Newly Released: Read-Only Ash

Before I started writing regularly every week, I’d envisioned myself creating fantasy and science fiction. But when I actually sat down at my keyboard three mornings a week (and then five days a week), the stories all seemed to be fantasy.

I was surprised, but okay with it. As long as I was telling stories, I was happy.

Then, 7 years into my writing journey, a science fiction tale collared my muse, and I wrote what would eventually become “Read-Only Ash.” As of this week, “Read-Only Ash” is available for your reading pleasure in both ebook and paperback editions. 😀

Check it out!

When utter defeat confounds you, where might victory hide?

Uzuri, a new-minted astronomer on her first posting, can’t wait to observe the stars from deep space. But when she awakens unable to form or hold new memories, probing the mysteries of the universe must surrender to unravelling the mystery of her own loss.

She finds the space station entirely deserted and all its floors coated by a black, gritty ash. Alone and without recourse, Uzuri hunts answers.

When she learns the truth of what happened, she must abandon the comforting path of retreat to face disaster, no matter the agony, or suffer her soul’s death.

“Read-Only Ash” is a science fiction tale of valor in extremity. If you enjoy heroic last stands, grab-by-the-throat intensity, and ultimate peril, you’ll love this ringing-the-changes-on-catastrophe story.

Peruse “Read-Only Ash” to wring hope from despair today!

“Read-Only Ash” on Amazon

 

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Cover Reveal: Read-Only Ash

Read-Only Ash will release on April 7, 2022!

Initially it will be available on Amazon for purchase and in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited subscription service for free download.

On July 7, Read-Only Ash will leave the KU subscription service and be available for purchase on all major e-tailers, including Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Amazon, and more.

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Listen and Cheer!

I have exciting news.

My friend Laura Montgomery, science fiction author extraordinaire, has been picked up by Podium Audio.

Who is Podium Audio?

They create some of the best audiobooks available. Their production values are high. They employ some of the best loved and most in-demand narrators out there. They produced the audiobook edition of The Martian!

The fact that they want Laura is big!

So how did it come to pass that Podium connected with her?

Someone at Podium reads a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and that someone read Laura’s Waking Late series. He loved it! From there, the rest is history. 😀

Let me tell you a little about the Waking Late series.

Sleeping Duty

Gilead Tan and Andrea Fielding survived their stint in the military, got married, signed up to emigrate to a terraformed colony world, and went into cold sleep for the journey from Earth. While they slept, the starship went through the wrong fold in space and settled for a different world, a wild world.

Three centuries after the founding of a colony on the uncharted planet, Gilead awakens to find humanity slipped back to medieval tech and a feudal structure.

Worse, the king who wants Gilead awake won’t let Gilead awaken his wife.

Sleeping Duty on Amazon

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Out of the Dell

On the planet Nwwwlf, in the lost colony of First Landing, the original settlers carved out one sylvan valley, a lone outpost where humans flourish. But their bright hopes and best intentions devolved over centuries into a rude replica of medieval feudalism.

Gilead Tan, who had been held captive for centuries in his sleeping cell, survived treachery and pain to free a small group of sleepers. But he and his friends now face the perils of life outside First Landing’s sanctuary—without their powered armor, their tools and technology, or anything else they need save for a few chickens.

Gilead must establish a safehold for his crew, but the alien environment does not welcome them and petty bickering threatens their meager resources. He hopes that a trace of smoke—spotted above a distant ridge—beckons them to a better place.

It doesn’t.

Out of the Dell on Amazon

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Like a Continental Soldier

The starship Valerie Hall failed to reach the terraformed world of its original destination. Instead, it found a habitable substitute where the settlers split into two factions. First Landing devolved into a rude replica of medieval despotism. Seccon might promise more.

Or so hope Gilead Tan and his companions.

Gilead spent three centuries in cold sleep, held there by a First Landing custom that decreed only one sleeper could be awakened every fifty years. Once awake, Gilead freed two dozen of his fellows—all soldiers like himself—and led them into the wilderness.

Close to two hundred civilians still lie trapped in the decaying cryo-cells of First Landing. Their captive slumber haunts him.

But despite its vaunted freedom, Seccon has one rule. No one goes back to First Landing.

Like a Continental Soldier on Amazon

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The first audiobook from Podium should release sometime this year. I’ll let you know when that happens!

In the meantime, if you read ebooks or paperbacks and you like sci-fi, give Waking Late a look. The first book—Sleeping Duty—has an awesome twist!

 

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Laura Montgomery’s Website

Laura Montgomery is many things to me.

College roommate from days of yore. Friend. Fellow writer. Cool lady. First reader. Talented science fiction author.

