And this is where I leave you

So, friends, if you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that my output on here has been... sporadic.  To say the least.  And that's because I've been working hard, and my Big Crazy Plan has been catching up with me.

WAY BACK in 2011, when I was still a Baby Writer trying to get an agent, I decided that I Would Do The Blog every Monday and Thursday, largely as a way to force myself into habit and discipline.  This was in no small part due to being at a conference where one panelist made a point that it's better to Not Have A Blog than it is to have a blog that's updated in a haphazard and dilettante way, especially if you're a Baby Writer trying to show that You Are A Professional Writer Person.  So I dug into that diligence, continuing through selling my first books, and then getting invited to be here on SFF Seven.

But, in the years since then, my focus and needs as a writer has shifted, and while it's been great... it's also been a lot to juggle all the different things.  And one of those things is, of course, maintaining the regular blog posts here.

It's been great here, and I've been thrilled with sharing this space with all these people here.  But, unfortunately, I've reached a point where something has to give, and sadly, SFF Seven makes the most sense. 

I hope a few of the things I've posted over the years have been intriguing or insightful or in some way helpful.  Or at least fun. 

I may still pop in from time to time, when I have something to scream about.  But for now, I'll take a bow, and do one last bit of shouty:


MARADAINE! Four braided series set in the same city!  If you've waited this long, please go put your hands on it!

All right, that's good.  Do good works, people.  I'll see you down in the word mines.

Flash Fiction, the Great Intimidator

I used to write a whole bunch of flash fiction before I knew that's what it was called. And then one day I went to a con and listened to a panel full of people who were experts at this, and now... man, I don't want to invade their genius space ever, ever again. It's too pristine.

Just, whoa levels of intimidated here.

So instead of writing a 100-word story about my most recent release, More Than Stardust, here's a 100-word excerpt that kind of gets to the core of the story:

So long as Chloe was some version of her freaky, robot, inhuman self, so long as she was other and awful and immortal, she would be fine.

And he would not.

Two people so different could never be together. Not really. Not to last.

Such a slip of a thing was a human life, a few dozen years, likely no more than a hundred. A burst of bright in darkness, a flurry of wonder, and then it was done. Gone. And all the magic it held in those short, precious years, just ceased existing.

How was any of that fair?

The Immortal Spy: Series Summary

Our challenge this week is to write 100 words --no more, no less--describing our current WiP or series. Dear Reader, it ain't as easy as it sounds. But, I am up for the challenge, so here we go:

THE IMMORTAL SPY
An Urban Fantasy Series

An immortal gatekeeper with a crippling case of amnesia works in the shadows, leveraging intel and assets to save the collective of Mid Worlds from its own hostile government and a ravenous army of foreign invaders. Aided by a raucous mix of spies and soldiers, the gatekeeper will thwart Fates, gods, angels, and dragons to protect the Mids, reclaim her past, and access untold powers. In a series where enemies are allies and old lovers surface with suspicious agendas, the IMMORTAL SPY takes readers from the very real streets of Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, to fictitious locales prowled by sinister deities.

Encouraging Creative Flow and Gradually Increasing Word Count

We revealed the cover of THE FATE OF THE TALA! So now everyone knows who the mystery protagonist is. (If you can't guess from the image, the description - and preorder link - are here.)

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is a challenge to write a drabble related to our most recent book or series. (A drabble is a scene in exactly 100 words. No more, no less.)

As usual for me with writing challenges, I'm going to pass on this one. I have good reasons for it, which I'm talking about on today's podcast. I'm doing daily podcasts at First Cup of Coffee during NaNoWriMo encouraging writers to embrace creative flow, i.e.: Pants that NaNoWriMo story!

On yesterday's podcast, First Cup of Coffee - November 2, 2019, I talked about building up daily wordcount gradually. So I've resurrected a previous post that gives a suggested strategy for hitting that 50K in November NaNoWriMo goal.

Here's the essence of it:

I take my own advice. The sort I had the opportunity to hand out a couple of weeks ago when Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo, visited our local chapter meeting, something I mentioned in last week’s post, too. One gal asked if Chris had advice on how to get going on writing those 1,667 words/day to make the 50K words/month that’s the NaNoWriMo goal. He said he didn’t so I offered mine. I told her that the temptation is to do the math exactly that way – to divide 50K by the 30 days of November and focus on achieving 1,667 words for each of those days. The problem with that approach is that writing that many words on the first day is akin to learning to run a marathon by going out and running ten miles right off the bat.

