shock. The line showing her heartbeat had flatlined–according to the machine, she was clinically dead.

I frantically keyed in a series of commands on my console. The robotic arm reattached the suction cups to Terra’s chest and reapplied the electric shocks. To my relief, her heart started beating again, but weaker and more erratic than before. A second later, the warning indicators on half the instruments blinked on. My heart skipped a beat as they flashed in rhythmic chorus. This was serious–very serious.

“Please, no,” I said, face paling. There was no-one on the ship to hear me, though; I was alone.

Within seconds, I figured out what the problem was. Micro-cramps in her muscles were causing uneven heating, cutting off the arteries and capillaries in various parts of her body. Her heart hadn’t recovered sufficiently to break the blockages, so they were spreading.

My hands trembled so much I doubted my fingers could type a coherent sentence. In spite of that, I worked as quickly as I could to counteract the complications, maintaining constant periodic shocks to her heart and significantly increasing the heat on her upper torso. With any luck, her blood would warm up enough to relax the contracted muscles and break the blockages. Still, most the indicators remained in the red–the electric shocks were simply unsustainable. I waited as long as I thought I could, then crossed my fingers and shut them off. Her heart kept pumping, but the beat soon drifted back into unpredictability.

I glanced up at the cryo chamber and caught my breath. Her arms, legs, and chest twitched and convulsed at utter random, undulating in a slow motion seizure. She had no control of her body. Chills ran down my neck and arms.

She needed more than the machines could give her. I pulled out a syringe from the medical cabinet and nervously fumbled through nearly four dozen canisters of liquid drugs. The wrong injection could kill her, but if I didn’t give her something right away, she didn’t have a chance. I grabbed the formula that I thought would best relax her muscles and filled the syringe.

A few of the indicators were moving out of the red when I returned, but the situation was still serious. A brainwave scan showed that her body was operating 85% autonomously from the machines and that she had regained partial consciousness. I waited until the indicator reached 95% and cracked open the glass.

Steam poured out of the chamber and splashed across the ceiling, while the sound of violent coughing came from within. Terra half slid, half fell to the ground. I rushed forward and caught her before she hit the floor, and she responded by vomiting on the front of my shirt.

Despite the heat of the steam, her skin felt cold, and her vomit even colder. I held her off to one side and patted her back to help her force it out. She stopped twitching and coughed a couple of times, but quickly grew weak in my arms.

“Come on, Terra!” I pleaded. Her breathing was too ragged for her to respond.

There wasn’t any time to lose. I pulled out the syringe and balled my fingers around it into a fist. It was built for a fast, emergency injection–the kind that could be jammed into someone’s leg. I brought it down on her right thigh. Her blotchy-blue skin rippled a little, and the fluid went in almost immediately.

A couple of seconds passed before the medicine took any effect. When it did, her whole body went stiff, and her eyes opened wide, revealing dilated pupils. Before I could react, she started convulsing violently, as if she were going into a seizure. I set her on the floor as gently as I could and held onto her head to make sure that she didn’t injure herself.

After about fifteen seconds, her body went limp again. I put two fingers up to her neck and felt for a pulse. To my relief, it was steady and strong. I sighed and practically collapsed.

As if in response, her chest heaved and she started vomiting again. I scrambled to my knees and turned her onto her side. How much stuff did she have in there–hadn’t she followed the 24 hour no food rule? No time to worry about that–just help her get it out without choking on the stuff.

She vomited and coughed until snot dripped down her face and the hoarse sound of her dry heaving filled the room. She was still too weak to sit up, so I supported her as best I could until she stopped. Sobs of pain slowly replaced the retching.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

What a stupid thing to say!

She looked up and gave me an icy glare. Tears and snot mingled on her cheeks. “No!” she shouted, then went back to coughing.

I held her until she began to quiet down. With the worst of it gone, relief came slowly to my nervous body. Her skin was getting warmer and her heartbeat was steady now. After forty years on the threshold of death, she was alive again.

Alive and completely naked. My cheeks flushed, and I set her on the floor.

