Underworld mobsters, nanobots, teleportation, and paintball.
For more on my aliens visit the government agency that protects them.
Department of Planetary Affairs.
For TWO DAYS only, Trespassing will be FREE on Kindle. Don't miss this opportunity to get your action/adventure scifi fix. Underworld mobsters, nanobots, teleportation, and paintball. For more on my aliens visit the government agency that protects them. Department of Planetary Affairs. This character spotlight is little different from the others. I break the fourth wall to talk about process a little bit. This quote here, that I lifted from Writer.ly's Facebook page reminded me that in the beginning, Ian Reynolds was not the young, aspiring FBI agent we see in world of the DPA. When he first appeared in my mind he was a mechanic on an intergalactic space transport ship. Ian was part of a crew of seven that transported cargo and people from planet to planet as a paid service. They also had a doctor and diplomat. If that somehow sounds familiar to you, don't get your brown coat all bunched, this was 1990, long before Firefly would come blazing into this world and burn up in the atmosphere we will call Fox. These guys were a little different. First of all, they were totally legal and above board on everything. They wore matching uniforms. Their ship was more akin to the Enterprise than the Falcon in terms of cleanliness. They were not all the same species either. Suffice it to say the storyline never went anywhere. However, so far, three characters from that reality have found new life in my other stories. Ian being one of them. [His fellow FBI agent, Miranda Grant is also from the same ship. They both live again in Book Zero of my series, Fallout. Ian will be returning in Book Two: Linchpin (currently under reconstruction.)] The name, Ian, I borrowed from a guy I knew at the time. Ian, the character, shared the same color and style of haircut as his namesake. Because of Ian's encounter with Elbie went bad, real bad, he has been stuck, mentally in that time period, so the haircut has remained unchanged this whole time. Ian, the intergalactic mechanic, and Ian, the aspiring agent, have the same personality as well. Very talky, outgoing, a little bit flirty, freaks out under stress. The bummer is that in Trespassing we don't get to see this side of him. He has been damaged by his first encounter with the Elbie in Fallout. So while life at the DPA has been good from him, he gets a "life" it is a very different life than what he was originally created for. Despite the uniqieness of his situation with the DPA he has a happy and fulfilling existence. As writer I sometimes think about my unused characters from stories that never went anywhere, or were ultimately edited out. I think they live their lives free and independent of me and they are there if I need them for something new. Sometimes when I do call upon them they have grown and changed just like long lost friends do too. A writer's life is full of wonder and strangeness. Edward Drake was born to Indian parents who immigrated to the United States before he could walk. His father died when he was young and his mother remarried to an American while he was in middle school. Edward has master’s degrees in bio-mechanical engineering and business management. He started with Alpha Cortex Solutions while studying at university. By the time the Elbie of the Arcadia collective arrived on Earth he was already on the path to becoming CEO. His natural charisma and ambition make him the perfect match for the Esben designation. As CEO of a cutting edge pharmaceuticals company he needs to look the part and his designer of his choice is Alexander Amosu. Each suit is customized to the buyer. Similar to L'heilh, Edward is always in style whether at work or at home. It was awesome! A really nice night with friends and new acquaintances. We had art from five fantastic artists: David Landry, Alyssa Abshier, Robert Chambers, David Yapp, and John Epsey. The cake was provided by Delia's Desserts. Check it for yourself. A big thank you to all my volunteers, Heather, David, Robert, Ben, Kathy, Linda, Natasha, Delia, Cari, Shannon, and Joe. Thank you to everyone who came out to the event, it was great seeing you all and I hope I got to say to each one of you. It was a great night. If you missed it, don't worry there's always book two. It is an undisputed fact to say Isaac Asimov is astounding and/or amazing but after re-reading some of his essay’s its worth stating for the record again. Isaac Asimov is always looking to humanity’s bright future. He acknowledges war, overpopulation, and pollution as potential dangers to our continuance but his writing always points to the best we can offer in the face of these obstacles. In 1977 he wrote: “In any civilization with computer science so advanced as to make teaching machines possible, there surely will be thoroughly centralized central libraries. Such libraries may even be interconnected into a single planetary library... Each machine would be plugged into this planetary library and each could have at its disposal any book, periodical, document, recording, or video encoded there” -From The New Teachers In this essay Asimov is imaging what education in the future will look like. Each person will learn what they want and at their own pace. The traditional class room as we know will be a thing of the past. This is a trend of course but the above quote sounds a lot like Google. 