Yeah, you can probably do it, but you’ll feel the pain later.

In fact, you might be able to do it for a couple/three/four days – and then the crash occurs. Like my recovery time recently, it’s a natural sequel to going flat out.

Better, I told her, to treat it like that marathon training. Build up a little more every day. Stop before you’re tired, because that energy will translate to the next day. Consider setting up a schedule for NaNoWriMo like this:

1 100
2 200
3 300
4 400
5 500
6 750
7 1000
8 1250
9 1500
10 1750
11 2000
12 2000
13 2000
14 2000
15 2000
16 2100
17 2100
18 2100
19 2100
20 2100
21 2100
22 2200
23 2200
24 2200
25 2200
26 2200
27 2200
28 2200
29 2200
30 2200

By the end of November 30, you’d have 50,150 words. Best of all, by the time you’ve got yourself doing 2,200 words a day, it will feel very easy and natural. Because you’d be in shape for it.

Another great aspect of this method is that if you're feeling like you're "already behind" - with this schedule you're not!

Visit to a Dead Science Fiction Project

DepositPhoto

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is to Share Something Great from a Dead Project.

First of all, I have very few projects that won’t ever be worked on. All of my scifi romance novels have been published and I just keep going on new projects. I don’t sit down to write a book and step away from it. I can think of maybe three short stories I wrote as an adult, which I can’t imagine going back to. There won’t be an excerpt today, however, because all three were laboriously typed on my old Royal and don’t exist anywhere electronically. So even if I wanted to dig through the storage boxes (I don’t) I’m not going to transcribe a 500 words or so snippet at this late date. I’d probably start editing it!

My SFR occurs in the Sectors, which is the name I gave my interstellar civilization. These three stories were early early attempts at writing in the Sectors, which was useful practice but I moved on. I did keep the name and concept of one location, Taychelle’s Planet, which I like to drop into current books. It was like Antarctica and they make good vodka there. 

The story that came to mind first for this week’s exercise involved a planet in the path of an invading alien armada. (I can’t remember if I named these aliens as the Mawreg, who are the Big Bad in my Sectors books but they were clearly the prototypes.)  Everyone had been evacuated but for one family from a ranch way out in the back of beyond. Three volunteers were waiting at the space port with the last ship, and would take these people to safety if they could get to the port in time. There was a baby being born, a flyer crash, a rescue, a brave pilot and takeoff in the teeth of the incoming enemy…and a happy ending of course. The baby gets named for the pilot who saved them all. No romance that I can recall, which is another reason I let this project lapse after finishing the first draft.

I also remember basing the space port on the USMC air station where my late husband worked at one time, as far as the setup and the atmosphere.

My most recent 2019 Sectors novel was STAR CRUISE: IDOL’S CURSE, which appears in the USA Today Best Selling Pets In Space® 4 anthology. A portion of the royalties earned through Veteran’s Day November 11^th goes to Hero Dogs, Inc., a charity which provides service dogs to veterans in need and first responders.

Usually I start with the concept of the pet for my PISA stories and develop the plot from what the animal ‘suggests’ to me but this time my jumping off place was legends about bad luck hitting tourists who steal rocks from certain locales.

I’ve always been fascinated by these myths and the tales of bad luck people believe they incur if they ‘steal’ a rock from a certain place. (And when I was researching this topic, I discovered there are various tourist spots where this belief flourishes, not just in Hawaii. The Petrified Forest in northern Arizona is another area where people frantically return rocks to the park after thinking their illicit souvenir has brought them bad luck.) I wanted to be sure I wasn’t doing cultural appropriation if I took this basic concept for my story, so I was relieved to find the modern legend arises in various places and is believed to have been begun in one locale by a tour bus driver who didn’t want volcanic ash and grit from purloined chunks off the beach or mountain messing up his vehicles. Another variation on the story says because it’s against the law to remove anything from a national park, a ranger invented the story to add an additional layer of ‘scariness’ to deter would-be souvenir hunters.

Of  course since I’m writing science fiction, I then took the entire topic a step further and gave my ‘rock’ some scary attributes, the ability to do real harm and a bit of carving to justify referring to an idol’s curse in the title.

