THE NAMELESS WORLD has launched!

 

My two-book story THE NAMELESS WORLD has launched! As of yesterday, both books were available in the Kindle story, and the first book, The North Edge of Nowhere, was also available n hardcover. The paperback covers for both books and the hardcover for books, Oaths and Promises, are still being tweaked bur they should follow soon.

This duology is difficult to categorize as it has elements of several genres. It's set in the far future on a colony world unknown to the rest of the galaxy, so it's definitely science fiction. Darius, the protagonist is 17 at the start of Book 1, so you could also call it YA, but the story progresses and by Book 2 Darius is 20, so you could also call it a coming of age story. And while the romance in Book 1 is confined to two important secondary characters, Daniel the Wanderer and Ramons, a physician, in the second book, Darius himself finds love, so you could also label this a romance. 

In the excerpt from book 1, below, we see a scene between Daniel and Ramons. Both of them are outsiders to the culture in which they live, Daniel even more so than Ramona. And both of them have a secret. Daniel thinks he has guessed Ramona's secret; Ramona is quite certain she knows his.

Excerpt from Chapter Two of The North Edge of Nowhere:

Grateful for the chance to think things over, Daniel left the main house before Lord Brian could change his mind. He walked outside and looked up at the sky. The early morning sunshine had given way to gray clouds. This would be Daniel’s third autumn at Castle Muir. He no longer found it depressing to spend days without seeing the sun.

Daniel debated. He needed a workout. The martial arts skills he had mastered years before had earned him a place here, and he needed practice to keep those skills sharp.

But still, the events of the morning had disturbed him, and he wanted some advice.

He walked to the square building with barred windows and a single door, euphemistically referred to as the guest barracks, to see if Ramona was still treating the wounded men. Ramona was an outsider here, too, even if not quite so alien as he was, and he usually found her advice helpful. At least, he told himself, needing her advice made a good excuse to see her.

The guard at the guest barracks shook his head in answer to Daniel’s question; Ramona had left a few minutes before. Daniel made his way to the back of the keep and knocked on her door for the second time that day.

When Ramona’s voice called out for him to enter, Daniel went in. A teakettle simmered on the stove next to the pot of boiling broom herb, and the flowery scent of fresh-brewed tea mingled with the woody herbs.

Ramona sat at her kitchen table sipping a cup of tea as if no untoward event had occurred. She offered tea to Daniel, but he declined.

“Did you hear what happened in the great hall after you left?” he asked.

Ramona rolled her eyes. “Who could avoid hearing it? It’s no small matter to Castle Muir that its lord has found an heir.”

The certainty in her voice surprised Daniel and incited that uneasy feeling he had had ever since he had dragged the red-haired boy upstairs. “Is everyone so sure this boy is really Lord Brian’s son?”

Ramona shrugged. “He looks enough like Lord Brian that Lady Helaina saw the resemblance easily.”

But Lady Helaina had had no supporters until after Ulf had cut the boy’s hair. “Surely whether one person looks like another is, to some extent, a matter of opinion.”

She glanced at him over her cup, rather an appraising glance. “There’s the ring. Basco remembers Lord Brian getting whipped for coming back from Antwerp without it. So did old Berta. Lord Fulke had told her the ring was from the time when we came to this place in silver ships.”

Daniel blinked. No one had ever made any reference to space travel in his hearing. Still concerned with the rightness of his own actions, he let that subject drop. “That proves that Lord Brian gave the ring to the boy’s mother. It doesn’t prove he’s the boy’s father.”

“The boy said the ring was his grandfather’s. His mother must have told him that it was. Besides, he has red hair, just like the old Lord.”

It sounded convincing, but Daniel’s conscience still pricked him. Lord Brian had made a decision from which there was no appeal, and no one else seemed to feel a need to question it. “Lots of people have hair that color.”

Curiosity ripened in Ramona’s expression. “Why should you care?”

Daniel took his time in answering. He had no fear that she would carry tales, but on the other hand, it was difficult to solidify his unease into words. “I held the boy down,” he said at last. “I was doing my job, but I was also helping take this boy away from his mother.”

Ramona stood up and reached for a long-handled spoon to stir her boiling liquid. “You brood about things no one else cares about. If this boy is Lord Brian’s son, then he has a right to him.”

Either on purpose or from inattention, she was missing the point. “But what if he isn’t?”

Busy with her potion, she spoke over her shoulder. “Don’t let it worry you. He is.”

“How can you know for certain?”

She turned her gaze back to him for a second. She glanced at the floor, then shot him a look from under her brows. She hesitated a moment, as if she were debating, and then she put down the spoon. She sat down again, folded her hands around her teacup, and looked straight at Daniel as she spoke in a low clear voice. “The way that you think I know.”

Daniel stood frozen and tried to gather his wits. He had never thought she would speak so plainly. He met her look with his own steady gaze, and they stared at each other for a few moments.

Finally, Ramona took a sip of her tea, staring into the dark surface as if it held the answer to a mystery.

Daniel opted to go for broke. He put both hands on the table and leaned over so that his face was close to hers. “If you know my thoughts, then you know what I’m thinking now.”

Ramona put her cup down. “I know.”