I could go on. But within the compass of this blog post, she’s a client! Because she hired me to revamp her author website.

As many of you know, I love playing with graphics and will seize any excuse to do so. Thus I’ve created many a bundle cover, covers for my own novellas and shorts, and even the occasional book cover for a friend.

Laura has seen most of my portfolio, so when she decided her website needed an overhaul…she hired me to do it. (A website is a bit too large of a job to do just for the fun of it—although it is fun. For me.)

I think it turned out really well (pleading guilty to bias), so I wanted to show it to you!

Here’s a screenshot of the Home page. You can click on the image, if you’d like to go visit the real thing. Laura’s a space lawyer, so her blog is an intriguing blend of space law, space colonization, and science fiction. Go look! I’ll wait. 😀

Don’t you love the art?

It’s from the cover of her latest release, Long in the Land. Isn’t the site itself clean and inviting and harmonious? It’s built on the theme Lyrical.

I could gush about all the things I think are cool about the site…but I won’t! 😉

Instead I’ll show you a screenshot of a blog post page. Clicking this image will allow you to see it at a larger size, large enough to read. Although…if you’re interested in reading the post, go visit her site!

Cool, yes?

Okay, I’ll stop blowing my own trumpet. 😉 But I can’t sign off without talking about Laura’s books!

I’m a fantasy writer and a fantasy reader, but I also read in other genres, science fiction among them. And Laura has written two of my favorites.

Here’s a little bit about them:

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Exoplanets. Terrorists. Lawyers…

Calvin Tondini has his first client, but he may be in over his head.

It’s the twenty-second century. Humanity’s first and only interstellar starship returns safely. Its mission to discover a habitable planet succeeded beyond all hopes, but there’s one problem. Captain Paolina Nigmatullin of the USS Aeneid left an unsanctioned human colony behind and now stands charged with mutiny.

Calvin must defend her!

Mercenary Calling on Amazon
 

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FAA attorney Terrence Rogers dreams of space, but he spends his days on informed consent for space tourists.

Young foreign service officer Hal Cooper faces real change with the arrival of an alien spaceship, but it means something else for Terrence.

“Rapunzel”—a short story—has an awesome twist, and it’s available for free. So if you enjoy SF and have a yen to try Laura’s fiction, give it a look.

Rapunzel on Amazon

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For more of my designerly play, ahem—work, see:
Covers, and More Covers
A Boatload of Covers

For more about Laura’s books, see:
LauraMontgomery.com/Books

 

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Read-Only Beauty

Read-Only Beauty started as an assignment in a writing workshop on how to develop ideas for stories. I wrote a story opening inspired by three words chosen at random from a dictionary: read-only-memory, number cruncher, derelict.

The assignment was limited to 500 words, but I couldn’t bear to stop there! I turned in the required word count, but kept writing to finish a piece of flash fiction, included in its entirety below.

photo by Myheimu

Temporarily down.
Back on July 8, 2022

 

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Fox in the Hen Coop

I must apologize for the lack of a new post here last week. I was sick. So sick, that even posting to say I was sick seemed beyond me. I’m on the mend now, but still not well enough to write the post I had in mind. Maybe next week! In the meantime, here’s a story opening, one of the bunch I listed under the popcorn kittens post. 😀

Stars by Brandon Davis

Mary cursed. Then cursed because she cursed. Cursing was symptomatic of the whole problem. She shouldn’t be able to do it, but Farmer Braun had replaced two corroded cybernetic chips in her temporal lobe last week with cheap black market knock-offs. New shades of meaning, along with new vocabulary, were the result.

She decided against a third round of blue – this was too serious for venting – and engaged the spooler again, heard its anti-grav whirr uselessly, followed by an ominous ka-chunk. Damn! That spooler needed to go out. The repulsion fence had to be deployed. The chickens must emerge to scratch.

Mary was only one of a thousand mobile avian robotic eyries – model MRY97 – in this meadow, the dirty system of Eridani78. But even one gap in the orbital shield would be too much. The Eridani primary generated plutonium and uranium nano particles in quantities immense enough to read as geysers of debris from far-off ancient Earth. A leak through Mary’s field . . . would poison an entire continent on the planet spinning lazily below. Her chickens must scratch.

She engaged the photoreceptor inside the housing that formed her body. The chickens – TCHQN49’s – clamped onto their roosting bars, indicators all go: internal checks performed, cleansing cycle complete, repair cycle complete. Mary permitted herself some sarcasm on that repair. No thanks to Braun. Why couldn’t the astro-shepherd keep the supply bays in Mary’s dorsal spokes stocked?