“Can you stand up yet?” I asked.

“Not…yet,” she groaned. “Cramps…everywhere.”

I grabbed a towel on the side of the control panel and hastily draped it over her. She reached up with a hand and weakly held onto it. I waited until her breathing became less labored before asking her again.

“How about now?”

She clenched her teeth and nodded.

I stood up and took her by one hand, pulling her gently to her feet. She bent her knees carefully as she sat up, still holding onto the towel. When she was standing up, she let go of my hand and reached out for the wall. The towel fell off of one side, but she didn’t make any attempt to fix it. She still seemed fairly incoherent.

“What’s…our…status?” she asked.

“Everything is going well. We’re about two light hours out from the system.”

“Good,” she groaned, slowly wrapping the towel back around her. I almost reached out a hand to help, but hesitated.

“D–do you need help?” I stammered.

“No, thanks, I think I’ve got it.” She glanced up at me, then down at my chest and grinned. “Sorry about your shirt.”

“What?” I looked down and saw the vomit. “Oh, that. Don’t worry about it.”

She nodded weakly and closed her eyes.

“Are you sure you don’t need help?” I asked.

“I don’t…think so. Getting…better.” She staggered away from the wall and nearly fell over. “So…cold…”

She had stopped shivering. That was a bad sign.

“Here,” I said, taking her hand. “Follow me.”

If she wasn’t shivering, her body wasn’t generating enough heat yet and she was at serious risk for hypothermia. The best way to counteract that was to immerse her in warm water. I led her down the hall and into the narrow, cylindrical shower unit in the bathroom. She nearly passed out on the way there, and I practically carried her the last half of the way. The towel fell off in the hallway, making things only more awkward for me, but that was no longer important.

I leaned her up against the smooth wall of the unit, and she slid down to her knees. Her skin was sickly pale, her arms limp, and she mumbled incoherently as her head flopped back against the wall, hair partially covering her face.

I bit my lip and reached around the side to activate the water. Should I turn the heat up to full, or would that give her system too much shock? My heart pounded in my chest–no time to waste. I set the temperature to low-warm and hit the activate button.

Jets of lukewarm water shot out from all sides, drenching my already soiled shirt and running out into the room. Rivulets ran down Terra’s face and pale skin, but she didn’t move.

“Come on,” I said, ignoring the water soaking my clothes as I knelt down and put my hands on her shoulder. “Terra, are you alright? Terra!”

I pressed my fingers against her neck and found a pulse. Her body shuddered and she coughed. Nothing else to do but give her some space and let the shower do its work.

My heart still pounding, I stepped out of the unit and shut the door. My shirt was soaking wet, and Terra’s watery vomit ran down my legs and pooled on the floor. As I stood there dripping, Terra stumbled noisily to her feet, teeth chattering. The diffuse glass began to steam up, indicating that she’d turned up the heat on her own.

She was recovering.

“Your clothes are outside,” I said as I pulled out the vacuum sealed bags and put them on a shelf next to the door.

“Okay,” she groaned.

“Are you okay? Do you need any more help?”

“No…thanks,” she muttered. I left the room.

When I reached the hallway, I leaned against the wall and promptly collapsed in exhaustion. A puddle of grimy water formed around me on the floor, but I no longer cared. I sat there by myself for a long time.

Excerpt from Genesis Earth

I spend a lot of time posting about my writing, but up until now I’ve never posted any of it. Well, I figured it was time to change that and post something from my second unpublished novel, Genesis Earth.

Here’s how I’ve been pitching it in my queries:

Michael Anderson is a young, obsessive planetologist haunted by the fear that he will never live up to the legacy of his astrophysicist parents. Terra Beck is the outcast child of a bitter divorce, who only wants to run away and immerse herself in her one true passion: astronomy. Neither of them has ever set foot on Earth, but when Michael’s parents construct mankind’s first artificial wormhole, both of them are naturally chosen for the exploration mission to the Earth-like planet on the other side.

