Volume V June 2024
Good day, or night what ever it is for you when you are reading this. I have some bad news, and some good news, or at least some okay news. The editor I had contracted with got sick. She’s over it, doing okay now, but was down for a couple of weeks, so she’s really behind schedule. I don’t know when she’ll get caught up, but The Descendant Saga is on the list. It’s just taking a little more time. (a lot more time) than I wanted. I’m like two months behind where I wanted to be. I had wanted to release the end of this month. I still don’t have my manuscript back yet. Much less have the audio book recorded and edited or the paperback and e-book formatted and ready for release, or the copyrights filed, or the ISBN, or the cover art formatted. There’s a lot to do. And my early July launch is now looking more like early September.
But… there is a candle to shed light in this dark time. I have not stopped working in this extra time. Sure, I have been working on a lot of things that aren’t book related. (Like my wife’s car that lost the timing belt on the interstate. Bent every intake valve, cracked every valve guide, dented every piston. Costing me a lot of time to put the thing back together.) But I have been getting ‘book work’ done too. Lots of researching, how to do things in the self publishing process, built myself a big checklist with lots of steps. So I can get this done right. I have even started self editing work on the second book. I may be stuck waiting on someone else for the first book, but I can keep working on the second one myself. Hopefully, even if there is a delay in the first book, I can keep on track to have both books released before the end of the year.
Lastly, I have decided that I will find another editing method to get the second book looked over and ready for launch. Nothing against the editor I am currently working with. I have nothing bad to say, she’s been nice, and has answered all my questions when I have asked. My problem is with the way the industry itself works. I’m not sure what I will do yet, but I will have to find another solution that is at least faster, if not also cheaper. Otherwise I will not be able to sustain the three book releases a year goal like I intended.
I know, another too short, underwhelming news letter that doesn’t have the “hey the book is available, get it here” link and QR code that we all want to see, but that’s what I’ve got. Like I have done in the previous couple issues of Tight Beam, I’m going to give you one of my old short stories, (after I clean it up a bit) to help tide you over, and expose any new potential readers to my writing and style. Like in the previous story with the motorcycle, this is related to The Descendant Saga, and is a cannon event in the universe, where and when don’t really matter, just that it happened. Thank for the read, here’s my short story “Protein”
The pilot looked out of her dim cockpit. She had the lights shut off to conserve power, and the small, cold compartment was lit only with the back lights of the instruments and control panels. The ship and the rest of the crew had been locked down to conserve power. Everyone but the pilot had been put into their emergency capsules. Cryogenically frozen, to save air, to save heat, to save power. This was great on paper, giving the pilot and the ship more time to fix the problem, but she hated it. She had spent the last week alone in utter silence.
Their ship had miss jumped, and they had been floating in an unfamiliar field of stars ever since. The pilot, and the ship’s computers, even with the A.I. assistance couldn’t make out where they were. Not a star in the black sky was recognizable. For all she knew, they might not be in the right galaxy anymore. Were they even in the right dimension? Miss jumps weren’t unheard of. Dropping the unfortunate souls, who know where inside of space time. But the technology had been greatly improved in the past fifty years, and it was an inconceivable phenomenon these days. The pilot had heard all about the mis-jumps of other ships, read case studies, but in her career as a pilot, she had never heard of it actually happening. But why her? Why now? What had happened? What had gone wrong?
She had spent too many calories looking over the computers and the engines and anything else that might tell her what happened, or give her a trail of breadcrumbs to follow back to their origin. They had enough power onboard the ship to jump, but only just, and this far into black space, between stars, they weren’t going to capture any solar radiation to charge up with their panels.
While in theory, she could just jump back to where she came from. It was useless to try to jump until she knew where they were first. The pilot couldn’t guess at where to go, and there’s no help in making two consecutive miss jumps. Because you could indeed get more lost. The way her luck was going, they might end up inside a star next time.
Instead, the captain had locked everyone but her in their storage tubes, and planned to wait for rescue. Most ships didn’t even carry storage tubes anymore. Jump systems were reliable enough they weren’t needed anymore. For once she was glad their shuttle was an older model that still had archaic equipment like cryogenic tubes and windows. Windows were nice in times like this, even if they were a hold over feature that none of the more modern ships had. They had helped her sanity in these many long, silent days. She was at a loss, and had considered taking a walk out the airlock and leaving the crew to their fate in the tubes, for all their chances of being found were.
She was unenthusiastically nibbling on a ‘flavorless’ protein block when her console chirped. After so long adrift, she was at first elated to have a new sensor reading. There was another ship out there. On an intercept course, even. They were being rescued. As the ship drew nearer, it got close enough for the cameras to pick it up. The display made her reconsider her unsuited spacewalk. The ship closing with her shuttle wasn’t anything built by human hands…
The Descendant Saga 