“Well?”

She stood up. Daniel backed up, but she took a step closer to him. She put her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him.

Relief flooded Daniel. He took her in his arms and kissed her hungrily. After a few moments, Ramona pulled away.

Daniel’s relief evaporated. “What’s wrong?”

“Just a moment.” She stepped to the stove and moved the pot of liquid off the fire, then came back to take his hand. “Not here. Someone might come in.” She pulled him with her through the doorway into the small bed chamber that was the only other room in her house. Before Daniel could say anything, she had shut the door and slid the bolt into its socket.

Writing in a series, and finding a good surprise

 Writing in a series has at least one basic difference from writing a standalone:starting with book 2, you have to allow for the reader not having read book 1 in a while, or even never having read book 1 at all. Therefore, you may need to explain things from time to time. The tricky part is, you don't want to bore the reader who has read book 1 recently (or who read it a while ago, but has an excellent memory). If a story keeps telling the reader things he already knows, he will get bored with it. It's basically a balancing act between  the need to move the story forward and the need to make the reader understand what's happening and why.

Another big difference is, in a series you can follow one character for years, if you can keep coming up with interesting things for them to do. That's a real plus if you have a character you want to grow and change with time.

Readers who fall in love with one or more characters tend to love reading a whole series about them. This can be a problem for the writer, who wants to move on. Personally, I've never sat down to write a book that hadn't already sprung  to life in my head. My first published work is 2-book series set on the panet Haven , I have another 2-book series (not yet published but coming soon) called the Nameless World series. They are very different in the way there were written. I thought of the Haven books as two stories while I was writing them; there is a nine year gap between the two books, for one thing, and characters who were secondary in book 1 come front and center in book 2 for another.  Ergo, I ended book 1 before I moved on to write book 2.

The Haven Series

The Nameless World books were written as one story but it was so damn long (240,000 words!)  that I eventually decided I had to cut it into two books. I found a place where a few months elapsed, and added a little additional text to give the book some resolution, I  made that the end of book 1. I also had to add some text to the start of book 2, and I had to edit the rest of the m.s. carefully to allow for the non-reader of book 1 (see first para in this post).

Cover at for Nameless World, Books 1 and 2

My three-book series set on the planet Wakanreo was kind of an amalgam of the other two series. I saw it as two books, one about the relationship between a human woman and a Wakanrean man, and another one about their children. However, on writing it, the "second book" turned into books 2 and 3. 

The Wakanreo series

I usually end a series because I have no more story in my head for that setting and those characters. That's not a problem until readers express a desire for more books in that series. This has happened more than once with the Wakanreo books in particular. I remembered starting  a fourth book, but as I recalled, it was only a few chapters, more of a short story than a novel. I published Alien Bonds in 2018, but I wrote the first draft more than 20 years ago, using a DOS-based software called XyWrite. I went looking for those few chapters and discovered to my surprise that the file was actually 56,000 words, nine and a half chapters! Luckily, I had transferred it into MS Word so I could read it. 

Now I have to decide if I want to return to Wakanreo with a book 4. But first I have to remember how I planned for the book to end! 

Lots of irons in the fire: THREE upcoming releases!

Somehow I now have a total of three novels in various stages of production. They started as two books, but one was so long, I had to split it into two books.

My science fiction romance Worlds Apart will come out in the spring from Crimson Fox Publishing. The book is finished but has not been edited, and it does not yet have a release date. My editor will start work in January and the cover artist in February. It's a longish book, but it does fit as one volume. It takes place on two very different colony worlds (hence the title), one where the hero is born and raised, and one very different world where the heroine has lived most of her adult life. 

The Nameless World, however, was slightly more than twice as long as Worlds Apart, and I ended up creating two books from it: The North Edge of Nowhere and Oaths and Promises. The two-book series is far future science fiction, and is set in my ThreeCon universe. It will come out from my own Cracked Mirror Press. The two books are a little different in terms of subgenre, or at least in terms of categorization of the plot. The first one is pretty much a coming of age novel, as Darius, the protagonist, is seventeen when it starts and twenty when it ends. It does have a love story in it, but it occurs between two secondary characters. The second book picks up only a few months after the first one ends. A lot happens in book 2, but a good part of the story line could be called a romance, as Darius is old enough to be involved romantically and that relationship is complicated. This dichotomy might turn out to be a real marketing challenge but I am hoping readers will find The Nameless World Saga compelling enough not to worry about subgenre categorization.  

While you could read Oaths and Promises without reading The North Edge of Nowhere first, the story makes more sense when read in order. It's a lot like The Lord of the Rings, which is really one story published in three volumes.  

Worlds Apart has no cover, as yet, so I can't show anything for that book, but for a teaser here is the initial cover art for book 1 of The Nameless World Saga: The North Edge of Nowhere.

Hopefully this gives you a clue as to the genre and style of the story. It's set on a colony world that has not been rediscovered— not officially rediscovered—  by ThreeCon. If you have any comment to make on the cover art, please do so here! 

This book is likely to see publication well before Worlds Apart, but I don't plan to release it until Oaths and Promises is ready, too, because I don't think it's fair to make readers wait for the conclusion of the story.