1989, Future Fantastic. “In the 21st century we will see a society in which one third of the population will entertain the other two thirds.” It might not be two thirds but with the proliferation of Podcasts and You Tube channels I would say it’s not that far off. Same essay. “There will be no bar to travel. You can still be a tourist or visit your friends in person by closed circuit television.” Not exactly, but close enough. Can we say Skype, Google hangout, GoToMeeting, etc to see people we could not otherwise afford to. This one is interesting. “...the technochildren of tomorrow will be accustomed to living in a decentralized world, to reaching out in a variety of ways from their homes—to do what needs doing. At one and the same time, they will feel both entirely isolated and in total contact.” This is exactly what is happening. While Asimov is a perpetual optimist the simultaneous isolated connectivity is not having the positive impact I think he imagined. I have seen a few articles and I know there a couple books on the subject. Being connected online has not done anything to make most people feel MORE connected, only more alone. A person may have 2,000 friends on their social networks but still experience profound loneliness. It is definitely a modern paradox that we have yet to figure out how to deal with. This is just what I read today. If I get any more good ones I will tweet them. [There are two sentences that could be considered spoilers if you haven’t read Trespassing. I colored them in purple so it's hard to read. If you DO want to read it, just highlight it.]
In Trespassing you meet Brendan, Kristy, Matt, and Derek as adults. In Fallout they are teenagers. But age is not the only thing that changed. The summer before middle school I wrote my first story. The kind you write for yourself. For fun, not for class. It was about a group of five friends who find an island of dinosaurs. (At the time I wanted to be a paleontologist.) Those five friends were Brenda, Jenny, Christy, Matt, and Derek. They have been living in my head for over twenty years. Through middle school and high school these were the humans in my Transformers fan fiction. So they have had many adventures together. Hopefully they seem well rendered. And if they do, it is because I have been putting through quite a bit with giant robots before they ever met the Elbie. In Trespassing I have swapped out robotic life forms for energy ones. If you look at the two lists of names you are going to see three differences: Brenda versus Brendan Jenny is missing from the second list Lysandra is missing from first the list Brenda and Jenny were the core of the group as BFFs. In 2001 when I wrote my first draft of Fallout Jenny became Jake. Jenny never made it into the Elbie reality. I wanted the BFFs to be opposite sex because that was more of my experience and I had lots of these in my circle of friends at the time. In 2006 I gave up on Fallout and I moved the timeline up, after the establishment of the Elbie in our world, Trespassing. This is when I brought in Lysandra. Lysandra had been a part of my Transformers fan fiction as well, in the post original movie reality. I really liked having Brenda and Lysandra as identical twins because it meant lots of messing around with identity and switching them out for each other but the story line still wasn’t panning out. Finally, in 2010 I made a drastic change. Brenda became BrendaN. The hobbies and interests of Jake became Brendan’s thus eliminating Jake and making Kristy the new BFF since she was now the only female in the group. Then it all came together. It seems so strange that something like that made the difference. While I don’t really know why it worked I can give you one theory. The most interesting part about changing Brenda to BrendaN was their relationship to Lysandra. I say “they” because in a writerly way Brenda still exists on her own outside of Brendan but she is very different from her male counterpart. One attitude Brenda/Brendan share is their hate for Elbie and specifically Esben. But for Brenda, the appearance of Lysandra meant she now had a method for carrying out the revenge she had wanted for years. Her feelings toward her identical sister were practically null. She was distant and calculated in the way she related to Lysandra. **SPOILER** Brendan on the other hand, revenge is a thought only after Elbie have harmed his sister. Rather than becoming less human at Lysandra’s appearance, he becomes more human than he has in years. This was not something I planned. Most of my characters are self-actuating. They tell me who they want to be. I did not create Brenda to be cold toward her sister any more than I made Brendan to be gushing over her. That is just how they are. One worked and the other didn’t. Pure and simple. It is one of the mysteries of creating. If I ever decide to release Fallout it will need some major overhauling because of the changes I’ve made to the character line up. I still write the kind of stories I want to, for myself, for fun, but it makes me happy to know that other people like them too. If you have any questions feel free to e-mail or Tweet me. The Department of Planetary Affairs is a necessary evil, like most government agencies. Its creation is actually in the years between Fallout and Trespassing. In Fallout it’s the FBI dealing