Promotional image of the cover for “Time’s Abyss.”
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi
My premiere science fiction novella Time’s Abyss now has four 5-star ratings on Goodreads. You can also find it in digital or hardcopy form at Amazon and any of your favorite online booksellers.
So far the Goodreads and Amazon ratings are excellent. Don’t miss out on this terrific SciFi, time travel, alternate universe adventure.
Just to give you a taste, here’s another brief excerpt:
© James Pyles
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi
It’s here! I received a digital copy of my first science fiction novella Time’s Abyss today, which means you can too. Go to books2read to find it at all of your favorite booksellers.
So far, it’s gotten 2 five-star reviews on Goodreads, one of which also appears on Amazon.
I’m particularly excited about this one since it’s my premiere solo publication. In the fiction realm, all of my other tales are short stories to be found in anthologies. That’s not a bad thing, but there’s something about having just your name on the cover of a book.
This isn’t going to be the last time if I have my say about it. First off, a few days ago, I finished roughing out a plot for a sequel to “Time’s Abyss.” What happens to Carson Everett and his team at the end of the adventure when they meet an unknown group of people? Does Theodore Falkon return to the island and will he use the experiment in a desperate attempt to return the Earth to a single time frame?
Promotional image for “Time’s Abyss.”
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi
As my regular readers know, my first science fiction novella Time’s Abyss becomes available exactly one week from today (can be pre-ordered right now). Here’s the Amazon “blurb:”
Promotional image for “Time’s Abyss.”
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi
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.
Found at Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie – No image credit available
Patrick Figeroa knew he had to get back inside the quarantine area and shut down the experiment within the next hour or it would become unstoppable. General Conrad Buchanan and his so-called “military experts” thought that just cutting power to the transfer unit would close the rift, and although the field remained active, they believed it was a residual effect that would gradually fade.
They were spectacularly wrong.
At thirty-five, Figeroa was considered the world’s foremost expert on transdimensional dynamics, but he had been certified a genius since age three, so such accolades meant nothing to him.
The remote testing ground in central Nevada seemed even more alien to him as he approached ground zero. It had been child’s play to shut down a sector of the defense grid in one sector surrounding area LI, including sonic, visual, and infrared sensors, so he could get inside. It was just after eight, and desert mornings in November were particularly unforgiving. Fortunately, he was well dressed for the freezing weather, but although he was prepared for what he had to do in every other way, the landscape, and especially the birds sailing above in the overcast sky puzzled him.
MorgueFile April 1408991814e81x2
It looked like a 1938 Ford Sedan, but the lavender paint on the body shone in its own light, and the headlights were black.
The radio message from Josiah Covington said her ticket back to his world would be in the poppy field south of town. He’d been definite that she shouldn’t use the dirigible this time.
Keisha Davis expected the car to be rusty and full of holes, but the door swung open easily, and everything looked brand new. She’d gotten her license just after her sixteenth birthday, but she didn’t think it covered this dieselpunk contraption.
She turned on the radio. It emitted an eerie glow as she adjusted the tuning dial. Seconds later, she heard him calling. “Josiah Covington to Keisha Davis. Transmitting at 1450 hours as arranged. Come in, Miss Davis.”
Keying the mic, she grinned at hearing her old friend’s now adult voice. “After all we’ve been through, you can call me Keisha.”
“What are you waiting for? Hurry!”
He was right. Her friends were in desperate trouble, and she was the only person in two worlds who could help. Turning the keys in the ignition, Keisha mashed down on the starter and then vanished!
I wrote this for the Flash Fiction for the Purposeful Practitioner challenge for May 9th. The idea is to use the image above as the inspiration for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 200 words.
Hopefully, you all have been following the steampunk adventures of fifteen-year-old Keisha Davis in this series. Seeing the prompt, I decided to tip my hand a bit, since I’m actually envisioning the character appearing in a trilogy. While the current storyline occurs in a steampunk universe, I want the sequel to feature to be somewhat in the alternate reality’s future, depicting a dieselpunk environment.
This would be the beginning of that second saga.
To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.
Oh, Roger’s linkup still needs lots of love, so it would be great if you jumped in and contributed a story. Thanks.
© Susan Spaulding
Lee Guzman had been operating his small, hot air balloon business for five years, but he always got the same question.
“You sure this thing is safe?”
“You bet, Craig. As easy as riding a bicycle.”
The latest pair to grace his gondola were Craig and Shawn Tucker, brothers who ran a parcel delivery service in nearby Macon.
