sci-fi

Friday Fiction: The Cliffs of Karkoom

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For this month’s short fiction, another of the building blocks for Paradise Falls. This time, it’s Weiland Fell. He’s a member of the Galactic Alliance Peace Keepers and, specifically, a specialist in hostage negotiation and search-and-rescue ops. He’s got a streak of daredevil in him and a willingness to put himself in harm’s way to protect others.

He also happens to come from Malchiar, a non-Alliance world with a bad reputation that Weiland feels he has to try and make up for.

Of course, not all rescues have a happy ending…as Weiland is about to be reminded of.

Read The Cliffs of Karkoom

Happy (or maybe not, this time) reading 🙂

Friday Fiction – Finding a Pond

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And we’re back with the short story writing (finally!) and we’re back in the same universe as Human Touch. As I mentioned when I posted that, it’s a part of a much larger universe and this is another of the building blocks for that universe – it also won’t be the last one of these I post!

When I first started working on the sprawling space opera, I started (as I usually do) with the characters. Who they are at the point you first meet them and who they were prior to that point. In the case of my four central characters (you get to meet the first one in this story) that meant a lot of backstory. Some of that came in the form of notes while some of it – the interesting bits! – came in the form of short stories or scenelets.

And I looked at what I ended up with and went: “I’m missing something.” That was a large part of the reason why the project got shelved. And then Human Touch happened. When that was originally conceived it was just a random sci-fiish story, but working on it last year I could see how it worked with what I’d been working on. It gave the universe reasons as to why things are the way they are and it gave things a bigger sense of history.

I love it when this sort of thing happens!

Once Human Touch was posted, I started looking at my other building blocks and began pulling them together so that they could be shared and this is the first one off the shelf. Meet Jellena Batrice. She wants to be a Special Investigator but the training is proving to be nothing like she was expecting…

Read Finding a Pond

Happy reading 🙂

Friday Fiction – Human Touch

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The second Friday Fiction post for the month and a very, very different kind of story (though with a similarly troubled gestation!).

I started writing Human Touch about ten years ago as an assignment for an Open University course and ran into a wall. I had a great opening and zero idea of where it was going! For the assignment I ended up writing something very different (that neither I nor my tutor actually liked all that much, so it’s not going to become a Friday Fiction piece!), but I kept the opening on file, reasoning that, sooner or later, I’d know how to end it.

And so to now. After ten years of nibbling away at the project, I was finally able to get it finished, inspired at least partially by current (political) events in various parts of the world. It’s not a happy story (unusually for me) and it’s definitely not seasonal, but it is a story I’m very pleased with.

As yet, I have no plans to revisit this set of characters…but as it does exist in the same universe as the sprawling space saga mentioned in the Project Notes section (though it’s chronologically, about a hundred years prior), I’m not going to say never.

Read Human Touch

Happy reading!