Author Archives: James Pyles

“Time’s Abyss” Comes Out Next Month!

time's abyss

Promotional image for “Time’s Abyss.”

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Last April, I announced that my novella Time’s Abyss was available for pre-order at Amazon for delivery to your Kindle device on October 15, 2021. That’s just a hair under six weeks now as I write this, and I’m really excited (you can find more links at books2read).

With a word count of over 29,000, this will be my longest published piece. Believe it or not, it can be difficult to sustain a set of characters and a common storyline past “short story” limits, at least for me, so this is a real accomplishment. Sadly, a long-time (in real life) friend of mine who was one of my biggest fans won’t be able to read it. He succumbed to ALS after many years of struggle.

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Three Weeks Until “Theo Klaagorn, Private Eye”

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Three weeks until “Theo Klaagorn, Private Eye”.

I’ll post the pre-order link when available. Just three weeks until the 2021 edition of Fall Into Fantasy is available.

In 2019, my short story “The Demon in the Mask” appeared in this edition. When I went back to Amazon, I found out that one reviewer last year put my tale in the top five that she enjoyed. It was, what I consider, a traditional fantasy tale of dark demons and fallen heroes, a story of redemption in the face of unbelievable loss.

By contrast, “Theo Klaagorn, Private Eye” or “private detective,” I can’t decide which, is whimsical urban fantasy, a world where fantasy creatures escape a horrendous war in the dragon realms to certain places on Earth, like Las Vegas in 1974. Theo is a dwarf who, with his friends, a giant, a werewolf, and a fairy, try to solve the murder of an elven prince and free his half-elf wife who was framed for the crime.

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My Short Story “The Last Astronaut” to be featured in the anthology “Exploring Infinity”

infinity
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A few years back, I read Richard Paolinelli’s novel Escaping Infinity, which I subsequently reviewed. I found out that although Richard hadn’t planned on writing a sequel, the novel’s fans kept pestering him about it. So he did, or rather, he will, in the forthcoming book “Expanding Infinity.” 

However, in between this and that, he invited authors to write a series of short stories for an anthology he is calling Exploring Infinity. Technically, with a hotel blipping in and out of 5,000 years of human history, kidnapping people to repopulate a devastated Earth in the far future, there must be a lot of stories to tell. Pre-order it at Amazon.

For me, there was only one: “The Last Astronaut.” I mentioned this just a few days ago. It takes the events in Richard’s novel and does a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on the original material (a play first staged in 1966 which I first found out about through a Shakespeare-obsessed friend in the late 1970s).

My character Booker Robinson is the observer of the events in Richard’s novel, but by the end of the story, he becomes much more than that. In Richard’s introduction to my story, he says:

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Another Short Story About to be Published in the Anthology…

infinity
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This is one of those things I really want to talk about but I can’t give out too many details yet. The publisher hasn’t given me the green light to name names, but one of my short stories has been accepted in an anthology that should become available the weekend after Labor Day (or so).

It’s a tad unusual. The publisher wrote a novel and thus created a universe. He’s writing a sequel to that novel, but in-between the first and the second, he invited various writers to try their/our hand at crafting a short tale in that self-same universe.

So of course I did and it was accepted.

The graphic at the top is a heavily cropped image of the poster for all three books, and while it’s pretty colorful, it (hopefully) reveals nothing.

I will provide you with a bit of an excerpt just to whet your whistle, metaphorically speaking.

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Book Review of “Cibola Burn,” the Fourth in the “Expanse” Series

cibola burn
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Last night, I finished Cibola Burn (2015), which is the fourth book in The Expanse novel series by James S.A. Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). As with the previous novel Abaddon’s Gate, it was a little difficult for me to get into at first, but once I was hooked, I was hooked hard.

The general plot is pretty straightforward. Now that the Ring is operational and the gateways to other parts of the galaxy are open, a group of belter refugees took their ship on an unauthorized journey through a gate and ended up in another solar system. For a year, they’ve been colonizing Ilus (called New Terra by the UN) and have set up mining facilities. However, the UN has chartered the Royal Charter Energy (RCE) corporation to both scientifically explore and materially exploit the world, seeing the settlers as “squatters.”

A small group of settlers, including Basia Metron who we briefly saw in Caliban’s War (yes, people who have appeared before come back) planning to blow up the landing pad for the RCE ship’s big shuttle as a protest don’t realize the shuttle is on final approach. In trying to abort the explosion, Basia sets it off, either killing or terribly wounding everyone on board including the UN appointed regional governor.

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To Be Published in “Fall into Fantasy 2021”

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Proposed cover art for “Fall into Fantasy 2021”

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Since 2019, my short stories have appeared more or less regularly in the Cloaked Press anthologies Spring into SciFi and Fall into Fantasy.