It seemed to me the idea of tourists and souvenirs fit in very nicely with my luxury cruise ship, and then since an entire deck of the ship is devoted to recreating a beach from the planet Tahumaroa Two, it was logical for the rock or ‘idol’ in question in my story to have come from that planet and need to go back there. This led me to ponder who in the crew would be likely to become involved with returning a rock and I decided it was time for the Cruise Director, Juli Shaeffer, to get her story. She’s been referenced many times in other STAR CRUISE stories but we really never met her.  I got to do all kinds of fun research into what exactly a cruise director does on Earth and then embellish and enhance for my starship.

My next challenge was how to put a pet front and center in the story, and to engage them in a meaningful fashion with the action. I decided Juli and Third Officer Steve Aureli had unfinished romantic business, and that Steve has an elderly aunt traveling aboard this particular cruise. Every time I thought about the character of Aunt Dian, I saw one of the Gabor sisters in my head, dressed in pink and a froufrou feather boa, clutching a tiny dog. (The Gabors were famous actresses in their day and Eva from the ‘Green Acres’ TV show is kind of who I was going for, although ZsaZsa did play Queen of Outer space once in a movie.) 

Of course Dian and Charrli, her dog, have a lot more backstory and aren’t what they seem on the surface. For one thing, they’re veterans of the Sectors Special Forces Z Corps, which means Charrli is very smart and telepathic with Dian. Charrli bonds with Juli and has an affinity for the rock or idol of the novel’s title.

Then I let the events unfold from there!

The blurb: An unusual bequest….

Juli Shaeffer, the Nebula Zephyr’s cruise director, receives a mysterious bequest from the estate of a longtime passenger – a lump of rock taken from a reef on the planet Tahumaroa. Legend states anyone who steals from the ocean gods will be cursed. The passenger’s will requests the rock be returned to the beach so his heirs won’t be affected by the bad luck he believed he’d incurred. Juli doesn’t believe in superstitions and she agrees to carry out this small favor on the ship’s next stop at the planet in question.

Until the rock disappears from her office…

When the rock disappears and reappears in various locations around the ship, and seems connected to a steadily escalating series of mishaps, Juli turns to Third Officer Steve Aureli as the only one she feels she can trust. Along with Steve and his elderly Aunt Dian – a passenger aboard the Nebula Zephyr for this cruise - she investigates the strange series of malfunctions plaguing the interstellar luxury liner. Steve and Juli enlist his Aunt Dian’s dog, Charrli, a retired Sectors Z Corps canine, to help them track the missing rock as it moves about the ship.

Juli and Steve must find the rock, hang onto it and transport it to the planet’s surface, before the alien idol’s curse turns deadly. The attraction between the two of them grows as the threat to Juli becomes more and more focused. Can she carry out her task while he keeps her safe from the alien curse? Will the capricious alien idol bring them good fortune…or disaster?

All Buy Links: https://www.petsinspaceantho.com/books/pets-in-space-4/

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WCQF358/

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07WCQF358/

Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07WCQF358/

Amazon AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07WCQF358/

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/pets-in-space-4

Books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/pets-in-space-4/id1476281234

Nook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pets-in-space-4-s-e-smith/1132911108?ean=2940163094325

GooglePlay: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/S_E_Smith_Pets_in_Space_4?id=jXuoDwAAQBAJ

From the Dead Letter File

As I am on limited computer time while recovering from a concussion, I'll just give you more story excerpt to read and spare you the commentary.

This is from what had been intended to be a half steampunk, half fantasy that no one wanted.

“Madam?”

            Voice. Male. Speaking one of the millions of tongues encoded on the language chip implanted in her brain, which, judging from the excruciating throb at her temples, was about to explode.

            “Madam,” the voice sounded impatient and what? Unsettled? “I must insist you shake off Anubis’s hold and wake. This instant. Can you hear me? Can you tell me your name?”

            What was her name this time? She wouldn’t have been sent in without cover. With a sickening lurch, her mind stumbled into habit and she mentally tripped the program interface that should provide an entire lifetime’s worth of names, dates, and places, memories of people, events and things she’d never actually known.

            Nothing happened. She forced her eyes open but saw only darkness. Fear caught in her throat. Uncertain how to proceed, she gave him the only name rolling around the splitting pain in her head. “Dainan.” It came out a bare thread of sound.