Shortly after their arrival in-system, Michael finds himself in an unanticipated first contact situation when an enormous alien ship appears out of nowhere and begins to converge on their position. When it ignores all their transmissions and shoots down their probes, the situation quickly degenerates into an emergency. To make matters worse, Terra secludes her self in the observatory and stops sharing her data with him.

Alone, twenty light years from the nearest human being, they must learn to open up and trust each other. As Michael struggles to keep the mission from falling apart, he is forced to reexamine his deepest, most unquestioned beliefs about the universe–and about what it means to be human.

Right now, I’m running it through a fifth draft before I send it to an agent I met at World Fantasy. Here is the prologue, where Michael begins his tale.

Enjoy!

Chapter 1

Earth was a ghost that haunted me. She was the single greatest thing that set us space-born apart from the older generation, the five hundred members of the original mission team. Though Heinlein station was the only home I had ever known, I soon learned that Earth, a world I had never seen except in pictures and videos, was where I was truly from.

My parents set the decorative screens in their bedroom to cycle through pictures of old Earth. While they were busy working in the lab, I would often sneak inside and stare at those images for hours. The landscapes and skyscapes they depicted were always so alien to me. Unbroken blue expanse overhead, instead of the grayish space rock of our asteroid. That line between floor and sky known as the ‘horizon.’ Solid ground underfoot, instead of the milky starfield shining up through transparent floors. Trees, plants, and shrubbery growing freely without the aid of hydroponics. Hundreds of human beings walking down wide open-air corridors called ‘roads,’–more people than I’d ever known in my life.

When I was about five years old, I used to ask my mother to bring out her photo album–the one with actual, physical pictures from the old world. I would sit on her lap and stare wide-eyed at the pictures as she explained them to me. That was my uncle, that was my grandmother, those were my cousins: faces from an unreachable world nearly half a light year away and getting further every moment.

One day, sitting on my mother’s lap, I glanced up from the album and saw tears in her eyes. That was the first time I had ever seen my mother cry. It made me feel frightened and unprotected, even in her arms. I never asked her to show me the pictures of Earth again.

Perhaps you’ve found, as I have, that the things that frighten you incite more fascination than the things you love. I trace the beginning of my career as a planetologist to that childhood incident, sitting on my mother’s lap. Years later, when I began my graduate level education, there was never a question in my mind what I would study. I had already chosen.

To me, planetology was never about physics, geology, or chemistry. Those were only the details. It wasn’t even about making a lasting contribution to the science–at least, not when I first started. I studied alien worlds simply to turn the lights on–to dispel the ever-present ghost of Earth that had haunted me from my childhood.

Did it work? Not really. But as I grew, my fascination with Earth grew with me.

Fourteen might seem like a young age to enter one’s chosen field, but you must realize that half the people on Heinlein station were highly trained physicists and engineers. With so many scientists on board, there was no shortage of teachers for those of us who grew up on the station. My parents personally tutored me, and they were two of the most brilliant physicists Earth had ever produced. They were, in fact, the chief scientists over the Mission itself.

The Mission was the closest thing to religion that I ever had. If religious devotion is measured by sacrifices incurred on the basis of unproven belief, I suppose that everyone on the station qualified for sainthood. We had set out from Earth to create mankind’s first wormhole, or prove that it could not be done. For this, my parents had given up everything: family, friends, their homes. Everything. The only safe place for such an experiment was two light years from Earth, and so we spent my entire youth and childhood in transit, not knowing whether the Mission would succeed or fail.

My study of planetology won me a great deal of admiration from the old timers, much to my surprise. Grown-ups who only a few years ago had chastised me for playing hide-and-go-seek in the labs now treated me like someone important. The scientists and engineers routinely asked me what I thought we’d find once we’d opened the wormhole. After all, why would a fourteen year old study about alien worlds if he didn’t expect to visit them someday? They treated me as if I had run some sort of gauntlet or passed a test of tremendous faith. I was one of them, united in the hope of a successful outcome to the great experiment–or, stranger still, I was a role model to them, someone with the faith they struggled so much to keep.