I’m proud to announce that my urban fantasy tale “Theo Klaaggorn, Private Eye” will be appearing in the upcoming “Fall into Fantasy 2021.”

Here’s a small preview:

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Not the Comic Books I Grew Up With

gay bobby

Images from “Uncanny X-Men #7,” “Uncanny X-Men #52,” and “All-New X-Men #40” found at “Bounding into Comics.”

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I received quite a bit of feedback on my last blog post, mainly in social media. So when insomnia seized me by the throat tonight, I re-read some other “controversial” material I’d sampled earlier and figured, why not? I need to kill some time and let being sleepy overwhelm my anxiety (long story).

I follow the blog Bounding into Comics and yes it does come from a somewhat conservative place socially. While I periodically complain that the entertainment industry has forgotten how to entertain, they/it does have other characteristics. One can be found in the “Bounding” article Every Single Comic Book Character That Has Been Retconned To LGBTQ+.

No, I’m not going to rant about LGBTQ representation in comic books or anything else. The world is a diverse place and that will naturally be reflected in what we watch, read, and listen to. Any form of entertainment is a product of its times which is why making and then remaking a movie or TV show decades apart will yield two different products. Compare the original 1960s Lost in Space with the much more recent Netflix remake (which admittedly I’ve never watched, but I’m convinced the two shows must be very different from each other). It’s also why it’s reasonable to have gay characters in comic books today when you would never have found even one when I was growing up.

Getting back to the article, there are only six DC and Marvel characters listed out of hundreds or perhaps thousands of superheroes, so it’s not like it is a big deal. The complaint that author John F. Trent makes is that each and every one of these fictional people started out as totally straight characters. Every single one.

And every one was retconned to become bi or gay.

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Why Don’t Men (Supposedly) Read Books by Women? Hint: It’s Not Because of Sexism

books

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This all started with an article in The Guardian titled Why do so few men read books by women? by M.A. Sieghart (the “M.A.” standing for Mary Ann). Her article (which she wrote to promote her recently published book) is quite short and her answer is simple. Men are sexist.

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Promotional image of Mary Ann Sieghart

Author Gwenda Bond commented on twitter about this, but it wasn’t until I read the rebuttal on deus ex magical girl by D.G.D. Davidson (a guy) that I found out about it.

I don’t know if Ms. Bond’s interest in the topic was the same as Sieghart’s, but Davidson wrote a killer response.

The article just a little long, but it’s worth it. I don’t want to reveal too much, but it has to do with another issue of mine; how the entertainment industry keeps missing the boat as far as actually entertaining.

For instance, in Davidson’s article:

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Book Review of “Abaddon’s Gate,” the Third in the “Expanse” Series

gate

“Abaddon’s Gate” by James S.A. Corey

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Finished reading Abaddon’s Gate by James S.A. Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) which is the third in the Expanse series. It was a little harder for me to get into at first, unlike Leviathan Wakes or Caliban’s War. Starting things off with Jim Holden and the crew of the Rocinante drinking and gambling in the casinos of Ceres didn’t set the right tone for me, at least not in the beginning.

Also, there was the plethora of new characters to absorb. True, each of these novels introduces characters unique to a particular book, but this one seemed to have a ton, including Anna, Bull, Tilly, Cortez, and Clarissa/Melba, and that’s just the short list.

Since each chapter is told from a specific person’s point of view, I had to keep reminding myself who that person was in the earlier portions of the novel. It was a tad “offputting.”

Oh, and Joe Miller makes a comeback but not as you might imagine, thanks to he, Julie Mao, the asteroid Eros, and the protomolecule all being thrown into the atmosphere of Venus, “cooking” for a while, and then having “something” emerge.

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Rejection and Feedback

typing

Found at typinglounge.com – No image credit given

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Random stuff.

I haven’t been writing much lately. Okay, I haven’t been writing anything new at all. I do technical writing for my day job of course, and I just finished yet another freelance job updating/refreshing test questions at the back a technology book (it’s actually more interesting than it sounds, pays pretty well, and has a quick turnaround).

What I have  been doing is submitting previously rejected short stories to different publishers, actually trying for more “mainstream” periodicals.

This is where the rejection part comes in. One story is basically urban fantasy/crime story (I’ve just submitted it yet again, so we’ll see) and the other is a sort of “pirates in space” tale, complete with oppressive colonizers, revenge, and swashbuckling. I even included a fictionalized version of a famous author.

The vast, vast majority of time when you get those rejection emails, they’re pretty standard fare and offer no feedback good, bad, or indifferent. This last one did:

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