            Smell hit her. Dank, musty soil that hadn’t been sweetened by any touch of sun and which supported no living thing. An acrid, metallic scent bit the back of her throat. She flinched. Did blood always have to smell like that? Whose was it? Above the background odors, a warm hint of pine combined with exotic spice tempted her to turn and burrow into the scent.

            “Dainan?” he repeated, jolting her out of reverie. “Is that your first or last name?”

“Loewe!” another male voice, raspy as a behlour cloud-cat tongue, shouted.

“Never mind,” the man beside her said. “Peter Loewe, at your service. What happened here?”

Too many questions. No answers. “Where?” she whispered.

“Where?” He laughed. It sounded forced. “We are short a meter from where that maniac murdered his last victim. Were you attacked? You don’t seem . . .that is to say, did you witness anything? Or were you, perhaps, a friend of the victim?”

“Attacked?” She nodded. Yes. That felt right, somehow. Attacked. Why?

“I – I apologize,” she murmured, automatically struggling to match his speech patterns, to fit in. “My memory is hazy.”

“Loewe,” rasp-voice growled. “Ma’at’s priestess and the police commissioner may be impressed by your magic tricks, but all I see is someone holding up my investigation. Leave the strumpet. She’ll sleep it off.”

Strumpet? Dainan frowned. What backward culture had Aeone sent her to this time? On what mission? And why did she not have cover memories?

“On the contrary, Inspector Cooper,” Loewe replied, the barest current of anger under his level tone, “I believe you have a witness on your hands.  The lady claims to have been attacked.”

“Attacked? What happened?” the inspector demanded of her.

She turned automatically toward the man addressing her. He reeked of stale smoke and moldering onions. The jagged ache in her head sharpened and she gasped.

“She is still dazed, Inspector, possibly injured, though the only outward sign I see is a scorch mark on her clothing there at the pocket.”

Scorch mark? Dainan frowned and cursed the fact that she still couldn’t coax her eyes to function to spec. Or at all. She shivered as anxiety spiked through her middle. She couldn’t do a proper damage assessment, much less attempt to initiate any kind of field repair. Not here. Not with witnesses.

“Injured,” the inspector huffed. “An addict, like as not. Won’t get a single useful fact out of her. Bundle her off, then. Just be sure to get an address so we can collect a statement later. Least you can do to be useful.”

The inspector stomped away, muttering.

Dainan sucked an angry breath between her teeth.

“That’s all very well,” Loewe said, his voice tight.

“No, it isn’t,” Dainan grumbled. “I do not like bullies.”

“You do not like - ” he broke off, drew a slow, audible breath and said, “I will endeavor to remember that. Allow me to have you escorted home and a doctor called. We may have questions once you are feeling more yourself. Where do you live?”

            Dainan closed her eyes and swallowed a sudden surge of nausea. “The River.”

           “The River.” He swore. “I have been educated in several of the finest universities the Empire of the Pyramids has to offer. I’ll be damned if I go on parroting a streetwalker like a schoolboy.”

“River Walker,” she corrected automatically.

“River – No. I’ll not do it again,” he cleared his throat. “Madam, where is your home?”

            “The River is my home,” she muttered, annoyance at his lack of comprehension speeding her heart rate. What was so difficult about understanding she didn’t belong in his world? Wait. Wasn’t there a rule against divulging her extra-planar origin? Had she just broken in? “My place of . . . birth doesn’t matter.”

            “Madam . . .”

            “My name is Dainan,” she said. Her voice sounded stronger. The hurt in her skull had subsided, but she still couldn’t feel her body. She cracked one eye open again and swore in her own, long dead, language.

            “I beg your pardon?”

            “I can’t see,” she said. “Your hypothesis regarding an attack is accurate. I’ve sustained damage. More to the point, however, I will be pursued.”

            “By whom? And why?” From the sharpening of his tone, she gathered that her companion had settled into his own investigation.

            “I don’t know,” Dainan hedged, confused by the flood of images that spilled through her head, none of which made any sense.

            He swore again.

            Dainan heard the rustle of fabric and the creak of leather as he shifted closer.

He dropped his voice so she had to strain to understand him. “You’re a tech or an inventor. Aren’t you? You said ‘your hypothesis’ and you aren’t touching anything.”