FREE sci-fi novel, plus a bit about WIPs.

Last week, I got to read about twenty thousand words of my clone-sibling’s WIP (well, one of them: he’s working on three different novels right now), the sequel to Project Brimstone (working title, Stormriders). And I gotta tell you, anyone who reads this novel without having taken me seriously when I said (over and over) that all our stories are connected somehow… They’re gonna miss a lot of the fun.

You remember how a couple of secondary characters from The Awakening series appear in Project Brimstone? Well, there’s more of that… and I don’t mean Deegan. Not just Deegan, anyway. He hasn’t shown up yet in Stormriders, although I’m sure he will. What I mean, though, is the sort of stuff that fills in backstory for some of those weirdos in that other series. Surely you don’t think Deegan is the only good-guy character in The Awakening who was… less so, once upon a time.

As hinted at in the title of this post, The Madness Engine (book 3 of The Awakening) is currently free on Amazon. (Paul forgot to post an announcement on his blog for this one, so that link sends you directly to Amazon.)

 

 

 

 

 

Another free sci-fi novel from author Paul B. Spence

Of course you were expecting this one: it’s the sequel to last week’s free novel.

Ah, Vesuvius, the planet where I first encountered Hrothgar Tebrey and his brother…

Read.

Enjoy.

Wait impatiently/eagerly for the third book to be free sometime next week… 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FREE sci-fi novel: limited-time offer

So there’s this sci-fi anthor named Paul B. Spence (my “clone-sibling”/identical twin), and he’s decided that as a way of helping people who are isolated due to this virus thing, he’s gonna offer his novel The Remnant for free, from midnight tonight through March 25…

If you click on this link, you can read a sample on the author’s blog before heading over to Amazon to get your copy of The Remnant.

The novel

The Remnant is the first book in a series. Paul plans to offer each of the other novels for free, in sequence, as the weeks go by. (Project Brimstone is free, too, through the 25th of March — it’s first in a different series — but you may want to get that one to read later, due to certain… thematic elements.)

The author

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cats, editing, and my clone-sibling’s new armor

So there I was this morning, making coffee in the kitchen, when the kitten came running into the room, dragging a full-size bath towel…

“Logan, what are you doing?”

“Boo-boo!” he meowed. Flop. Flip. Purrrrr….

Cats are so weird. Isn’t it great? 🙂

Logan and Smudge. Hard to believe Logan is only eleven months old. He’s gonna be ENORMOUS by the time he’s a full adult cat.

 

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A couple weeks ago, I asked my clone-sibling, “Do I just have a face that makes people think, ‘This guy looks like he’d be especially good at editing military sci-fi’?”

Paul, of course, thought that was funny. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you do.”

(No one online has any idea what I look like, other than ‘like Paul but with longer hair and no beard.’ But people certainly thinks he looks like someone who’d be especially good at writing military sci-fi, so… *shrug*)

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Want more cat pics? Of course you do…

Ashley, the kitty with little fog feet.

Mr. Tip, a.k.a. Doodle, the Dude, Doodlecat…

Grace still hasn’t been able to get pics of the Cedar Brothers, Stripe and Splotch. Stripe, by the way, is ready to become a housecat, if we can find someone to adopt him. He asks to be petted, have his ears scratched, etc. A few days ago, he allowed Grace to pick him up and cuddle him; he purred the whole time.

Yesterday, Logan tried to chase Tip, who was undaunted: ‘I’ve been a cat longer than you have, and I grew up with three sisters, all torties. You don’t scare me, kid.’

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This morning, my clone-sibling finally got his latest SCA armor upgrade: new gauntlets. And perhaps the too-obvious joke that came out of that wouldn’t have happened (at least not immediately), except he’s wearing black, and Grace insisted on taking a photo of Paul wearing his new gauntlets…

Paul wearing his new gauntlets. Any resemblance between this photo and a card-sized portrait described in one of my favorite novels is entirely deliberate.

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(I’m not oblivious to what’s happening in the world right now. I just thought people might want to read about something else every now and then. Maybe even something fun. Y’know, since stress is bad for one’s immune system and all…)

 

 

BadGramma’s all-natural revenge extract :-)

Just a bit of grammar humor here… inspired by the bad grammar in a couple of lines from a movie I really liked. (Yes, it’s true: I can’t even watch a superhero movie without flinching inwardly when someone uses blatantly incorrect grammar. *shrug*)

One cannot extract revenge. One may exact revenge, though.

exact (verb): demand and obtain (something, especially a payment) from someone

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Missing the Point

Someone read this post a couple of weeks ago and apparently took great offense at the phrase ‘passing for human.’ Said it was racist and ableist… I understand how it could be either/both of those things, in a totally different context. What it is, however, is literal.

The post is a sort of character questionaire, but it’s written as if the character were reading and responding to the questions in person (and making the occasional snarky remark to/about his author, whom he blames for his troubles). There is no reasonable way anyone could miss the context in the blog post: the “offensive” phrase occurs more than one thousand words into it, and there are plenty of clues well before then that the fictional person using it actually isn’t human (but has had to pretend to be). Therefor, this “offended” individual who left the comment is a troll or an idjit. Maybe both. Probably both.

The title of this post is a bad pun, or a bad joke, or something like that… We don’t care right now, though, ’cause we’re both annoyed at the troll/idjit. (In this context, we refers not to the blogger and his clone-sibling, but rather to the blogger and the character whom he interviewed in that older post. Translation: Jason Grey thinks the “offended” person is a troll/idjit, too.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once again, he seeks beta readers.

It’s time for the next stage in preparing this manuscript for publication: beta readers!

We already have one volunteer, someone who’s never read for us before, and that’s good, because this story is a bit different from everything else the author has written so far.

But I’ve been thinking: How can we get a few more?

…Grace just said, ‘Maybe you should bribe them with being Tuckerized or something.’

Sure, why not? Beta read my clone-sibling’s novel I Won’t Cry for Yesterday, and you (or rather, an alternate-universe version of you) can be a background character in one of the upcoming novels set in Geoffrey’s home universe. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that, if you lived in a world where the feral plague killed more than ninety percent of all humans, you’d not only survive but get the earliest version of the vaccine, the one with… interesting side effects? 🙂