FREE Weekend & SFF Saturday 2/23/13

I'm back!  I won't bore you with the varied (and disturbing) reasons why I haven't been posting for Science Fiction & Fantasy Saturdays.  Just know that I haven't abandoned the story of Prisoner 1138 and I hope to share more of his journal with you in the coming weeks.  This week, however, I'm killing two planets with one asteroid: posting a snippet of DREMIKS which is FREE on Amazon for the weekend of February 23rd and 24th.

Amazon US link here
Page with links for other countries here.

If you've already read DREMIKS and are looking for other scifi and fantasy books, please check out the links at the SFF Saturday site.

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(This is a brief, 10 sentence, description of Dwax, the Dremikian alien aboard the spaceship Hudson.)




Dwax floated to the medical bay. He preferred humans to use the term “float” instead of the repulsive “slither” that some found so applicable. He wished he could understand the human psyche’s need to associate anything that had tentacles with slimy, slithering, creatures of the muck and wet. Dwax had never once slithered and he hated being dirty. In one of his arm tentacles, he carried a stack of disks for Dr. Ruger.

Trained to follow in his father’s diplomatic footsteps, according to the rigid caste system of his home-world, Dwax had no useful medical knowledge. His father had, however, considered it a diplomat’s duty to supply Dr. Ruger with several weighty tomes on the subject. Much as he was bored by all things medicinal, Dwax was fascinated by the coffee-skinned doctor and her soft voice. Happily freed from a meeting with Chancellor Trell, Dwax looked forward to an afternoon in the doctor’s company.

SFF Saturday 8-25-2012

This week's submission for Science Fiction Fantasy Saturday is an excerpt from "Dremiks".  I invented a card game for my characters to play and spent a large amount of time figuring out the rules of the game.  This snippet has been modified from the published version of "Dremiks" in order to meet the requirements for SFF Saturdays (10 sentences or less).

Don't forget to check out the other authors' work!

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The four officers were playing spay-ya bushki, a popular card game in university dorms and military barracks all over Earth. The name was a bastardization of the Russian phrase “grandmother’s tears”. The rule set had evolved over the years, and, as was common with every game, each group of players added their own quirks. Played with one hundred four cards from two distinct decks, spay-ya was a bizarre combination of bridge and poker. Each player was initially dealt three cards. They had to bet before looking at those “hole” cards. The bets hovered a foot above the table to each player’s right side, projected by small keycards that recorded wagers and money won or lost.

Swede flipped two cards face up from the top of the deck; these cards became the high and low trumps. Because a spay-ya deck had eight suites, there were several possible designated trump suites and numbers. A skilled player combined card counting, strategic thinking, and a great deal of luck in his game play.

"An Alien in a Crate"

I grew up with expressions like "Don't buy a pig in a poke".  For those not up on Southern American colloquialisms, that means "Don't purchase a pig in a sack" or, "sight unseen".

Consumers of books needn't buy a book without knowing what they will get. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have "Look Inside" or "Read Instantly" preview functions.  Many indie and self-published authors also offer samples of their work, either on their blogs or through book sites.

On both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, you can read the first two chapters of "Dremiks", for free, right on your web browser. You can also browse through samples and snippets at then end of this post.

Don't buy an alien in a crate--take a minute to learn about Dremikians and their human saviors by reading the available free samples. And don't worry, I work hard to make sure the plot twists of the book remained unspoiled!

Flight aerobatics
“The thing is, you’re emotionally stunted.”
“How’s the jaw, sir?”
Engineers vs pilots vs robots
Chapter 8 via FrontRowLit  

Science-Fiction/Fantasy Saturday 7-7-2012

Welcome back to another 10 sentence snippet for SFF Saturday.  I hope long-time readers will find this blog version easier to read and comment upon.  If you've already read "Dremiks", this week's offering will be very familiar*; so, please feel free to read lots of new material from the other great authors at : http://scififansat.blogspot.com/2012/07/sffs-07072012.html
If you haven't read "Dremiks", what are you waiting for?

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Maggie crouched underneath the panel system of the pilots’ flight simulator, her curses varying in volume from whispers to loud tirades. She was aware of, and further infuriated by, Swede’s lack of concern over her ire. To both the women present, Swede’s only visible emotion was amusement. Maggie crab-walked from underneath the panel. She had to twist at her waist to raise her shoulders past the seat edge and then twist again to stand fully upright.