She threaded her photoreceptor through to the spooler’s hutch. And cursed again, unnoticing of herself this time. Black carbon soot mottled the spooler’s ceramic carapace, concentrated around the ejection module. Mary unfurled her molecular probe to analyze the vacuum. Yep. Bitter scent of burnt copper. Sweet taste of almonds. Damn, damn, damn! She’d noticed the older repulsor beads growing ragged and scratched. One of them – she launched her internal palp – was fouling the ejector mechanism. The carbon scorching felt gritty under her palp, the jammed bead, sharp where its hull was delaminating.

Damn! This was the rat that ate the cheese that lay in the house that Jack built. Except her rats, the TCHQN’s, wouldn’t eat. And her cheeses – the plutonium nanos – were deadly.

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For more science fiction samples, see:
Dragon’s Tooth
Dream Trap

For a fantasy sample, see:
Fate’s Door

 

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Dream Trap

Fourth in my series of story openings. Inspired by a nightmare. Beware!

Hot! by Martin Cathrae

Something was wrong. Very wrong.

She shivered even though she wasn’t cold, feeling a frisson of horror move though her.

The street lights glowed dimly, obscured by a faint mist in the growing dusk. She looked right, looked left. No traffic, even here at a corner. Just the same patched asphalt lined by low anonymous brick buildings and deserted.

She shivered again and stepped from the curb. Why didn’t her footsteps sound as they should, hurried slaps of shoe leather on paving? The world seemed strangely muted.

She reached the opposite curb, stepped up on the buckled surface of a sidewalk in poor repair. Should she turn? Try another route? These soulless streets chilled her.

A drift of muffled laughter snatched her attention. There! Up ahead.

She broke into a run, leaving the humped sidewalk for the more level roadway. A warmer glow of light flickered in an abandoned lot. Firelight? Here?

And where was here? She didn’t know. Only that it was unfriendly, empty, and nowhere known to her. I’m lost.

Five men huddled around the rusted steel barrel, ragged coats unbuttoned, mugs of – coffee? yes, coffee – wrapped in their knobby hands. She couldn’t smell the rich aroma of the brew. Wished she could taste it, real and hot. How did she know it wasn’t liquor? It should be liquor. These were homeless men, warming themselves around trash burning in a barrel.

She approached them, tripping over a half-buried fragment of tire tread, feeling the scritch of brittle grass against her ankles. Why did her body feel so lethargic? Why was she cool, as though blown by the breeze of a ceiling fan, but not cold? It was winter.

She tried to speak, “Please. Please help me,” but nothing came out. The men didn’t see her. They gestured to one another, laughing again at a joke, their pinched faces illuminated by humor and snapping flames.

Please. See me. Let me in.

She was running again, unnoticed by the men, running from their unconscious rebuff.

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For more science fiction samples, see:
Dragon’s Tooth
Fox in the Hen Coop

For a fantasy sample, see:
Witch’s Sweet

 

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Dragon’s Tooth

This is the second post in a series of story openings. I’m hoping to get my readers’ views on what they’d like to see me write next!

photo of night sky

Her hand hurt. And her wrist. In fact, her whole right arm and shoulder hurt, stretched out to the side like that and angled up. Pulled by some steady and unyielding force. She struggled to raise her gluey eyelids, but couldn’t quite manage it. She was floating, towed by her arm.

The hush of air moving in close confines sounded in her ears. The slight funk of unbathed human made her wrinkle her nose. She swallowed, wishing for water to wash away the sour taste in her mouth.

Where am I?

She tugged against the pull on her arm. It was so uncomfortable, her hand turned like that with its back leading, and something rigid guiding her fingers into an awkward array, digging into the flesh.

What is this?

This time her eyes made it open.

Oh!

The begemmed scarf of a thousand stars spread across the dark of deep space, gleaming in soft reflections on the ceram-glass of her faceplate.

“This is why I . . .”

Why I what? She couldn’t remember.

She looked back past her trailing hand. Darker there, fewer stars. No shuttle. No station. No . . . planet.

Over that shoulder and to her back? Endless space.

Somehow she didn’t want to look ahead. Didn’t want to see what drew her on so inexorably. She struggled again against her trapped arm.

And looked.

Oh, gods! What was that?

A whirl of faintly sparkling dust? A current of shadows? The maw of a star dragon? She hardly knew, but it was power. And danger. And death.

She began to fight in earnest, throwing herself against the alien brace that wrapped her gloved right hand, working to slip her fingers and palm out of the metal’s embrace.

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For more science fiction samples, see:
Fox in the Hen Coop
Last Tide

For a fantasy sample, see:
Legend of the Beggar’s Son

 

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