They’d been steadily climbing under partly cloudy skies, but now the balloon was ascending into a gray mist that hadn’t been there a minute ago.
“What the hell?” They all grabbed the rigging as the five-mile-an-hour breeze from the northwest suddenly turned into a hurricane.
“Beats me, but hang on!” It was all Lee could say. This wasn’t just unpredictable weather, it was crazy impossible. Amazingly, the balloon held together, that is, until they all heard the rip.
“We’re going down!”
The wind quit abruptly, and they descended below the mist.
“Hey, ain’t that the Golden Gate Bridge?
It was, but nowhere near their San Francisco. Steamships were crossing from the City to Marin County, and the air was full of dirigibles and biplanes. It wasn’t the past, it was something else, like another world, and a new adventure had just begun.
I wrote this for the Sunday Photo Fiction for May 6, 2018 writing challenge. The idea is to use the image above as the inspiration for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 200.
Since I’ve had steampunk on my mind lately, and since the prompt is an image of a hot air balloon, I decided to send these three guys on a little trip.
In the 1961 film adaptation to Jules Verne’s novel “Mysterious Island,” escapees from a Confederate prisoner of war camp in 1865 steal an observation balloon in a storm, and are taken over the Pacific Ocean, eventually to be deposited on a “mysterious island.”
I used that basic premise, setting the initial scene near the former Andersonville Prison (later known as Camp Sumter) near modern day Andersonville, Georgia, and then had the “strange gray cloud” be a gateway, not to a mysterious island or the past, but an alternate “steampunk” universe, like the one I’ve been crafting in this series.
To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.
Steampunk wallpaper – Found at 1zoom.me
Some people don’t believe in heroes, but they haven’t met my Grandpa. –Anonymous
Keisha sat frozen in the pilot’s seat of the airship Graceful Delight as the image of her Grandpa, forty years younger than the day he died, stood like a living apparition just ten feet in front of her.
“Did you hear me? Let me take the controls, quickly!”
“Oh, yeah.” She stood up just as the Delight pitched to port and she sailed to the floor.
“Grab the netting and hang on.” Isaiah Covington immediately took the chair she had just vacated and began to work the controls. “I apologize for my lack of chivalry and social grace, but I’m afraid saving our lives must take precedence.”
Image: Getty-US ENERGY
Aiyana Kaleya Zheutlin had been reading strange languages for the past three weeks, ever since returning to the present and the arctic base of Operation or rather Project Retrograde and discovering how much of the present they’d changed. Something Kelgarries and the fastidious and annoying Dr. Antoine Barnes had mentioned in their briefing when the six time agents got back caught her interest.
She was pouring over photographs and reports on The British Museum’s collection of clay tablets originally discovered in the ruins of the ancient city of Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard in 1849. The Library of Nineveh’s King Ashurbanipal was a monumentally historic find. It contained important works, all on baked clay tablets, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Law Code of Hammurabi, the former included a non-Biblical account of a great flood like the one in the Book of Genesis.
The Museum’s collections database counted 30,943 tablets in the entire Nineveh library collection. Most were written in cuneiform and a few in other near east languages. However, Aiyana was looking for clues of the use of a previously unknown language in these records.
© Ted Strutz
“The next leg of our vacation takes us on the ferry from Port Angeles to Victoria where we leave the U.S. for Canada.”
“Honey,” Glenn’s wife complained. “You sound just like a tour bus driver.”
In the backseat, eight-year-old Brittany groaned while her six-year-old brother Jackson rolled his eyes. They had been on the road for almost a week and would rather have been back home in Fullerton spending their days with their friends at the community pool.
“Just trying to brighten the mood while we wait to get onto the ferry, Sara.”
It seemed to be taking forever for the line of cars to move, but as Glenn and Sara looked out, they realized they had much bigger problems.
“Glenn, I thought it was the rain on the windshield at first, but…is everything…twisting?”
Everything around them, the cars and ferry in front of them, the pedestrians, roadway, the hills in the distance were all changing, becoming indistinct, as if they didn’t really exist.
Then everything abruptly shifted and shimmered, and then everything was different. Glenn had to grab the steering wheel tight because the car was now moving forward at 35 miles per hour rather than sitting still. They were part of a line of cars traveling on the Port Angeles/Victoria Bridge, crossing not only the Strait of Juan de Fuca but into another universe as well.
poweredbyrobots.com 