with the situation, this is a time before Homeland Security existed. Once the existence of Elbie goes public it is decided that there needs to be a specialized task force to deal with Elbie specifically but also to speak for the government to the public as liaisons. In the beginning, hosts are thought of as victims. So there is a feeling that the Elbie are a threat. A dangerous thing to be dealt with similar to terrorism. The DPA is meant to be the advocates for both human and Elbie. A factor working against the DPA that I tried to bring out in the book is the idea of transparency. Because the initial response of the government was to hide the existence of Elbie when the Arcadia cluster arrived, the DPA has had to work hard to regain public trust. At its inception leadership of the DPA is the same as you see it in the book. Two co-commanders, one a host and one not. Draegg is the same Elbie from the start, his host was Miranda C. Grant. Miranda was an FBI agent and Alexander Eriksson’s partner. They were the primary agents dealing with the kids and the Elbie so it was felt that they were the best choice to be the head of this new agency. The third agent involved was Ian Reynolds, a newbie to the FBI at the time of Fallout. Miranda was well liked and a people person, unlike Eriksson, so she was usually the one who dealt with the media and the public in general. We do not see Miranda in Trespassing because she has been killed in the line of duty. Justin Meyers, Draegg’s current host, was a colleague of Miranda’s and took her position as co-commander as a way to honor her dedication and vision of the DPA. February 2008. I went from one used book store to the next and could not find a single, beat up copy of Ender’s Game. A fellow student in one of my writing classes had recommended that I read it (three years prior) and now it was on my brain it and nowhere to be found. The fact that I could not find it used anywhere told me it was probably okay to buy brand new, so I did, and it wasn’t the first time. I read it in February, then again in April, and I think in October and December too. I read Ender’s Game at least once a year. I found it in the regular sci-fi section, but the cool versions are always in the young adult section. [I’m not usually a fan of adults reading young adult books, but a good book is a good book no matter what the target demographic is.] As a writer I always try to figure out what makes a book work. Why do people love certain worlds and not others? Orson Scott Card has accomplished two things with Ender’s Game. He does a really good job at keeping you riveted through Ender’s personal trials and dilemmas. And of course Ender himself is the big draw. His inner struggles, while trying to grow up under such and extreme and intense environment is done so well. It rings true. As if growing up wasn’t already hard enough, throw on top of that an impending intergalactic war. Geez, talk about raising the stakes. Even though it takes place of several years the pacing is just right. Ender’s Game is the first of a series. The rest happen when Ender is an adult and I love adult Ender even more than young Ender. Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide are both really excellent. With each book Card wrestles with a different moral question which plays out in the most fascinating ways. Children of Mind you have to read just to see what happens to everyone, but all the really great stuff happens in the first two. There is a fifth book, Ender in Exile, but it was added much later and is really for filling in the gaps in Ender’s growing up. I will be at the midnight showing of the movie. When I saw Inception and the sequence where they fight in the hallways as it was turning, I thought immediately of the battle room and hoped one day to see this book on the big screen. November 1st is a long ways away. I make notes to myself as things come to me so I don't forget them. However, as I was just cleaning out those same notes I have found some that I have no idea what they mean. EXAMPLE 1: (See picture) I have no idea who, what, or where is going on here but I am intrigued. These are the kind of finds I love because something is already in progress AND it came from my brain. I don't remember writing this and I have no clue what story, if any, it is tied to. This could be a whole new world I haven't discovered yet. It could be related to Lysandra, but for some reason I don't think it's an Elbie thing. We'll see... EXAMPLE 2: Animal Instincts That's it. Nothing else. I wrote in the June 15th. That was a Saturday. Does absolutely nothing to help me figure out what the heck I was telling myself. Since both words a capitalized it must be the title of something. But that is all I have at the moment. EXAMPLE 3: 139 122 130 129 Written on June 12th. I have not idea what these numbers are related to. More often than not I do remember why I wrote something down and am glad for it. These kinds of things just show me how vast the space is inside our own heads. I wrote this after watching Empire Strikes Back on my new DVD. Leave it alone, Lucas Why you mess with my Star Wars Get a new hobby Boba Fett's voice has been the same my whole life and he has to go and change it to the Australian guy. Not to mention changing the Emperor's hologram message while in the asteroid belt. HAN SHOT FIRST |
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