“From a medical stand-point, Maggie, the human body really isn’t designed to contort that way.”

The commander rolled her shoulders to work out a kink, then shot a withering look at her roommate as she collapsed into the mock-up pilot’s chair. “Well, the engineers who designed this piece of crap didn’t have human physical limitations in mind—as usual.”

Swede placed a screwdriver in her out-stretched hand. “In all fairness, ma’am, the same engineers who designed this also designed a robot to fix it.”


* Snippet varies from the published version of "Dremiks" in order to meet the 10 sentence limitation of SFF Saturday.

Science Fiction Fantasy Saturday 2/18/2012

I'm participating in Science Fiction Fantasy Saturday. Hop on over THERE to find submissions from other sci-fi and fantasy authors! Also find us on Twitter with the hashtag #sffsat .

The is a scene from my novel Dremiks, which will be released in March. Enjoy!

Doctor Ben Fortunas snorted. “Does she respond to my complaints? Yes. Respond as I would like, as she should? Not a damn bit. Human women, lad, are a conundrum surrounded by a gravity well. You’ll get sucked in and discover only circular logic and mind-numbing prattle.”

Though a particularly descriptive insight, Dwax thought, it wasn’t much help towards his greater goal. How was he to understand humans if they didn’t understand themselves?

Dremiks as Space Opera

I used to wince when people described my first novel, Dremiks, as a space opera. The term made me feel tawdry and seemed to cheapen my writing. I’ve come to embrace the description, though. Opera, in all its mediums, deals with the emotions of the human condition. If I had to summarize the work I’ve been struggling with all these years, it would be just that: an examination of human interaction and behavior and the contrasts it presents with alien races.

So much of science-fiction and fantasy futuristic fiction assumes that man overcomes his inherent tendencies toward violence, xenophobia, and avarice. I’ll admit that at the tender age of 13, when I started writing Dremiks, I subscribed to that ideal as well. Surely by the time man conquered inter-galactic travel we would be kinder, smarter, more noble. The slap-in-the-face that is day-to-day adult life made me cynical in my writing as well as my political out-look. Dremiks has evolved from a giggling teenage short story to an imagination of the continued war between man’s demons and angels. The setting is still deep-space and most of the character names are the same, but that is where the similarities end.

There are elements of romance involved in the novel. I’m a romantic at heart. I find it difficult to believe that a group of people thrown into the unknown and living together for over a year would not develop some intimacies. It is far more un-realistic to assume that all officers and crew of a starship would remain celibate and platonic in their relationships than it is to let human nature take its course. There it is again- that basic belief that man has not changed so very much, despite our technological and sociological advances. Of course part of my belief that men and women (or any other pairing you choose to make) naturally fall in love, or lust, while working together is personal bias. I met my husband in college while we both worked in the same dorm.

There’s betrayal, lust, deception, love, life, and death in this novel. I try to interject light-hearted moments because no one’s life is wall-to-wall drama. While I hope the adrenaline junkie reader will find enough action to keep his interest, Dremiks is not a militaristic, space-battle, novel along the lines of Battlestar Galactica. You’ll be three quarters of the way through the book before you find a character wielding a gun. (A few knives make earlier appearances. Stabbings are fun!)

Here is a short excerpt dealing with some of the themes I’ve just discussed. For reference, the commanding officer of the spaceship Hudson is Captain Brett Hill. His executive officer and chief pilot is Commander Margaret (Maggie) O’Connell. This scene takes place half-way through the book. The setting is the officer’s mess (dining room).


“So what do you think, Cap’n?”

Brett sipped his water. When he glanced sideways at O’Connell his lids drooped slightly and his left eyebrow rose a fraction. A quirk of his lips, so fleeting it was possible the others never saw, let Maggie know that he had noticed the shortened, more familiar, form of address.

“Do I think it was inherent nobility that brought us out here?” He shook his head. “Maybe. I don’t call it nobility, though. I think it’s our innate human need to champion the underdog. We are constant optimists. We’re the emotional descendents of the caveman who stood defiant in the front of the wooly mammoth. We rebuild cities at the base of Vesuvius, get back on the bicycle when we fall off, whack that hornet’s nest every spring. Humans cheer for the couldn’t be, believe in the shouldn’t be. We love causes; the harder, the more lost they are, the more we love them.

“Is that nobility? Maybe. Maybe it’s a pernicious genetic defect that makes our species susceptible to shared delusion. What ever it is, it keeps life interesting.”