They could not have been more wrong. I didn’t want to explore new planets or set foot on an alien world. The closest I ever came was through the eyepiece of a telescope, and that was the way I wanted it. My studies were purely academic.

When I turned eighteen, we arrived at ground zero. The station became a flurry of nervous energy as we maneuvered into position and set up the hundred trillion kilowatt NOVA generators and focusing mirrors for the graviton beams. With everything spread out across hundreds of cubic kilometers of space, it took us nearly two months before we were ready.

Twenty two years after embarking from Earth, on June 24^th, 2143 C.E., the day of the experiment finally arrived. That day forever changed the course of my life.

At the moment of truth, I lay sprawled out on the transparent floor in my room, watching the stars turn beneath me. Large crowds had gathered in other locations to watch, but I preferred to be alone. My father’s voice came over the station-wide radio, giving his moment-by-moment report. Though I was alone, the excitement on the station was so thick could almost taste it.

I hear that it’s common for people on Earth to dream about falling from a great height. I’d never had that dream–the concept of vertigo meant nothing to me. I think I got a taste of it, however, as I watched the wormhole form in the sky.

The starfield began to spread out from a single dark point, the way a film of oil on water separates when it touches a drop of soap. The hole grew surprisingly fast, pushing the stars aside and forming a circle of warped, diffused starlight around its edge. I gasped in fright; the center was pure black, the color of an abyss. As it grew larger, I felt as if it were sucking me in. Soon, however, the hole stabilized, as if it had always been there.

As the station rotated, I discovered that the wormhole had warped the starfield beyond all recognition. I tried to find the constellations I’d known so well, but could only pick out one or two. I felt sad knowing I’d never see any of them again.

The scientists didn’t take much time off to celebrate, but when they did, they went completely wild. Alcohol was everywhere in abundance, from numerous stores and hoards that had been kept for this very occasion. The shiest, most reserved people danced drunk in the hallways, and old enemies who hadn’t talked for years walked up and down the corridors with arms on each others’ shoulders. A spirit of happy, universal friendship swept over the station. People let their guards down, took off their masks, and momentarily forgot any hard hard feelings. It was a glorious time–the end of history.

Eventually, though, the celebration lost steam, the hangovers died down, and we woke up to face the inevitable future. Our robotic probes explored the wormhole and made some basic observations of the other side.

Their findings were frightening enough to sober us all.

Graviton theory told us how to create an artificial wormhole, but it gave us no way to predict where it would open up. We could expect one of three possible outcomes: first, that the wormhole opened to a different location in our present universe; second, that it opened to a different location and different time in our universe; or third, that it opened to an entirely different universe than our own. In every meaningful way, however, we were shooting blind in the dark.

The first observations showed a universe very much like our own, with stars, galaxies, and other nebulae. Just twenty light years away, orbiting a yellow-white main sequence dwarf, the probes discovered a handful of exoplanets. One of them, a terrestrial world, orbited within the star’s habitable zone. An initial spectroscopic survey revealed that the atmosphere of the planet was rich in oxygen and nitrogen–just like Earth.

That was when we detected the signal.

The last probe to return picked up an unnatural high frequency radiation burst, originating from the system with the planet. It lasted only half an hour before dissipating, but was powerful enough to be detectable halfway through the wormhole. No naturally occurring object emitted that kind of signal. The only thing we could compare it to was the radio emissions from a standard NOVA engine–but even then, the signal was more than a hundred times more powerful than anything our technology could produce.

In other words, something strange was out there–something we couldn’t explain. The only way to find out more was to send out a mission to explore the alien star.

As the only qualified planetologist young enough to survive cryofreeze, I was an obvious pick for the mission from the very start. Though I never wanted to go, I couldn’t refuse; if I had, my parents would have killed me. This, they believed, was our moment in history–our moment to make a truly historic contribution to science and humanity. Why wouldn’t I jump at such an opportunity? Of course I would go.

I didn’t become a planetologist to set foot on alien worlds. That was the last thing I ever wanted. After we opened the wormhole, however, what I wanted no longer mattered.

Or so I thought.